Tag Archives for " Sales "

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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Planning is So Boring (said the broke salesperson)

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

Until you have clarity on your daily and weekly activities, generated as a result of a defined sales plan, you’re just winging it. And, you’re wasting precious hours every week that could be used to prospect, build your funnel, and create more customer contact. If you think about it, that may be the biggest loss in failing to plan – the time you lose as a result of indecision or filling time while you wait for the next customer emergency. But not to worry. Your competitors are probably in the same boat. You hope.

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Customers Only Care About Price (Until They Buy)

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

Customers clearly care about a lot of other things other than price. In addition delivery and service and follow-up, they also care about support, and training, an innovation, and efficiency, and a dozen other things. But, for some reason, you can’t get them to focus on those things – not until they’ve beaten you up for a better price. The fact is, you will never get to the top of the sales leaderboard by cutting your prices. And until you learn how to avoid the commodity trap, you are pretty much screwed.

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