Sales Management

The future of selling will see a new sales strategy emerging. This new strategy is called the “whole-brain” selling approach.

Anna Hoglund investigates how selling in the future will become much more professional. (Read more…)

Proactive, positive, consistent new business winners are the holy grail of any sales organisation. All of my clients have their own unique ways of motivating, managing and running their sales teams yet they all have problems from time keeping those teams on target and “up for it!”

In this article I am going to cover the core fundamentals of How to Develop a Proactive, New-Business Sales Team. These are the same strategies and techniques that I have used to help many of my clients explode their personal and their team’s sales. (Read more…)

It’s a well known fact that the most powerful way to generate new business is by word of mouth/referral and yet very few people ever bother to develop a systematic approach to generating new business in this way. Why is this case? (Read more…)

Many companies spend time and money trying to understand what methods they can employ to encourage personnel to work hard and to meet high sales or other targets.

It could be argued that a company’s sales force is its most valuable asset; they need to feel appreciated and well remunerated and, in return, should be more loyal to the company.

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Call centre staff often tune out when they’re introduced to a new piece of customer relationship management (CRM) kit, with reluctant staff tending to add the minimum data they can get away with, or simply ignoring it and continuing to use their existing personal systems. However, as John Paterson reveals, if bosses follow eight simple dos and don’ts, it’s actually quite easy to get agents on board at implementation time.

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Pre-Sales is an overloaded term that commonly refers to a set of parallel activities that occur during the sales cycle, generally more technical in nature.  This may include product demonstrations, technical presentations, solution discovery, proof of concepts, RFQs, and more.

So what makes for a good sales support person?

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Sales funnels are funny things. Sales leads flow through from the top and either convert to sales or fall out, as part of the sales process. Most sales professionals seem to accept the process and are resigned to the fact that only a given proportion of leads convert to sales. That means the marketing activities need to be expanded to increase sales.

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Who in their right mind ever thought up sales forecasting?

Can’t you just see the manufacturing staff of every company sitting around waiting each month anxious to read the sales forecast to determine what to build? Talk about a way to go out of business! (Read more…)

Recently I stumbled across some notes that I had kept from a project I had been involved in which involved looking at manager behaviours. The aim of this project was to identify "preferred behaviours" in sales managers when they were working closely with their sales representatives.The outputs were interesting and helped my colleagues identify four main types of sales managers and the differences between effective and ineffective behaviours.

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