Understanding the Sales Force

FEBRUARY 22, 2023

I began debunking sales articles when the first ones predicting the death of selling appeared circa 2008. Later, articles predicting the end of selling became both more prolific and more specific including the certain death of: Solution Selling Cold Calling Consultative Selling Sales Process SPIN Selling and more.

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Top of Funnel Positioning Scale Inbound 408

Understanding the Sales Force

JANUARY 3, 2025

Last January, my first article included the introduction of my new Sales Grid. Stay tuned for my next article and video on getting ready. Nothing wrong with that. But as someone who likes breaking rules and pushing the envelope, I’m starting the New Year by looking back to January of 2024. Then watch this short video.

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Video Engineering Quota Motivation 173

Understanding the Sales Force

OCTOBER 19, 2024

And because this is my brain, this article is actually about sales, not baseball! I wonder how many years of my life that will impact…] Back to the point of this article. And that’s when it hit me as if I was hit in the face by a 95 MPH fastball. This is huge! Each opportunity. Each at-bat. Each pitch.

Epiphany 188

Epiphany Real Estate Face-to-face Coaching 188

Partners in Excellence

JANUARY 2, 2025

Reading a fascinating article in the NYTimes, Giving Kids Some Autonomy Has Surprising Results , got me thinking. ” But as the article points out, we have to create the underlying frameworks and guardrails to achieve success. Afterword: There is a bigger issue this article points out.

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Government Education Pipeline Segment 127

Understanding the Sales Force

FEBRUARY 1, 2025

But all of this talk about Buy Cycle is a conversation that we already had in another article. Buy Cycle is one of 21 Sales Core Competencies and you can see all 21, the data behind them, and even how you compare, by clicking here. Back to the sales leaders.

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Sales Leadership Buying Cycle Coaching Proposal 286

Understanding the Sales Force

OCTOBER 13, 2024

I created an analogy for my first article when I wrote about scaling, hiring and firing salespeople , based on what I read in Genesis. Today’s article is about on boarding and coaching salespeople, an analogy I created from what I read so far in Exodus.

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Coaching Hiring Scale Sales Leadership 188

Understanding the Sales Force

JANUARY 9, 2025

In 2015, I wrote about my encounter with Chris Cagle, but that article was about how he was opening doors for the new business he had launched. Before we dive deeper into timing, please check out this article from four years ago about urgency alignment. Bugs in My Whiskey Thanks to Country Music Timing is everything!

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Airlines Decision Maker Call-back Vendor 173

Understanding the Sales Force

OCTOBER 9, 2024

Resource – Read this article about what a company learned about their sales team from the sales team evaluation Step 2 – Optimize Sales-Specific Recruiting and Hiring We changed how they attract, vet, interview and select new salespeople, including the addition of a predictive sales candidate assessment.

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Hiring Lead Scoring Lead Rank Compensation 352

Understanding the Sales Force

FEBRUARY 28, 2023

Today's article is different from most of my other articles because there is no opening analogy, very little data, and a complete lack of humor. It's such a serious article I was ready to delete it before I clicked the publish button. If you don't like the subject, the content or the writing, it's OK.

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Data Sales Compensation Company 313

Understanding the Sales Force

SEPTEMBER 12, 2022

I've written several articles (same as always) about OMG (Objective Management Group) Tailored Fits/Proofs of Concept where I analyze the differences between a company's top producers and bottom producers to identify the findings/scores that differentiate their tops from their bottoms. It's the same (as always) but different (new games).

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Comparison Groups Objections Examples 312

Understanding the Sales Force

JUNE 11, 2021

His answer is the focus of this article on selling! Starting in the fourth inning, Timmy, the eight-year-old Astros fan sitting next to me, didn't stop chatting with me for the remainder of the game. When Timmy said he hated the Red Sox I had to ask him why. Why do you hate the Red Sox so much Timmy?".

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Sales Closing Account 407

Sales and Marketing Management

MARCH 8, 2023

In this podcast episode, we dive deeper into an article Amy wrote for a Sales & Marketing Management entitled “How to Create a Sales Enablement Center of Excellence.” The post Amy Franko on Creating a Sales Enablement Center of Excellence appeared first on Sales & Marketing Management.

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Sales Enablement Sales Marketing How To 368

Understanding the Sales Force

MARCH 30, 2023

Today, I read two articles that had some quotable copy which we can translate to sales. The first article is about baseball and I'll translate what it says after the quote I pulled out.

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Revenue Leads Marketing Qualified Lead Sales 311

Understanding the Sales Force

FEBRUARY 14, 2023

Sometimes, that's the feeling I get when I'm writing articles and I have solid data on my side, while dozens of competing authors just won't stop their constant borage of articles using junk science, anecdotal evidence, and alternate facts. If you watched Super Bowl 57, you observed two teams that simply refused to give up or give in.

Data 309

Data Sales 309

SBI Growth

OCTOBER 10, 2024

I n the article, co-authored with my colleagues Bryan Kurey and Dave Lingebach, we examine the high costs of Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) turnover and its significant impact on company performance. We’re excited to share the findings of our latest research, which was just published in Harvard Business Review: The Hidden Costs of CRO Turnover.

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Research Revenue Data Company 156

Partners in Excellence

JANUARY 20, 2025

At the end of the article, I had and Afterword, suggesting the same principles used in high impact coaching within our own organizations should be applied in working with our customers. I want to do a deeper dive in this article. They approached it in the opposite way I approached it in this article.

Coaching 127

Coaching Customer Face-to-face Opportunity 127

Understanding the Sales Force

JUNE 27, 2023

Even though this article begins as a baseball article, in the fourth paragraph it quickly morphs into a sales article. As my regular readers know, my son is a baseball player - a rising college senior (as of the summer of 2023) - and I still coach him in the batting cage when he's home for the summer.

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Hiring Coaching Sales Consultative Selling 304

Understanding the Sales Force

AUGUST 25, 2021

Regular readers know that I'm all about the data and I have written nearly two thousand articles based on data from Objective Management Group's (OMG) assessments of more than two million salespeople. Please understand that the dirty window and sill are not mine - I found the image via a Google search.

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Meeting Google Exact Data 386

Understanding the Sales Force

MARCH 16, 2025

If you missed my March 14 article on Sales Cringe – my first in over a month – that will explain why we had the time to rewatch “24.” It was amazing to both of us that despite how much we loved “24” the first time we watched it, we didn’t remember any of it as we watched it the second time.

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Training Revenue Face-to-face Decision Maker 227

Anthony Cole Training

NOVEMBER 1, 2024

This article is the 1st place winner of the 2022 Sales Pro Central MVP Awards on Sales Leadership! In our sales management training, we have developed 10 keys and a framework of activities that provide a new or tenured sales leader with a roadmap they need to put in place to help lead their team to greater sales success.

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Marketing Qualified Lead Leads Sales Leadership Training 299

Understanding the Sales Force

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

For those of you who are familiar with my series of articles about Bob - the worst salesperson ever - you can catch up by enjoying, laughing, and making fun of him here. 12 of the articles that show up on that page are about Bob! Today, I reviewed the worst OMG evaluation of a sales manager that I have ever seen.

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Promotion Sales Management Sales Sales Process 296

Understanding the Sales Force

JANUARY 4, 2025

But that’s a conversation for a different article. Strategic Account Plans Account Retention Average Gross Profit Average Account Value Lifetime Account Value There are more but you get the gist of it. You can even score relevant items and integrate them as a component of compensation. Getting this right has three parts.

Account 173

Account Hiring Quota Territories 173

Understanding the Sales Force

NOVEMBER 23, 2024

This is my third article using the Bible as an analogy to sales and I am currently reading Numbers. What is Numbers if not God’s mandate to Moses about, well, the required numbers for success?

Comparison 173

Comparison Exact Follow-up Call-back 173

Understanding the Sales Force

APRIL 18, 2023

But this article isn't only about normal, it's also about the abnormal in both baseball and sales. As we do each Friday in March and April, my wife and I drove to upstate New York to watch our son's college baseball games.

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Sales Revenue 294

Steven Rosen

APRIL 10, 2024

The interactive podbook below contains videos, audio, articles, summaries, transcripts, and YouTube shorts from this podcast episode. This article will delve into the key insights from the podcast and explore the themes of ideal hiring profiles, non-negotiables, and the importance of a systematic hiring process.

Hiring 296

Hiring Strategy Negotiation Ideal Customer Profile 296

Anthony Cole Training

SEPTEMBER 22, 2023

Years ago, one of the lead execs from our client KeyBank shared an article called, “What it takes to be a Coach”. It began with: You must understand the game.

Coaching 288

Coaching Sales Coaching Marketing Qualified Lead Leads 288

Understanding the Sales Force

JANUARY 20, 2023

While my articles usually begin with an analogy, I am breaking the rule, incorporating 4 separate analogies, and then attempting to string them together at the end. You're not supposed to mix alcohol and medication, which isn't an issue for me because I don't drink and I avoid medication. We'll see how it goes.

Analysis 294

Analysis CRM 294

Understanding the Sales Force

FEBRUARY 25, 2024

According to the search results inside this blog, I have written on the topic of coaching salespeople more than 400 times or 25% of my articles. The Top Sales Leaders quoted in the article are sales experts – like me – and I couldn’t believe what I read. Their advice wasn’t bad. It was good advice.

Coaching 341

Coaching Guidelines Margin Incentive 341

Understanding the Sales Force

MARCH 14, 2023

This article will explore two weather-related analogies: As a Nor'Easter barreled across Central Massachusetts today, a few interesting storm-related happenings were analogous to some sales-related occurrences.

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Sales Forecasts Forecasting Relationals Sales 280

Partners in Excellence

OCTOBER 22, 2024

We read all the latest books and articles on innovation (or start them). Afterword: Below is the discussion from the AI agents on this article. We fool ourselves into thinking the secret of innovation, change, and success is starting something new. It’s exciting and different from what we are currently doing!

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Churn Up-Sell Tools Account 118

No More Cold Calling

JANUARY 13, 2022

Bernard Marr reports in his article, Future of Work: The 5 Biggest Workplace Trends in 2022 : “The World Economic Forum predicts that AI and automation will lead to the creation of 97 million new jobs by 2025. An article for your newsletter? AI is a dominant trend, and the prediction of an AI-automated workforce is compelling.

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Trends Margin Cold Calling Inbound 356

Understanding the Sales Force

JULY 17, 2023

Dinger, our GoldenDoodle, who I have featured in several articles , tore his ACL last week. Based on the non-stop rain and humidity we have had for the last 6 weeks in Massachusetts, you could probably make a case that not only do we now have a rainy season, but where our house is located, we must live in a rain forest. Hold that thought.

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Closing Consultative Selling Sales Forecasts Forecasting 292

Understanding the Sales Force

NOVEMBER 15, 2024

As I pivot to selling, please watch this two-minute video before continuing the article. Needless to say, while Kyle struck out in every at-bat for the rest of the season, Jack had some success and actually got himself a couple of hits. Incentives work.

Prospecting 173

Prospecting Incentive Incentives Cold Calling 173

Steven Rosen

MAY 20, 2024

The interactive podbook below contains videos, audio, articles, summaries, transcripts, and YouTube shorts from this podcast episode. In this thought leadership article, we will explore Margo Edris, Regional Vice President of Sales at Salesforce, ‘s insights on how to bridge the knowing-doing gap in sales leadership.

How To 296

How To Sales Leadership SalesForce Coaching 296

Steven Rosen

MAY 24, 2024

The interactive podbook below contains videos, audio, articles, summaries, transcripts, and YouTube shorts from this podcast episode. This article delves into the podcast episode’s key themes and explores AI’s implications in sales leadership.

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Company Sales Leadership Retention Loyalty 296

Zoominfo

AUGUST 20, 2024

Fast Company recently published a pertinent article on the benefits of aligning the sales and marketing functions within B2B companies, outlining the challenges and obstacles that often accompany bringing together two siloed teams that do not usually collaborate.

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Fashion Promotion Discount Data 130