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)

Throughout this eBook, you will learn 11 key strategies that will help you position your profile to be seen as a thought leader and subject matter expert, leverage your existing network to gain access to decision makers and engage with people who are engaging with you.

Each sales opportunity presents its own unique dilemma in terms of identifying the "real buyer". Further examination of a sales opportunity will yield additional information regarding the viability of the opportunity as it relates to the product and service offerings available from the salesperson's company. One of the most important steps in the sales process is to identify the real buyer ‐ an individual I'll call the "relevant executive" for the sales opportunity. Recent research (like that shown in my book Selling to the C‐Suite) shows that key executives typically get involved early in the buying cycle to understand the issues creating the need for a solution. They will often delegate the middle phase of the buying cycle—exploring options, setting vendor criteria and evaluating solutions—to others at lower levels of the organization. Senior executives also get involved in the project again during the final phase to help plan the implementation and measure the results. That’s why waiting to get involved with an organization when the RFP is initially received can be problematic. The better strategy is to gain access to the relevant executive early in the buying cycle, at a time when it is possible to actually influence RFP criteria by showcasing the benefits and value of your products or services. Click below to download this paper to help you and your team develop the right strategy for targeting and engaging with the right - and relevant - executive.  

Beyond the Sales Process focuses on the frontline of engagement with customers. It is specifically intended for salespeople, account managers, their managers, and sales leaders, as well as others who have responsibilities and pressures associated with developing and winning business, and those who are tasked with extending and expanding their relationships with customers.

Today's C-Suite executives have a wide variety of concerns, mostly involved with planning, managing and affecting change throughout the organization.  They are also concerned about multiple constituencies - customers, shareholders, employees, suppliers, competitors, business partners, regulatory agencies and the various governments in which they operate - both domestically and internationally.  C-Suite executives are willing to meet with professional salespeople if they are convinced that the salesperson can deliver true business value to them. This white paper will outline the six steps that will enable you to successfully engage with C-Suite executives - and to maintain and leverage those relationships over the long term.

Executive Summary How do you know if your executive presentations are effective? In this white paper I am going to give you a series of tests you can use to form an objective assessment about the quality and effectiveness of your presentation. I have spent nearly fifteen years researching and reviewing literally hundreds of sales tools and presentations from big companies to small boutiques, and many in between, and believe the effectiveness of an economic impact sales tool used in (and after) the sales process boils down to these important criteria:

Able, adjusted, all systems go, apt, equipped, fit, in order, organized, planned, prepared, primed, qualified, rehearsed, set. These are all synonyms for the word ready. The question is, can you really be sure that these words apply to your sales team? To help you not only shift the way you think about sales readiness, but actually take steps towards ensuring your own sales organization’s readiness, we have compiled 22 tips to guide you.  

Just as B2B sales strategies must adapt to increasingly savvy buyers, sales training must change too. This brief discusses how newer training content and methods can result in a better, smarter sales force.

Research shows that effective sales coaching can dramatically improve the performance of sales teams - in some cases driving up revenues by 20% or more. But all too often sales organizations find it challenging to develop a sales coaching program that's embedded in a coaching culture.   Read this 5-page white paper and learn best practices and strategies for developing an effective sales coaching program for your sales organization.   In this whitepaper you will learn how to:   Implement a proven sales coaching model Create a coaching culture Use metrics to maximize the ROI on coaching Turn sales managers into great coaches

Sales Enablement: How do we do it? The phrase sales enablement has become a standard term in the language of those who support sales performance. There are currently 37 LinkedIn groups with this phrase in their titles. There are software companies, products, consultancies, and all kinds of online resources that include sales enablement in their names, descriptions, or value propositions. It's a great descriptive phrase for marketing products and services, but, like many such catch phrases, means different things to different people. This free white paper from Dr. Carl Binder, originator of The Six Boxes®, will help your sales leadership team understand and implement these concepts and - yes - enable your sales team to perform at its highest potential.

A recent survey conducted by SAVO Group of more than 500 executives at 125 successful companies found that organizations that practice sales enablement consistently out-performed the Fortune 500 average year-over-year growth rate by nearly four percentage points. This white paperdescribes the seven attributes that separate these top-performing companies from the rest and the ways in which you can enable your sales team to consistently make the sale and increase overall revenue.

Engagement, the employee’s commitment to their organization and their willingness to perform beyond expectations, has become a focus area for management. Engagement is more than mere job satisfaction; fully engaged employees are motivated and dedicated to making the organization a success. At the most simplistic level engaged employees lead to happy, loyal customers and repeat business. Importantly engagement also leads to improvement in retention levels. In short, it impacts the bottom line. Dale Carnegie Training asked MSW Research to undertake a benchmark nationwide, cross industry study of 1500 employees to explore engagement in the workplace. The study discovered that although there are multiple factors affecting engagement, the personal relationships between a manager and his or her direct reports is the most influential. 

With a speech analytics application, businesses have access to invaluable information contained within their interactions with customers that can help them gain flexible, scalable business intelligence, enhance revenue, and diminish risk.

With unprecedented adoption among businesses and consumers, the iPad is quickly becoming the preferred device for mobile sales professionals. Find out how enterprise adoption of iPads gives organizations an advantage when in sales and marketing.

The cash vs. tangible incentives argument is an old one. This paper suggests that there is room for both, and both can be effective when used in the proper application.

Imagine attending a dinner party where someone sitting next to you asks "So, What do you do for a living?" if you respond that you work as an accountant or an attorney, the person would undoubtedly nod in acknowledgement of a familiar answer. However, if you said "I'm the head of sales enablement for my company," the next question likely would be "What is sales enablement?" 

CSO Insights 2013 Key Trends Analysis provides an overview to the eight key attributes found in high performance sales organizations. Download now and compare how your sales team's best practices align with the high performance organizations in this study.

This free Sales Enablement eBook provides a systematic approach to helping sales reps prepare for customer interactions, engage customers and prospects effectively, and advance more opportunities to close. You’ll learn how marketing, training, management, and of course, sales, each play a critical role in the sales enablement process.

Imagine attending a dinner party where someone sitting next to you asks "So, What do you do for a living?" if you respond that you work as an accountant or an attorney, the person would undoubtedly nod in acknowledgement of a familiar answer. However, if you said "I'm the head of sales enablement for my company," the next question likely would be "What is sales enablement?" 

One of the most significant barriers to sales organizations is bringing their sales cycle under control. Read this research from Aberdeen Group to discover how the use of electronic signature tools can improve sales team performance. 

"An incentive is something that stimulates or motivates with the intent to spur determination and action." Sales incentives studies have shown that sales incentive programs have a great influence on a company’s bottom line. A sales incentive program can be a powerful business tool that can be used to recognize and motivate salespeople. 

It’s Friday morning, and you’re thinking about Monday’s management meeting - the one where you’ll be presenting your mid-quarter sales forecast to the executive team. You’ve just sent another reminder to the sales team to update their deal information in the expensive SFA tool you installed a year ago. After chasing down a few rogue reps (who act as if they’ve never seen the tool before), you’re finally ready to run the numbers. Immediately, you see that several deals are slipping. Uh-oh. How did this happen? What caused last week’s healthy forecast to take a turn for the worst? Are all our prospects getting squirrely at once? Are our reps falling down on the job?

Read research by Aberdeen Group on how top-performing sales teams are using contemporary technology tools to reduce their sales cycles and increase their win / loss "batting average". Learn about how to better leverage people, process and technology to optimize your sales cycles. 

Business-to-business leaders are searching for ways to improve sales productivity, battle rising selling costs, accelerate skills development and transition to solution selling. What most don’t realize is that the quality and effectiveness of their sales content are critical to addressing these issues.