The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

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.

With most of the workforce now working from home, sales managers are figuring out what the new normal is when it comes to their team’s workflow. 

While there are numerous benefits to an at-home, flexible work schedule (like lower stress and a higher employee retention rate), sales teams still need all the help they can get for constant communication, effective project management, goal setting, and team building. 

Thankfully, there is an arsenal of apps, integrations, and platforms that will not only help teams to stay motivated and productive, but will also help to crush quotas as well. Keep reading to find out which tech is right for your team.

The Impact Leadership System is both a training curriculum and an ongoing guidebook for sales leaders of all organizations and levels of experience. This system ensures sales leaders make the right People decisions, follow the best Processes, and engage in effective Planning to deliver top Performance.

In episode 6 of the Improving Sales Performance series, Managing Partner at The Center for Sales Strategy (CSS) John Henley uncovers details about the new Impact Leadership System and how sales leaders can use all four stages in various ways.

Is it possible to drive sales performance and keep an amazing company culture during these challenging times? Yes! And Taja Graham, Vice President of Sales for Emmis Communications Indianapolis, provides the proof in her interview with Matt Sunshine.

Episode 5 of the Improving Sales Performance series deep dives into things Graham is doing in her market to drive performance, as well as what she’s doing to keep her team engaged. Plus, she touches on how they’ve modified planning for next year to drive performance.

Have you ever heard about Katie Francis, who shattered the 30-year-old world record by selling 21,477 boxes of Girl Scout Cookies in 2014?

On weekdays, Katie worked seven hours a day selling cookies. On weekends, she put in 12 hours a day. What started as a goal of selling 18,100 boxes, quickly raised to 20,000, and then to 21,000. Katie’s a goal-setter — and reaching a goal just motivates her to set a higher goal. She sold a record of 100,100 boxes of girl scout cookies in her seven years as a girl scout.

To be successful in sales, Katie quickly learned you can't take "no" personally. This young lady has a solid ego that rejects rejection along with an agile mind that readily learns and adapts.

Your role as a leader is to drive your people toward your ambitious culture. How do you do that? You must connect with people!

When COVID-19 closed gyms, 58% of trainers lost some of all of their income, and 23% were furlough or laid off (PR Newswire). How did one gym manage to gain more members now than pre-COIVD?

Episode 4 of the Improving Sales Performance series with Tony Hartl, founder of Crunch Fitness Austin and Planet Tan, provides listeners with a few secrets of how he’s getting new members and keeping existing ones amid the pandemic. He also discloses how he keeps his team focused and energized.