Find out more about one of the best organizational structures for any presentation, and learn how to apply it to make positive changes, deliver presentations that will be remembered, and drive results.
Your customers love you, but are they improving your bottom line?
The Oxford English Dictionary made “post-truth” its 2016 Word of the Year, noting that use of the word had increased 2,000 percent over its usage in 2015. Oxford defined post-truth as occurring when “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” What’s more, in the Post-Truth Era, you might be wondering, Will I need to be even more liberal in my treatment of “the truth” just to keep up with my competitors?
In sales, the occasional closing curveball is inevitable. But if you’re consistently encountering unwelcome surprises in the later stages of your sales process, the problem doesn’t lie with your prospects: It lies with you. Asking the right questions along the way will help you identify potential obstacles while there’s still time to deal with them — and meet your quota.
Why is it that many salespeople hate internal sales meetings?
You know, the ones where everyone sits round a desk and covers off the trivia and very quickly get bored with the whole process because the only result is that the manager gets to criticise and moan about the current sales figures again?
Meetings where everyone gets together should be vigorous, exciting affairs that get everyone buzzing and ready for the next sales call, not a dreaded amalgam of dry, stale and flat minutia.
Your quota is the number that your company assigned to you. It’s your revenue goal or, in some cases, it might be a goal assigned to profit. Your number is what your company needs from you, and they have attached a certain commission or bonus to that goal. Your company wants you to max out your compensation, but your number has a certain income attached to it.
98 percent of your leads are dead. Here’s how to resuscitate them.
If there is one consistent complaint we hear from frontline sale managers, it is that they are always short on time. This isn’t surprising given the numerous responsibilities sales managers have, including recruiting and hiring new sales professionals, day-to-day management tasks, sales coaching, and administrative duties. Additionally, they face the challenge of managing sales professionals who are typically independent, strong willed, and often have little day-to-day contact with their managers. And in many organizations, sales managers are required to both sell and manage.
If you want to run a marathon, you can’t expect to get great results unless you train properly. The same goes for sales readiness. In order for reps to perform at the top of their game, they must be trained and then coached to reinforce and eventually master their sales material.
In some ways, the sales force is the most measured function in any company. All salespeople have a number (a quota) assigned to them, and progress toward that number is tracked maniacally. However, anyone who has ever tried to measure the ability of a sales team knows that this number is insufficient to determine whether a seller is actually good or bad at their job. But if you really want a challenge, try to measure the performance of the salesperson’s boss—the frontline sales manager.
