How do your outside sales representatives work? Scenario A: Are they spending all of their active selling time in front of potential new customers? Are they relentlessly chasing down new prospects, constantly expanding your portfolio of customers and profitably growing your business? OR Scenario B: Do they have a set book of business and are…
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I first wrote on these themes in December of 2018. The ideas still hold true but what were emerging trends have now rapidly accelerated. Digital networking and connecting and selling via various electronic media which were emerging concepts gaining acceptance a short while ago have now become every day realities. How often in the past…
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As I work with clients, over and over I hear their difficulty finding new customers and their desire for assistance with lead generation. As I have worked through this, I have had a realization. What if I gave them 20 new accounts? What if it is 50 new accounts? How about 100 new accounts? How…
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This is a period of unprecedented disruption for all of us. There is disruption in our business lives. There is also disruption and perhaps hardship in our personal lives. Some businesses are finding themselves quite busy while others have had the rug pulled out from under them. I offer a few thoughts for those that…
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This will likely be more in the form of story-telling but it does offer some insights into ideals that have guided my own leadership development journey. There are courses, books, blogs and countless websites that all talk about how to develop leadership. To me, the best way to develop leadership is to put yourself into…
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An organization’s sales manager is an extremely critical role. It may be one of the most difficult jobs in an organization but it is often the one role where there is no training investment. When there is a need for a sales manager, an attempt is made to promote the best sales representative. Often the…
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Now is the time to be thinking about your approach to sales! The world is rapidly changing and amongst those changes are shifts in how business to business (B2B) customers are looking at salespeople. I share some shocking statistics from a study published by Forrester Research: 60% of B2B Buyers prefer not to interact with…
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Having a sales pipeline should be a given for any sales representative and monitoring pipeline health should be an absolute for any sales manager. It should be, but it seems it is not. It reminds me of the old joke/adage, “the problem with common sense is that it is not that common!” I can still…
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Through years of working in business to business sales, many of these years as a sales representative and many out working with countless other sales representatives, I came across many sales representatives that considered themselves the relationship seller. They were the route salesperson who would regularly check in with their customers, with ready access to…
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It is strange how you gather a number of similar experiences and begin to sense a trend. For me, all of sudden I have encountered situations where sale representatives either do not like to sell or are not capable of selling! I will offer some thoughts but I would really like to receive some feedback…
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