The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

It’s widely believed that the first Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software was introduced in the 1980s. Since then, businesses have made large investments in time and money to launch CRM initiatives, only to have their salespeople misuse them or not use them at all.

Over the years, business leaders have begged, threatened, bribed, and cajoled their salespeople to use these powerful tools. But in the long run, threats and bribes simply don’t work.

So how can you increase the adoption of your CRM by your sales team? How can you get them to actually use the tool you’ve invested in? Here are a few ideas.

As a sales manager, it’s important that you continually take new courses of action to help your team generate more sales.

Here are six practical methods you should consider.

A person needs many skills and qualities to be successful at business, including good organization, communication, leadership, and negation.

Business acumen is another necessary skill for those who are driven to succeed. But what is it? And how can you develop it?

Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about business acumen.

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"Refuse to make excuses or blame others. The leader always says, if it's to be, it's up to me."

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How many open positions are on your team?  Open positions are an opportunity to improve the talent level. You want to make your goals more attainable and hiring top-shelf people is the best way to do that. 

However, building a high-quality sales team isn’t easy. It typically requires a lot of time and money to assemble a team of top performers. What if we told you that there’s a proven system that would help you get a list of great people to interview? Would you be interested?

Being a great manager is tougher than being a great salesperson.

Think back to when you were a new manager, what was one piece of advice you wish you knew back then, that you now know?

Here’s what a few of our experts at The Center for Sales Strategy said.

Every organization wants to grow on some level – whether it’s more clients/customers, higher revenue, more locations, more product lines, etc.

There’s no one way to grow a business, but there are plenty of reasons it stops growing or slows down.

Here are some of the reasons companies stop growing.

Making a first impression with your potential clients is vital to getting ahead.

When you make that cold contact, you want to ensure that they'll want to buy from you. A part of this is using the right method to reach out to your contacts. Which is better, cold calls or sales emails?

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"A person always going hir or her best becomes a natural leader, just by example."

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Nobody likes to feel used.

This is probably not a news flash, but salespeople don’t like to feel as though they're being used by their sales manager to hit their budget or bonus.

During an industry conference, I happened to be sitting next to two sales managers discussing their second-quarter budgets and how difficult it was going to be to hit them.

The manager doing most of the talking said to the other, “I just don’t know what I am going to do. Maybe I just need to get more bodies in here and get them out selling and hitting the streets. The folks I have in here right now just aren’t getting it done for me, and I don’t want to miss hitting my bonus in Q2.”