The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

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.”

Here we are at the end of another week, and the weekend before the holiday! In this post, we'll look at how to make sure you don't come back to an overflowing inbox and how you can use the downtime to plan to make 2016 your most successful sales year yet!

1. 5 New Year's Resolutions to Boost Sales Results — Salesforce

We love the start of a new year because it's a great opportunity to set new goals and get a fresh start. This post from Salesforce suggests 5 excellent goals for the new year that will boost your company's sales.

“Co-branding, also called brand partnership, is when two companies form an alliance to work together, creating marketing synergy.”

Who wants to be average? If you knew that the average webinar according to Clickmeeting.com had only 28 participants, wouldn’t you want to beat that average? (28 participants does not necessarily indicate only 28 people registered—this means that 28 people attended the webinar at the scheduled time. Many more probably registered, but those whose schedules don't allow live attendance will only watch the webinar recording.)

If getting 28 people to attend your webinar seems like a lot for the size of your company, or if you want to exceed that average number, you might want to consider some alternative methods to getting more registrants. One alternative to the common promotion techniques of social, email and advertising is to use some form of co-branding. 

The holidays are the perfect time to show your team how much you appreciate them. But sometimes it's hard to think of meaningful gift ideas. We've got you covered this year! We collected ideas from our sales consulting staff here at The Center for Sales Strategy (each of whom was once a salesperson and a sales manager) to share with you. Here are 12 gift ideas you can't go wrong with.

More and more, I am hearing from our clients that the single toughest thing for salespeople to do these days is to secure quality appointments. Just so we are all on the same page, a quality appointment meets the following criteria:

• It's scheduled in advance
• It's with the decision maker(s)
• The main purpose of the meeting is to discover needs, get an assignment, or present ideas

Having salespeople cold call for hours upon hours is not efficient—it's expensive and it's very 1990’s.