The criteria your customers will use to make the final buying decision (which solution to choose from which vendor) can shift over time. I hope you are keeping in touch with your Sponsor(s) and can check in with them regularly to see if they have added criteria, made some criteria more or less important than … Read full article
If you’re selling to the Complex Buying Team, the criteria that each decision maker considers important will be different. *Remember: if your sale involves more than one decision-maker, you’re selling to the “Complex Buying Team.” To win, you’ve got to identify all the decision-makers, determine their position on the team (Gatekeeper, Integrator, Virtual Authority, User, … Read full article
Our sales management training program is more comprehensive than other sales management training programs. Others place significant emphasis on a few aspects of the sales managers’ role, such as how to coach the sales process and how to hire salespeople. While our program also includes these necessary modules, we provide much more, simply because the … Read full article
At TopLine Leadership, our sales training programs are designed to help your sales team to think and feel like a customer, that is, how to get into the customer’s head. With our sales training program, your sales team will learn how to sell based on how customers buy. We understand what it takes to improve … Read full article
Are you familiar with the old sales axiom telling is not selling? Well, telling is not coaching either. Confucius had it right when he said, “What I hear I forget, what I see I may remember, but what I do I understand.” He could have been giving advice to sales managers on how to develop … Read full article
A common mistake sales managers make when coaching salespeople is to give them a laundry list of things they need to improve upon. Most of us only have the capacity to improve one or two things at any given time. You don’t want to overwhelm your sales reps because you may damage their self-confidence. Give you … Read full article
In sales management, most sales managers focus on the “Close” part of the sales process because that is where problems/mistakes rear their ugly heads. A sure thing sale suddenly goes “silent.” The prospect decides to check out other vendors. Everybody panics”¦ and that’s when the sale manager steps in to try to close the sale. … Read full article
If you’re a sales manager, how did you spent your time over the last week, the last month? How much of your time was spent helping your sales reps develop their sales skills? How much time was spent helping them think through what they need to do to move a client forward in the buying … Read full article
I have reviewed many sales manager job descriptions over the years. Recently I was retained by a Fortune 500 company to examine their job description for the sales manager position. Fully 85 percent of the duties were directly linked to coaching salespeople. After this review, I conducted face-to-face interviews with a number of the sales … Read full article
In sales management, many managers face a lot of distractions. Often times, the first thing to go out the window is developmental coaching… time spent helping salespeople improve their skills (not just closing one sale). These sales managers haven’t observed their salespeople selling, or intervened at key points of the sales process, so when a … Read full article