SalesHQ

Sales pros aren't the only ones who can offer valuable lessons in the art of persuasion. I saw a great sales job in the Tampa airport by a person who probably didn't even see himself in sales. It was an airport security person who did a masterful job of crowd control. We had an 8 a.m. flight from Tampa to Toronto. ...

When Jack Welch was chairman of General Electric, he would regularly ask the top managers in the company's 14 major businesses a series of questions about the global competition. These questions are worth sharing. What are your global market dynamics today, and where will they be over the next several years? What actions have your competitors taken in the last three ...

Companies, when they interview, focus their attention on learning about the candidate. However, equal importance should be placed on the candidate interviewing them so that both sides can make a solid decision on the relationship. My wife Sharon and I dated for exactly two years before I proposed to her. Over our two year courtship, I got to know her likes ...

The responsibility for ensuring that every member of the sales team is successful and performing at optimum levels lies entirely with management and below are the eight reasons why sales people fail. In fact, I usually ask just three very straightforward questions, in order to identify why a salesperson is underachieving i.e., • Are they visiting/talking to enough clients/prospects? In other ...

As a manager, executive or business owner your top priority today is exceeding company goals. You can't do it yourself, so the best way to exceed your goals is to have what we call "High Performance Teams" working for you.   High performance teams are a special class of team that has the ability to easily adapt in a rapidly changing ...

Her name was Cindy, but around the office, she was better known as "Solitaire Cindy." Whenever I walked by her desk, the Solitaire screen on her PC was running. Frankly, it bugged me. Why should Solitaire Cindy game her day away while I busted my hump in my job, along with my fellow employees? I asked her manager how she felt ...

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is neither a Goal, nor a Key Result Area (KRA), nor a Target, nor a Result nor a Critical Success Factor. And yet these terms are often used interchangeably with a KPI. A KPI defines itself, to a large extent, by its name; it is a performance indicator, i.e. the performance of the process it is ...

In tough times like these, your need employees to be up-front about problems they're experiencing on the job-whether it's an angry customer, a process that no longer works or a project that's heading for disaster. Smart leaders know that employees are a source of new ideas, as well as a first line of defense against damage to the bottom line. For ...

The world that people live and work in is complex. The behaviors and skills required to solve a simple problem are always multi-dimensional. And yet much, or indeed most, training developed and executed in corporate training programmes are linear in nature. This mismatch between the real world and the training world makes certain that many organizations are wasting their training dollar. ...

 “If I could just get my team really engaged in this project . . .” “The problem is that people don’t seem to really care. If they were more committed to this work, we’d get better results. . .” “You can’t get people to really work hard any more . . .” I’ve heard all of these comments, and many like ...

No question, channeling the energy of a sales team can be a challenging endeavor. But here's an incontestable fact: How you compensate your reps determines where they invest their time and the results you get. The incongruence of sales compensation is one of the biggest disconnects in companies. Executives sit in a boardroom with strategic plans of grandeur, but the plan ...

Not enough companies have learned how to employ sales training as a strategic tool. Those that have are leaders in their industries, offering their shareholders maximum return on investment. They are able to quickly adapt to changing market conditions, are respected by their customers, and provide consistent sales performance. The salespeople who work for those companies are motivated, stay in their ...

With webinars, e-learning, conferences, and professional trainers, there are a lot of opportunities to get sales training. Some are worthwhile, but some are worthless. If you are attending a training, watch out for these failures so you do not waste your time on a "strategy" that will never work. 1. Ambiguity Concepts are built using shorthand labels rather than the full ...

Executives and managers are often left feeling frustrated when their staff doesn't perform a task the way they expected. This can be eliminated by sharpening your communication and filling in the gaps that are often left open for interpretation. Here are some guidelines. Step 1. Know what the task is. Step 2. Have the end result/desired outcome you want to produce ...