I recently spoke with a sales leader who saw a dramatic increase in his team’s close rate, increasing from 34% to 54% over the last twelve-month period -- not bad!  So how did this sales leader improve his team’s close rates?

Are you a sales leader looking to improve your team’s performance and grow sales numbers? Most sales leaders would say yes – they are on a never-ending quest to improve the sales process, sharpen their team’s selling skills, and close more business.

You don’t have to be a baseball fan to enjoy the movie Moneyball with Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill. The movie is an account of the Oakland Athletics baseball team's 2002 season and their general manager Billy Beane's attempts to assemble a competitive team on a minimal budget. In the film, Beane (Brad Pitt) and assistant general manager Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) used sophisticated analytics to break the game of baseball down into leading indicators and metrics that can predict success (in this case, scoring runs and winning games).

What is the most expensive decision you can make as a frontline sales manager? Hands down, it's deciding who you'll bring onto your team as your next sales hire. Let's take the time to figure out what the cost per hire could look like.

How often do your well-intentioned sales coaching efforts result in direct pushback or a bit of passive resistance?

Previously, we discussed why “linearity” doesn’t work when managing enterprise sales opportunities. Selling to the enterprise involves fewer high dollar value opportunities as compared to SMB sales. So traditional daily or weekly SMB sales activity metrics such as “How many calls did you make today?” are less useful when managing an enterprise team. The quality of each sales interaction your Account Executives have is much more important than the quantity at the enterprise level. But measuring and managing quality is challenging; it’s not something you can meaningfully track on a sales dashboard. Quality is something you have to observe and coach. Here are three critical qualitative factors to help you provide high-impact sales coaching to your AE's and improve their win rates with enterprise accounts.