The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

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"The single biggest way to impact an organization is to focus on leadership development. There is almost no limit to the potential of an organization that recruits good people, raises them up as leaders and continually develops them."."

- John Maxwell

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Case Studies and campaign recaps are powerful tools to help sell success. When managers share individual wins with their team, it boosts morale, sparks ideas, and motivates others to do similar work.

Salespeople value the real-life experience of their peers. After all, the best part of working in sales is celebrating your biggest wins after hours, weeks, maybe even months of hard work. Sales wins are a combination of strategies, tools, and content — doesn't other players on your team want to know what worked well for the salesperson who sealed the deal?

Continuing season 5 of the Improving Sales Performance Series, host Matt Sunshine and co-host Stephanie Downs, continue to focuses on celebrating #WomenInSales for the month of October.

Guests Lori Clark, Director of Local Sales at KHOU-TV; TEGNA - HOUSTON, and Dana Nagel, Director of Sales, TEGNA/WKYC Media join the show to share their insight, tips, and knowledge on various topics that help companies improve sales performance.

Tune in now or keep reading for a brief overview.

About half of all sales reps don’t achieve their yearly quotas.

Reasons for not hitting quota vary from not having enough opportunities in the sales pipeline to not following a sales process. Additionally, sales quotas have risen, yet the percentage of reps making their quota has fallen.

If your salespeople aren't hitting quota, here are a few questions to ask yourself. Remember, a quota is only valid if it's aligned to your organization and employee success.

According to a LinkedIn report, women represent 39% of the workforce in sales – and only 21% of Vice Presidents in Sales are female.

The State of Women in Sales report shows that the sales industry has the second largest gender equity gap in America. Why aren’t more women in sales?

Aside from being a demanding career, sales professionals are up against a lot of biases accusations such as being “manipulative,” “pushy,” and “dishonest.” Women are often preconceived as being too emotional for a sales career. But we’re here to debunk that myth.

- MOTIVATION -

"Leadership is not about titles, positions, or flow charts. It's about one life influencing another."

- John C. Maxwell

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The new season of the Improving Sales Performance Series has a slight twist. 

Host Matt Sunshine is joined by co-hosted by Stephanie Downs to focus on celebrating, honoring, and recognizing #WomenInSales for the month of October.

To start the season, Nicki Harkrider-Probey (VP, Local Revenue Officer at TEGNA) and Jessica Hagan (President & General Manager at KTVB News Group) join the show to share their insight, tips, and knowledge on various topics that help companies improve sales performance.

Tune in now or keep reading for a brief overview.

You may have heard this phrase exclaimed in many different ways: “Our people are our greatest asset”.

But what exactly does that mean? And if people truly are an essential ingredient to running a business, how do we ensure that they remain a strong and steady force?

Hiring the best without investing and nurturing their talents is one of the biggest mistakes an organization can make. Let’s take a look at some of the facts and figures on employee development.

When you've been in the industry for a while, you realize the astounding similarities between sports and business. Like sports, sales is a highly-competitive field, and you must have the ability to think on your feet with rock-solid professionalism.

In both, success boils down to having a winning attitude that demands discipline and attention to detail regarding how you prepare and perform.

As an athlete, it’s vital to understand the basic concept of agility — the ability to change your body’s position by having quick feet. As a sales manager or consultant, rather than applying the phrase, “Move Your Feet” to your body, you must apply it to your mindset and tactics.

- MOTIVATION -

"Engaging people is about meeting their needs – not yours."

- Tony Robbins

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Once you present a solution to a prospective buyer or client, two things happen.

It becomes either Close Won or Close Lost. Close Won is obviously the ideal or desired scenario, but what happens when your pending deal is Close Lost? Is ALL lost? Maybe not. 

Ask yourself these three questions to determine if you can change a Close Lost scenario into a Close Won.

Your recruitment strategy pivots on how you effectively use and deploy different tactics (and mindsets) to reach ideal candidates.   

There's no question we're in a talent shortage, and if you're curious about some of the ways to reach candidates using social media, make sure you take a look at these insights on best practices.

Whether a sales reps is out in the field answering prospects' questions or within the office conversing about company initiatives, inefficient communication can take a significant toll on your company's success.

When communicating with prospects, quick access to the right information at the right time is essential for selling the product or service.

Having better communication skills will increase your chances of closing the deal. Here are a few simple steps for salespeople to help take their communication with prospects to the next level.

If you have ever been part of hiring and training a new employee, you know how important it is to get it right. The company can only be as good as its employees, so each hire has the potential to raise the performance bar for the entire organization.

So, how does a company ensure that they get that right? We believe it’s a combination of both art and science.

- MOTIVATION -

"A good leader leads the people from above them. A great leader leads the people from within them."

- M.D. Arnold

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Someone once said that perceptions can’t be wrong because it’s a perception, an opinion and impression of someone else. However, perceptions are often wrong because if they were right, they would be called facts.  

Whether we deserve it or not, we’re judged by every person that we connect with. The words that come out of our mouth firmly establish an imaginary tattoo on our forehead as we stand in front of a quality prospect.

Perception is everything, and how you’re seen by your team, prospects, and clients is a key to success. New research shows that you have 27 seconds to make a positive impression and 1 minute to prove value in any given situation. Like it or not, how you look, dress, and speak helps people to form an opinion of you.

Assuming a sales manager does need a training plan can be a costly mistake. Too often this element is overlooked, and revenue suffers. Creating a training plan that includes specific elements to be completed in the first 30-60 days on the job is a great way to avoid this.

Here are four areas that should be included in a sales manager training plan:

• People
• Process
• Planning
• Performance

Keep reading for information on each to add focus to the area of creating and using training for a manager.

Successful sales is a difficult multi-level process that requires a lot of effort, knowledge, and attention. Sometimes methods and approaches that showed good results in the past don’t work anymore.

In this case, there's a need to search for something new and reliable, something that will rescue the situation. That’s why it's important to follow sales trends and consider using new features before competitors. It always helps to be one step ahead and earn the reputation of the leader.

In this article, we'll take a close look at 5 new and already popular eye-catching trends in sales.

The pandemic has made the job search for both the candidate and the recruiter challenging.

Never has a tight labor market had a deluge of resources in the talent search coupled with savvy job seekers. Online recruiting is not new. In fact, in the mid-1990s, the first online job boards changed the way candidates applied for jobs.  Goodbye cotton resume paper, and hello to the digital CV.   

There's no question that organizations worldwide are searching for talent, and that net is wider than ever with work from home and work from anywhere.

- MOTIVATION -

"Earn your leadership every day."

- Michael Jordan

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