The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

After spending over a decade helping sales organizations select highly talented employees and coaching those salespeople and sales managers to turn talent into performance, I have discovered what I believe are two undisputable truths:

• A shockingly high number of people are not engaged at work.
• Talented people who leave their jobs usually point to their manager as the problem.

The latest numbers from Gallup tell us that 70% of our employees are disengaged in their jobs and a recent study by SAP and Oxford Economics revealed that one in five of our top performers are likely to leave their jobs in the next six months!

This means it’s not enough to hire highly talented people into your organization and it’s not even enough to put them in the right positions so they can effectively use their talents (although both of these things are critical!).

Once hired, these talented people need much more from their manager in order to consistently feel engaged and fully realize their potential.

So what can you do to increase employee retention and maximize the performance of your people?

Today we have a guest post by Mikita Mikado. Mikita is the Co-Founder & CEO of PandaDoc, a platform helping sales teams create, deliver, and track intelligent sales content to close deals faster. To learn more about simplifying your sales documents, connect with Mikita and the PandaDoc team on Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Recently, I watched a documentary on Russian ballerinas. The film highlighted the rigorous training and selection process that these aspiring dancers endure to become professionals. The instructors and directors of the Russian dance companies have very specific attributes and talents that they look for when selecting dancers. They look for and identify these talents as they watch the dancers in action because they know these talents are essential and often difficult to find. Unfortunately for these aspiring dancers, most just don’t have the talent to become a prima ballerina.

Similarly, not everyone has the talent to be a successful salesperson.

It’s very smart to use a validated talent interview to uncover the innate abilities of your sales candidates and predict their future success in sales. It’s like the final auditions the Russian ballerinas must nail before they are invited to join the company. But make sure you are scouting for talent long before audition day! You have plenty of opportunities to discover potential all around you as you observe other people in action. With consistent practice, you can sharpen your eye to spot signs of potential in these areas every day.

We have all been there. The manager announces a new hire and someone says, “but they’re so YOUNG!” Or “Really?! They look like they’re 12!” As people are staying in the workforce longer, it's easy to have 30, 40, even 50 years separating Junior AEs from seasoned salespeople. So the question is, how can you get your team to all just get along?

It seems like a lifetime ago, but I was once the Associate Publisher at Competitor Texas magazine, a 80,000 circulation endurance sports magazine. Most of my clients were either running, cycling, or triathlon events or retailers and had a website but hadn’t started to build up a sizeable presence on social media. Most hadn’t even considered using digital ads to get visitors from related fitness websites to their own site.

It was a great time to be in the media industry, and we were just beginning to see the potential of integrating digital, social, email, event marketing, grassroots campaigns and print all together into one campaign. But we had one BIG challenge: how to effectively explain this new way of thinking to potential advertisers when many of these race directors still had event registrants filling out paper registration forms and mailing them in. They were certainly not embracing new technology or uses of media very quickly and were quite resistant to any change. So how to get through to them and show them how integrated solutions work? That’s where inbound marketing came in.

Developing revenue for nonprofit organizations can be a challenge for many reasons. One of the main reasons is finding potential donors and sponsors who resemble your best partners and meet the following criteria:

Football. It is one of America’s favorite past times. Growing up in the South, football has been a part of my life since I was a small child. College football is literally in my blood, as my grandfather, father and brother all played football where they attended college. 

As an alumnus of Auburn University and a passionate supporter of the Auburn Tigers football team, I clearly remember the amazing turnaround from 2014 to 2015. In 2014, Auburn finished the season with a dismal record of 3-9 overall and 0-8 in the SEC, but those of us who love Auburn stood by our team and believed things would eventually get better. 

Who knew what a difference a year would make?  In one short year, head coach Gus Malzahn led the Auburn Tigers to a 12-1 overall winning record, clinching the SEC Championship title, and earning a trip to Pasadena to play in the BCS National Championship title game against undefeated Florida State University.  

A successful head coach of a winning football team can be likened to a successful manager of a winning sales team. A sales manager after all is “coaching” his or her team to success, wins, and GROWTH. There are three important areas that both a head coach and a sales manager should keep in mind when coaching their teams to success:

If you’re a B2B company, then it’s probably safe to guess that you are looking to generate more leads. Not just more leads of course, but better leads. The type of leads that you are excited to send to your salespeople, that your salespeople are thanking you for, and that are consistently converting into new customers.

However, sometimes your efforts can get a little stale. You're doing everything you're supposed to be doing: blogging two to four times a week, sharing on social media, and nurturing the leads you do have. But it’s not enough. While traffic might seem to increase, your leads aren’t.

Here are five things you can do today that will help you get more leads tomorrow!

Cause Marketing is a buzzword bantered about by many in the nonprofit sector. To some, the concept is a proven method to help organizations solve business problems via an association with a worthwhile cause. To others, it is merely a tactic designed to pitch and sell sponsorships to nonprofit events and initiatives.

One, one thousand.

Two, one thousand.

Three, one thousand.

Where are you going with this?  

Four, one thousand.

Five, one thousand.

Ahem, I have more important things to do. 

Six, one thousand.

Seven, one thousand.

Get to the point!!! 

Eight, one thousand. Done!

The point is to illustrate—in words only—the interval of eight seconds.

Why? Because eight seconds is the average attention span of a North American, revealed last year in a study by Microsoft Corp.

We all remember the cartoon image of a cat with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, getting advice on his (usually) bad decision. Hopefully we get better advice from our Personal Board of Directors. What are we talking about? Simply put, your Personal Board of Directors is the group of people who help you to make important decisions personally or professionally and that hold you accountable for those decisions. We all have one, whether we realize it or not. The question is, have you personally picked your Board?

There has been a lot written over the last few years about a new approach to selling. This approach has some characteristics that have been used in selling for years—relationships and asking great questions are examples. But this new popular approach has a few differences. For example, instead of approaching a customer to do a needs analysis starting from scratch, the salesperson is told to share an interesting insight and then use that to challenge a prospect with tough questions to get a provocative conversation going.

Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink. There are more businesses operating in America today than at any time in the past. Competition is sharper and the stakes are higher than ever, ensuring that marketing and sales challenges loom large for a great many of them. So why do both sales managers and their salespeople rate this the second-highest ranking item on their lists? Prospects shouldn’t be hard to find—there should be prospects everywhere they turn.