Building High Performing Sales Teams

Are you under constant pressure to deliver an ever increasing sales targets? Do you want to explore if there is a way that you can build a culture that enables high performing sales teams and guide them to consistently push the limits and deliver quarter after quarter? Then join me in my quest to find out what it takes to build such a culture. In my opinion, there are three components that contribute to building a culture that enables a high performing sales teams: Sales Process – Do you have a clearly defined sales process and do your sales execs […]

What Do You Do When You Lose a Deal

No matter how good you are, you are bound to lose some deals to your competition. However, all is not lost. As they say, “Losing a battle doesn’t mean you shall lose the war”. How you respond and act in such a situation can go a long way in ensuring you continue to succeed in selling. Here are a few questions that could help you in making the most from the lose sale: Do you thank the prospect for giving you an opportunity to compete for their business?  Do you wish them success with their purchase? Do you ask for […]

Sales Forecasting

Every sales organization has a sales forecasting process in place. This is usually done in a meeting or on a tele-conference.During this call each sales team talk about how much sales closure do they each expect for the week, month or quarter. This is also the meeting where senior sales managers (2 or 3 levels above the sales executives on the road) want to know the status of the pipeline and determine if they will be able to achieve their sales quota for the respective period, as they are measured on delivering their sales quotas. Typically, everyone in the sales […]

PBTO24: What’s the Measure of a Sales Managers Success

One of the most important pillar of building a high performing sales team, is the performance of your sales managers. So, how do you evaluate the performance of a sales manager? If your organization is like most of the sales organizations, the answer is very simple – Does he hit his sales quota? Sales organizations function like a clear top-down organization. The sales VP or CSO or whatever he is called gets a quota (based on the CEO’s commitment to the stock market or to the board members and investors), say $100 Million. He then adds a cushioning factor and […]

The changing role of a sales executive

In today’s environment, sales executives serve one purpose – to sell your products and services to your prospects and customers. In a B2B environment, we are slowly realizing that the nature of how we sell has and is changing rapidly. We started with selling products and services based on features and benefits. Then we moved towards solutions selling. Slowly, but steadily, we are now moving towards consultative selling or even challenger selling models. All of these models are still geared towards the “Push” model of selling. We have built a product or service, it will will help you solve a […]