From Sales Enablement To Buyer Enablement

The more I’m working on that fantastic and challenging topic and the more I’m discussing the term „sales enablement“ with peers, the more I’m wondering – is this always the right term?

You might be surprised „What a question, of course it is the right term! We have to enable our sales force to deliver better results, to grow, to be more effective, more efficient“, and so on.

Wait a minute; let’s recap the “why” and “what” of sales enablement. The “why” is a pretty obvious – traditional function-oriented inside-out approaches are no longer working – something is broken. The “what” is described in many ways, also here in one of my earlier blog posts. However, it’s definitely not about creating more content and more trainings and throwing all of that over the fence to the sales force – won’t be successful.
Sales enablement, processed in a meaningful and valuable way, is quite the contrary!

8 Sales Management Mistakes Business Owners Make

When a small business owner first launches his company, he is usually the one doing the selling. As time passes and his product becomes more successful, the business will eventually reach the point where it's time to hire one or more salespeople, so that the owner can concentrate on running the business. Unfortunately, this is the point where success often becomes fatal. Most small business owners have little management experience – and for those that do, they quickly discover that sales management is quite different from other management roles. Such business owners can find that their new sales team causes profits to plummet, instead of bringing them to new heights. If this is your situation, consider if you are making one or more of the following sales management blunders.

Sales Leadership: Don’t Confuse Busy with Productive

Busy, busy, busy.  If someone were to ask me to identify our members’ top five challenges, being too busy would rank right up there among the most frequently discussed issues.  Now when our members are talking about being too busy and struggling with time management, they are talking about it on a strategic level.  Essentially, sales leaders have so many competing priorities and so many different goals they are responsible for that they find it challenging to figure out where to allocate their energy.  And if sales leaders are struggling with this issue, you can best that their sales teams are too.  So how do we as leaders create clarity for ourselves and the teams we are leading?  How do we figure out what is most important?

A Simple Guide for Creating a Lead Scoring Program

High leads volume is good – skimping on lead management and prioritization is not.

Without some system for ranking prospects, you risk your sales team wasting time on leads nowhere near buying, and marketers nurturing opportunities that are a bad fit from the start. Fortunately, marketers designed the scoring method to address this issue.

Research firm Software Advice posted a two-part video series details how to design such a program. Those tips – from VisionEdge Marketing President Laura Patterson – are summarized here.

Sales Role Clarity Drives Revenue

Do the individuals in your sales force understand their roles and spend a majority of their time on activities that drive a business result? Chances are not likely. In a previous blog post we discussed some common role issues that can lead to inefficiencies; these issues are often deep rooted and thus hard to diagnose. In this blog we will lay out a solution to pinpoint those inefficiencies and help assign clarity, accountability and responsibility to the correct sales resources. As a refresher, I have listed the four top sales force structure role issues below.

Which Comes First? A Cheap Customer or a Cheap Salesperson?

Think about this for a moment.

Salespeople are quick to say how customers are cheap and they don’t want to spend any money.  Fine, they can say what they want, but I’ll counter the argument about customers being cheap. I contend that typically it all comes back to the salesperson being cheap.

Cross-Selling: Why We Need An Outside-In Approach

Ask ten people how they define cross-selling and almost nine will define cross-selling from a product, solution and portfolio perspective, from a vendor’s view only. Asking Google, most of the definitions show pretty much the same, based on an inside-out perspective, based on own products, solutions and their potential. I didn’t find a single definition that cared about the customer and the value a vendor could add to a customer using specific cross-selling possibilities.

So, what do we expect? Of course, we expect that sales reps are successful with cross-selling. “Why not?”, you might argue from a product marketing, content or training view point, “we prepared everything for them, the stories, the content, the bundles, the packages, the pricing offers, the trainings. They just have to close the deals, can’t be so difficult!”

Fear Of Success

The opportunity for sales people to improve their craft these days are tremendous, not only do you have the traditional sources, but between blogs, webinars, You Tube, and more.  Any sales professional who wants to improve their output only needs to set course and make it happen.  Many set off to improve their skills, but not all succeed, and key reason is they fail to fully execute.  They read the material, or watch and re-watch webinars, but rather than committing to the program, and committing to their success, they pick and choose, and cherry pick those things they like, and discard those things they don’t like or “find acceptable”.  By not executing the entire method or technique they are sabotaging their own success.

An Abundance of Managers, But Too Few Leaders?

One of the questions I am most frequently asked is what are the key differences between a leader and a manager, and this is the best quote I have ever read. It succinctly describes those differences.

“There is a difference between leadership and management. Leadership is of the spirit management is of the mind. Managers are necessary, but leaders are essential. We must find managers who are not only skilled organizers, but inspired and inspiring leaders.” – Field Marshall Slim

Summer reading for sales pros

(MoneyWatch) Ah, summertime! Time to curl up on the beach or by the lake with a good Nook. Or Kindle. Traditionalists out there may even pick up one of those old-fashioned books (ink and paper included). In addition to the latest spy thriller or romance novel, consider adding some recent sales advice books to your summer reading pile.

Here are five I recommend:

8 Steps To Sales Training That Sticks

How many times have you thought you had taught someone to do something correctly only to get different results than you expected?  Many inexperienced sales managers make the mistake during a sales training session of just telling someone what needs to be done or even explaining how to do it but they leave out a very important step. Demonstration. Glenn Pasch, COO and Partner of PCG Digital Marketing and PCG Consulting, outlines the eight steps of sales training.

More than 50% of Frontline Sales Professionals are Behind Quota

It seems as though everyone is talking about the decline in sales performance, and an awful lot of sales gurus are scratching their heads right now.

As we almost close on Q2, more than 50% of frontline sales professionals will be behind quota – so what is going on?

The fact is that there is no single answer: It is not that organizations have stopped investing in skills development training, because they haven’t. Neither is it the case that sales leaders have become less competent, I don’t think they have.

Types of Sales Pitches

Different situations will call for a different type of 'pitch,' or sales presentation. In some circumstances a full-bore sales pitch is inappropriate and will be more likely to annoy or offend a prospect than engage him. As a rule of thumb, the less of a relationship you've built with a given prospect, the easier you should go with regards to selling.

Business Success = Sales Growth – Costs Control

If there is one lesson that the current and past recessions and volatile economic situations have taught most of us, is how to monitor and manage our costs.

What appears not to have yet been learnt is how to organise the disciplined, accountable forecasting of sales by the people who know - the sales team.

5 Principles to Eliminate Competition and Grow Effortlessly

For more than 20 years I’ve worked, firsthand, with more than 1,500 companies and I’ve personally observed almost 10,000 salespeople.  As each year passes, I notice that 90-95% of salespeople are working harder and harder, just to keep pace.

I’ve also noticed that there’s always about 5% of salespeople who have nothing to do with the treadmill.  They’re always growing – regardless of market, industry, size or even the economy.

Measuring Outcomes Instead of Activity (A Note to the Sales Manager)

I had an interesting conversation with Michael Leeds, the CEO and Founder of IntroRocket. We were both bemoaning the strong desire of some sales managers to manage their salespeople’s activity. The visibility the new tools provide only seems to encourage this behavior. Activity isn’t the cure-all that some managers believe it is, but it is an absolutely a remedy for low activity (we all know someone who would do much better if only they improved their activity).

Sales process management and workflow

The Sales Cloud is the world’s most complete, trusted, and popular workflow automation engine for the full range of sales management needs. And now the Force.com Visual Process Manager lets you take sales process management to yet another level—more quickly and easily than was ever possible before.

The Visual Process Manager makes it simple to eliminate the grunt work from sales management processes so your reps can spend more time pursuing customers and less on administration. You can also make sure everyone is following the same playbook, adhering to the sales process management rules and procedures that have proven to work best for your organization and sales cycles.

Sales Managers: Micromanage vs. Inspect What You Expect?

It is a fine line for any manager — the difference between breathing down your salesperson’s neck and making sure they are tracking toward their goals and objectives for the day, week, month, quarter and year.

While no rep will say they like to be micromanaged, no manager likes to see when their salesperson is behind and it is too late to catch up. So, how do you avoid being that manager who is always cracking the proverbial whip yet also driving results?

Sales Early Warning System—Are You Leveraging It?

The second half of the year has just begun.  Recently, I’ve been getting some panicky calls, “Our pipeline is a disaster!  We need to find and close more deals!”  What’s shocking to me is the level of “surprise,” being expressed by these very sophisticated business people.  I have to admit, it’s a little difficult for me to understand the “surprise.”  I wonder, “Why does this seem to be a surprise, do people have the right measurement systems in place?’”

The Executive’s Guide to Dominating Your Competitor’s Strategy

If you want to dominate you industry you have to be able to dominate the conversation going on in your industry.
You have to be able to steer the conversation in a way that benefits what you are trying to do.

    If you are the big guy and trying to get bigger then you need to be able to create a conversation that helps you do that.  On the other hand, if you’re the small guy trying to disrupt a legacy market, then you need to understand how to create words and a discussion that support your disruption.

In every industry there are rules.

Rules that decide what is important.  Rules that decide what you can charge your clients for your services and the “best practices” that frame up how you deliver your services.