Top Sales Leadership - resources for sales leaders

Colleen Stanley

Did You Bring Your Face To The Sales Meeting?

by

A recent break helped me find inspiration and themes for my blog/vlog. Vacation is when you engage with salespeople and service people. You eat at a restaurant, you rent a kayak or you buy a souvenir. These are different experiences with one common denominator between an average customer experience or a great one: A person’s… Read More

Do You Need Sales Rejection Trainig?

by

If you’ve been in sales long enough, you’ve probably experienced sales rejection. This rejection takes on different shapes and sizes, depending on your sales role. An inside salesperson connects with a rude, challenging prospect. The prospect ends the call early. (A nice way of saying they hung up on you.) Rejection. You’ve been courting a… Read More

Do You Need to Stop or Start?

by

The countdown is on.  There are approximately 34 days left on the calendar (depending on when you read this) to hit your 2014 sales goal.  For some sales managers and salespeople, there is little anxiety because the ‘money is in the bank.’  Not so much for others.  There are sales professionals looking for ways to… Read More

Do You Really Believe That?

by

The self help guru’s are the best at teaching, “You are what you believe.  Your thoughts determine your outcomes and actions.  And what you think about most will manifest in your life.” These guru’s are right and many salespeople and sale managers still subscribing to old beliefs and ways of selling do not serve them… Read More

Four Ways to Think More Like a Sales Leader

by

Salespeople think like salespeople, when they should be thinking like leaders and CEOs. Top salespeople know this, and act every day like the CEO of their own business. Here are four principles to consider: 1. First in or last out? Every good salesperson knows the best time to reach the C-suite is early in the morning or after… Read More

Is Poor Emotional Intelligence Preventing You From Gaining More Business?

by

You’ve preached the importance of consistent prospecting and business development to your sales team. All heads nod up and down in agreement. You’ve dedicated a portion of each sales meeting to teaching your team new skills and strategies for opening up opportunities. Key performance metrics have been determined and are being tracked. So with all… Read More

It’s Time to Update Your Sales Playbook(s)

by

Can you imagine a sports team running the same plays year after year and still expecting to win? The answer, of course, is no. However, many sales organizations use the same sales playbooks year after year and then wonder why they aren’t closing more business. Is it time to update your sales playbook? Since the… Read More

Sales Pipeline or Pipe Dream

by

Monday mornings start off with sales meetings and the infamous sales pipeline review. The sales manager interrogates, the salesperson fabricates and the CFO wonders how she can run a company when the sales department isn’t able to accurately forecast sales. So what’s the answer?  There are several reasons for inaccurate sales forecasting, however, the two… Read More

Stress Management Is Sales Management

by

I’m hearing this a lot from salespeople: “I’m really tired. Feeling a little burned out.” This is not coming from salespeople or sales managers that are whiners or professional complainers.  They come from normally optimistic, high-energy individuals with a high bounce-back factor. The reality is 2020 was hard. It didn’t matter if your industry either… Read More

The Emotionally Intelligent Sales Manager

by

Integrating emotional intelligence skills into the sales profession is a fairly new concept for most sales organizations.  Progressive sales organizations such as American Express and Motorola are adopting the knowledge and skills as they know it is an edge in a competitive market. So what is emotional intelligence and how can it help sales leaders… Read More

The No. 1 Attribute of Emotionally Intelligent Sales Leaders

by

Sales management is a challenging role, one that requires many talents and skills. The effective sales manager must have problem-solving skills in order to properly diagnose sales performance issues. They are excellent teachers because they’ve learned how to teach and transfer the habits and skills that create top producers. Let’s add another one to the… Read More

The Sales Management Elephant in the Room

by

There is great technology for helping sales managers review sales conversations and meetings. But sometimes technology is viewed as a magic wand for curing missed sales quotas. Tech tools can analyze who did most of the talking on the call, how a salesperson handled objections and whether or not the salesperson set up a clear… Read More

Three Reasons Sales Managers Fail

by

I’ve said it more than once in my role of coaching the coach: Sales managers get set up to fail. They’re promoted to sales management with little understanding, training or education about what it takes to build and develop a great sales organization. Selling to a prospect and customer is different than teaching a salesperson… Read More

Three Ways Sales EQ Improves Bottom-Line Sales Results

by

CEOs and sales managers always are looking for the one or two things that will set them apart from the competition. They invest in innovation and new products; they meet and talk about branding and marketing. Maybe it’s time for your sales organization to look at the best predictor of success: hiring and retaining salespeople with… Read More

To Tell The Truth – Candor and Kindness

by

I am a big fan of the magazine, SUCCESS. They do a great job with articles, interviews and relevant topics geared towards business and sales. In a recent edition, Darren Hardy interviewed Jack Welch. As always, Welch had a lot of great information to share. My biggest takeaway was his comments around the often misquoted,… Read More

Why Sales Professionals Struggle to Demonstrate Empathy

by

Empathy has been described as the ability to know what another person is thinking or feeling. It’s an important influence skill in business and life. However, to really know what another person is thinking or feeling, you first must develop another EQ skill: emotional self-awareness. The self-aware sales professional is in tune with the emotion… Read More