The Invisible Sales Manager
A sales manager needs to be seen and heard if they are going to lead their sales force. One of the downsides of our technologies is that the salesperson can monitor their sales force’s results over long distances. For as long as there have been CRMs, salespeople have feared their sales manager would act as Big Brother, monitoring their every move, tallying up their activities
Six Keys to Change (Or, How to Avoid Irrelevance)
Change sucks. It requires one to step into the unknown. To twist and turn into a new transformed self, team or firm. To leave the safety of the known path. Lift anchor and sail into a foggy horizon with no guarantee of safe harbor. Difficult as it is … irrelevance is worse. Individuals, teams and companies that wish to transform must endure change. Successful change requires six steps
Addressing the Challenges of Being a New Sales Manager
The shift from being an individual contributor to leading a sales force isn’t an easy transition. The character traits are different, and so are the required skills. While it’s helpful to have experience in a sales role, by itself, it’s not enough to ensure success. Few sales managers are provided the training and development that would enable them to lead their team and reach their goals. Instead,
Tips for Practicing One-On-One Listening to Improve Internal Comms
Companies are recognizing listening’s impact on retention, productivity, and culture by installing macro-organizational listening strategies. Strategies include designating a chief listening officer, hiring listening consulting firms and employing organization-wide listening mechanisms like engagement surveys; pulse-taking during exit, onboarding, and post-merger interviews; crowdsourcing methods like suggestion boxes or polling on specific topics.
Culture
It has been written that culture eats strategy for breakfast and that culture is a great differentiator among companies. If you query Google on “What is a good company culture?” you will get billions of results (6,250,000,000!) and if you click on the links of the results on the first page you will have a list of over 100 different keys to culture. Purpose, values, mission, respect, freedom, quality of leadership, great compensation, high growth, flexibility, diversity, multi-stakeholder capitalism and on and on the list goes.
How to Use Career Development to Drive Talent Retention
Retaining top talent is the essential business strategy in 2022, with 87 percent of organizations citing it as important or critical. To reduce voluntary turnover, which 39% of organizations believe will increase greatly or moderately this year, organizations seek to re-imagine several elements of human capital management. Career development sits at the top of the list.
Why We Micromanage (Even If We Don’t Want to)
Micromanagement. We have all experienced it – and if you are a leader, you have mostly likely done it. Yet no one ever says that great leaders are micromanagers. If it isn’t effective and we don’t like it done to us, why do we micromanage? Not all the items on this list will affect or afflict all leaders in the same way, but all are among the reasons why we take over, step in, or “try to help.”
Missing the Forest for the Trees: Leading vs. Lagging Metrics
Too long, didn’t read: Goodhart’s Law should be used for leading metrics, but lagging metrics make great targets. In fact, the further downline you go, the better they get (to a point). Today we are going to be talking about a topic I have been exploring for a while: Goodhart’s “Law”. For those of you who are unfamiliar, the adage goes “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
Let’s Call It a Retention Review
We have all heard about the Great Resignation. The notion that many people are leaving their job or not returning to work has been a persistent theme of 2021 and 2022. There are any number of theories as to the cause of this trend: Pay scales were too low. Government benefits were too high creating a disincentive to work. People were fearful of getting sick and/or bringing the virus home to members of their family.
In-Person Events are Back. What do Marketers Think About It?
SmartBrief surveyed marketers about in-person events now that mask mandates have been lifted across the country. A lot has changed since last summer. The in-person events industry was crushed in 2020. About 83 million people had to change plans when the pandemic hit, per Forbes. Two years later, live events are making a comeback, but SmartBrief’s most recent survey of marketers finds
Three Steps to Engineer a Better Sales System With CPR
It is 4:20 p.m. on a Friday, and one of your largest advertising clients calls and tells you that they want to promote a special for an upcoming holiday in two weeks. They have a six-figure budget, and they need you to present it to their board members the following Tuesday. What do you do? Call a quick huddle with your leadership team? Gather every promotional flyer and email over an outline of where you will place those ad dollars?
Why You Need to Rethink Your Approach to Power in the Workplace
Any treatment of the topic of power in the workplace is sure to generate energy. (OK, sorry for the bad pun.) Add in guidance that the pursuit of power might be healthy and lead to personal, group and organizational success, and, well, the discussions are sure to become high-voltage. (Stop me.) Yet, I argue that your relationship with power — specifically cultivating power — is essential for your success and the success of the people around you.
Six Practical Ways to Help Your Team Make More Sales
As a sales manager, it’s important that you continually take new courses of action to help your team generate more sales. Here are six practical methods you should consider. 1. One-on-One Coaching By helping your sales representatives to become more skilled and confident in their approaches, regular coaching is crucial. Yes, as a sales manager you’re sure to have a busy schedule, so finding the time to coach your team to assist them in their skills and confidence levels may be difficult. But don’t lose sight of the end goal.
Sales Managers: Power of Belief + Encouragement
(By Loyd Ford) The power in sales starts with what you believe. It’s in what your local sellers believe, too. To flip around the old saying, “If you believe it, you will sell it.” Every single person on your team wants to win. The difference between those sellers at the top of their game and those in the middle or dragging up the rear comes in what each one thinks actually produces winning for them.
Is It Time to Restructure Your Sales Operation?
Perhaps as a sales manager or sales executive, you have pondered the question, “Is it time to restructure my sales operation?” When you’re not getting the results you need from your sales team, it’s certainly tempting to consider restructuring how you’re going to market. How to Determine If You Should Restructure Your Sales Team Getting breakthrough performance from a new approach is very appealing