The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

We hope you've had a great week! It's Friday, and today we're sharing what we've been reading online this week! Here are our "best" from around the web.

Product-focused training and sales skill training - both are important to increase the knowledge and expertise of a sales team, but which is more important? Which has the larger impact? Before I answer that question, let me define the differences between the two to make sure that we are all on the same page.

In over 25 years of working with sales managers, I have heard countless stories about how urgent items have displaced important items. When we work with managers, they readily agree that items like these are very important to their success in the job:

Nothing fires me up like facilitating the Talent Focused Management live simulation workshop. The lessons are powerful, and the takeaways are career-changing! Following last week’s workshop, I asked our participants to share one of their greatest lessons learned from the program, and one response really stood out for me. 

We hope you've had a great week! It's Friday, and today we're sharing what we've been reading online this week! Here are our "best" from around the web.

Inbound and outbound sales strategies are both crucial to a healthy, thriving business. Since leads are the lifeblood of most sales teams, receiving them in more than one way allows your company to be dynamic and flexible, easily shifting with the latest marketing trends and poised for conversions.

Many managers I work with have strong and detailed onboarding plans for new hires, but in general, onboarding is something that often does not get enough attention from managers. If you haven’t given it much thought, you might want to consider enhancing your plan.

With a blog title like that, you may be questioning my sanity. Why would you want to fire your best prospect before you've had the chance to even get a meeting? I assure you my thought process here is sane and relates to a problem I see many salespeople face. Sometimes you hang onto prospects, even the very best prospects, too long and it becomes a waste of time and misguided focus that could better serve you to work on other leads.  

We hope you've had a great week! It's Friday, and today we're sharing what we've been reading online this week! Here are our "best" from around the web.

As a person, you probably have an inborn knowledge of what your strengths are personally, as well as professionally. You might be a great cook, a strong tennis player, or great at board games. You know that you create strong relationships with clients, are great at the close, or really creative in helping your clients.

Recruiting and hiring top talent is a tall order!  But it is critical for success in a sales organization.

THE BOTTOM LINE: There is only one reason why a prospect fails to respond to your calls or emails.  She or he is not convinced you will bring any value to them, and thus, your request for a piece of their precious time gets ignored. If they only knew what you have been able to do to help your clients! The problem is they don’t know.

We hope you've had a great week! It's Friday, and today we're sharing what we've been reading online this week! Here are our "best" from around the web.

I work with a lot of B2B sales organizations.
Some perform well.  Some perform not-so-well.

Symptoms and Suggestions to move beyond the stall!

Too often sellers fail to convert new business target accounts because they stall at various points of the sales process. Here are some symptoms and suggestions designed to help sellers move beyond the stall to convert a new business target to a new business customer.

We hope you've had a great week! It's Friday, and today we're sharing what we've been reading online this week! Here are our "best" from around the web.

I’m sitting in a hotel lobby enjoying my dinner. But I’m only steps away from the front desk. I can easily hear people checking in. What surprises me is the number of arriving hotel guests being greeted by their first name—before they hardly get in the door. There are warm hellos, how is Jane (the wife of a guest), how is your mom doing, and this goes on and on the entire time I am eating (and working!).

I can’t help but wonder—are most salespeople this engaged with their customers? Have they built the kind of relationships this front-desk staff developed? These hotel guests don’t arrive with luggage every evening. Some may check in once a week, others probably once a month or less often, but wow, this hotel has it mastered. It’s amazing to watch. I can say that I don’t recall this level of service at most establishments, much less a hotel.