Monthly Archives: July 2016

When You Cannot Take a Vacation

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

The truth is, when the troops can’t do without you — when you cannt take a vacation because the place will fall apart — both your work and personal life can get ugly. You never seem to have enough time to get to the truly important things, and team performance is necessarily going to suffer. It will suffer now because you’re the bottleneck in a system that limits the team’s output, and it will suffer later because you fail to develop the talent underneath. That failure will inevitably result in long-term employee disengagement, mediocre performance, and – no joke – health issues.

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A 12-Step Program for the Recovering Sales-Hater

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

There are quite a few professions that have a complete aversion to the idea of selling.

Accountants, bankers, engineers, doctors – they generally don’t want to sell. They certainly don’t want to be called salespeople. In fact, they don’t even want their names in the same sentence with the word “selling.”

Let’s just call them what they are: Sales-Haters.

Unfortunately, in the very next breath these same professionals want to know how they can increase business, survive the economy, defeat the competition, and win more projects.

Seriously?

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Sales Without Service is Killing You

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

It seems that people perpetually complain that the economy is bad. So, why do restaurants treat their customers so poorly? Wouldn’t it stand to reason that every customer is critical in a bad economy? Heck, aren’t they critical in a good economy? In fact, isn’t creating an outstanding dining experience THE foremost objective with regard to bringing customers back in? Which means that a sales department that is not supported by great customer service is almost certainly doomed to fail.

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What Happens After You Close the Sale?

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

In many cases you’ve worked for weeks or even months to secure a piece of business – a process that likely included several meetings, a number of presentations, and a host of follow-up calls before you finally hit the goal line and heard the magic words, “Let’s do this.” Do you really want to screw it up now? This is when the real work begins. Like when a home builder sells a house — it’s great to get the sale, but you still have a home to build. And that experience can lead to a delighted customer who tells everyone about you, or it can become a train wreck that kills the opportunity to get tons of referrals.

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