A look into each of the characteristics top performing sales teams have in common. Watch this video to help your team achieve their full potential.

A look into each of the characteristics top performing sales teams have in common. Watch this video to help your team achieve their full potential.

If you're a football fan, you're no doubt familiar with the woeful tale of Johnny Manziel’s brief professional football career. Manziel was a star college quarterback who won the Heisman trophy as a freshman in 2012. The Cleveland Browns later drafted him in the first round of the 2014 NFL draft, where he played for two injury-prone seasons in 2014-2015.

Manziel’s time at Cleveland was plagued by questions about his behavior, work ethic, substance abuse, off-the-field problems, as well as his inability to translate his college game to the professional level. The impact on the Cleveland Browns was catastrophic. They wasted a precious first round draft pick as well as lost time and money. Here is a description of how he hurt Cleveland as well as a litany of his bad behavior. 

As a sales manager, you may not consider yourself a sales leader. After all, strategic leadership issues fall within the purview of senior executives such as the Chief Revenue Officer. But ask your sales team to describe your leadership qualities and you may hear comments such as “She knows how to communicate what she wants,” “He makes the right decisions at the right time,” “She’s very persuasive,” or “He works twice as hard as anybody else on the team.”

Since the day the first contact management systems added features to enable Reps to keep track of their opportunities, there has been a constant struggle between manager and sales rep to keep the pipeline clean and “update the damn CRM.” Management wants a roll-up of their reps’ pipelines to enable better visibility and produce accurate forecasts, while reps are not motivated to spend precious selling time on administrative tasks and data entry that doesn’t help them close business.

The reason is pretty simple. Managers become accustomed to telling as opposed to enabling their salespeople to identify and solve their own problems. Consider these two typical situations:

In our 2017 Sales Management Research Report, 5 Hallmarks of a High-Impact Sales Organization, we found that sales managers at high-performing organizations spent significantly more time coaching their teams than average and lower performing teams.

Sales coaching is one of the most important activities a manager can do to improve the performance of their sales team, as evidenced by the 2017 Sales Management Research Report.  Yet managers often confuse sales coaching with just having one-on-one meetings and telling their reps how to improve. At the heart of good sales coaching is a mindset that encourages the rep to take responsibility for their development and engage in a collaborative, positive process of improvement. This involves key sales coaching activities that are different than other things you may be doing to direct, manage or motivate your team.

I was sitting down with our Chief Customer Officer, Ray Makela, and we were discussing deal coaching.  I reminded him of his blog post on 5 Deal Coaching Questions for Sales Managers to Ask and he made a very interesting point about a sixth question he now wants to add to this list; What's the decision making process? 

Although the sales pipeline and sales forecast are closely related, they're not the same. In this Q&A, we explain the difference and best practices you can use to make the most of each.

According to an article in the July – August 2017 issue of the Harvard Business Review, How to Predict Turnover on Your Sales Team, “estimates of annual turnover among U.S. salespeople run as high as 27%.”  This is an alarming rate especially given how challenging it is to hire top sales talent in a tight labor market.

Our new report confirms the importance of developing sales managers to improve sales performance. This is something that the principals of the Sales Readiness Group already knew from their work with hundreds of sales organizations. 

Part of managing performance is to have a more productive sales team. In this Q&A video, we share five techniques you can use to increase sales team productivity.

On this episode, we discuss key considerations before promoting your best salesperson into management. The different skill set required to be a great sales manager, and how to set new managers up for success.

On this episode, we discuss how to approach selecting which sales metrics to track, the importance of using leading vs. lagging indicators, and which key metrics you should focus on to improve the performance of your sales team.

On this episode, Kim Rody asks: How do you find great sales managers? In this video, we discuss key considerations before hiring a sales manager. Then we also go over important sales management skills to look for to find the best person for the job. 

For many sales teams, a full sales pipeline is reassuring. It means their salespeople have plenty of potential deals to follow up on and lots of calls to make. It gives them hope that many of deals will close before the end of the quarter.

Yet, often at the end of the quarter, a good percentage of those deals haven’t closed— and everyone ends up disappointed. What went wrong?

I’ve written before about Angela Lee Duckworth’s concept of “grit,” which she discussed in her popular TED talk, “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.” Duckworth defines grit as a winning combination of passion and perseverance, and she found that this quality is high among very successful people (including salespeople).

How do passion and perseverance manifest as behaviors among salespeople? As a manager, you’ve probably noticed the grittiest members of your sales team tend to do the following.

In this episode, our CEO Norman Behar shares best practices for managing a remote sales team. A challenge that sales managers have struggled with for years. Norman discusses the impact technology has had on the sales management function and shares techniques you can use to manage, coach, and lead a remote sales team.

On this episode, Kenneth Vogt, owner at Vera Claritas asks: What do you cover in your weekly sales meetings? If you have a weekly meeting with your sales team, what is regularly on the sales meeting agenda? What is useful to you as a manager? What is useful to your salespeople?

Today, many sales managers and sales teams are almost constantly connected to their screens, devices, apps, and online tools. While these technologies are designed to improve sales effectiveness, I see two potential pitfalls when it comes to the proliferation of technology and selling.

On this episode, Mel Harding, VP of Product Marketing at Occulus, Inc. asks: Who's ultimately responsible for the sales forecast, the sales rep or the sales manager? 

On this episode, Kumarasen Govender asks: What questions should I ask during the coaching process? Our Chief Customer Officer Ray Makela shares a three-step approach to creating a sales coaching mindset; and three types of powerful coaching questions to help sales reps improve their skills.

On this episode, Jeet Vadher asks: What should be the sub-goals for achieving sales goals? Our CEO Norman Behar discusses the distinction between results (the goal) and behaviors (the sub-goals); and shares a four-step framework to manage performance.

On this episode, our CEO Norman Behar discusses tools and processes to measure the coaching effectiveness of sales managers, two types of sales coaching, a five-step coaching model, and five key questions to ask during opportunity coaching.

On this episode, Mary Ann, MBA asks: In today's business landscape constantly changing e.g. new products, competition, changing workforce (boomers retiring, millennials moving up) and pressures to achieve sales targets/company goals, how do you make more informed, confident hiring decisions?

I recently had the opportunity to hear Mike Kunkle, Senior Director of Sales Enablement at Brainshark, speak about Top-Producer Analysis (TPA). As usual, Mike’s talk was informative, thought-provoking, and memorable. This is information every sales leader and sales enablement professional should be considering if they’re looking to improve the performance of their sales team. I was left with several important takeaways:

Imagine that you could go on an action/adventure vacation anywhere in the world, where would you go?  Maybe a safari in Namibia, trekking in the Himalayas, or perhaps exploring ancient ruins in Peru. The possibilities are endless.