The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

At the beginning of a new year, it's tempting to set goals for the next 12 months. After all, you'll have your results from the prior year and can identify where you fell short and where you want your company to improve. 

However, try to resist the urge to create annual goals that are too detailed and contain too many action items. If you fall behind, it's hard to catch up. You can quickly lose momentum and focus on what you're trying to achieve.

Instead, quarterly goals make more sense when you're looking for action-driven results. At the end of each quarter, you can then set the appropriate goals for the next quarter. These can fit into some more general goals for the year but should also be aligned with the long-term strategy. 

Let's take a look at the steps to create a quarterly action plan, how to measure success, and how to plan for the following quarter.

So much has been said and written about what top sellers do to set themselves apart from the average and low performing salespeople.

Let’s look at this from a different angle. What things do they make certain to NEVER do?

In order to fully understand what makes a high performing sales person, it’s helpful to recognize behaviors NOT exhibited by this elite group.

How would it feel to be part of the 1%? You have a flexible schedule and have a reliable, dependable, top-performing sales team. To many, that life will only ever be a dream.

That's because the 1% are willing to do things that others aren't. From creatively improving sales performance to being a leader and mentor, here's how you can join the 1% as a sales manager.

According to research, over $5 billion is spent solely on sales training and sales improvements every year in the US. If your remote sales team is not up to speed with the latest sales strategies and techniques, you could be costing your business a lot of money in missed opportunities.

Coaching a remote sales team has its perks, you have less overhead because there is no brick and mortar location, plus, everyone has a bit more freedom and flexibility.

That being said, there are also many challenges of coaching a remote sales team, including the lack of connection and distance. 

So the problem is knowing how to lead a remote sales team effectively so that you can increase your sales and get a major ROI on your sales training costs. The last thing you want is to spend a lot of money on sales training and not have it be well-received. 

Thankfully, we've created this article to solve those problems, keep on reading to learn more.

The pandemic affected more than just the health and daily lives of people across the world. It affected behaviors and perceptions—including how media is used.

With media plans reconfigured and millions of dollars’ worth of ad budgets shifted - to say the rug was swept out from under the advertising industry is an understatement.

In case you missed Episode 8 of the Improving Sales Performance series, here’s a breakdown of the conversation that host, Matt Sunshine and guest, Gary Pizzati had on how many traditional clients are buying and selling in 2021. Plus, recruiting and selecting top talent, the impact of technology, and how to keep a sales culture alive during these unprecedented times.

What do American crime dramas, musical fantasies, and a Canadian sitcom have in common? They can all help you practice social distancing and make you a better person. It’s true! Research provided by Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts found that watching high-quality TV dramas can actually increase our emotional intelligence and make us more empathetic people.

Our team at The Center for Sales Strategy (CSS) and LeadG2 survived 2020, but not without the help of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+. Here are some of the binge-worthy movies and shows that all of us have been watching while staying home and social distancing.

What are your most effective recruiting tools and strategies?

As a hiring manager, you’ve witnessed first-hand that simply posting a job listing is not enough to attract top talent to your organization. You may have tried to throw-out company statistics and numbers while interviewing, but even those impressive numbers didn’t set you apart from the competition.

So, how do you stand out and sell candidates on your company? The answer is surprisingly simple: storytelling.

These days you can never get enough information on work from home best practices, how to use video to help manage and sell, and how to manage a remote sales team.

In episode 7 of the Improving Sales Performance series, Matt Sunshine hosts a roundtable discussion with Jim Hopes, Stephanie Downs, and Kurt Sima — all consultants at The Center for Sales Strategy (CSS). This is a rare opportunity for listeners to see what an internal meeting is like at CSS and to truly learn from a team of sales experts that offer different points of view.

None of us fathomed that a year ago we could do business without traveling. No one imagined that we would exclusively have online events, online trainings, online meetings, online calls, and so on. Lessons learned in 2020 boil down to three words — Accept, Adapt, Accelerate.

• We’ve accepted that there’s a new reality for the way we do business
• We’ve adapted to the way we sell and talk to clients based on our new reality
• We’ve accelerated the sales process (and more) in order to improve

Although conducting business during a pandemic has been challenging, are all the changes we’ve made really that bad? Here are some lessons learned in 2020, straight from the mouths of experts at The Center of Sales Strategy (CSS), LeadG2, and Up Your Culture.