Like this article? PLEASE +1 it! Evan Signature
Evan Carmichael Top Header about About Home Profiles articles Tools forums inspirational quotes About facebook Twitter YouTube Blog

sales organization Tagged Articles



Direct Sale Marketing At Trade Shows
Your direct sales organization will find unlimited leads at trade shows and fairs.

What Will Your Sales Organization Look Like in 24 Months?
Let's face it, with the speed of change revved up as high as it is, developing and executing a five-year plan is nearly impossible to do. While it may be true that changes in technology, the economy, the political administration, and the markets are considerably volatile today (and certainly more difficult to plan for and navigate) I believe that when designing and developing a plan for your sales organization, you clearly need to decide what it is that you want to be “when you grow up.”

Put ONLY Your Best on the Front Lines Driving Sales
Good enough isn't good enough anymore! Your customer acquisition efforts need to be driven by the BEST! When the economic winds were blowing harder, even our turkeys could fly! The wind has died down and has changed directions. Having only TOP representation in the field with your prospects, customers, and clients is a MUST DO for any company looking to stem the tides of customer exodus and margin erosion. When is the last time you looked for a superstar?

The Queen of Cosmetics: Ash Creates an Empire
As Ash’s sales for Stanley Home Products continued to increase, she began to recruit and train other salespersons to work with her. It was SHP policy that for every person Ash recruited, she would receive a small percentage of their sales revenue. Soon, Ash had over 150 women working for her. However, the success of Ash and her sales team quickly began to worry SHP executives, who promptly moved Ash to Dallas and refused to let her continue receiving commissions from her previous sales recruits. Ash made the move to Dallas but resented SHP for punishing her hard work.

The Knives Your Sales People Should Have
In December, I wrote a post titled Give Your Sales People All The Knives. While I let you draw whatever conclusions you wanted from the post, I thought I’d follow through and give you a little more detail about what I meant by the statement.

Sales Leader’s Job in Perspective
Sales leaders must recognize their role within the context of the sales organization. They have to remove their personal attachment to the sales team, and approach sales from a business perspective. This creates clarity and helps them focus on their main objectives as team leaders: Increasing revenue and encouraging the growth of their sales team.

CEO Impact on Training and Consulting Projects
Often we are asked, "What are the factors that caused the difference between our successful and unsuccessful projects?"

Track Sales Calls with Call Accounting Software
Call accounting software allows managers to track sales calls, monitor employee productivity, decrease telecom expenses, and track marketing campaigns.

The Shadow Syndrome
Is a sales manager an essential component of a successful sales / marketing strategy?

Looking For A Top Network Marketing Company
Needing to make additional income has led many people to the internet to solve their finacial problems. The business model that they find which offers a great compensation plan and company training and support is in the network marketing industry. Look closely at a top internet marketing company for your income needs. They offer more then meets the eye. They could quite possibly offer a new life and financial freedom around the corner as they have done for many others.

Sales Prospecting on Steroids
With all of the articles written about sales and cold calls being dead (I usually write the counter arguments to that. How would you find new business if the only thing you could rely on was a lead?) it was a breath of fresh air when Michael Strickland, my guest on this week's edition of Meet the Sales Experts, spoke about prospecting on steroids. His five tips for sales success in today's economy are:

What Is Your Sales Team’s A. Q.?
It has been known for some time that if you want to measure an individual’s intelligence, you administer an Intelligence Quotient test. This has been an accepted method of measuring one’s intelligence for many years. In sales management, intelligence is important, but this does not get you closer to measuring or predicting your sales team’s effectiveness or the ability to predict with any certainty the projections of future sales. How do measure this? With an A. Q. test.

Overcoming the Dysfunction in Sales Organizations
These days, many companies have questions about compensation for salespeople and sales leaders and as a result they make a lot of mistakes too. Why would a company want to squash a top producer because he/she is making a lot of money? It happened to Rocky once and he weighed in - with a strong opinion - on the subject.

"Leading Works Better Than Selling."
Our research found that that harder one pushes to make sales, the harder it is to grow a territory. This article covers several reasons "leading works better than selling." Also, borrowing an effective sales strategy from top performers can change your whole mission on a call. It ensures your efforts are magnified with top performers' work values. And replicating top performers' practices of dealing with common sales challenges can help you, like them, outperform counterparts and trends with 31 percent annual sales growth compared to 5 percent for the status quo.

Chinese Salespeople May be the Next Group to Outsell Your Salespeople
What are you going to do when, not only are you out priced, out sourced, out willed, out shipped, and out produced, but also out sold - by the Chinese? That is the question posed by my Kurlan & Associates colleague, Frank Belzer, who is blogging from Shanghai, where he is spending the week training Asian companies in the art of sales management.

Just How Important is Preparation to Sales?
Jim believes that you must know everything there is to possibly know about a potential customer or client, perhaps even more than they know about themselves. My theory for preparation revolves more around a salesperson's ability to be strategically and tactically prepared for every imaginable scenario that could occur in a sales meeting and cycle. Both of our approaches depend on the salesperson being prepared to ask good, tough, timely questions. If your salespeople combine those two approaches, they would be unbeatable.

The University of Sales
Is everybody on your sales team as dedicated as you are to continuously augmenting and upgrading personal knowledge and skills? There's no question that it's absolutely essential ...unless of course all your competitors are lazy and stupid.

3 Reason’s to Invest In Sales Management Training
If you want to thrive in difficult times here are 3 reasons why you should invest in sales management training. Your sales force is your company’s most expensive promotional resource. Yet too many sales organizations operate well below their potential. Your front line sales managers are the people who can unlock the potential in your sales organization

Sales Management Training and Focus
In a strong economy just showing up to play is enough to achieve your sales objectives. In today’s economic environment sales leaders are facing sales force downsizing and poor sales rep morale. Sales reps are frustrated by longer sales cycles, dropping demand, unrealistic quotas, concerns about declining income and losing their jobs.

Why Prospecting is Like Baseball
The reason I want to talk about why prospecting is like baseball is because I recently saw a quote by Mickey Mantle that struck home: "During my 18 years in baseball, I came to bat almost 9,000 times. I struck out over 1,700 times and walked over 1,800 times. That means I played seven years in the major leagues without even hitting a baseball."

How to Get the Entire Sales Force to Change - Now
Most people don't change because they are: * afraid of it, * uncomfortable with it, * don't want to give things up, or * don't want to take things on. For me it was the latter two...

How Focus Helps Sales Management Effectiveness
In a strong economy just showing up to play is enough to achieve your sales objectives. In today’s economic environment sales leaders are facing sales force downsizing and poor sales rep morale. Sales reps are frustrated by longer sales cycles, dropping demand, unrealistic quotas, concerns about declining income and losing their jobs.

Recession Proofing Your Sales Force
As the leader of your organization, the next 6 months will prove to be more pressure-filled then you may have experienced in years. With decreasing prospects and the cost of doing business increasing, a squeeze on profits is inevitable.

Sales Simplified - Discovery... The
Salespeople must be skilled at asking key questions on every call in order to find the solution that would best fit the needs of the customer/client. How do we do we do it effectively?

Stop Blaming Sales!
If sales isn't responding - then marketing is responsible. Marketing's role is to give sales the tools and training they need to sell the company's solutions. It's also marketing's role to get them excited about the newest offerings. So the next time someone starts to blame sales for lack of product acceptance in your customer base or for discounting deals that don't generate the margin or results you expected - think again. It's most likely sales is doing the best they can with what they've been given.

Your Sales Organization has Never Been So Important
Time to reinvest in one of your company's most valuable resources-your sales force. Optimize the effectiveness of your sales forc.e

What Is A Quality Sales Organization?
Are you interested in extracting the optimal results from your sales organization? Then focus on building an organization that has a healthy, high performance culture. A high quality organization will ultimately morph into a world class sales machine.

Green Business Travel: Increase Sales and Save the Whales!
Sales Managers – Corporate Social Responsibility department ready to rat you out for your huge carbon footprint? Laying awake at night trying to figure out how you’ll make numbers with a reduced travel budget? Take heart! You can travel green and reduce travel costs, all while increasing sales (….and saving whales).

Sales Scoreboard
Having a scoreboard is an essential element of any game. Constantly showing the score helps you know where you are, evaluate your performance and make the adjustments necessary to win.I've used this same type of scoring system to help organizations and individuals increase their performance and achieve record results.

Sales Training for the B2B Sales Team
Sales training for B2B sales professionals can streamline sales activity to allow your B2B sales reps more time to invest in profitable, revenue-producing leads. Sales training for a B2B sales team will also provide your team with the skills they need to successfully present themselves and your company to complex prospects.

Expansion Plans
If you have a service or product based business you have the opportunity to expand sales within your customer base without adding new customers. Many times customers seek a supplier for a specific product or service and are completely unaware of other offerings from your company. There is also a chance that your customers are buying products from your competitors that you can provide them.

Leverage Your Strengths Fire your Weakness
Now is the time for your New Year’s resolutions. We can easily rattle off the personal changes we will attempt to make for the new year. Things like, I’m going to exercise more, eat healthy, drink less, quit smoking, allow for more family time, make better use of my time, etc. Have you taken the time to set objectives or “resolutions” for your business? We are entering the age of efficiency. Banks and credit card companies are cutting off risky business, secondary finance companies are rethinking their business model, car manufacturers are cutting dealers and products, airlines are cutting routes, and on and on. What is your plan for 2009?

Sales Best Practices - Not
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the difference between company A and B. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to implement the process either. But it does take more than a 60 day commitment to the new process. When it's been broken for a decade it doesn't get fixed in a calendar quarter.

Flush the Ambiguity out of your Sales Pipeline
Truth or Fiction! Do you feel this is the guessing game you are playing when assessing the potential and probability of your sales pipeline? Uncertainty over new business opportunities is a big issue. Often times it is a result of having a subjective, non-scientific approach to predicting potential and probability of revenue opportunities.

Basic Alignment Drives Sales Results
As important as product, technology, market message, and strategy all are, there is nothing more essential to the overall organization’s sales success than the internal alignment between the sales leadership team and the corporate strategy. The point transcends Sales and applies to every function within the firm, but SalesFulcrum's founder discusses it specifically to Sales.

How To Assess Your Sales Intelligence Quota
Answer the following questions. If you answer "No," you could be missing a strategic advantage that you could incorporate in to your sales system to make it more effective. 1. Do you know exactly how many calls it takes to make a sale? If not, perform an analysis. 2. Do you know how long your sales cycle is?

Five Myths that Slow Down Sales and How to Avoid Them
Time is money, yeah, yeah, we’ve heard that before. But if time really is money, why do so many professionals squander it chasing anyone with a pulse, including their most horrible prospects? Because they still embrace one of the Five Myths of selling, common mistakes that drain profit and energy from a sales organization. Read on…

Learning from Experience: Implementing After Action Reviews in Your Sales Force
The problem with many sales organizations is not laziness, lack of selling skills or the myriad of other issues CEOs point to when sales are down. The problem with most sales organizations is the inability to learn from experience.er Action Reviews are now used by many companies in a number of ways. When conducted properly, the AAR serves as a post-event debrief that generates specific actionable recommendations (SARs) for immediate use. It also creates an environment in which sales people can identify real mistakes, learn from them, and make immediate adjustments, rather than get bogged down in blaming the market, the prospect, or the competition.

Drawing the Wrong Conclusions
It is often said that numbers don’t lie. While the numbers in your financial statements are correct, the conclusions you draw from them may be wrong. This misinterpretation can cause significant revenue loss in your company.

How to Encourage Higher Sales Performance
Excellence in a sales organization means different things to different individuals and sales managers. Todays, sales manager must ensure that all individuals meet organizational criteria. This includes adhering to policies while also meeting and exceeding sales goals. The only way to ensure that people create excellence is by creating excellence in people.

5 Initiatives in Building A World Class Sales Organization-Part 2 of 3
In part 1 of this series we identified the 5 main areas that must be focused on when building a world-class sales organization as: 1-Finding Good People. 2-Getting Them to Join Our Team. 3-Getting Them Trained and Producing. 4-Growing Them into Top Producers. 5-Keeping Them. In the first article, we tackled 1 and 2 which covered some of the things that are necessary to recruit and hire top talent. Now the true work begins! Getting Them Trained and Producing, and Growing Them into Top Producers

5 Initiatives in Building A World Class Sales Organization-Part 3 of 3
In the previous two articles we reviewed some important initiatives involved in building a world-class sales organization. We identified 5 main areas in doing so. These 5 areas of focus are: 1- Finding Good People. 2- Getting Them to Join Our Team. 3- Getting Them Trained and Producing. 4- Growing Them into Top Producers. 5- Keeping Them. The first article addressed appropriate strategies in recognizing, recruiting, and hiring top talent to our teams. The second article addressed getting those individuals up and producing quickly. In this article, we will address the maintenance of those individuals. This maintenance will be designed to continually grow your people to be better, more productive members of your sales team.

Are you sure you know who you're competing with?
In past times competitors clashed often enough to develop a sixth sense on each other's strengths, weaknesses and strategies to win business. In today's environment your competitor could be an adversary that you have no knowledge of whatsoever. The competition could be an international company, a new start-up, an internal customer team willing to do the work, or have the mandate to do nothing because of business pressures. The competition landscape has changed and will continue to offer challenges to all companies.

Turning Sales Setbacks into Success
As sellers, we invariably run into obstacles that are tough to overcome. Learn what top sellers do when they encounter these challenges and how they use them as a springboard to success.

Other sales organization Related Articles

Sales Professionals Partner with Coaches for Extreme Results
Here's the Sales Challenge. You’re a Sales Professional in charge of sales for your organization and your revenue goals are up 20% over last year.

Remove Distractions to Ignite Sales Growth – Part 1
The most common thief of sales growth is distraction. Based on my experience, I estimate that on average, employees lose 40% of their time to distractions. This number ranges between 30% and 60%, depending on the company they work for, and can reach as high as 70%, depending on the individual. Distractions can be classified into two types: 1) leadership and organization; and 2) individual-specific. The leadership and organization distractions can be categorized into poor sales support, customer service mishaps, products that do not meet client needs, bad sales management, and poor communications. “Individual-specific” distractions refer to daily mental or situational conditions faced by the salesperson. Part I deals with leadership and organization because these have a more dramatic impact on growth than most companies realize

What culture do you develop?
As a leader have you considered the culture you want in your organization? A culture of an organization is determined by the behaviors and perceptions of your people. Consider, how your people treat your customers, how they treat each other, what their perception of your suppliers is, or more importantly, what do they think of the leaders and managers? You have heard the phrase 'walk-the-talk', people are watching you and based on your behavior they develop perceptions and will act accordingly. As an observer of an organization, it is very easy to identify the culture, one visit to a store, one interaction with the sales team, or customer service department will provide you with an indication of what is happening in that organization.

What Is A Quality Sales Organization?
Are you interested in extracting the optimal results from your sales organization? Then focus on building an organization that has a healthy, high performance culture. A high quality organization will ultimately morph into a world class sales machine.

Have You Mastered Sales 1.5?
Sales 2.0 is getting tons of buzz right now in the technology market. So how do you begin to transform your organization? Take baby steps: you need to master Sales 1.5 before Sales 2.0. You need a solid foundation on which to initiate real change

3 Reason’s to Invest In Sales Management Training
If you want to thrive in difficult times here are 3 reasons why you should invest in sales management training. Your sales force is your company’s most expensive promotional resource. Yet too many sales organizations operate well below their potential. Your front line sales managers are the people who can unlock the potential in your sales organization

Creating a Quality Sales Culture
Sales culture has a large impact on any organization. A quality sales culture that is adopted by every individual within an organization creates efficient practices and consistent results. Sales leaders and upper management must understand that people are inherently resistant to change. New practices must be introduced over time to ease transition and ensure their new envisioned culture is accepted within the organization.

Formalizing The Sales Support Function
At the highest level, the Sales Support function is responsible for ensuring that the Sales & Marketing departments have the tools, resources, and systems they need to achieve current and future sales revenue targets. Use Demand Metric’s downloadable Director of Sales Support job description to formalize the role of sales support in your organization.

Standardized Marketing Metrics and Organizational Singularity
The problem is that there isn't a standard set of marketing practices on which to base standardized metrics. Although nearly every organization may have a web site or a brochure, the usage of those tools is very disparate. marketing should be tied to the organization's key performance indicators, including profitability for a profit-driven organization. Beyond that, the organization should break down its KPIs according to its sales cycle and measure marketing's performance at every stage in that cycle.

Management by Osmosis
Sales Managers are a critical part of any sales organization and by extension, the entire enterprise. Selecting the right manger and providing them with the tools and skills necessary to succeed are vital, and sadly too often mismanaged. Avoiding this costly error should be the most important mission for senior executives in a sales organization, it should be hands-on and practical, not passive and emotional.

Featured Article

Bottom Footer



Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!
Name:
Email:
Popular Articles

Selling What Sizzles vs. Delivering Real Value

TOP Level Selling

Taking Advantage Of Internet Advertising Trends

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.