The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

This is the glorious time of year when most leaders are engulfed in budgets, planning, meetings, and deadlines. 

With less than six weeks until 2023, let’s dive into a few things to check off or add to your list.

Setting meaningful as well as realistic goals is a skill that all sales leaders know is crucial. When looking at sales goals, let us clarify that they need to be both meaningful, with a focus on hard, not vanity metrics. They also must be realistic to your industry, region, market, team, and organizational capacity.  

One of the best ways for sales leaders to set realistic goals is first to look back. History can offer meaningful data and will provide checks and balances when dealing with projections and not actuals. 

Keeping a clean pipeline for your sales team provides incredible insight into several areas of your sales department. It takes a particular discipline to stay on top of the pipeline, and it is well worth the effort. 

To start, you need a tool that will allow you to access your pipeline at any time. At The Center for Sales Strategy (CSS), we use HubSpot. The deal stages provide tremendous insight into seller activity and success and show signs of potential derailments to a deal.

Creating an environment of trust and becoming a trusted advisor is one of the most important roles of a successful sales professional.  

That requires a shift from focusing on selling your product or solution to understanding and meeting the needs of the prospect or client in the now, near, and far.

Often, a sales funnel and sales pipeline are confused. 

They are not the same, and both have a distinct purpose along the path to purchase. They both provide an incredible amount of intelligence when examined in part and as a whole. 

Marketers and sales leaders that collaborate closely will learn that ensuring the sales funnel and pipeline are both full, healthy, and clean defines some of the biggest indicators of revenue success. 

2022 is poised to be one of the most disruptive years for media sellers. 

Organizations faced with staffing challenges and companies struggling to recover from losses —  businesses in every category feel the impact. And often, there are stark differences based on category and region. 

Generally, businesses are looking to grow new business and revenue. Bolstering sales, disruption in the workplace, supply chain challenges, and a host of other opportunities means a laser focus on how to sell in 2022 will be vital to success. 

Sellers and managers can win more deals by focusing on several cornerstone principles and repeating them daily.  

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.

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.

Most companies scale back recruiting in response to a financial crisis. Did you know that 1 of the 3 most effective responses is to hire top performers from the competition?

Companies looking to hire the best talent should pay attention to these recruiting trends we’ve seen in 2021 and what it means for future years.