The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Sales leaders that commit to growing and developing their people through effective feedback boost sales performance, attract and retain top talent, and outperform other organizations that fail to make feedback and coaching a priority.

Recruiting and Selecting highly talented people for your organization is critical - but you can’t stop there. Innate talents cannot develop into strengths until your team members can use them consistently, confidently, and productively.

Providing consistent and specific feedback on performance is key in helping direct reports learn, grow, and maximize their strengths.

Inquiry is a powerful motivator. We use it to fuel conversations, problem-solve, and, ultimately, improve sales performance.

High-value questions are a driving force to much-needed mental shifts — especially in today’s environment. When your mindset changes, so does your behavior. As sales leaders, we can’t control market conditions, but we can influence a few things — like choices.

Below are five questions we challenge sales leaders to ask their salespeople every week if they want to improve sales performance, fill their funnel full of new prospects, and increase customer loyalty.

Sales coaching is not about telling your sales team what to do. There's so much more to it.

Sales coaching helps sales leaders equip their teams to reach their maximum potential, and gives them the tools and knowledge to make better decisions in their sales process, which leads to overall improved sales performance for themselves, the team, and you.

Are you coaching a salesperson who is struggling to stay focused and deliver results while working from home?

You’re not alone! Several studies provide evidence of increased productivity while working remotely, but earlier this year Forbes also reported more than 75% of employees admit their productivity has plummeted due to distractions related to working from home and the pandemic.

If your salesperson has low discipline and struggles with organization, don’t lose hope — there are several strategies you can use to regain their focus.

A recent CSO Insights report states that “sales reps are often drowning in content. Yet it’s often not the right content, nor is it easily accessible.” Getting busy reps to open and read material that will help motivate them through the sales process is challenging.

Podcasts, also known as “learning on the go,” allows listeners to consume powerful stories that motivate and educate. Although routines have changed significantly, innovative sales leaders are using podcasts to reach their sales reps on another level to improve sales performance.

We all have a choice to make. That choice is what we’re going to do for the next 20 weeks of the year. We can continue to worry, fret, blame, and sit on the couch (if you're not doing any of those things - hurrah for you!). But we can also take the opportunity to be the Comeback Kid. 

Twenty weeks is a long time. That's 100 working days, with a few holidays thrown in. We encourage you to continue the activity that got you where you were before this pandemic struck. And, while we always encourage you to visualize the win, it's the plays in between that are really important. How can you win each day? What activities should you do to get you to the finish line? And, are you doing those activities to the best of your ability?

While no one has enjoyed dealing with the fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic, it has certainly provided many of us with impetus to change how and where our associates do their work. 

Technology has saved many businesses from crushing productivity loss and caused many executives and managers to re-think how work gets done in their organizations, and especially how productivity is affected by working from home (or, any remote location). 

But this is only the beginning. There are other changes on the horizon in the next 5-10 years that will demand that we change how we define work and how we measure productivity.

Have you ever participated in a trust building exercise?  They have been the craze for years.  There have been a few fun ones, like Escape Rooms, but there have also been a few you wish to forget, like “trust fall.” Seriously, who enjoys blindly falling backwards hoping someone will catch us?!   

Team building exercises are a great way to form relationships and build reciprocity. But developing trust takes time—much longer than one afternoon—and activities alone are not how a foundation of trust is established. Building an effective team starts by asking thoughtful questions. Those questions spark conversation, providing team members an opportunity to share bits of information about themselves, and over time, leading to more trust and engagement—improving team productivity along the way.

How do you know if you have a sales structure problem? Too often, sales organizations are evaluated single-handily by their results. If your company isn’t hitting targets and sale goals aren’t being achieved, the blame falls on not having the right salespeople. But, is the source of lost revenue really a “people” problem?

Underperformance is easily blamed on salespeople because data often helps support the claims. However, while we always seek to improve the performance of sales teams, there are a few indicators that show you may have more than a people problem.