As Chris Lytle puts it, the transition from sales into sales management can be an interesting one. “You get paid for doing less of what you got promoted for doing more of.” In his book, The Accidental Sales Manager: How to Take Control and Lead Your Sales Team to Record Profits, Chris talks a lot
When it comes to recruiting sales people, every sales leader has their own combination of traits that they look for. One popular trait that pops up in a lot of hiring profiles is “past success” or “track record of success” or “Demonstrated success making quota and achieving success“. On the surface it looks like a
Everyone wants to hack these days. On the marketing side, everyone is talking about “growth hacking” instead of user acquisition. On the Sales side, everyone is talking about “sales hacking” instead of field or sales enablement. Every blog out there is promising a faster way to grow startups through hacking. First and foremost, I think
Wanted to follow-up on something interesting Steli said when he spoke at the BTM event in September of last year. Eric asked him if he could list off his favorite sales hacks, and Steli responded that he only had one; the follow-up. Then he went on to say: 90% of winning happens with the follow-up
The number one sign you’re building a sales machine is that you’re trying to map out a sales process and roll-out a CRM. You’ve made it to the big leagues…. now what? Well, now the skills that are going to get you and your team to the next level are not the same skills that
I was watching a qlik webinar the other day, and this equation popped up on the screen. Sales Transformation = IQ + EQ + XQ It’s simplicity and veracity hit me like a ton of bricks. So many projects within a sales team struggle because of the lack of a rollout framework that requires theses
Define trade: a skilled job, typically one requiring manual skills and special training. Define profession : a paid occupation, especially one that involves prolonged training and a formal qualification. According to these definitions, Sales is still a trade. Something closer to being a blacksmith than to being an investment banker. Why is there no formal
As part of an earlier post on motivation, I outlined the importance of job clarity. The act of breaking down a job into very simple observable, and quantifiable behavior, so that you can communicate it to a new member of your team. Why? First, Job Clarity, is key for keeping people motivated because they can
Pipeline management is the one best practice that links all sales team together. Whether it be a hand-written list on a white board, or a custom dashboard in Insightsquared, every team knows they need to track the deals they are working on as they get closer to closing. Every team has time set aside each
In Management by Metrics: Part 1 I talked about the path to a metrics based management environment and outlined the first couple of steps. To recap, these are the steps I’ve used successfully to build a culture of management by metrics: Be curious Observe Dig into the numbers Look at the trend Understand averages Diagnosis
