The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

SCENARIO: For the first time in a long time, you have sales positions open, but the most talented salespeople likely are already employed elsewhere. 

Even the most successful sales managers can find themselves in this situation if they aren't intentional with their management practices and focused on retention.

Recruiting and filling your talent bank is important. Even so, don't lose focus on the effort it takes to retain top talent. There’s always a strain on your resources when you try to scramble to fill a vacant sales position, but it’s a double-whammy when the vacancy is left by your superstar performer.

All sales managers know that it’s important to have a full staff of salespeople in order to hit your goals. But you know how risky and ineffective it is simply to hire anyone who can fog a mirror. It’s essential to hire only the right people. 

When searching for the right talents, skills, and experience, strong sales managers recognize that talent is primary.

You've met with a prospect several times — and this person also happens to be the CEO of the business. Score!

You've built a great rapport, they've shared challenges with you, and you've developed the perfect solution. You're really getting excited about the opportunities that are unfolding!

It's all going perfect, until you hear...

When you start a new sales job, there’s always a transition that includes many different learning curves. You learn how to embrace a new culture, learn to meet the expectations of new leadership, take on new functions within a sales job, and then there's the social pressure.

One of the best ways to ease the pain of transition is to offer new sales hires training—training in areas that help introduce skills needed or training for existing salespeople to enhance skills they may have already developed but can always improve. 

Throughout season 2 of the Improving Sales Performance Series, we’ve focused on the data and analysis of the 2020 Media Sales Report.

In this episode, John Henley, Managing Partner at The Center for Sales Strategy, and Greg Giersch, Vice President of Client Experience at The Center for Sales Strategy, join Matt Sunshine to discuss the data from the Media Sales Report surrounding the analysis of the sales training and development data.

You can stream it now to hear their insight, advice, and initial thoughts after analyzing the data that was just published. Or keep reading for a brief overview.

Often, clients come to us when their sales are not where they want to be, and the first thing they say is that they need us to come in and do sales training.

Yes, sales training will help, but alone, it won't be the only thing that helps improve sales performance. 

In this video, I discuss four words you need to remember to help your team improve sales: 

• TRAIN
• REHEARSE
• COACH
• MEASURE

To start something at the beginning and complete it (in order) to the very end is seen as a virtue. Linear thinking is logical, and experts say that most of us in the western world rely on it 90% of the time. But don’t let that limit you into believing there's always just one path to the best result.

What result do you want from sales training? To say the team completed all the courses or learn to sell smarter or faster?

Have you ever heard about Katie Francis, who shattered the 30-year-old world record by selling 21,477 boxes of Girl Scout Cookies in 2014?

On weekdays, Katie worked seven hours a day selling cookies. On weekends, she put in 12 hours a day. What started as a goal of selling 18,100 boxes, quickly raised to 20,000, and then to 21,000. Katie’s a goal-setter — and reaching a goal just motivates her to set a higher goal. She sold a record of 100,100 boxes of girl scout cookies in her seven years as a girl scout.

To be successful in sales, Katie quickly learned you can't take "no" personally. This young lady has a solid ego that rejects rejection along with an agile mind that readily learns and adapts.

The realities of COVID-19, coupled with legacy sales issues, are making it more difficult for sellers to set appointments with new business prospects. Problems inhibiting a seller’s access to decision makers — like a lack of trust — have been compounded by the uncertainties of the current business climate. The bottom line, already a tough job, is now even more difficult.

Simply put, helping sellers develop expertise in the Identify and Connect steps of the sales process is needed and will provide a high ROI on training time. Specifically, improving skills related to finding prospects and setting appointments will increase the number of prospects in the sales funnel and lead to cash!

When dealing with severe levels of change, it’s natural to reign in and hyper-focus on the activity we feel is most essential to surviving and thriving in that environment. In sales, that core activity would include things like the need to continue identifying quality prospects, connecting with decision makers, and discovering their needs and desired business results.

Activity is important, but a knee jerk reaction to keep approaching those activities the way you always have will not be effective when business cycles are at their most volatile.