Over the last 20 years, required characteristics of a sales rep have been radically altered. What are the differences, and what must a salesperson be to make it in today’s sales force? How do you define today’s sales force effectiveness? Yesterday Those of us who are old enough can remember the successful salesperson of yesterday. ... Read Post

You’ve seen it yourself as sales management: despite a great sales process that the sales force is pushed to follow, and sales analytics measuring it, there can still be quite a difference between salespeople. Some close consistently, others close intermittently. Some meet—and in some cases exceed—their quotas. Others are always lagging behind. Can this gap ... Read Post

The term insight selling has come about in an era of educated buyers, and is now influencing sales strategies everywhere. Since buyers can conduct plentiful research on potential solutions to their issues, they no longer turn to salespeople until they’ve got a relatively firm grasp on what their solution should look like. Salespeople armed only ... Read Post

Be a good Salesperson is an animated short sitcom that is set in a fictional company office, in the sales department, and parodies barriers salespeople run into. Watch it now: Be a good Salesperson. Read Post

 50 years ago, the success or failure a sale was carried completely by the salesperson. Leads were sketchy, there was little to no sales process of any kind, there was certainly no automation—and it was totally up to the sales rep and his or her skills. Through the 1980s and the 1990s, the pendulum swung ... Read Post

It would be wonderful—at least for some—if everything could be automated as has been done in factories. A complex machine such as an automobile can be put together practically from scratch along an assembly line, and there’s never a human hand involved. Computer-driven robotic precision goes into every rivet placed, every weld dropped. And with ... Read Post

Once you’ve created a robust sales process for your organisation, the next step is to ensure you can accurately measure it. That’s because the figures you generate will provide you with the clarity you need to make better decisions and ensure smarter execution of your ideas. In addition, if you can quantify the performance of ... Read Post

Progressive pipeline management—otherwise known as opportunity management—is completely dependent on the information available to sales reps. It often happens that such data is somewhat sketchy and incomplete, which of course paints an unclear picture of the risk involved in a sale. The poorer the information, the more the activity of the sales force resembles haphazard ... Read Post