The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Chris Brogan recommends an exercise at the beginning of each year that he calls “My Three Words.” He uses these three words as a way to focus his energy and effort for the coming year—a creative twist on the new year’s resolution. I have seen Chris refer to this the last few years, but this is the first year I decided to take his recommendation.  

I created a first draft and set it aside a few days and then came back to put it in final form. My three words are Think, Decide, and Appreciate. Here’s what I resolve to do.

Sales meetings are often seen as a necessary evil by both salespeople and sales managers—the salespeople often think they are a waste of time (and sometimes they are) and managers generally hate putting them together (and a are often not that good at it). So, here are five tips to help you produce a sales meeting people will want to be part of, with less work on your part to provide all the content:

It's Friday! Hope you've had a good week! Now it's time for us to share what we've been reading online this week. Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. Peer-to-Peer Coaching: Your New Secret Weapon — SalesForce

Peer-to-peer coaching reinforces best practices and builds a deeper level of trust with your peers. This article examines the benefits that peer-to-peer coaching can bring to sales training. Think about what would be possible if each manager finished training with an unconditional commitment to proactively coach each other.

As a parent of two small children, I've coached my share of soccer teams over the years. I like to think that my teams learned something from my coaching and leadership, but I am starting to think that I learned more from them.

Many of the lessons I have learned can be applied to sales and specifically sales management: the team that keeps score does best, practice like you intend to play, and you are only as strong as your weakest player.

Here’s a new year’s resolution I have: I am going to try to be more demanding in 2016! Demanding about the right stuff, that is.

We can all fall into the trap of being ok with good performance (from ourselves and others)—instead of demanding great performance. An example of this for our company is in the area of insights. Many of our clients count on us for insights related to specific categories of business or overall consumer trends that impact numerous business categories. Over the last few years, we've tried to do too much. As a result, we had a lot of average content in our business category insights. This year, we are going to narrow our scope and improve our content (and design). I am going to demand it from all of us.

Happy New Year! We've collected our favorite posts and articles that we've read this week, and we're sharing them here with you. Get ready for a great 2016!

1. 3 Sales Tips to Pounce on Before the Ball Drops — Salesforce

Streamline your sales tasks with technology. This post from Salesforce explains how implementing three tips will help you be more productive in 2016.

Many books have been written on leadership and many workshops given for leaders on how to build sales teams and influence positive change in cultures. Some observations:

The most important job of managers is to coach, develop, and maximize the talents of their direct reports—sales managers developing salespeople and general managers developing sales managers. When people are maximizing the talents they have, sales and productivity will follow.

Here are my top 6 recommendations to improve sales culture and make sure management is getting the most from the talents of the team.

Merry Christmas to each of you! We hope you all have a very happy holiday, however you are celebrating! While you're kicking back and enjoying the time away from work, you can track Santa's progress! 

When you pay attention, a holiday party can tell you a lot about your team’s talents. And what you learn about each person could change the way you coach them, and make them more successful.

Recently, I talked with a sales manager who took his team on a bowling outing to celebrate the holiday season. It was a fun team building activity, and it also taught him a lot about each person’s strengths.

The organized, fun salesperson on his team planned the entire outing down to the bowling teams and the gift exchange. Everything was perfect, and everyone had a great time.  

The relationship seller got everyone to participate in a hilarious game where you eat disgusting flavored jelly beans. Everyone did what she asked and completely trusted her when she said, “it’s really not that bad.”