Peak Sales Recruiting

A while back we wrote the tongue in cheek article entitled “19 Simple Ways to Make Your Best Reps Leave” and now with the battle for sales talent more fierce than ever, we are following up with some advice that you can immediately use to keep your best reps happy and producing for you.   [...]

The Vice President of Sales is the hottest seat in any company, and one that turns over most often. When a company hires a new VP Sales, he or she is more than likely taking over a sales function that has been underperforming and there is a usually a mandate to turn things around as [...]

I read somewhere that only two thirds of sales teams set sales quotas which is generally consistent with my experience. That means about a third of companies are not setting sales quota’s for their reps – and here’s why that is a recipe for failure. People tend to do what is asked of them. If [...]

If you are like most sales managers at this time of year you have a few sales reps who are falling behind in their numbers. You are optimistic that the fall will mean a bounce-back but you don’t want to carry dead weight on your team either. While successful sales hiring is matter of science, [...]

We are responding to a question from one of our readers: We are an early stage, growth oriented company where performance is critical. I share our sales numbers with the whole company as part of monthly updates. Do you think it helps or hurts to share details on how each individual rep performed against quota? [...]

The pool of top sales professionals who want to join a company that doesn’t look “high performance” is about as small as the market for buggy whips. Small. When it comes to hiring, the better your company looks, the more interest it will attract from job seekers, which means you have to go beyond the [...]

This is an adapted from the book Sales Recruiting 2.0 – How to Hire Top Performing Sales People, Fast Is there any better icon of a winning culture than the New York Yankees? Each year they field a team expected to win it all and if they don’t get to the World Series, their fans [...]

Stephen King said “Talent is Cheaper than Table Salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” Isn’t that the truth! Here are three ways to encourage your sales reps to work hard and achieve their highest potential: 1) Keep reminding them why they need to win and [...]

We have talked a lot about the traits your reps need to have in order to be successful. Flipping it over, you need to be vigilant in addressing reps who display sales habits which are detrimental to their own sales performance. In my experience, permitting these behaviours can also bring the team down or have [...]

Selling Power Interview with Dave Stein discussing approaches to sales training. His company, ES Research, helps sales management and corporate training organizations evaluate, select and implement sales training and productivity improvement programs. Some interesting notes from the interview: US companies spend $4B per year on sales training only 20% of companies measure the effectiveness of [...]