When sales enablement, marketing or sales leadership decide to roll out a skills and competency-based training program, they often overlook a critical first step. They will typically reverse-engineer time periods where sellers are best suited for learning, such as the summer months, down times between quarters, or in preparation for Q4. They execute training programs … Continue reading “Critical First Step: Leadership Communication Plan”
It’s interesting that as you grow and evolve in business, you see in hindsight mistakes in the way you communicated the value proposition of your product or service. And I confess that I made a giant mistake in the way I boasted about our certification process. Let me first explain the process, then the mistake … Continue reading “Mission 100%: Learning Is The Ultimate Leading Indicator To Success”
A couple of weeks ago I was listening to a podcast. It was talking to sales leaders, discussing how leadership development has moved into a critical state. In most companies, too many sales leaders are new to their role – and fresh to management. The company has spent a lot of time, money, and energy … Continue reading “Leadership Training Has Gone From: Nice To Have, To Absolutely Critical”
We’re approaching the end of sales kickoff season. Companies have brought their sales teams together, and have started planning new go-to-market strategies. They’ve added new product features, benefits, and new territory plans to their sales bags. With the best companies (unfortunately, most companies don’t do this enough), there is a new skills-based learning deployed at … Continue reading “Post-Sales Kickoff Prospecting Slump? Now What?”
I was in Nelson, British Columbia recently for an extreme skiing trip in the Selkirk Mountains. I had the opportunity to live on top of Baldface Mountain for a week with 46 other CEOs, and it was incredible to listen to the pitfalls, challenges, best practices, and opportunities in each of their businesses.
I’ve been fielding a lot of questions and calls over the last few weeks – and there’s no question that every Chief Revenue Officer is panicked. Outside of their annual referring revenue (the billings they need to protect from the core), there’s always a gap, and they all have to start at zero every year … Continue reading “Starting The Year at Zero: You’re Behind. Now What?”
Lately, we keep hearing time and again from customers that frontline sales managers are falling down at a pace that is clearly a four-alarm fire! I back what people have been saying on podcasts and webinars I’ve engaged with about a management crisis, and agree with them. There’s no question that frontline sales managers – … Continue reading “Management Crisis: Converting the Sales Manager Into a Coach”
I was in Paris this week launching a social selling program for a global enterprise account that has thousands of sellers. For the majority of social selling launches, companies typically look at modernizing their digital prospecting to find net new markets and accounts. In fact, this is how 75% of companies look at modern, digital … Continue reading “Relationship Mapping: The #1 Hole In Key Account Plans”
We’ve just entered the 2020s, and for the last two months, we’ve been fielding calls from companies planning their 2020 kickoffs and sales training. As we dove into their existing sales processes and methodologies, we’ve found that many of these processes and methodologies have been acquired from third-party sales training companies like Sandler, Corporate Visions, … Continue reading “You Don’t Have A Prospecting Methodology. Now What?”
At Sales For Life over the last couple of months, we’ve been analyzing our content marketing performance, and of course our content marketing spend. Looking back historically, only a few years ago in 2017, we had a $1 million per year spend in our marketing department, and for lead generation. Our content marketing was truly … Continue reading “The 2020s: The Age of The IP (Intellectual Property) Influencer”