The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Unprecedented times call for different strategies. While there’s no real consensus as to what state the economy is in currently, signals point towards a potential economic slowdown either on the horizon or seeping its way into your industry. The disparate nature in impact on different sections of the economy makes for truly interesting (but mostly frustrating) times.  

Regardless of whether your prospects or clients feel an economic pinch, preparing your sellers to navigate these trends will only help you. As your clients adjust to changing currents, your team should too. 

The world runs at a rapid pace these days.

Twitter tells you in 280 characters, TikTok shows you in 10 minutes or less, and we want all the episodes of our favorite shows released all at one time!

We’re impatient by nature, and we want the kind of solution that turns everything around now, including training our salesforce. While some of these quick hits may work in the short run, most are not sustainable, and they leave you needing more, especially in the world of employee development.

This post was originally published on Startups.co

Ditch the "why" of your sales conversation and focus on the "how" to show prospects that you hear and understand their needs and can solve their unique problems.

Buyers want things to be easy. So easy, in fact, that 89% of buyers say that they choose vendors that made a return on investment easier to prove or that could be easily justified with a business case. They also preferred speed over price — with 80% of buyers citing deployment and ease of use as “very important.”

Your customers want to understand how to use your product — not sit through a pitch and wonder if it’ll actually fit their needs. Selling is less about explaining why buyers should buy and more about showing how an easy-to-use product or service will help them.

Helping sellers improve sales performance is an important—perhaps the most important—part of a sales manager’s job.

A key part of the process of improving performance is evaluating a seller’s performance. Tracking and evaluating important metrics will serve as a source of celebration as well as a way to add focus for future training and skill development.

Please note, this type of review and evaluation should not be confused with the typical annual review required by HR departments. HR reviews serve some purpose, but rarely serve as the catalyst for improving sales performance.

Trigger Warning... If you get easily offended by brutally honest feedback that might seem harsh and mean, you might want to skip today's blog post.

Ok, now; that we've gotten that out of the way, here's that brutally honest and possibly mean content:

You should NOT invest resources into poor-performing salespeople!

Productivity refers to moving the sales cycle forward, improving application numbers, and increasing booked volume. Productivity measures how well you're able to meet the goals and objectives of your company, regardless of whether these are short-term or long-term goals.

On a day-to-day basis, if you write out a to-do list at the start of the day and are able to cross off most or all of the items by the end of the day, then you can consider it productive.

On a bigger scale, if you're able to meet the goals and objectives you have established for your company, then you're seeing productivity. Increasing productivity means that you will come closer to your goals. Remember, some people are more natural at this than others based on their talents.

Without sales, you don't have a business.

Your profits are directly linked to sales performance, so it's important to maximize sales wherever possible. There are a range of things you can do to improve sales, and if you're not doing this your business will never reach its full potential.

For a rundown of some simple things you can do to improve sales performance, keep reading.

The Pareto principle has been applied to everything from farming and land ownership to productivity and employee performance since the Italian economist Vincent Pareto first coined it in 1896.