John Henley, on May 29, 2014
We're regularly asked by clients to help them create compensation plans for salespeople and others in their sales operation.
They want to know how to make sales compensation effective for the salespeople and good for their bottom line.
We generally start consulting by suggesting they break the process up into the following three steps.
Mike Anderson, on May 28, 2014
Does it ever seem like life is moving so fast that everything’s a blur? I can help you with that by sharing this one simple law of physics: You cannot focus on everything. So of course, when you try, everything’s going to be a blur.
A few years ago, I took a photography course. One of the early assignments was to focus on a fast-moving object by keeping the camera trained on the subject, regardless of the background. That’s why this picture of a car moving down the highway is in focus, but the road and everything else around it is blurry.
Kathleen O. Celmins, on May 26, 2014
Today is Memorial Day. A day to remember those who have given their lives for us, and a day to be with friends and family. To celebrate togetherness, and (hopefully) eat something fresh of the barbecue.
Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer. The weather is warmer, and if you're anything like us, you find yourself winding down outside instead of in front of the television.
But what should you read? I asked my colleagues about the best business book they've read in the last year. Here's what they had to say.
Tell to Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story
The premise of the book is that the most successful communicators are those who are adept at telling stories. The business environment is replete with facts and figures thrust upon us by seemingly un-ending Power Point slides and voluminous presentations. But research indicates the most effective way to connect, persuade, and to gain genuine interest in other people is to be an effective story teller. Don’t tell me why I should do something, rather illustrate the impact of what you have to sell has on real people in real situations. Tell me about how you changed a life or solved a pressing problem for someone. People want to hear your story, not your data.
The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential...in Business and in Life
You can be much more effective professionally (and personally) when you learn how to break goals down into manageable tasks and to be more focused when you work. I’ve learned some great new ways to do this, as well as some tried and true tips on how to create and maintain new habits. It’s an easy read and very applicable!
Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
The book is about a lot of things, but mostly about vulnerability. Vulnerability is where innovation and creation begin.
This week was busy! We launched a new self-directed online course called Brand & Connect, which is a really powerful way to learn how to establish your profile online. People are searching for you as soon as they know your name -- you can guide them on what they find.
Kathleen O. Celmins, on May 22, 2014
Here at The Center for Sales Strategy we work remotely, which means our professional lives are contained on the internet. I was excited to find that my colleague (and crosstown neighbor!) Greg Giersch was working on launching a new self-directed online course we’ve just published called Brand & Connect, so I asked him to meet with me.
This new course is one of Greg’s important recent projects, so I came to lunch loaded with questions about Brand & Connect.
1. What was the impetus behind Brand & Connect? Why did you start it in the first place?The short answer is that today potential clients are researching salespeople online before they ever agree to meet with them. Salespeople are being judged and graded before they ever meet a prospect.
The longer answer is that I've been building this product for years. In 2006 when Twitter first came out, I was an early adopter. Everyone in the office thought, "what is a sales manager doing on Twitter?" They thought I was just "playing online," but I was fascinated by how much you could learn from the early thought leaders and use social media to connect with other professionals around the world.
The first half of the course is about building your personal brand—figuring out who you are and what you have to offer. What benefit do you bring to your clients? The second half teaches you how to connect with people, especially prospects. There's an old saying that a good salesperson can sell anything to anyone, but that's not really true. A good salesperson provides the right solution to the right customer.
Surprisingly, often they don't, so we help them consider their brand from three perspectives:
Jim Thompson, on May 21, 2014
Sales managers are so busy these days that it is easy to get caught in the everyday shuffle of dealing with all the tactical and urgent items on their to-do list. It makes it very easy to forget what your real job is: managing salespeople and maximizing the talents of your sales team.
Here are five strategic ways to get the most out of your salespeople:
After working with your salespeople over a period of time, you probably have a pretty good idea of where they excel and where their limitations are. At The Center for Sales Strategy, we have a talent assessment that can tell you their talents without having to wait months to determine that on your own.
Steve Marx, on May 20, 2014
There are only two kinds of prospects who agree to see you: the ones with lots of extra time on their hands and the ones who are tantalized by what you have to offer. The former are tough to find these days, and when you do you often discover that they don’t have any spare cash to go with their spare time.
And so our task as salespeople is to tantalize the prospect enough that he or she will be motivated to carve out a block of time in their busy schedule. Salespeople who ask for only a sliver of time, instead of an ample block, set themselves up for failure by positioning themselves as unimportant and inexpensive and by leaving themselves too little time to launch a successful relationship. If you need plenty of time with the prospect, figure that the prospect will need plenty of tantalizing before agreeing to invest that time.
Most salespeople attempt to tantalize their prospects by dangling their product in front of them. Fewer tantalize their prospects by dangling their process. See which one is more like the approach you use…
The numbers are turning increasingly negative for salespeople: more people are competing with you to get a slot on the prospect’s calendar at the very moment when more available information has plenty of prospects convinced they don’t need to see salespeople at all. If you want to meet your goals in an environment as tough as that, your approach needs to be very together, very tight, very toned. But most salespeople have an approach that could only be described as weak—often because their personal brand is flabby.
Not to fear! I will be your personal brand’s trainer. One of my specialties is helping B2B sellers get into shape, and I can help you, too. (Note for those who dread working out: don’t worry, no sweat will be involved in this process, but you will get results if you put in the work.)
Kathleen O. Celmins, on May 16, 2014
This week was a great one for us. I especially liked Matt's post about how to determine the ROI of your inbound marketing program. It can be hard to measure, especially if you can't easily connect your inbound efforts to your sales pipeline. The rest of the week had valuable information as well, both on our site, and around the web.
Brian Hasenbauer, on May 15, 2014
As an inbound marketer, I download pretty much every piece of premium content I find. (Premium content? That’s the material for which you need to fill out a form or you can’t download it, a form asking for your name, email, phone number, perhaps job title, and the like.) For me, it’s purely research on marketing trends, learning how to do inbound marketing better, and of course, checking out the competition.
I find it very interesting that even though I sometimes use my gmail account (not my work email) that I constantly get calls from companies where I downloaded some premium content, and they’re trying to sell me marketing automation services. It's not hard to do a search on LinkedIn to find the few Hasenbauers that are out there. It's not like my job title and my company are hard to find. Most anyone can see that I work for a company that does marketing automation and inbound marketing.
So why do these companies bother calling and following up on leads that have no chance of converting? Great question.
Before any inbound marketer picks up the phone and calls a lead, there are three questions they should ask themselves:
