The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

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"Many receive advice, only the wise profit from it."

-Harper Lee

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As sales professionals, one of the biggest challenges we face is trying to connect with a new prospect. With so many different touchpoints, it’s easy for a prospect to avoid or ignore your voicemails, emails, texts, or LinkedIn request.

If you want your message to stand out, it’s critical that you have a solid valid business reason (VBR) that establishes you as trusted and valued. However, it’s equally important to ensure you have a strong email subject line. You can have the best valid business reason on the planet, but if the email is never opened by the intended recipient, what good is it?

Take this five-question quiz to set the foundation for this blog post—simply answer agree or disagree.

1. I interview sales candidates every week, even if I don’t have openings on my staff.

2. I find my best sales candidates when I’m under the gun and have openings on my staff.

3. I move out underperforming sellers often because I keep a talent bank of qualified prospects.

4. I am a proactive recruiter, always looking for, and evaluating talent.

5. I often tell candidates that I’m interviewing even though I don’t have a position open.

If answered disagree to the majority of these questions; continue reading this post.

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"It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure."

-Bill Gates

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The 2019 Media Sales Report studies the landscape over the past year, including the expectations for sales managers and the strategies employed by media sales professionals to assess their impact across five key topics:

• Compensation and Sales Team Size
• Training and Development
• Number of Appointments and Sales Process
• Sales Enablement
• Culture and Industry
• More!

You can see some of the highlights for the survey in the infographic below. If you'd like to read the full report, download it here.

Your sales team has goals. In order to evaluate the activities that are being performed in pursuit of those goals, you need measurable indicators known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Aligning your team with the right KPIs increases productivity and enhances performance, but it also allows you to monitor the overall health of your organization and team. With KPIs, you can:

• Measure progress
• Analyze patterns over time
• Make adjustments when necessary
• Solve problems
• Tackle opportunities

The hard part is choosing the KPIs that are most relevant to both your industry and goals. Here are some tips on how to select sales KPIs that align with your business goals.

If you fail two out of every three at-bats in the Major League, you'll end up in the Hall of Fame. If you fail 90% of the time as a venture capitalist, you'll end up being a multi-millionaire—possibly a billionaire.

So, why are salespeople afraid to fail? And why do sales managers often berate a salesperson when they fail? If you’re never failing, then you’re probably never winning either. We tell our team to take risks and explore new opportunities, but are we reiterating that embracing failure is actually good for business?

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"A team is not a group of people that work together. A team is a group of people that trust each other."

-Simon Sinek

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One of the most common debates in sales is how to best measure performance and other sales indicators. While some organizations prefer process-oriented KPIs, others have an outcome-oriented bias. Both ends of the spectrum are invaluable for powering your sales, but when it comes to prioritizing inputs vs. output, the “i’s” have it.

The majority of participants that attend a “typical” training program or workshop will forget 70% of what they were taught within two weeks. Our goal for the Talent Focused Management (TFM) workshop is to provide clients with strategies and tactics that they can actually put into practice immediately.

Here are some takeaways from sales managers that will enlighten The Center for Sales Strategy (CSS) clients, as well as others, as to why —and how—not all workshops are created equally.

Prospecting was spot on. The needs analysis meetings uncovered a clear desired business result for the prospect. And now it's time to shine—sales proposal time! 

Ask any sales rep what the hardest part of their job is, and we'll bet they’ll say “closing.” Don't be scared. Ensure your hard work (or your team's hard work) doesn't go wasted by following these tips gathered from our sales experts when creating and presenting your sales proposal.  

Of all the decisions and executive makes, none is as important as the decisions about people, because they determine the performance capacity of the organization." - Peter Drucker 

The new year is 1/12 complete, and January is old news. How is your organization doing so far? Are you on track to exceed your growth goals for 2020? Are you lagging behind?

Growth of a sales organization will not happen unless the people in the sales organization are growing. Here are four important elements to consider that are directly linked to growth of your people and the decisions you make in coaching and developing them.

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"Quality performance (and quality service) starts with a positive attitude."

-Jeffery Gitomer

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From personal branding and thought leadership to prospecting, lead nurturing, and recruiting—there are many benefits to using LinkedIn as a sales professional. The problem is that sales professionals don't have time to set up or update the basics of their LinkedIn accounts to best represent them and their company. 

You can't build a great building on a weak foundation, and the LinkedIn profile is just that: the foundation that could affect the success of your social efforts. Use this checklist to ensure your profile is updated and the best representation of your personal brand, the products you sell, and what you have to offer a prospect.

At The Center for Sales Strategy (CSS), we take delivering results seriously. Our proven strategies help clients improve their company’s sales performance and increase their sales revenue by providing strategic plans and tailored solutions for their needs.

We've taken some time to dig into last year's numbers so we can analyze and improve in the coming year. Here's what 2019 looked like.

The sales pitch is delivered, objections are resolved, and the contract is sent. Now, you patiently wait for the prospect to sign, and you’ve sealed the deal. But then — the email comes through, and suddenly you’re scheduling a sales negotiation.

Even if a salesperson has properly qualified a prospect and correctly managed their expectations through the sales process, they still can find themselves shifting gears from consultant to negotiator. And while negotiations can go in an infinite number of directions, honing-in on these six sales negotiation tactics will help close the deal.

Salespeople seem to always have so much to do, yet never enough time to get it all finished. Recently, I met one-on-one with about 30 different salespeople over the course of a two-week period. During each of these meetings, the salespeople revealed that they could benefit from some priority management or time management lessons.

That got me thinking that this is something I bet many sales managers and sales teams could use. So I asked all of my colleagues at The Center for Sales Strategy (CSS) and LeadG2 for their best time management tips. Here's what we gathered.