As a sales manager, you have no doubt had this experience. You just returned from making a sales call with one of your people and they begin to describe to someone else how the call went, who said what, and what got accomplished. As you listen, you are wondering if you were even on the same call, because what you saw and what you experienced was quite different. So, what’s going on here? Is your salesperson just obtuse, or perhaps trying to spin the story to make himself look good? Chances are, neither.
I recently talked with a person in senior leadership who told me his company hired a salesperson six months ago who took an $80,000 pay cut to come to work for them. She left an obviously lucrative sales job in a bigger company because, despite her level of achievement and huge revenue contribution, she felt no appreciation for her accomplishments and, was being forced into a rigid sales structure totally foreign to what made her successful.
While there is no tactic as valuable as a good strategy, there are times when—despite your artful and strategic approach to 
My wife and I subscribe to Consumer Reports and recently I was leafing through the pages when I came across an interesting article outlining the best and worst values among cars. They calculated the cost of ownership over a five-year period taking into account factors like cost of acquisition, reliability, maintenance cost, fuel efficiency, depreciation, etc. Turns out the Honda Fit is THE best value on the market at a cost-per-mile of 44 cents. That's pretty impressive considering a Mercedes S550 costs $1.70 a mile to own and the vehicle I drive, the Acura RDX, costs 84 cents a mile to own, nearly twice the cost of the Honda Fit.
If you add up the value of everyone who sits in on a sales meeting—including yourself—you’ll realize how expensive sales meetings are. You should also remember the best training takes place in the field, with real accounts, not in a conference room with theoretical examples. But, there are still some legitimate reasons for having a sales meeting: education, training, team building, problem solving, positive psych and recognition. 
