The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

As a B2B sales consultant, I’m always looking for simple ways to help my customers get their heads around driving revenue. Here are five words I’ve been talking about a great deal lately:

1. Talent
2. Structure
3. Concentration
4. Activity
5. Integration

Here are some simple tips tied to each word that will help sales organizations improve revenue in the upcoming year. Feel free to add this list to your sales consultant resources:

Improving Sales Performance Often Requires Changing Focus

Have you ever had a ticket to this movie as a B2B sales consultant?

You’ve been working with a sales organization for a year or so and installed the following systems:

• Account list management
• Talent recruitment and development
• Sales training and related revenue development initiatives

And nothing is happening… sales performance remains the same!

As B2B sales training consultants we often overlook the concept of focus and control when helping struggling sales organizations.  Simply put, two things exist in the world of salespeople: Things they control and things they do not control.

Here’s a list of things salespeople do not control:

• Pricing
• Inventory
• The economy
• RFPs
• The competition
• The attitudes of their customers
• Other departments in their company
• Account assignments
• Sales quotas