What makes an effective sales manager? Acting as sales manager can be a difficult job because you wear two bulls-eyes: one on your front and one on your back. Your senior management is pushing for results, numbers, revenue, and profit. Your sales people are looking to you for guidance. At…...
Grow the Sales Division – By Improving Your Talent Pipeline
Quick quiz for sales leaders: Over the past three working days, how many total hours did you devote to expanding your pipeline of qualified sales applicants? If you’re like most of the leaders we talk to, the answer was either a small number, an embarrassed silence, or both. Deepening the…...
Don’t Waste Millions of Dollars on Bad Sales Hires
Making poor hiring decisions is expensive. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) suggests that replacing a bad hire costs 30 percent of their total compensation. Considering opportunity loss, I’ve seen replacement costs as high as a million per person in an enterprise B2B complex sales environment. That’s a painful reality.…...
4 Tips for Building an Awesome Team Culture
In a previous post I talked about how creating an awesome company culture has tremendous ROI in terms of increased profits, decreased turnover, higher goal attainment, and becoming a lightning rod for top talent…not to mention the amazing customer experience the results! So how can you go about creating an awesome culture in your team…...
Why You Should Shift Hiring Focus to Skills
When was the last time you reviewed the position description you use to hire sales reps for your organization? If it’s been awhile, you might want to consider rewriting the description to shift hiring focus to skills, instead of college degrees. That advice comes from Virginia Rometty, who stepped away from…...
How to win the war for sales talent
A high performing sales team is invaluable to a growing startup. Winning the most promising candidates is a cutthroat battle. It takes a lot more than a generous compensation package to get top candidates to accept your offer. You need to show them early on that they’re joining a company…...
15 Communication Skills That Are Crucial to Sales Success
Good communication is crucial to sales success. Sounds obvious, right? You can’t make a sale unless you’ve demonstrated value to a prospect. You can’t do that unless you’ve understood their problems and devised a strategy to solve them. In turn, you can’t do that until you get your prospect to tell you what’s wrong.…...
How to lead a sales team without micromanaging everyone
Managing people can be tough. Managing a sales team can be even more challenging with all the priorities, tasks, pressure from the C-Suite and the stress of hitting monthly or quarterly quotas. The most challenging part of the sales job is having the right balance between not enough or too…...
How to improve the performance of your sales team in 2020
No matter whether it is a small or prosperous company, everybody wants to sell more. But how to achieve that result? How to increase sales team performance? What techniques can be applied to sell more? Let’s have a look at this question in greater detail. What Is Sales Performance? This term means how…...
Why You Believe There Are No Good Salespeople
Entrepreneurs and leaders often complain that there are “no good salespeople” available in their market. Maybe you’ve muttered that yourself. But even if the salespeople you hired didn’t produce good results, the truth is that there are good salespeople in every market! As a leader, it’s your responsibility to attract them and get…...
How to Accurately Assess Soft Skills in Sales Candidates
Soft skills remain one of the most challenging skills for recruiters and hiring managers to identify. Only 41% have a formal process in place to measure them, according to LinkedIn’s 2019 trends report. Many recruiters continue to use outdated and ineffective assessment methods. Soft skills in sales are especially valuable, so it’s…...
Six Tips For Sales Leaders On More Effective Hiring
Hiring is one of the most important things we can do as a leader… and yet for many of the people we work with, it remains something of a blind spot. It’s not a skill set they make a conscious effort to improve. Yes, there are a lot of priorities,…...
Avoid Buyer’s Remorse: 4 Tips for Hiring Top Talent
The other day, a friend of mine was asking me for advice on hiring people for his small, but fast-growing business. While I’m no recruiting machine, I have hired a number of people in my day. What have I learned? Astute (but ultimately poor) candidates can put on a good…...
Do This Before Hiring
Ready to hire a new salesperson or salespeople for your team? I know, there can be a certain air of excitement surrounding hiring. Bringing in fresh thinking and the possibility of creating a new leader within your organization are always potential outcomes with new hires. However, as you’re likely…...
Playing for Keeps: Retaining and Growing High Performers
Jessica Klek is RVP of Enterprise Sales at SalesLoft, the leading sales engagement platform, helping sales organizations to deliver a better sales experience for their customers. I’ve always been intentional with my career. Even though my plan has changed many times, just having a plan gets you where you need to go.…...
Stop Asking About Past Quota Attainment in Sales Interviews
If a salesperson hit quota at their last job, they’re much more likely to hit quota at your organization, right? Not so fast. According to statistics from our sales professional user base here at RepVue, only 46.7% of sales professionals globally are achieving quota. And it’s even fewer in software sales organizations.…...
