Peak Sales Recruiting

Its a safe bet that if you don’t already have Gen Y’ers on your team, you soon will as they age and become a more dominant group in the sales profession (see Wikipedia for Gen Y definition). If you have been managing since the early nineties or before, you will be acutely aware of the [...]

One of our readers recently pointed me to this dark story entitled Sales 101 from the barstoolsports site….by way of a glossary, the author writes about his time as an inside sales rep at a tech company. Hopefully your reps aren’t as jaded or disinterested in sales. Sales 101 I graduated from the University of [...]

I like Tom’s post at the Total Sales Manager on what the sales manager wants to hear from sales candidates or stated another way, what you should here from strong candidates (What A Sales Manager Would Like To Hear From A Sales Candidate). Tom’s article lists a strategy for forcing sales job applicants to ask [...]

Reading Q&A with Mike Bosworth on his view of the changing role of the VP Sales, in which he answers questions such as what are the different challenges faced by a VP Sales today vs. 10 years ago and how will they be different ten years from now. The key thing is the increasing sophistication [...]

Article by Geoffrey James – Top 10 Lousy Sales Approaches – some of them sound pretty funny, but you tend to see most or all of them across a large team – Lousy Approach #4. The Razzle-Dazzle. Example: “This is the next generation, state of the art…”” Lousy Approach #2. The Assumption. Example: “Everyone in [...]

Sorry if the title of this post offends anyone, but hey, this is 2009! Warm and fuzzies are awesome but they don’t pay the bills. So if you are like many sales managers right now, you are looking at a good percentage of your team underwater on their targets. Perennial top performers seem unaffected by [...]

We tackle projects of all different shapes and sizes. The most exciting ones revolve around a tech company with under-performing sales, where a recruiting project must not only hire great sales rep but create a culture change on the whole sales team. Anyone who has tried to create large scale change knows how challenging this [...]

Great  post by Geoffrey James over at BNet recounting conversation between himself and Ray Williams on sales management truths and fiction. All are bang on…I would add #8….that great sales reps should be promoted to sales management (See Six Reasons Not to Promote your Top Reps to Sales Management). Read the full article at BNet. [...]

Social networks are getting so much attention these days, that CRM vendors are building features that support communities and information sharing. Oracle and Salesforce are leading the charge. Makes sense? Sales people are amongst the most social groups in many companies. But the adoption seems to be lagging and ITBusinessEdge noted, that “competitive salespeople — [...]

“Most sales managers have less than five years experience… Many of them may have never faced a tough market…” So says ValueSelling Associates which offers good advice for managing sales during tough economic times. This white-paper references sales management behaviors that worked during good times as well as the bust times that followed the PC [...]