The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Finding a candidate with top talent to fill an open position is a good feeling. You’ve found someone that possesses the skills and experience necessary to perform the job at hand and do it well. Box checked! 

During the interview process, you focused mainly on their qualifications and professional background, but it was hard to get a sense of who they are and what they are about. You tell yourself that it’s not too much of a concern; with their skills and talent, it should all work out.  

Sometimes it does work out, but many times it doesn’t. Don't overlook this one key factor when hiring a new candidate!

Culture is defined as a way of life for a group of people. When in doubt about what to do, the members will fall back on what they have learned from their culture. They don’t even think about it—they know what their culture would tell them to do.

Business organizations all have a culture, and when you walk into a business and take an instant like or dislike to being there, you are experiencing their culture. Sometimes they don’t even have to say anything—it’s an attitude you can almost feel.

Business-to-business organizations don’t often have potential customers walk into a physical location. Often a salesperson is how the client and prospect experience your organization’s culture. What is your sales culture telling them?

Trust is fundamental in any highly engaged, high-performing team. Without trust and integrity, people question why they want to work for a company or manager who doesn’t have convictions. When asked, highly engaged employees describe their companies and leaders as “authentic” or “genuine.”

Building trust takes time. Whether in person or virtually, it can take months or years to build a solid base of trust, but it takes just minutes to lose it. Trust is ever-evolving and something you need to be mindful of every day.

At our company, our employees crave growth and development. One way we add to this focus is through our quarterly book club. Our business book club is different from most, as we all read a book we are interested in, not one we all read together.

Having a book club where we all read different business books exposes us to a huge library to explore that we may not have thought of before. It also allows us to grow in areas that appeal to us.

Reading is one of the major habits successful people have in common. For instance, Bill Gates reads 50 books per year, Warrant Buffett reads 500 pages every day, and Mark Cuban reads 3+ hours a day.

Creating an environment where employees can develop is important to both their personal and career growth.

When you create a work environment that fosters a culture of learning for you and your employees, you will reap many positive returns.

We hear this question more than ever, "What makes a good leader?"

In the first 2022 episode of Improving Sales Performance, Stephanie Downs joins Matt Sunshine and guests Maryann Balbo and Fran Mallace of Cox Media.

Maryann and Fran are both Group Vice Presidents at Cox Media, and throughout the show, they discuss qualities of a good leader, leading in a 'people-first' company, and offer advice for sales leaders on company culture, sales management in 2022, and looking forward.

Tune in now or keep reading for a brief overview.

Providing quality content that helps our clients and visitors improve their sales performance is a goal of ours, and we hope this blog has brought you insight, education, and tips to get you on the path to success.

We've searched for the most popular blog posts of 2021, and we've curated these lists to bring you some of the most informative content from the year. Check out these top blogs on the sales performance from 2021, and let them kickstart your 2022 sales strategy.

How do you create a culture that attracts and retains top talent?

One lesson Arnie Malham, Founder & President of BetterBookClub and Author of Worth Doing Wrong, teaches us in this episode is that it takes time and will not happen suddenly.

Tune in now or keep reading for a brief overview.

Having a great company culture in today’s economy is not just a luxury, it’s a necessity.

The Center for Sales Strategy (CSS) is known both internally and externally for our incredible culture — especially as a fully remote company. How do we do it? How did we build our company culture?

This LIVE broadcast is from our annual staff meeting in Dallas, TX. Host Matt Sunshine discusses topics with a few team members from The Center for Sales Strategy, LeadG2, and Up Your Culture, around how we built our company culture and how we now help others improve employee engagement and company culture.

Tune in now or keep reading for a brief overview.

Although lowering, unemployment rates are still much higher than we’ve seen in recent years. However, don’t let that fool you; as you can see, it’s still a very competitive job market out there.

Why? In part, because smart companies are examining their talent and prioritizing their top performers. When they know it’s time to let someone go, you can guarantee it’s not going to be their top people. However, while unemployment is higher, top talent is still scarce.

How can you structure your interview process to let top talent shine through? And beyond that, how can you change your traditional interviewing process to show top talent you have an adaptable, strong company culture?