White Paper: Can You Find Real Meaning in Life Through Sales?

While it might be easy for some professions–a doctor, a judge, a firefighter, even a lawyer–to find meaning in their lives, for a salesperson it can be tough. Along with countless negative media portrayals over the years, and tainted social attitudes, a salesperson encounters the highest percentage of rejection of just about any profession out there.

How important is meaning to a person’s life? For at least one significant answer to that question, we can turn to Victor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and holocaust survivor, who founded an entire school of thought around a person’s search for meaning. Frankl saw this search as life’s primary motivation.

It is important to point out that Frankl also said that each person must discover such a meaning for themselves—nobody can give it to them. So while we cannot give each individual salesperson the meaning for their own life, we can certainly point out that they mean a great deal more than they might have been given credit for in the past.

So what meaning can be found in the life of a salesperson? Is it something to be ashamed of, or something–as we at Pipeliner believe–that should be a source of pride?

In this white paper, Nikolaus Kimla explores the subject of the meaning in the life of a salesperson–the most challenging, yet the most rewarding career available.

Chapter 1 › Can a Salesperson Find Meaning in Life?

Just based on social commentary, along with incredibly negative entertainment media over the last 100 years (think Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross, just as 2 prime examples), it would appear, at least at a surface glance, that the only meaning salespeople could find in life would come from pressuring prospects to buy things against their will, grubbing for money and, in the end, total misery.

Chapter 2 › Slapping Back at Negative Attitudes on Sales

While there are thousands of suggestions out there of what your meaning in life might be, only you can decide what your meaning in life actually is. It’s different for everyone. If meaning in life was the same for all people, then it wouldn’t be a problem finding it, would it? You could just ask your neighbour. But unfortunately, it’s not that easy.

Chapter 3 › Do You Find Meaning, or is it Forced On You?

We can fairly say that there are 2 primary concepts in anthropology or the study of human beings today, or (better) two different world views on humankind. One is the so-called socialist mindset, and the other is the more entrepreneurial approach. Because we believe salespeople are “entrepreneurs within an enterprise,” this is the one we favour.

Chapter 4 › What Factor Brings the Most Meaning to Sales?

Meaning in life for a salesperson is tied directly to altruism: the performance of good for others for no other reason than the good performed. When salespeople really benefit others, they not only make repeat customers but they help enhance their own reputations.

The Five Fundamentals of Effective Sales Management

by John Golden & Matt McDarby

Tom Landry, the legendary football coach, once remarked, “The secret to winning is constant, consistent management,” which is a perfect summation of what it takes not only to win Super Bowls but also to manage a winning sales team. The key for sales leaders lies in constantly focusing on those activities where they can provide clarity for salespeople, coach and improve their skills, and add value to their opportunities and accounts, and doing all of this consistently within a predictable framework.

To achieve this there are five fundamental management activities that effective sales leaders leverage to build and maintain successful, winning sales teams. These activities include a careful alignment with the organization’s Go-To-Market strategy, a deliberate focus on early-stage pipeline opportunities, a dedication to coaching, and a deliberate approach to account growth, all underpinned by a carefully designed and rigorously-adhered-to operating rhythm.

Aligning Sales with Go-To-Market Strategy

Where Strategy and the Market Intersect – There has been a lot written recently about Sales and Marketing collaboration, much of it focused on how both groups can work together to produce better, more effective collateral and tools for the sales organization. All of this is good; however, there is a fundamental step that needs to take place first, and that is for the leaders of the sales organization, be they executives or frontline sales managers, to sit down with marketing and other relevant groups to review the company’s Go-To-Market strategy.

Having an Early-Stage Focus

Effective sales managers understand where they should invest most of their time and where they bring the greatest value to both individual salespeople and the organization itself. It is not, as is so often the case, in being the “super closer” parachuting in at the end of a sales cycle to rescue a deal or push it over the line; rather it is at the other end of the sales cycle completely.

Coaching Excellence

As is the case in sports, music, dance, and other disciplines that require ongoing commitment and hard work, coaching is a key enabler to great performance in professional sales.

Customer Growth Planning

Account planning in many organizations tends to be an annual or otherwise infrequent, periodic process by which management extracts somewhat useful information from the sales force about key customer relationships. In the most effective sales organizations, account planning is a more frequent and more valuable process by which sales teams develop and launch effective strategies for growth, based on their ability to address issues and opportunities that are strategically important to their customer.

Download The Five Fundamentals of Effective Sales Management now.

The Shoe on the Other Foot: Salespeople Must Think Like Buyers

There is a long-term situation in sales of salespeople having a rather one-sided viewpoint: they think only like salespeople. It’s all about the pitch—selling points that they’ve seen work before, and using those to convince that buyer to purchase.

Salespeople have been operating this way since the beginning of time. The better salespeople perfected their pitches so they could recite them in their sleep—and sometimes it seemed that they were doing exactly that.

But the salesperson of old wouldn’t stand a chance in today’s sales landscape. One vital element in the sales-buyer relationship has radically changed: the buyer.

Radical Shift

Today a buyer is learning a considerable amount about a product or service before that first contact with a salesperson. It’s even been said that the majority of the buying decision is actually made before that first contact. Whether or not that’s true, it is true that a salesperson is confronting a far more educated buyer in that first meeting or phone call than in yesteryear.

Where a great sales pitch used to work before, today it’s a whole different game. A salesperson must learn all about the various actions a buyer takes in making a purchase, and most importantly learn to be rapidly responsive to those actions in ways that are meaningful and motivational.

If you think back to sales you’ve been involved with, you’ll realize that in deals that won, you successfully monitored various buyer actions in coordination with taking actions of your own. In deals which were lost, there had to have been actions you didn’t take, or at the least key indicators you missed.

To the degree that due regard for buyer actions is taken, the sale is succeeding.

Sales Process

In an effort to bring salespeople up to speed with buyers, most companies have evolved a sales process—that series of steps that take a sale from lead to close. The sales process is a path for the sales rep to follow that hopefully mirrors buyer behavior and makes for a higher closing ratio.

Selling Methodologies

There are numerous popular selling methodologies today. Consultants are hired to bring in one of these or another such method. Interestingly, each of them seeks to make it possible for a sales rep to monitor, influence and be responsive to buyer actions.

Selling System

To emphasize the importance of buyer actions and seller’s activities, we at Pipeliner recently evolved the Pipeliner Selling System. This system, which could be called a common denominator for all successful sales processes, shows that a seller can not simply march through a sales process, but must be acting to cause—and be responsive to—the various buyer actions all down the line.

What does all this mean for your sales team…and for the CRM solution that you choose? You owe it to yourself and your organization to find out.

Download our free white paper The Shoe on the Other Foot: Salespeople Must Think Like Buyers.

Leading from the War Room: Building a Battle—Ready Sales Force

It can often seem that running a sales force is like fighting a war—and in fact it more or less is a war between your company and your competitors. The prize is new prospects, new customers, sales, customer retention, and market share.

As a sales manager, your troops are your salespeople. You want those troops to be as battle-worthy as possible. You want them to return as winners—for their own satisfaction as well as the bottom line.

What are the best methods to make your team battle-ready and lead them successfully?

1. A Competent Fighting Force

Before you can fight a war, you have to have troops. Similarly, to have a sales force you need to have sales reps. If that sales force is going to win, those sales reps need to be skilled and effective at what they do.

2. Withstanding the Heat of Battle

In military maneuvers, there is an enormous amount of difference between battle tactics of even 50 years ago and those of today. It’s a similar scenario in the sales battleground: That traditional sales rep is going to be left far behind in the trenches by a the modern sales force enabled by the Internet, social media and leading-edge sales automation.

3. The Sales Process: Your Tactical Procedure

For sales reps, the sales process brings an orderly progression to sales cycles, and for the sales manager it provides a positive direction through which he or she can supervise the sales force.

4. Sales and Marketing: Run Up the White Flag

As sales manager, you may have limited interest in what Marketing is up to. You may have various beefs with them, but you have been content to let Marketing do its job and let the sales force get on with selling. But Sales and Marketing are like two units of the same overall fighting force.

5. To Win Battles, You Need Great Intel

The stories of battles decisively won or tragically lost due to intelligence are legion. What would be the “intelligence” for you as a sales manager and for your sales force? With the goal of making sales and winning customers, it would be the “intel” of what your product or service could fulfill based on what potential customers need, want and desire. It would be clues to their pain points.

6. The Skill of Leadership

You’ll hear many stories from combat veterans about that sergeant they could always count on—the leader that would bring them through hell so they would survive to tell the tale. Such leaders learned to lead—and so must sales leaders.

7. The Safe Base Camp

A combat military leader knows that there must be a safe base camp—a place troops are as safe and secure as possible, and from which they venture out to battle and back again. As a sales manager your “base camp” is your sales department—the environment you create in which your salespeople can thrive and sell to their fullest. This safe place is the crux of efficient sales management.

8. Empowering the Salespreneur

Fighting forces are given little freedom of decision. They are given strict orders on how to proceed, and are expected to follow their orders to the letter.This is one way that a fighting force and a sales force dramatically differ. For as we are now discovering, sales reps require as much freedom to decide and act as they can be given.

Download Leading from the War Room: Building a Battle-Ready Sales Force now.

Managing a Social Sales Team

There has been so much talk about Social Selling and what that means to Salespeople but there has been precious little attention given to the impact on Sales Managers.

John Golden of Pipeliner and Matt McDarby of USR decided to address this issue in this collaborative ebook which offers practical advice and concrete actions that can be taken to ensure that social selling is both adopted and then managed in the right way.

Managing a Social Sales teams covers the following topics and ends with an Action Plan:

The Sales Manager as Greatest Revenue Multiplier
The Sales Manager as Agent of Social Change
Using Social Profiles as a Branding Opportunity
Using Social Channels to Align With Your Buyers’ Journey
Typing Too Much Is the New Talking Too Much
Likes and Shares Don’t Pay the Bills
Measuring Success
Patience
Always Focus on the Buyer
Your Social Sales Management Action Plan

Evolution in Progress: How the Entrepreneur Is Changing the World

This is a book about freedom—the freedom that once existed, the little freedom we have left that we can still take advantage of, and a strong hope for a greater freedom in the future.

Within these pages I am opening some old yet crucially relevant arguments and placing them squarely on the table for discussion, debate and perhaps resolution. I believe, as do many others, that the entrepreneur is the heart and soul of a free economy—and today that freedom is being seriously eroded, blocked and in some cases outright prevented.

– Nikolaus Kimla

1. Bureaucracy & Taxes

Let’s start off with a fictional but all-too-realistic picture of what it is like to run a small-medium business, and the severe burden taxes and bureaucracy place on its very survival and existence.

2. Understanding Social Welfare

It seems that it isn’t enough that small-medium businesses pay more than their fair share of taxes and are inundated with bureaucracy. Now the burdens of health care and social responsibility are falling on them as well. What once were voluntary beneficial activities are now being made “mandatory.”

3. Inequality in Funding

The oft-cited principle of “equality” does not seem to apply to small and medium-sized businesses. Huge amounts of tax money have been made available to big corporations—in particular under the banner of “fighting the crisis”—while smaller businesses have been left empty-handed. Yet they are responsible for a lion’s share of the value and jobs that are generated.

4. Competition With Big Business

Small and medium-sized business nearly always have a different culture than large corporations. Within a small-medium business, the individual human being is much more the focus of the relationship. This is compared to the highly professionalized, anonymous structures found at big corporations.

5. In the Beginning Was the Family

For small-medium businesses, no discussion of staffing issues would be complete without a mention of the family unit. Families were the original source of human resources for farms and, only a short time later, for small businesses.

6. Mega and Micro Solutions

Unfortunately, “businesses create problems and government solves them” is a prevailing sentiment regarding business and government. Companies and the economy as a whole are stigmatized as “perpetrators”; others like to see themselves in the victim role, a victim that only the State with a capital “S” can help.

7. Technology Means Knowledge–and Power

There are many others that have not recognized the true power that knowledge managementbrings companies—especially to small-medium businesses operating against much larger competitors.

8. Software: The Great Equalizer

Like it or not, the IT revolution is here, and there is no way around it. What we are experiencing and using today—from the global knowledge encyclopedia to local administrative tools—is just the beginning. IT and the e-applications connected to it are calling into question a multitude of customary practices and opening up completely new perspectives.

Download Evolution in Progress: How the Entrepreneur is Changing the World now.

Salespeople, Sales Management and the Importance of Taking Risks

In today’s mega-technological super-convenience society, we’ve all but lost sight of one particular fact: Life is a risk. We’ve built walls, dams and roofs to keep it out. We’ve armed ourselves with the latest inoculations to keep risk from making us sick. We’ve mounted the latest weaponry to safeguard us from our enemies. We’ve insured ourselves as many ways as possible so that risk doesn’t lose us money.

But risk is part of life, part of business–let’s fact it, part of everything. Taking risk is how anything ever got built, invented, created or originated in the first place. It’s how anyplace was ever discovered, then made habitable and colonized. And taking a closer look at the environment in which we all live, taking risk is how any business ever got founded, built up and became any kind of success; somebody somewhere stepped out and took that risk.

Start Taking Risks Again

In this ebook, Nikolaus Kimla shows us how and why taking risk is actually important. Since, with Pipeliner, we are mainly concerned with business, the book mainly focuses there. And since sales and sales management require a measure of taking and understanding risk, we’ll be zeroing in there as well.

Nikolaus takes us through an understanding of the risk-taking personality–what kind of person is it that takes risks? In detail we examine why salespeople should once again become risk takers. We learn why sales managers need to have a full understanding of leading and lagging indicators in order to accurately predict risk. We learn the crucial role that technology must play in predicting and understanding risk. We take a real-life risk lesson taken from today’s headlines. And much more.

We hope that by the end you’ll understand risk for what it is: a guidepost to your next great success!

Because of technology’s capability for reduction of risk, we see high-tech virtually everywhere: hospitals, cars, schools—and even in our homes. Today’s Internet of Things is comprised of a vast array of smart devices and appliances, interconnected with each other, and with us. It has now come to pass that technology not only reduces risk, but warns us when risk threatens.

Chapter 1: The Risk-Taking Personality

What kind of personality is it that can (often successfully) take risks? That would, of course, be the entrepreneur. It’s the one type of individual that can lead and get anything built. For any great innovation or forward measure in a society, you’ll find some kind of entrepreneur behind it.

Chapter 2: Salespeople: Become Risk-Takers Once Again

In the last 20 years or so, automation has taken an enormous role in sales. A mammoth attempt has been made to create a “perfect system” in which leads are sought out, discovered, and served up to salespeople so that all they have to do is sell.

The net result of these efforts, if continued, could ultimately lead to a sales force that no longer takes risks. But the thing is, taking risks is a large part of what made them salespeople to begin with.

Chapter 3: Sales Management: Importance of Leading and Lagging Indicators

Much of the time, sales management is conducted through what are called lagging indicators. But in managing for the future, we need something that will show us how the activities we are engaging in now will impact our figures for the quarter or the year.

Chapter 4: Evening Out Company Risk (Lessons From VW)

In normal conditions, especially in companies with greater longevity, owners and executives have an understanding that there is a balance between risk and sustainability. It occasionally happens, though, that company management and even owners lose sight of the fact that risk and sustainability are related, and go completely overboard with risk. A fantastic case in point comes right out of today’s headlines—that of German auto maker Volkswagen.

Chapter 5: Increased Sales Are Literally Staring You in the Face

A sales manager faces many daily frustrations in sorting through and figuring out all the risks that must be estimated, taken and not taken. A large part of the reason for this frustration is that a sales team is made up all kinds of divergent elements. How does the sales manager bring them all under control?

Chapter 6: The Real Edge on Reducing Risk: Technology

Any forward technological advance in a civilized society is usually conducted in an effort to reduce risk. If you don’t fully embrace that concept, then you can never use risk factors to lead you to sound decisions—they can only surprise you, and often in a bad way.

12 Steps to Creating an Effective and Predictable Sales Pipeline

12-step Checklist to Help You Create Your Own Custom Sales Pipeline.

The Benefits of Building your Sales Pipeline from the Ground Up

Here’s a comprehensive list of sales pipeline checklist items. Whether you run a small or large sales team— or are a contributor yourself, you’ll love this guide. Totally actionable; use it to make your own custom and optimized Sales Pipeline.

With this Checklist you will learn:

How a Sales Pipeline and Sales Process can help your business grow.
How to do proper research and set up a good foundation for your Sales Pipeline.
The necessary steps you need to take to build your Sales Pipeline.

Before “12 Steps to Creating an Effective & Predictable Pipeline,” these techniques were scattered across the Internet. Now, with the help of Sales Training Expert John Golden, we’ve put them all in one place.

Don’t let a lack of sales process slow you down. Turn your sales pipeline into a measurable and predictable set of steps to guarantee better productivity and results.

Download this free checklist now.

Your sales pipeline, even after it has been firmly established, should remain dynamic. Over time markets change, the economy changes, your products and services improve, and your sales reps develop more efficient ways to advance and close sales.