Tag Archives for " Engagement "

To BANT or Not to BANT?

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

If you’re new to sales, BANT is a method for “qualifying” sales opportunities that includes four areas – Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing. The idea is that these are four critical qualification factors that should be determined rather early in the sales process to ensure a salesperson isn’t 1) wasting time, 2) trying to sell the wrong person, or 3) trying to proceed without an understanding of the prospect’s actual needs. But sales guru, Jim Keenan, thinks it’s a joke. Is he right??

Continue reading

Can Millennials Hack It in a Demanding Workplace?

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

Boomers have little patience for the self-absorbed social media addict who wants to “hack” his/her way through life, avoiding the very appearance of work. So, it was little surprise when a 2014 survey of 20,000 HR managers by Scout Exchange and Oracle HCM Users Group revealed that HR managers have serious doubts about the Millennial work ethic.

Continue reading

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.

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