Peak Sales Recruiting

You need to hire sales people and you like the fact that these days more candidates are applying for your jobs, but the ones you want are the ones that are still employed elsewhere and they may not be inclined to move. In fact, sales candidates are generally reluctant to move in this economy – [...]

It is a few days before quarter end and if you are like most sales leaders, you are in the final push to hit your number, so here are the top ways to squeeze as much revenue as possible from your team over the next few days. 1. Prioritize the Deals – If your business [...]

I love quarter end. Having spent many years selling myself, I remember the rush of the countdown and closing everything you can to hit your quota and get into accelerated commissions. I also enjoyed the competition amongst all the reps hustling hard and getting super creative to not only hit their own numbers, but to [...]

Most sales VPs think they are doing just fine on sales hiring. “We’re able to find everyone we need.”… “I get what I need from HR.”…”Most of my reps are on plan.” That may be true, but tracking three simple performance metrics will give you much better visibility into what you are doing well and [...]

Last week I was speaking to a hiring manager who said they received several hundred cv’s in response to a recent job advert and only one was qualified for an interview, then this week I received an email from CareerJoy citing a study which suggested interviewing skills are more important in getting a job than [...]

As a sales force leader, you are constantly watching the performance of the team, evaluating who is doing well and who needs a push to perform better (or, to be blunt, who needs a push all the way out the door). The bottom-line way to evaluate your sales reps is on quota attainment, but even [...]

Last week I attended the executive briefing from Miller Heiman which just released its Sales Best Practices Study for 2009. We covered the 2008 Sales Best Practices Study here. This year 3,900+ sales professionals participated in the research. Some highlights from 2009: “Successful sales organizations do not do one or two things well; they maintain [...]

There is a cliché that sales people don’t typically have the best resumes, so there is a tendency to dismiss or reduce the importance of the resume in sales hiring. And good selling is about the personal interaction anyway, right? Well, most of us don’t have time to meet everyone to find our whether they [...]

The concept of Sales 2.0 represents an enormous change in the way many companies sell and market. Some of us will be attending The Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on March 4th and 5th to see best practices in action. So it begs the questions: What is Sales 2.0, is it right for your [...]

The strength of your leadership determines the production from your sales force. We asked the most successful VP Sales how they spend their time and what they focus on to ensure they are meeting or exceeding the company’s sales plan. Here are the three most common habits across the leaders: 1. Focus on the top [...]