The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

How many open positions are on your team?  Open positions are an opportunity to improve the talent level. You want to make your goals more attainable and hiring top-shelf people is the best way to do that. 

However, building a high-quality sales team isn’t easy. It typically requires a lot of time and money to assemble a team of top performers. What if we told you that there’s a proven system that would help you get a list of great people to interview? Would you be interested?

What do the best managers do to get their salespeople to pick the right prospects? They become the gatekeeper. No prospect should ever get on a salesperson’s Target list until it has been fully qualified against a set of objective criteria, a target business profile.

When helping a salesperson determine a high priority prospect, ask them the following questions using the following criteria: Dollar Potential, Access, and Fit.

In 2022, we're challenging you to reconsider the way you're doing business to improve your sales performance.

The sales process is constantly changing and it's changing more rapidly than ever, yet there's a generation of salespeople still selling like it was any year before 2009.

Also in the mix are sales managers not adept to the evolving sales world, and therefore, might struggle to lead their team to good sales results.

The top organizations in any marketplace place a high value on their people because they are the foundation on which success is built.

They place an even higher value on managers who can develop top performers. Yet, all too often, business leaders hire people they believe in and sit back to see what they can do.

SCENARIO: For the first time in a long time, you have sales positions open, but the most talented salespeople likely are already employed elsewhere. 

Even the most successful sales managers can find themselves in this situation if they aren't intentional with their management practices and focused on retention.

Recruiting and filling your talent bank is important. Even so, don't lose focus on the effort it takes to retain top talent. There’s always a strain on your resources when you try to scramble to fill a vacant sales position, but it’s a double-whammy when the vacancy is left by your superstar performer.

Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Mark Cuban — all agree that one habit is a key ingredient to success.

Practicing good health habits by eating right and exercising each day is what these billionaires, and 21 others, agree helped create the foundation for their businesses and financial success. Your habits and routines determine your success and your future. In order to see the true benefits of any effort, you must be disciplined and consistent.

The same holds true when developing new business. It takes that same effort and discipline to consistently create a healthy sales pipeline.

Inquiry is a powerful motivator. We use it to fuel conversations, problem-solve, and, ultimately, improve sales performance.

High-value questions are a driving force to much-needed mental shifts — especially in today’s environment. When your mindset changes, so does your behavior. As sales leaders, we can’t control market conditions, but we can influence a few things — like choices.

Below are five questions we challenge sales leaders to ask their salespeople every week if they want to improve sales performance, fill their funnel full of new prospects, and increase customer loyalty.

Have you ever stopped and wondered how many other salespeople are trying to get a meeting with the same prospect as you?

It’s a pretty overwhelming number when you think about it. Day-in and day-out, decision makers are being bombarded with voicemails, emails, drop-ins, and various other methods your competition is using to gain access.

In today’s competitive marketplace, it’s tough to cut through the clutter. Leading with a compelling insight that you can turn into a valid business reason (VBR) is essential for your prospect to want to connect with you.

Technology has disrupted the traditional techniques we have used to approach prospects. Today, the most successful developers of new business have a smart and focused prospecting strategy.  They concentrate their efforts on a disciplined strategy that provides more appointments and more revenue. 

The shotgun approach of yesteryear is dead. Before technology disrupted our approach, we could sit down, call 100 prospects, and get ten appointments. Any mention of not having enough appointments was met by your sales manager with, “This is a numbers game! Sit down with the phone, and don’t quit calling until you get ten appointments.” 

Today that strategy is total folly.