The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

What have you been reading lately? There's so much content published every week that a person can never read it all themselves. That's why we're here, bringing you the weekly wrap up.

Here are the five articles that piqued our interest:

1. The best leaders are like gardeners, according to General McChrystal {Inc}

2. How finance executives measure the ROI of inbound marketing {Contently}

If it’s been a long time since you admitted ignorance, you might want to be worried. I was talking to a client the other day asking questions about their plans for sales enablement and he said he had to admit his ignorance on the topic.

Wow. How refreshing. You have to be smart and confident to admit ignorance. Get the irony? That made me stop and try to remember when the last time was that I was willing and able to admit ignorance. I hope you stop and do the same now.

If you have not had this experience lately, you probably fall into one of two camps:

1. You’re not challenged—not talking to enough smart people or reading interesting books and articles.

If every time your prospect or customer felt like you were pushing your products, rather than focusing on his business, he transformed into a Hollywood film director and screamed, “Cut. Boring! You’re out of here!” He’d be doing you a favor. What happens more often is that the prospect is bored and finds a semi-polite reason to show you the door. He’s just polite enough that you don’t get the bigger message—that you were boring.

What have you been reading lately? There's so much content published every week that a person can never read it all themselves. That's why we're here, bringing you the weekly wrap up.

Here are the five articles that piqued our interest:

1. A really strange way to level up {Inc}

2. As social media evolves, so too does their function {AlleyWatch}

Don’t let the next paragraph scare you away. This article is going to help you make improvements to your sales organization, not fine-tune your skills on a bike!

Cycling is a big thing in my house. My husband is an avid cyclist and the world sort of stops this time of year as we pay homage to the Tour de France. But even if you know nothing about cycling or couldn’t care less – you’re going to care about this…

Before I tell you why, ask yourself:

Would it be worth your time and energy to improve something by one percent?

Would it be worth it to expend the energy to improve lots of things by one percent?

Remember your answers and keep reading.

I’m not talking about the hip hop ladies from Queens, who burst back on the scene recently in a Geico ad, I’m actually thinking about salt and pepper.

Salt brings out the flavor in food, and a “Salt Manager” brings out the natural talent in their people.  Pepper, meanwhile, adds a strong sensation to food, a “Pepper Manager” brings a healthy dose of expectations and accountability. 

How to be a Salt Manager

Bringing out a person’s natural talent starts by having an objective assessment of what those talents are. It’s rare that one of your people, even one of your stars, is fabulous at everything. So you need to know their aces and spaces, what comes naturally to them and what is difficult for them to do.

The natural inclination of most managers is then to (a) assume the person needs no help and support with what they’re fabulous at, and (b) lots of training and coaching with the stuff they find tough. That’s backward.

Now, be warned. Each of these methods for undermining success is potent. If your purpose is to ensure that the prospect doesn’t buy, all you need is one of these five. Any one will do.

1. Fail to Qualify the Prospect

Since this is the first significant step in any professional B2B selling process, it’s your first opportunity to mess up. And this mistake has become harder to make in recent years, but if you go out of your way, you can do it. Harder to make? Yes. Qualifying the prospect requires information, and information is abundant these days. You can search for information about a company and find buckets full. In some cases, you can learn about specific challenges they’re facing or opportunities they’re chasing. And information about specific people at the company that you might approach? If you want to stay in the dark about them, be sure to steer clear of LinkedIn. Not only is it easier than ever to qualify a prospect, but these days many of the best prospects are raising their hands and qualifying themselves. But never mind all that: Derail your sale by investing gobs of time in an unqualified prospect.

What have you been reading lately? There's so much content published every week that a person can never read it all themselves. That's why we're here.

Here are the five articles that piqued our interest:

1. What is sales enablement, anyway? {SalesForce}

2. Marcus Lemonis tells us when to take bigger risks {Inc.}