Tag Archives for " Coaching "

The Insanity of Sales Managers

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

Unfortunately, the whole concept of insanity seems to be lost on many sales managers. Salespeople will produce the same mediocre results over and over, but never change a single thing they are doing. In many cases, they resist any kind of change, insisting that what they do actually works! The problem, they say, is a sluggish economy, or a product that lacks key features, or a marketing initiative that falls short, or a set of circumstances that is working against them. Anything, of course, except what they are doing. Over and over and over…

Continue reading

The Unpopular Road to Top Sales Performance

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

The truth is that practice is incredibly important to performance. In fact, I would ask you to name one skill of any consequence that does NOT require practice to excel at that skill. Anything? Of course not. You cannot perfect any skill unless, and until, you practice. Which means that your employees are practicing to improve their skills, or YOU (the manager) are guilty of the ultimate performance killer – no practice.

Continue reading

Sure, We Train Employees (wink, wink)

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

As a leader, you have absolutely no excuses; you either choose to train your employees or you don’t. But most don’t. In fact, the odds that your company is adequately training and developing people is somewhere near zero. The problem is that a failure to train your employees – really train them, not just hand them a manual, or expect them to get up to speed on their own – lies on the border somewhere between insanity and blatant stupidity. After all, don’t trained employees do better work? Don’t trained managers lead more effectively? Isn’t training a critical part of employee engagement?

Continue reading

The Arrogance of Experience

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

All things being equal, when faced with a “very important” task, most companies will choose a person with successful experience to take it on. Whatever that task looks like – a big project, an important new customer, a critical product launch – most leaders will choose experience to get the job done. No question about it, experience counts. Until it gets arrogant. The arrogance of experience can be quite costly.

Continue reading