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 [...]

Your Customer Is Learning How to Kick Your Butt

Getting sales leaders to understand the importance of a strategic approach to sales performance improvement is often an uphill battle.
So, when I get in front of a group of sales leaders, one of the things that I say to grab the participants’ attention is, “Somewhere in another building on the other side of town, there is [...]

Sales: Is it Art or Is it Science?

That’s a question I’m often asked about business-to-business selling.
I define science (in this application of the word) as the ability and willingness of a person to follow a set of processes in order to carry on the business of day-to-day selling. Examples would be formal planning, the use of checklists, dependence upon research, vigilant qualification, [...]

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, [...]