Tag Archives for " performance "

3 Levels of Sales Leadership (only one creates top performance)

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

The most significant objective as a sales leader is the creation of action plans on specific accounts. Not plans like ‘making more calls.’ Or ‘improving closing ratios.’ Or selling more of a specific product. Which may all be great ideas, by the way, but they are necessarily incomplete.

The reason to create plans is that it is much easier to manage a salesperson’s activities when it is directed towards the right types of calls and the right size of opportunities. It is much easier to troubleshoot performance issues when you understand the intersection of results (keeping score), activities (which leads to the score), AND specific plans (the application of those activities in a context).

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The Disservice We Do to the Sales Profession

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

The reason that I love selling so much is that I love to compete. I love that I can adjust, change directions, learn new skills, and develop new ideas in order to create more success. Selling is a dynamic enterprise that rewards initiative and drive and excellence. But we in the profession are often guilty of doing a HUGE disservice to the profession.

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Why Do You Never Seem to Have Enough Time?

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

Salespeople never seem to have enough time. Which is interesting, because time is arguably the most important asset that any salesperson has. In fact, the real currency that salespeople trade in is not products and services, it’s time and ideas. The less time a salesperson spends in front of potential customers, the more challenging it is to develop new business and grow revenue; and the fewer productive ideas a salesperson has to offer customers, the more difficult it is to win acquire new customers.

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When Good Results are BAD for Business

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

Stop for just a moment and ask yourself a simple question: What is the defining characteristic of an effective leader? Think about it. What is that “one thing” that causes you to say about someone, “OK, that person is a leader.” If there is such a thing, it would certainly be useful, wouldn’t it? You could just identify those individuals with that one characteristic and get them on the bus!

But, the problem with the question is that it produces a laundry list of responses. A leader is actually many things: confident, decisive, commanding, persuasive, responsive, charismatic, transparent, caring, intelligent, innovative, insightful….and so on. So, you likely think this as an impossible or meaningless exercise. One thing? Really?

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