The Sales Manager’s Mentor

My friend Jeff Lehman has a new book coming out.  I’ve read a preview copy.  It’s entirely different from his last one, The Sales Manager’s Mentor (Second Edition).  
I met Jeff at the National Collegiate Sales Competition a few years ago, where we were both judges. He was just finishing the second edition of Mentor. I read through every page of [...]

Complimentary Webinar :: Wednesday, Sept 17th

I’ve been invited by Avitage to talk about sales coaching in their upcoming webinar.  I’ll be discussing symptoms of ineffective coaching, the reasons that companies don’t have ongoing coaching systems and six key steps to take to assure that coaching becomes the critical component of sales effectiveness it should be.  You can read my previous post [...]

Avitage: Directly Addressing The Sales Coaching Challenge

Coaching is one of the most critical components of a total approach to sales effectiveness, but it is often underutilized and mismanaged. 
I’ve been enjoying my conversations with Jim Burns, CEO of Boston-based Avitage.  Avitage is a small technology company that provides communication mechanisms and techniques for, among other things, delivering sales and marketing messages.  In fact, [...]

Sales Training Doesn’t Work Because ________.

You’ve probably read a lot of articles by sales trainers entitled something like, “Why Sales Training Doesn’t Work.”  Google that phrase and see what I mean.  You can also look again at the title of this post for another example.
The TAS Group’s CEO, Donal Daly, wrote a post on The Sales 2.0 Network blog that provides [...]

Satisfied with Your Job? Not If You’re a Sales Executive

Debbie Antonelli of Richardson pointed out to me that a recent survey by ExecuNet has only 54% of sales executives are satisfied with their current job:
 

  Profession
Percentage of Executives Satisfied With Current Job

  CFO/Comptroller
68%

  HR
65%

  Marketing
63%

  General Management
61%

  Sales
54%

  MIS/IT
53%

Source: ExecuNet 2008

I’m being not cynical when I say I’m surprised that the percentage for sales executives isn’t lower. 
More insight from the survey:
Top Five Reasons Executives Are [...]

Sales Kick-off Meetings: Are Results on the Agenda?

What will the next guest speaker at your sales kick-off meeting deliver?

Content?
Motivation?
Entertainment?
Results?

If you are planning, attending, expecting results from, or paying $5,000 to $50,000 (or more!) for the privilege of listening to someone talk for an hour or so, you need to think carefully before you answer that question.
As part of my discovery process for [...]

The Sales Hiring Epidemic

As I mentioned in my earlier Springsteen post, I’m in Ireland, “on tour” delivering a series of workshops for sales executives.  One module covers hiring sales people.
Directly responsible for hiring the wrong sales people are the sales leaders who haven’t developed that skill and don’t have a process. At the root of the problem, however, [...]

Think Twice About That Promotion!

Jim Brodo, Senior VP of Marketing from Richardson, asked if I would contribute some content to their newsletter.  I went back over some of what I wrote over the past year or so, and rediscovered a piece on promoting top sales reps to management positions.
This is an important issue for both the sales person and the executive  [...]