The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

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.

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.

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."

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.

Great sales managers truly want to grow and develop the salespeople that report directly to them. And, we’re not just talking about the new hires to the organization. We’re talking about all the salespeople they are responsible for.

At our Talent Focused Management workshop — a workshop that sales managers who are clients of The Center for Sales Strategy attend — we highlight a famous quote from Peter Drucker:

“It is the people who determine the performance capacity of the organization.”

The best investment a sales organization can make is to commit to grow and develop its people. The great news is that salespeople want to learn and develop. In fact, the 2019 Media Sales Report found that 95% of salespeople said that learning and development are important to them. One of the best ways to grow and develop your salespeople is through the effective use of feedback.

These days, there's a quick fix for everything. From a 21-day diet to a 3-step skin care plan and a 24-hour credit repair, it's our natural instinct as humans to look for quick solutions to our problems. We’re impatient by nature, and we want the kind of solution that turns everything around now.

While some of these quick fixes may work in the short-run, most are not sustainable and they leave you in worse shape than you were before. Ironically, the quick fix delayed the real solution.

In our world of quick fixes for everything, we also expect a quick fix to be applied to sales. However, the best sales performance solutions combine a jump-start plan to deliver immediate results together with a long-term plan to assure sustainability. And, the long-term plan must include three fundamentals.