Blog

In the sports world, coaches and managers are evaluated on one metric: winning.            In the corporate world, victories are just as important. For sales managers, it’s about winning deals and hitting quotas — and their success rate is scrutinized by executives at the highest levels of the organization.

Given the number of challenges sales organizations have encountered during the Covid pandemic, it is easy to lose sight of the importance of focusing on customers’ needs and priorities. While there are numerous distractions (personal and professional), organizations that are customer-driven have emerged stronger than ever.

It's been quite a year for sales leaders across the country. Before we gaze ahead to 2022, we want to take a quick look back at 2021, and remember how far we've come. We entered the year with so many challenges and opportunities and tried to share with you what we were learning along the way. Here are some of our most-read posts of the year. We hope that implementing some of these strategies and tactics made your sales teams run more smoothly in 2021.

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.

For some people, the word “sales” comes along with its own set of baggage and negative connotations. Your point of reference may relate to your personal experience with an overly aggressive “sales pitch” while going on a timeshare tour on your vacation. Or encountering manipulative “fear tactics” to purchase an extended warranty when you purchased your dishwasher. Unfortunately, this connotation can also find its way into business-to-business sales situations where companies get push back from their sales engineers and solution consultants who say their job is to help customers solve a problem - not to sell them more services.

Many senior sales leaders are enamored with “linearity”- the concept that the sales process can be broken into monthly, weekly, and even daily activities.