Sales News Articles

Discover sales news articles featuring TopLine Leadership President, Kevin F. Davis, sharing his insights on successful sales management training in leading publications.

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Sales & Marketing Management News Articles

5 Keys for Motivating Your Top Salespeople

Here are five keys for motivating your top salespeople. As the sales manager, it’s your job to keep your top salespeople motivated. Read the full article.

5 Unconventional Tactics of Excellent Sales Managers

Excellent sales managers aren’t made overnight. As a manager, you’re always learning and growing along with your sales team. Every team member has a unique reaction to your management style, and it takes a great manager to navigate all those unique situations and relationships. Read the full article.

3 Things Great Sales Managers Do Differently

Whenever I meet with sales managers, I ask them to do a quick exercise where they grade each of their reps on two factors: skill and attitude. After talking about the insights this gives the managers into their reps’ development needs, I challenge them this way: “This is a report card on your salespeople, right? …Wrong!  It’s actually a report card on your sales leadership.” Read the full article.

Managing A Prima Donna Salesperson

Most sales managers I know have a love/hate relationship with the prima donnas on their sales teams. They love the star player’s passion and hard work; they hate the self-centered behaviors that demoralize or discourage the rest of the team. Read the full article.

How to Know When to Give Up on a New Hire

I advise companies to have a standard policy that defines the first 90 to 180 days (and maybe a little longer) as a trial period. After that point, the candidate’s fit is reevaluated. You will look at the new hire, evaluate their progress, then decide whether to “invest or divest.” Read the full article.

Rocking the Boat to Drive Team Success

In a SMMConnect webinar I delivered to over 100 sales managers recently, I talked about eight instincts they developed as salespeople that are now harming their effectiveness as team leaders. Interestingly, about 30 percent of the participants said that the sales instinct they struggle with the most is “avoiding conflict.” What does that mean? Read the full article.

Selling Power

SellingPower News Articles

Ready for Your Best Q4 Ever?

The start of the 4th sales quarter is near, and you need to make it your best ever. Here are four sales management strategies to maximize sales success during October-December. Read the full article.

How to Revive Your Lost Sales Coaching Causes

On a recent Webcast delivered to sales managers, the moderator asked me, “Do you think some salespeople are just uncoachable?” My quick answer was yes. We’ve all known salespeople who don’t make the changes sales managers recommend. Read the full article.

How the Best Sales Managers Control Time

The biggest problem sales managers face is not having enough time to get everything done. Unfortunately, the way many sales managers problem-solve with their salespeople ends up in creating more “stuff” for the sales manager to do. And that leaves less time for more important priorities, like sales coaching. Read the full article.

How to Improve the Attitude of Your Sales Team

Salespeople with a positive attitude sell more. Customers also buy more from positive salespeople – and this, in turn, leads to even greater sales success. That’s why one of the most important things a sales manager can do is improve the attitude of the sales team. Read the full article.

How to Become a Great Sales Coach

I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes the difference between sales managers who fail their teams, those who do a competent job, and those who excel. Read the full article.

How to Become a Good Sales Coach

I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes the difference between sales managers who fail their teams, those who do a competent job, and those who excel. Read the full article.

How to Raise the Performance of Your Sales Managers

I don’t know of a single successful sales organization where sales reps are allowed to sell any way they want. Every good company has some kind of common, consistent sales process to grow sales. Read the full article.

The Disastrous Under-development of Sales Managers

In your professional career, how many days of sales training do you think you received? How many days of sales management training have you received? (I don’t mean courses on general management and leadership – I mean training specifically on how to manage a sales team.) I asked this question a few weeks ago during a public webinar I was delivering to a diverse group of sales managers and sales executives from across the globe. Read the full article.

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Quotable News Articles

How to Coach a Prima Donna

How can you successfully coach a prima donna into being a more positive, friendly, role model sales team member? The trick lies in using his or her own sense of entitlement to bring out positive traits. Here’s how to make that happen. Read the full article.

3 Corporate Obstacles to Effective Sales Pipeline Management

Sales pipeline management is a one-on-one conversation that a sales manager has with a salesperson about the opportunities the rep is currently working on and the likelihood of hitting the monthly sales projection. The best sales managers use these conversations to accomplish more than a sales forecast — they use these calls to improve a rep’s sales skills and win rate. Read the full article.

Too Many Sales Managers Aren’t Doing These Three Things

Every sales manager wants to have a high-performing team. Yet too often I’ve seen sales managers who are their own worst enemies when it comes to reaching that goal. Making some simple changes in what they are doing as managers can go a long way toward creating a better sales team with stronger sales results. Read the full article.

Lessons in Turning Weakness into Strength for Sales Managers

One of my favorite quotes comes from the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu: “Eventually your strengths will become a weakness.” Nowhere do I see this lesson more clearly than when a great sales rep is promoted into sales management, and never succeeds as well at managing as they did at selling. The reason is tied to Sun Tzu’s insight: the instincts and habits that made a salesperson successful are often the exact opposite of what they need to succeed in sales management. Here are three examples of sales rep strengths that turn into weaknesses when they become sales managers. Read the full article.

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Sales Pop Purveyors of Prosperity News Articles

6 Things Great Sales Managers Do Differently

When we think of an effective sales manager we often think of someone who manages a sales team that consistently hits the sales goals and objectives set by their company. But success is more than a number. Here are six things that the best sales managers do differently. Things that you can implement to create an elite, high-performance sales team. Read the full article.

Avoid Getting Blindsided by Poor Sales

For many sales managers, the approach for sales reps making their numbers is to leave them be to get on with it. But then one day they’re blindsided by poor sales from a sales rep that in the past has been a high producer. How can this be avoided?  Watch the video.

Interview with Kevin Davis – Sales Manager’s Guide to Greatness

Having worked his way up from sales rep, to sales manager, to general manager, author Kevin F. Davis understands the particular challenges faced during the transition from sales to managing salespeople, and the transition from managing sales reps to managing managers. Watch it here.

More sales news articles

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Why Great Salespeople Often Fail as Sales Managers

One of the biggest frustrations I hear over and over again from Sales VPs or Directors is the high number of peak performing salespeople who never achieve the level of success that everybody expected they would once they are promoted into management. These failures are costly to everyone: Upper management loses a great salesperson and gains a mediocre manager. The top-rep-turned-manager who is used to success can get demoralized. And an entire sales team witnesses a successful peer become an ineffective boss. Read the full article.

StrategyDriven

How a Sales Manager Can Think Like a Leader

Almost every sales manager was, at one point in their career, a peak-performing sales professional, top dog on the team. When promoted, everything changed—except, perhaps, them. This presents a problem because managing and leading a sales team requires a completely different mindset from selling. Yet what sales managers have to rely on are the instincts and competencies they developed when they were selling. Read the full article.

Training Industry

The Costly Impact of Untrained Sales Managers

Most sales managers came up through the ranks and were promoted into a management position because they excelled at selling. But because they don’t know how to be an effective sales manager, a promoted salesperson can fall victim to the lure of the adrenaline rush that comes from chasing the big deals and being in on the action. Read the full article.

James Muir

Book Review – The Sales Manager’s Guide to Greatness

There is a relative dearth of sales management books compared to sales books. By my count there has only been a couple of good entries in this category in the past few years. That’s why I was so excited to receive an advance copy of The Sales Manager’s Guide to Greatness by Kevin Davis which I can tell you is a book every sales manager should add to their library. Read the full article.

Business Innovators Radio Network

Business Innovators Radio Network

Kevin Davis is the president of TopLine Leadership, which provides sales training and sales management leadership training programs to companies from diverse sectors. Kevin is the author of “The Sales Manager’s Guide to Greatness” & “Slow Down, Sell Faster! : Understand Your Customer’s Buying Process & Maximize Your Sales”. Read the full article.

SalesGravy

Sales Manager’s Guide to Greatness with Jeb Blount & Kevin F. Davis

There is no doubt that leading salespeople is one of the hardest roles in business today. Sales leaders are tasked with mentoring, coaching, training, inspiring, and motivating salespeople but have little actual time for these tasks. In this Sales Masters video, Jeb Blount discusses the biggest challenges facing sales leaders with Kevin F. Davis – author of the new book, Sales Manager’s Guide to Greatness. Watch the video.

Red Rocket Blog - Growth Strategy, Team & Capital

Lesson #265: Top 10 Traits of Good Sales Managers

I was recently introduced to Kevin Davis, the author of The Sales Manager’s Guide to Greatness, a new business book currently available on Amazon.  Kevin is the President of TopLine Leadership, a sales management training company, and is an authority on the sales management topic.  Kevin identified 10 key traits of good sales managers, summarized below.  He was kind enough to allow me to share them with all of you in this post. Read the full article.

The CEO Magazine

3 Keys for Converting Sales Managers into Team Leaders

I’ve seen it time and again, and I’m sure you have too: a high-performing rep is promoted into sales management but never becomes as successful as a manager as they were as a rep. Why does this happen? Read the full article.

Destination CRM.com from the editors of CRM Magazine

Following The Sales Manager’s Guide to Greatness

Most sales managers want their teams to flourish, but they often have difficulty providing the help and guidance their reps sorely need. The lack of results cascades throughout the organization as poor individual performances amount to plummeting sales and revenue. In his new book, The Sales Manager’s Guide to Greatness, author Kevin F. Davis sets out to close the gap between good intentions and effective actions by offering sound time management and instructional advice to busy sales managers. Read the full article.

Brainshark

3 Ways Sales Managers Can Make Time for Coaching

The reality is that even organizations that value coaching still struggle to make it happen. One of the biggest reasons managers fail to consistently coach their teams? Time. Read the full article.