Are elite salespeople born or made? After years of studying this subject, John Asher, CEO of Asher Sales Strategies, says, “Both.” He’s identified and developed five factors for sales success that can help business leaders and sales professionals grow their business.
What makes a team optimal?
Alignment, communication, collaboration, energy management, leverage, trust, and what else?
The secret sauce is actually no secret.
It’s great to be busy, but not if your team burns out.
Here are three of the most important things a sales manager does to drive performance improvements and achieve sales targets.
Leaders is not complicated, but it does require us to be proactive and develop the right skills.
Listen more and talk less.
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.
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.
