The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

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.

- MOTIVATION -

"How you sell matters. What your process is matters. But how your customers feel when they engage with you matter more."

-Tiffani Bova

- AROUND THE WEB -

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With a new year in full swing, it's time to perform some routine maintenance to ensure a strong first quarter (Q1) . A great place to start is taking a second look at your account list. Follow these ten steps to get your sales organization’s account list cleaned up and ready for a successful year!

Sales managers are superheroes that possess special traits that help them save the day and lead their team to improved sales performance. Here's a few traits that stand out most about these savvy business leaders (as told by GIFs). 

What we say and how we say it matters. The language used with prospects impacts your capability to excite and encourage them about the deal at hand. Certain words prompt predictable behavior, and every word or phrase you choose to use will generate an emotional response.

Sales leaders who understand the psychology of communication and language learn to upgrade their vocabulary quickly. They discover the right words and phrases that help develop positive associations with their brand, products, or services. To be an effective leader, you need to think, act, and talk like a leader—here’s how.

- MOTIVATION -

"Without hustle, talent will only carry you so far."

-Gary Vaynerchuk

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Whether it's in the gym or on the field, athletes like Michael Jordan and Tom Brady are known for being the hardest workers during practice. And, as the greatest athletes of all time, they're not out there trying to learn something new—they're simply practicing the basics.

Josh Kaufman, author of The Personal MBA, writes that to go from “knowing nothing to being pretty good” actually takes about 20 hours of practice—that’s 45 minutes every day for a month. As leaders, we're accustomed to being great at what we do. But in order to learn something new and help your salespeople get better, everyone must practice. 

To remain competitive, organizations must invest more time and effort into the selection process. If you’re curious why so many companies fail to fully activate the talents of their people, take a closer look at how they make their hiring decisions. 

Regardless of what your company does, there is only one way to build a top-performing organization. You need to make sure you get both the talent and the culture fit right with every single hire you make.

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."

- MOTIVATION -

"To sell well is to convince someone else to part with resource — not to deprive that person, but to leave him better off in the end."

-Daniel Pink

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