Monthly Archives: February 2017

The Leadership Value of Clarity

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

One of the most powerful things you can do to start down the path towards effective leadership is to create clarity for your team. Why? Because people will never run their best race (or do their best work) if they don’t know where the finish line is. Teams will never perform at optimum level without mission clarity, role clarity, and measurable objectives. Here is how one very effective leader created that clarity for his new team members.

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The (Senseless) Debate Surrounding Cold-Calling, Social Selling, and Email

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

For the past few months, social channels have been lit up like Times Square, engaged in a mind-numbing debate about the “best” tools to use in creating sales opportunities. In a nutshell, the debate is this: “Which method works best in producing sales opportunities—cold-calling, email, or social selling?” The problem with these kinds of debates is that it contains no scientific rigor whatsoever, but every voice seems willing to tell the world they are ABSOLUTELY right. Well, right at that given moment anyway, since a few experts seemed to have changed their opinions recently.

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Another Loss, Another Pity Party

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

When salespeople win a sale – when they close a deal – it’s because they are good at what they do. Just ask them! They will tell you how hard they worked; how smooth they were. The will give you every detail of how they set the hook and reeled in the Big One. But if you listen to salespeople talk about a loss, you will hear something else entirely. Instead of talking about their mistakes or missteps, you’ll hear a litany of reasons that explain why they lost the sale.

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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?

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