7 Ways To Make Your Monday Morning Sales Meetings Buzz

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.

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Your Quota and Your Real Goals

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.

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How to Avoid the Sales Management Time Trap

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.

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The Most Common Misconceptions About Sales Coaching

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.

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How Do You Measure Sales Management?

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.

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The One Thing Sales Organizations Should Do To Increase Revenue In 2017

If you believe the research, only 55% of salespeople make quota. That means 45% of sales people don’t make their quota, and the reason is we’re flying blind. For years sales organizations have had to use quantitative metrics to determine if a sales person was effective. We’ve measured the number of calls, the number of touches, meetings set, closing percentages, average deal size, emails sent, conversion rates, quota attainment and more, to ascertain a salesperson effectiveness.

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Executives and Salespeople Are Misaligned — and the Effects Are Costly

Republished from Harvard Business Review, January 26, 2017
U.S. companies spend over $900 billion on their sales forces, which is three times more than they spend on all ad media. Sales is, by far, the most expensive part of strategy execution for most firms. Yet, on average, companies deliver only 50% to 60% of the financial performance that their strategies and sales forecasts have promised.

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Why Sales Commissions Don’t Work (in the Long Run)

Republished from INC, August 12, 2014
By Aaron Skonnard

Think about salespeople and you think of stereotypes: people who are motivated only by money; risk takers who thrive on the adrenaline of a potential massive payoff; territorial lone wolves who aren’t team players; nine-to-fivers who are inherently lazy and will only work hard if incentivized with a big carrot.

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