Managers know they need growth to survive—but innovation isn’t easy. In this Harvard Management Update article, HBS professor Clayton Christensen and co-authors detail the six keys to creating new-growth businesses.
Listen more and talk less.
If your brand’s message is important to your company (which it should be) then the sales development should be directly aligned with marketing.
Bad pitches ruin good products. That much has been true since the dawn of sales and isn’t changing anytime soon. What has changed, though, is that the average salesperson can’t rely on their conversational skills alone to close a deal. They have to translate those compelling pitches into writing.
Everything you need to know to create a sales funnel that converts like crazy.
It used to be the day and life of a sales person was defined by how many sales calls they made. Productivity was king. If a great sales person could get a prospect on the phone, it was highly likely that a deal would get done. Having been a sales rep, who ‘dialed for dollars’, a manager who pushed my teams to constantly be working leads to someone who is constantly on the lookout for sales best practices – I was pleasantly surprised to find some compelling new research tackling the topic of what makes a winning sales discovery call.
Many of the most successful people had to fight tooth and nail for opportunities to learn new skills and advance up the corporate ladder. That’s often because what they wanted to learn and achieve wasn’t in sync with what their bosses wanted for them. You’re not a data scientist. You’re not cut out for engineering. Sales isn’t what you do. Lines like this are still used all too frequently when employees tell their managers that they want to move in a new direction.
Pretend that you’re an experienced buyer who has met with hundreds of business-to-business salespeople. What percentage of them would you say are excellent, good, average, or poor?
According to a new study of more than 230 buyers, 12% of salespeople are excellent, 23% good, 38% average, and 27% poor.
The bad news is that the underperforming salespeople lack the self-awareness to know that buyers don’t value them, nor do they understand why. They don’t take the time to figure out why they lost a deal or longtime client. They either don’t know why they weren’t selected or they reflexively blame it on factors out of their control.
Interviews with buyers illustrate seven important lessons about the mistakes salespeople make and why they lose business.
A strategic plan demands strategic execution across the whole of your business. Plans are just paper until leaders getting people to implement them. Here’s how.
If developing your employees isn’t at the top of your list of priorities, here’s why that needs to change.
