The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

It’s springtime in the United States. The birds are singing, flowers are blooming, and we’re hoping our long stint of April showers is about over. It’s time to plant the seeds that will become your summer garden. When you plant a garden, the final step is to pull out your garden hose and give the ground a good soaking.

If you spring a big leak in the hose, near where the faucet is, what you just planted is not going to get much water. If you spring a leak at the end of the hose, that water is just going to leak out onto your new seedlings and your garden will grow nearly as well. It’s easy to see that a leak near the beginning of the hose (pipeline) is the bigger problem.

A Leak in the Sales Pipeline

Can you believe it's May already? At this rate, the year will be over before we know it. We're excited for the summer preview weather we've been having, but if you're in a part of the world where summer preview means tornado season, we hope you're staying safe.

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up

• Matt Sunshine wrote about The Center for Sales Strategy's recent conversion to HubSpot Platinum status and discussed how and when we got involved in inbound marketing in the first place.

• Steve Marx argues that brevity is only a virtue in some circumstances. He wrote this piece of advice 20 years ago, and noted that nothing has changed except the delivery channels.

Today, we're happy to have our taxes done. Do you wait until the last minute or do you file as soon as you get your return?

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up

• Mike Anderson wrote about Vendor Relationship Management, and said, "Just because you’re already the selected vendor and serving the customer, it doesn’t mean the customer is no longer interested in VRM—in managing their relationship with you."

• Dana Bojcic wrote about listening for talent when interviewing salespeople, and said, "If you don’t know the answer, ask more questions. Ask a lot of questions… and then really listen."

Today, we're happy to have our taxes done. Do you wait until the last minute or do you file as soon as you get your return?

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up

In Best Practices when Networking on LinkedIn, Brian Hasenbauer writes, "Don’t send LinkedIn requests to people you don’t know or don’t have a solid reason for knowing them."

Today, we're enjoying April showers, and working on many behind-the scenes projects. This week, we tried something different, and published a timeley piece on Sunday. What did you think? We'll be adding a weekend post here and there, especially if there's something newsworthy that just can't wait.

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up

In Never Send an Email When You’re Angry: Otherwise, This Might Happen to You, Brian Hasenbauer described how there really is such a thing as bad press, and how an angry email sent in the heat of the moment caused a PR disaster for one professional.

In How to Increase Engagement on Your Company Blog, I wrote about how to look beyond comments to see which posts are really resonating with your target personas and write more content that appeals to them.

Today, we're still laughing about all the pranks that we fell for this week (even though we told ourselves we wouldn't believe anything we were told, we fell for all the same silly lines just the same). We also can hardly believe that we're past the first quarter of 2014! Time flies when you're having fun, right?

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up

• Matt Sunshine got a terrible email, which prompted him to write How Not to Send a Follow-Up Email, and in it he noted, "Never forget that your potential customer owes you nothing."

• Mike Anderson, when he told us about the five things our sales collateral should include to ensure it doesn't get tossed wrote, "At the very least, your sales collateral should not send a message that’s in conflict with the tone and texture of the conversation you have begun."

Today, we're thinking about our brackets, and wondering why college basketball is so hard to predict. How's your tournament going?

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up:

Below are some takeaways found within this week's blog posts:

Sales Hunters, Sales Farmers, and… Sales Trappers?:

"Trappers do it differently; they entice the prey—er, prospects—to come to them. They set out the honeypot that brings the bears, the cheese that attracts the mice, the information and advice that pulls prospects in and prompts them to make the first move toward doing business.  In the epic battle between the Sales Hunters and the Sales Farmers, it just may be the Sales Trappers who win."

The following is a post by our colleague Don Oylear. From time to time, we'll highlight great advice from our peers. Find out more about Don at the end of this piece, and contact us if you'd like to post something!

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You’ve hired top talent, and you’ve trained them up on best sales practices. They know your products inside and out. You’ve role-played until you can no longer stump them, but something is missing. What is that?

The answer is Field Coaching: Watching salespeople in action in front of real clients who hit back and fire live ammunition is the critical step in developing your salespeople. Your salespeople may not be the LeBron James or Tiger Woods of their field, but if they have the basic talent to succeed in the job, then with a little coaching, they could become great.

Today, we're celebrating the official beginning of Spring! We hope wherever you are, you see flowers blooming instead of a snow pack.

This Week at The Center for Sales Strategy

It’s an interesting fact in business that the people at the top don’t always know best. In fact, most of the time, the person who has the skills and experience to offer a solution to a particular customer is the salesperson.

A few years ago, I was negotiating a very large sale that involved complex discussions and choices to be finalized in order to send out a proposal. The standard sales cycle at our company closed in about three months, on average, and I was working with a decision maker to finalize the proposal.