Archive for January, 2012

Quarterly Sales Upgrade – a 90-Day Strategy

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

We still maintain that you can conduct an effective 90-day salesperson or sales team upgrade without a lot of money, fanfare or wholesale change-out. It’s done through 4 core areas of focus:

1. Territory Scrutiny
2. Target Shooting
3. Message Crafting
4. Activity Analysis

We get many requests from many executives and sales leaders seeking help in improving sales revenues through sales training and consulting. They say “Our team needs more sales discipline” or “Our team needs more qualified sales opportunities” or “Our team needs to improve customer questioning skills” or “Our sales pitch is inconsistent.”

Of course, these are all legitimate concerns and competency areas that can be improved, however it’s not telling the whole story. An honest assessment of one’s territory opportunity set and priorities, focused customer targeting, up-level-ing of all occassion sales messaging, and obsessing with (quick) daily and weekly feedback analysis are the keys to sales upgrading.

It’s a new year. Q1 is here – how’s your team going to perform in Q2?

Hooray for 100%’ers!

Monday, January 9th, 2012

While some criticize and only pool people into categories of 1% and 99%, we herald the achievers – the Sales 100%’ers.

Congrats to all 2011 sales winners who attained 100% of their quota. We know these sales producers worked hard to meet and exceed quotas and goals assigned in the midst of obstacles, difficulties and a host of customer and market challenges.

100%’ers and all those who work hard in producing and selling goods and services make the nation and world economy work. We could only hope that all people would have the heart, determination and work ethic of all those who achieve the Sales 100% Club.

New Year Selling

Wednesday, January 4th, 2012

We wrote a couple of months ago about the end of the “Solution Selling” era. This month we’ll address the rebirth of sales enablement across progressive selling organizations. A new day (year) is upon us as enlightened companies, consultants and sales trainers develop and implement sticky, adaptable and scalable selling systems that help organizations run like fine-tuned, ultimate sales-driven machines.

The next wave available to companies is an explosion of sales effectiveness and new efficiencies. Prepare for a 10-year run of sales team upgrades and resets.

This new era of sales enablement is already underway in many companies like Citrix, Fujitsu, Adobe, Boeing and VMware, to name a few, that are investing in re-optimized sales tools and practices for their modern updated sales teams.

There are 4 components* to a revamped sales enablement program:
1. Strategy (where to go)
2. Messaging (what to say)
3. Process (what to do)
4. Leadership (how to coach)

* DSG Consulting, an MXL Partners affiliate partner firm.

The redevelopment and integration of each of these component areas into carefully tailored sales 2.0 manual and automated playbooks is opening up an exciting new frontier in a land filled with opportunity. We’ll break down each component in this SalesNote.

Are you “revamping” enablement of your sales organization?