The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Promoting someone to a manager doesn't make them a leader.

While managers have power, they too often lack the skills to use that power effectively. What you want is a strong sales leader, but how do you get there?

That question is why we've written this guide to people management and leadership development. We'll review the core difference between a manager and a true leader and how to train managers to get there.

It's obvious why sales performance is a crucial part of any organization. Good sales performance leads to increased sales and greater profits. These results become a motivating factor for your sales force.

A motivated sales team will perform well. This creates a cycle of continued success. However, it's often hard to achieve. 

Poor sales performance results in lost time and increased costs. Sales managers end up spending 90% of their time trying to manage poor sales performance. Your organization can avoid this by implementing an effective sales performance strategy.

This will facilitate the productive use of your sales managers' time and a motivated sales force that helps improve your company's bottom line. Read on to learn more about sales performance and how you can improve it with a comprehensive strategy.

A bucket list is an ultimate list of things you would love to have happen, or be able to do, at least once in your lifetime.

While many of us use bucket lists for personal achievements, we couldn't help but wonder what's the ultimate bucket list for a sales manager look like? Improving sales performance in your organization is critical. But how will you get there?

We invited several of our team members to help compile this list, which is certainly not a complete list, so we invite you to add to it in the comment box below.

Some people are skilled at closing a sale. It's easy for them to build rapport with customers, gather information, pitch a product or service, and then close the sale. Others excel only in connecting with prospects and find it incredibly hard to present a product or close the sale.

Utilizing a sales process can help salespeople become better at what they do. In this article, we cover the basics of the sales process and teach you how to improve sales performance.

At The Center for Sales Strategy (CSS), our mission and reason for being is to Turn Talent into Performance. Talent is foundational, but it’s not the only element.

It starts with talent, but you must also develop. After you’ve selected the person, you must commit to growing and developing them if you really want to turn talent into performance.

How do you grow someone?

Even your best sales reps aren’t immune to sales performance gaps.

There are common gaps like not following the sales process, poor listening skills, not properly preparing for calls, not identifying valid business reasons (VBR) early in the process… the list continues.

However, one of the most common sales performance gaps that you need to close in order to boost revenue is right at the very beginning of the sales process. Do you know what it is?

Increasing sales productivity and performance is a top challenge for any sales leader. One study even found that it surpasses the obstacles of recruiting, hiring, and onboarding.

Data suggests that salespeople spend as little as 23% of their time actually selling. In conjunction, the 2020 Media Sales Report found that nearly 1 out of every 3 (31%) of salespeople spend 20-25% of their time in discovery meetings.

Sales managers try various things to hit their targets: hiring more reps, reassigning territories, changing compensation plans… and more. Yet there’s one thing that most organizations have not tried, and when done correctly, you’ll see the growth and revenue performance you desire.

The Media Sales Report tells us that the hardest job in sales is getting an appointment with a new prospect.

As a sales manager, it's fairly easy to speak up in the sales meeting and tell your salespeople that they need to do a better job prospecting, or that they need to just commit more time and energy to getting appointments. But they already know those things, and they're facing huge hurdles that their counterparts of a few years ago didn't face.

This article was originally published on Entrepreneur.com.

What’s the worst thing that can happen if you buy weak leads from a questionable source? New York City real estate broker Nathan Horne almost found out.

Like the thousands of professionals in his industry who collectively spent $10.5 billion on advertising in 2017, his employer, The Corcoran Group, focused on branding instead of strategic lead generation. So, when Horne called someone he thought was a hot lead, he got the surprise of his life. Instead of a potential buyer, the police detective who answered the phone made a veiled threat about having a gun and being willing to use it.

One of the leading indicators for sales success is to look at the number of appointments that a salesperson has each week. (This is not the only leading indicator that you should be tracking, but it is one of them.)

The idea is that if a salesperson has a significant amount of appointments each week which involve finding needs, getting assignments, presenting solutions, or delivering a proposal, that this quality sales activity will lead to good solid revenue performance.  

It's fair to say that everyone in sales or in sales management would agree with this, but here's the flaw — many salespeople are confusing "I'll follow up with you next week" with "I have an appointment."

To be clear, "I’ll follow up with you next week," does not mean you have an appointment.