Business leaders look for predictability. They seek insight from mounds of data to get just a glimpse of the future. They demand their sales and marketing executives put the business on the right path to meeting or exceeding sales and margin goals. Sales executives create detailed business plans to identify new opportunities and retain existing customers.  They train sales reps and channel partners on product benefits and teach them to overcome objections. They develop compensation plans aligned with corporate goals to encourage growth. Marketing leaders identify competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. They define buyer personas and construct profiles to ensure the right messages reach the right prospects. They carefully map out every step of the buyer’s journey to know when and how to influence behaviors. All this to increase the likelihood of success, to gain more certainty and predictability. Shouldn’t your sales incentive program work this hard to engage your participants? Knowing how and when to nudge your participants could mean the difference between blowing past your goals and scrambling to explain a disastrous failure. This eBook maps the sales incentive journey which participants embark upon when engaging with a program. We’ve developed it from insights gained during almost 50 years of observing and influencing participants, and it can help put your program on the road to predictable success. Click below to download this eBook.​

Competing in the world of selling today means understanding the changing world of your buyers and adjusting your sales approach accordingly. The biggest change for sellers is that the game has gotten harder, and sellers need to execute at a higher level than ever before to compete. Committing to this level of change is the difference between college sports and pro. The players are bigger. The game is faster. The conditions are more challenging.

In today’s sales environment—where product and service solutions and customer relationships are growing more complex—there is an increasing need to continually raise the skill level of salespeople. Managers play a critical role in making sure those skills are learned and used. Statistics speak loudly that manager support/coaching is the number one action that can amplify organizational sales performance: Organizations can gain a 29% increase in top-line salesforce performance due to the skills of sales managers, independent of the skills of their salespeople. Manager coaching has a great impact on performance over and above the impact of training alone. In our study, while just training salespeople resulted in a 43% improvement in performance, when manager coaching was added, overall performance improved 67%, a 24% improvement over training alone. Unfortunately, sales manager coaching is at an all-time low, resulting in as much as 85% of sales skills never being used to drive performance. Why aren’t sales managers dialing up the decibels?  

Team selling today is no longer required just for blockbuster business-to-business sales pitches. Whether you are in consulting, investment banking, or technology or are a financial advisor, home remodeler, or lawyer, pivotal meetings with customers and prospects now often involve more people — on both sides of the table. In fact, according to Harvard Business Review, "…the number of people involved in B2B solutions purchases has climbed from an average of 5.4 two years ago to 6.8 today."

Think about the best manager you ever had. We are assuming, of course, that you’ve had at least one good manager in your lifetime. C’mon, there’s got to be at least one. Think back to all the teams you’ve been on. This person could’ve been your boss at that horrible minimum-wage high school gig that you only showed up for because this person made it worthwhile. Maybe you had a strong leader during your college part-time work. Or, like many in today’s workforce, your first full-time, professional manager played a major part in developing you during your formative years into the kind of executive you are today.

Coaching and leadership are about people. People are unique and to compound the situation they behave differently under varied circumstances. So is it not an overstatement to suggest that there is a framework that can be applied to achieving greater success with people and through them? I will answer with my standard mini-exercise. Assume you are a recruiter. You are asked to identify a Field Commander for a hot war zone as well as a Guidance Counsellor for an all-girls high school. Did your mind automatically paint different pictures as to who will fill the roles? Intuitively, you recognize the differences but what are the factors that brought you to that conclusion? Also, what if the roles were not so far apart, could you intuitively distinguish among candidates? That is role and the value of a reliable framework. For decades, as a member of member of the Extended DISC™ network, I have been using an approach that I call DISCerning Communication to drive healthy interpersonal relations among a cross-section of groups. When people experience others communicating with them in a manner that is comfortable for them the opportunities for positive cooperation increases exponentially. Someone referred to it as communicating from inside the head of the other person. Course after course, webinar after webinar, article after article I receive encouragement to present DISCerning Communication principles in a concise publication to a wider audience. This is your invitation to join the mission and make a positive difference in how we communicate and relate to others.

Most sales managers I know have a love/hate relationship with the prima donnas on their sales teams. They love the star player’s passion and hard work; they hate the self-centered behaviors that demoralize or discourage the rest of the team. That leaves sales managers with a dilemma: If they come down hard on a prima donna, that salesperson may just take his/her talents elsewhere. Not good. But a sales manager can’t afford to ignore the situation, either, because prima donnas are often engaged in behaviors detrimental to the team. A simple truth in sales management is that what you don’t confront, you condone. What can you do then?

CSO Insights’ 2017 Sales Manager Enablement Report compared the win rates on forecasted sales opportunities between companies with a formalized approach to coaching—meaning there is a standard approach used by all sales managers—to those companies where coaching strategies were entirely left up to the manager or done informally. Their findings provide proof as to why a sales coaching initiative at your company is so important: companies who had adopted a formal approach to sales coaching achieved a win-rate on forecasted deals that was 19% higher. In short, developing a strong sales coaching culture offers a great ROI. And great leverage: Each sales manager trained is then empowered to improve the win rates of every sales rep on their team. Here are seven keys that will move you in that direction.

If your sales team isn't producing the results expected, the pressure is on you to fix the situation fast. One option is to replace salespeople. A better option is for you to optimize your performance as a sales leader. In The Sales Manager's Guide to Greatness, sales management consultant Kevin F. Davis offers 10 proven and distinctly practical strategies, skills, and tools for overcoming the most challenging obstacles sales managers face and moving your team ahead of the... (click to download excerpts from this eBook)

If your sales team isn't producing the results expected, the pressure is on you to fix the situation fast. One option is to replace salespeople. A better option is for you to optimize your performance as a sales leader. In The Sales Manager's Guide to Greatness, sales management consultant Kevin F. Davis offers 10 proven and distinctly practical strategies, skills, and tools for overcoming the most challenging obstacles sales managers face and moving your team ahead of the... (click below to download excerpts from this eBook)