After a few years of managing high achieving salespeople, I noticed that there are key differences between the best sales reps and the rest in how they conduct themselves. One of the most noticeable differences is what they did outside of the office. Simply put, the top performing reps kept working while the majority of
Achieving big sales is no easy feat and doing it consistently is rare. A significant piece of the sales management success recipe and one of the most challenging aspects of driving superior sales results is hiring the the right sales people. We extracted what the top sales experts had to say on sales hiring and building a
If you haven’t built a team of highly qualified and skilled sales professionals, don’t waste your time and money investing in sales processes, training, compensation plans, technology, marketing support, or strong products and services. Depending on the industry, somewhere between 20 and 33 percent of salespeople aren’t capable of being successful at their jobs. It’s
One of the biggest shifts in selling approaches occurred in the mid-1980s when Mike Bosworth, formerly of Xerox Computer Services, popularized “Solution Sales.” Bosworth championed the idea of selling “expert to non-expert”, in which salespeople proactively uncover a customer’s business requirements and position offerings as a ‘solution’ to these business needs rather than simply waiting for purchase requests.
When we launched Peak Sales Recruiting many years ago, we looked at the market and recognized the under served need for companies to recruit high achieving sales people. While it was overly common at the time for recruiting companies to specialize their services outside of a geographical region, we saw an even more acute need
It’s interesting to note that a paper in the American Psychological Association titled “Introverts and Extroverts” published in 1924 ends with a question about whether introverts and extroverts belong to personality types at all. The paper provides definitions of both terms – an introvert being “an individual in whom exists an exaggeration of the thought
Recruiting high achieving sales professionals onto your sales team is no simple task for a few simple reasons: They are rare, They are employed, not looking for a new job, and are constantly receiving offers from competing employers. Overcoming these challenges takes significant effort and commitment, but the investment is justified by the superior results that top
We see it all the time. A great sales candidate meets with a prospective employer who rejects the candidate and elects to hire someone else. Oftentimes the reasons are legitimate – such as poor cultural fit – but many times, there are no logical reasons for the decision not to consider the candidate who would
As we have written about before, top performing B2B sales people want to work for industry leading and highly reputed companies which their chances of success are greatest. Since there is excess demand for the services of top sales people, why wouldn’t they be selective in who they work for? In an Internet dominated world, a key question
Prospective clients often come to us with a typical problem: many of the salespeople they hired seemed great during the interview process, but under-performed once they were hired. When a new sales hire doesn’t work out, the loss is huge. Poor-performing salespeople can cost thousands in lost opportunities and revenue, and worse yet—damage a company’s reputation
