The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

When you've been in the industry for a while, you realize the astounding similarities between sports and business. Like sports, sales is a highly-competitive field, and you must have the ability to think on your feet with rock-solid professionalism.

In both, success boils down to having a winning attitude that demands discipline and attention to detail regarding how you prepare and perform.

As an athlete, it’s vital to understand the basic concept of agility — the ability to change your body’s position by having quick feet. As a sales manager or consultant, rather than applying the phrase, “Move Your Feet” to your body, you must apply it to your mindset and tactics.

Straight from the Director of Sales at Zimmer Communications, Carrie Berkbuegler discusses sales leadership, sales performance tips, and answers a few questions that we all have.

You’ll get answers to questions like – what are the key performance metrics you track? What are the big rocks that you’re focused on? And how has sales management changed over the past few years?

Tune in now or keep reading for a brief overview.

What do selling and tennis have in common?

Bernie Weiss, President at iHeartMedia New York and Author of Ace It! How Sales Champions Win New Business answers that question, plus offers some sales performance tips.

Tune in now or keep reading for a brief overview.

What big rocks should sales managers focus on? What should they be doing or learning right now to ensure success?

On this episode of the Sales Leadership Series, Scott Sutherland, VP/Market Manager of the Phoenix Market at Bonneville International, joins host Matt Sunshine to answers these questions and discuss sales and executive leadership tips.

Tune in now or keep reading for a brief overview.

_It's the beginning of the month. You're ready to help your team crush their sales goals. Sometimes they need a reminder of why they love what they do or a little help to boost their morale after a lost sale.

Well, there are many things you can do to help your team improve sales performance and reach their sales goals, and here's something that can help boost morale, inspire, and increase productivity: motivation. 

We've put together 31 motivational quotes related to sales and business success. That's one for each day of the month!

Improving your staff's productivity and efficiency is difficult when there are so few of you. That doesn’t mean it isn’t impossible to delegate work in a way that compensates for being short-staffed, but sooner or later, you’ll need to find the right sales structure for balance or hire more employees, or you risk burnout.

Hiring employees may be the best option if you’re experiencing a sudden influx of work. There's also the option for leased employees, who can be placed as temporary workers and don’t require you to handle their HR or payroll employment duties.

First, let’s take a look at how your company can stay productive without hiring more employees. Then, we’ll show you the telltale signs of when it’s time to take the outsourcing plunge.

Building trust virtually, finding qualified leads, getting in front of the decision-makers — these are all challenges that salespeople face. And as a sales manager, you’re finding innovative ways to address these issues.

However, to become more effective in your role and provide a better overall direction for the entire team, it’s important to know the current challenges that sales managers face as well.

To help narrow down the current sales challenges facing sales managers, we asked our experts to weigh in. Here's what they said.

As a sales manager, how often do you struggle with the line between being a supportive and understanding manager, and holding your sales team accountable?

After hearing excuse after excuse about why so-and-so wasn't going to buy such-and-such, you throw your hands up and ask yourself, "If all of this feels so out of my control, what is in my control? What can I focus my team on that ensures we win where we need to win?"

How many performance metrics are you currently tracking? How many should you track?

We can all agree that measurement improves performance, and it’s essential to success. But you can’t keep changing the rules of the game. Performance improvement comes only when we focus on the same metrics over time. We need to follow the right measurements and stay focused.

In this episode, Matt Kiger, Regional Vice President at Townsquare Media, discusses how sales leaders can make an impact on their sales performance through performance tracking.

Tune in now or keep reading for a brief overview!

As a sales manager, how much better would your life be if you had access to better forecast accuracy and improved sales performance?

In this episode of the Improving Sales Performance series, Trey Morris, VP / Senior Consultant at The Center for Sales Strategy, discussed how sales leaders can make an impact on their sales performance through effective pipeline management.