The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

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.

This post was originally published on Business.com.

Top sales managers don't just look for candidates when they need them — they keep in contact with potential team members to build an internal pipeline of interested and engaged salespeople.

The best products and services in the world don't hold up a company if no one buys them.

Most companies depend on salespeople to bridge the gap between production and purchase. When high-performing sellers leave, sales managers scramble to fill their roles. In the ensuing chaos, they usually hire the first competent person to walk through the door.

Every relationship has ups and downs, and that includes relationships between coworkers.

The members of your sales team might be going through problems at home that can cause problems at work.

There might be conflicts with other members of the sales team.

When problems exist in other areas of life, it can affect the accountability of the whole sales team or individual team members. Either way, it's possible to remedy the situation and make accountability a priority for your team.

As a sales manager, it’s important that you continually take new courses of action to help your team generate more sales.

Here are six practical methods you should consider.