The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

According to a DePaul University study, the average turnover cost per Account Executive (AE) is $97,690 when you add up recruiting costs, training costs, and lost sales. So, if you lose five AEs in one year - you’re close to losing nearly a half a million dollars. 

Couple that with the fact that in a Glassdoor survey, only 19% of AE’s have no immediate plans leave their companies, but 68% of AE’s plan to look for a job within the next year.  

Why do sales reps leave? And what can your sales organization do to stop your top sellers from leaving?

At The Center for Sales Strategy (CSS), we’re big believers in talent. And nothing confirms our trust in talent more than when we witness a direct connection between the talent level of a given salesperson and the success they achieve.

When highly talented, that success happens more quickly and it lasts over the long haul — and when talent is softer, success is modest at best. Same is true for highly talented sales staffs versus those less talented. 

But our confidence in the predictable relationship between strong sales talent and strong sales performance has confirmed something else — talent is rare and precious. Talented salespeople are worth their weight in gold not only because they produce prodigious returns on the investment employers make in them, but also because they’re so darn hard to find.

And a staff full of such salespeople? A sales manager should count themselves an unusually outstanding recruiter and manager if half the staff is highly talented. 

The IMPACT sales leadership system is both a training curriculum and an ongoing guidebook for sales leaders of all organizations and levels of experience. This system ensures sales leaders make the right People decisions, follow the best Processes, and engage in effective Planning to deliver top Performance.

In episode 6 of the Improving Sales Performance series, Managing Partner at The Center for Sales Strategy (CSS) John Henley uncovers details about the new IMPACT leadership system and how sales leaders can use all four stages in various ways.

Working with sales leaders and managers through a crisis like the pandemic is full of twists and turns — and new discoveries!

Significant transformations such as downsizing and restructuring because of things like COVID can disrupt the flow of a sales team, however, done properly, they can improve sales performance. Many sales organizations are discovering that removing unproductive sellers (and not replacing them) creates a more productive team.

Since early this year, many changes have been implemented, but an emerging hot topic among sales leaders now is sales staff size. As a sales manager, is this something you have been thinking about?

Your IFM's should be the most productive and most important time spent with your sales reps every week.

For those unfamiliar with the acronym IFM, it stands for Individual Focus Meeting. What is an IFM? It's what our team at The Center for Sales Strategy (CSS) calls your weekly one-on-one meetings with your salespeople (CSS loves to create an acronym for more common sales terms to keep you on your toes.)

Numerous studies support the fact that one-on-one meetings have a large impact on your team’s performance. So, if you’re struggling with IFM’s, it’s time to prioritize and improve with these three tips.

One of the largest inhibitors to sales enablement in organizations is taking a random approach to it.

According to Salesforce, 58% of pipelines stall because sales reps are unable to add value. Is your current sales enablement content addressing the issues your clients and prospects are facing? Research says for many companies the answer is no, and it’s due to the lack of a sales enablement strategy.

As you look to grow your sales enablement efforts, our experts want to offer their tips on successful sales enablement strategies that they know are proven to work.

Before we get into the how to use a Sales Playbook, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page when it comes to answering what is a Sales Playbook.

In its simplest terms, a Sales Playbook is a key piece to a winning sales enablement strategy that outlines your sales process and aligns it with the buyer’s journey. It provides salespeople with a collection of resources like best practices, insights into their buyers, how to approach specific sales scenarios, talk tracks, email templates, ways to handle objections, competitive intel, and more.

More than 60% of organizations today are using sales enablement, meaning — if you’re not on board, there’s a strong chance your competitors are. If you’re competing against organizations with sales enablement tools, you’re already at a disadvantage.

Despite the proven benefits, many sales departments haven’t deployed sales enablement resources. They expect to do business the same way it’s always been done. The results are a slowed sales process and repeatedly missing quota. What’s holding them back from implementing a sales enablement strategy?

The Pareto Principle suggests that 80% of sales come from 20% of clients. Alternatively, 20% of what you do represents 80% of that activity’s outcome.

Most of us know this rule, and we’re familiar with the labels – Key Accounts, Target Accounts, and Secondary Accounts – what we often fail to realize is the impact of what it’s like to lose a Key Account.

Understanding that most of your sales come from a relatively small number of clients, and having an Account List Management Strategy (ALMS) in place, realigns your organization's priorities, leading to an increase in revenue and sales performance.

The realities of COVID-19, coupled with legacy sales issues, are making it more difficult for sellers to set appointments with new business prospects. Problems inhibiting a seller’s access to decision makers — like a lack of trust — have been compounded by the uncertainties of the current business climate. The bottom line, already a tough job, is now even more difficult.

Simply put, helping sellers develop expertise in the Identify and Connect steps of the sales process is needed and will provide a high ROI on training time. Specifically, improving skills related to finding prospects and setting appointments will increase the number of prospects in the sales funnel and lead to cash!