The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

With a new year in full swing, it's time to perform some routine maintenance to ensure a strong first quarter (Q1) . A great place to start is taking a second look at your account list. Follow these ten steps to get your sales organization’s account list cleaned up and ready for a successful year!

Sales managers are superheroes that possess special traits that help them save the day and lead their team to improved sales performance. Here's a few traits that stand out most about these savvy business leaders (as told by GIFs). 

What we say and how we say it matters. The language used with prospects impacts your capability to excite and encourage them about the deal at hand. Certain words prompt predictable behavior, and every word or phrase you choose to use will generate an emotional response.

Sales leaders who understand the psychology of communication and language learn to upgrade their vocabulary quickly. They discover the right words and phrases that help develop positive associations with their brand, products, or services. To be an effective leader, you need to think, act, and talk like a leader—here’s how.

Whether it's in the gym or on the field, athletes like Michael Jordan and Tom Brady are known for being the hardest workers during practice. And, as the greatest athletes of all time, they're not out there trying to learn something new—they're simply practicing the basics.

Josh Kaufman, author of The Personal MBA, writes that to go from “knowing nothing to being pretty good” actually takes about 20 hours of practice—that’s 45 minutes every day for a month. As leaders, we're accustomed to being great at what we do. But in order to learn something new and help your salespeople get better, everyone must practice. 

To remain competitive, organizations must invest more time and effort into the selection process. If you’re curious why so many companies fail to fully activate the talents of their people, take a closer look at how they make their hiring decisions. 

Regardless of what your company does, there is only one way to build a top-performing organization. You need to make sure you get both the talent and the culture fit right with every single hire you make.

If you lead a sales team or if you’re in sales yourself, then you know that closing business is a key part of the job. Yes, there are also other very important parts of selling, such as:

• Conducting a quality discovery meeting
• Overcoming objections
• Keeping your promises

But, in the end, if you’re not closing sales — you’re not going to make it. As a general rule, when it comes to closing business, you might adopt this saying that we’ve been using for quite some time— "Slow down the proposal and speed up the sale."

Are you looking for ways to create a company culture that will help you accomplish your business goals?

If so, you may have read about Zappos corporate culture and its ten core values. You know that core values determine the priorities of the company, and they’re what support the vision of your company and help shape the culture.

Here’s why the most successful companies have core values in place and pay attention to culture fit when they hire new people.

Historically, the term sales collateral referred to one-sheets and brochures that often hung on a wall, and when the sales team met with a client or prospect, they would grab a one-sheet to help build their case—and it worked great! In the 21st Century, you need more.

If you have—or have ever had—a veteran salesperson on your staff, you know they bristle at training. The mere suggestion of it can set them off—and for good reasoning! 

Most of us were once salespeople, and we were good at it. And we too would sound off on why training wasn’t for us, why we wanted simply to be left alone to perform. Here's a list of reasons why sales veterans hate sales training, can you add to the list?

The world of sales has rapidly changed as new technology evolved and became more accessible to businesses and sales teams. Over the last decade, the major trends in sales have included ideas like inbound marketing, social selling, and implementing sales enablement tools.

From companies becoming more intentional about building a culture of engagement to sellers mastering the art of shared-screen conversations, predictions in sales trends for the next decade take a slightly different approach. Improving sales productivity and the overall sales process are still top priority — but there’s more! Here are our predictions for the next ten years in sales, sales management, and sales marketing trends.