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SalesResources.com - Management and Leadership Articles
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SalesResources.com is a free sales training portal.
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Is Your Company Value Statement Killing Morale?
Chances are your company has a written set of values. A growing number of companies do. If your company does, chances are very good that one of the statements says that employees are valued above all else. Chances are also good that one of the statements has to do with how family oriented the company is and how employee commitment should be to family before company.
Chances are also very good that there is a statement that says customers are the key to company success.
Ive consulted with, visited with, and worked for hundreds of companies that have value statements. Most are interchangeable-both in terms of the value statement verbiage and the companys actions.
Not often are the companys actions in line with their value statements. Most often, especially in large retail environments--but certainly not exclusively-the companys value statement and the companys actions are diametrically opposed to one another. Maybe not on purpose (although for many, the value statemen
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Who Wouldnt Mind An 88% Roi
22% vs 88%
Thats the difference coaching and training reinforcement can make on a companies ROI when it comes to sales training.
It goes without saying that practice and reinforcement are the keys to any success. You cant just practice your baseball swing for one day and think youre going to win the home run derby. The same theory applies to sales. You cant expect to be a great salesperson if you dont keeping practicing and improving your skills. Practicing once will not make you salesperson of the year.
Training reinforcement is the key to success. Seminars help employees learn new selling techniques and new ways to stay in front of customers, but a study conducted by Sales Performance International found that participants in sales training forget half of what is taught within 5 weeks. Managers need to take it upon themselves to implement regular training sessions so that employees can keep up what they learned.
Here are some things managers can do to make sure that t
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Are You Flying Blind?
I was in a conversation with a CEO last week asking questions about their sales organization, the critical sales ratios they monitor, how frequently they meet, what they accomplish during their sales meetings, turnover on their sales team, profit margins, their competitive landscape, and a host of other issues. As I asked these questions I could see the CEO was getting more and more frustrated.
Finally he just threw up his hands and said "Look, I dont track any of that stuff. I just watch the results they put up and until recently I didnt have to worry about it!"
Heres the mistake I made - by asking so many detailed questions I painted managing the sales organization as a complex, mysterious and difficult to understand process. Its not, but it does require top management attention and you cant manage it simply by looking at the results .
As CEO you dont have to track every last detail - leave that for your VP of Sales and your sales managers - but here are four key
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How To Be The Doc Rivers Of The Sales World
So, you want to have a high performing sales team, but you dont know where to start. You could try reading hundreds of books and learning different methods, you could send your employees to a seminar or you could have turned on the TV and watched the NBA playoffs.
The Boston Celtics managed to transform from an average regular season team that was thought to be too old to compete into a stellar playoff team that was a force to be reckoned with. How did they do it though? Simple. Practice, determination and the non-stop coaching of Doc Rivers.
Every team has the same the same type of players: the Rajun Rondos, who are stars that everyone has to deal with, the Kevin Garnetts, who may be older but still have something left to give, the Rasheed Wallaces, who simply seem uncoachable, and the Paul Pierces, who are worn out, tired and injured. These types of personalities are also found in the office. So, how do you overcome daunting odds and make them into a championship playing
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Panic And The Rise Of Micro-management
Im hearing more and more frustration from both salespeople and sales leaders as the slow economy increases the panic on the part of senior management. Sales are slowing dramatically, profits are down or have completely evaporated, and the pressure is increasing on all levels to produce, produce, produce.
Along with the pressure to produce comes the micro managing of the sales team and its leadership. Managers are having daily pipeline meetings with the members of their team. Increasingly these meetings are getting uglier and uglier with increased threats if sales dont increase. Middle managers are having daily calls-in some instances two or more calls per day--with the managers under them as they want an accounting for each team members activities, including reviewing the sales status of each and every prospect. Management is demanding detailed reports for each prospect. If a salesperson deems a contact to be a non-prospect, managers are demanding the salesperson continue t
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