What is it beyond sales skills that exceptional salespeople and sales leaders possess that make them so successful? It's not just one thing but a set of factors that create a competency that make the difference between a good salesperson and and an elite sales superstar. You can think of it as the sales equivalent of Emotional Intelligence. The more of these factors your sales team has, the better they will be at keeping cool under pressure, forging meaningful connections with prospects and...

by Cheryl Powers

How do you know for sure before you hire them that a salesperson or a sales leader can and will do what it takes to succeed? Their resume can't tell you. The headhunter doesn't want you to ask. The candidate will try to convince you in the interview and will likely be a more skillful interviewer than you are.

If you are serious about the success of your sales force and the success of your new hires, you simply can't wing it. You must know the specific sales skills, sales...

by Cheryl Powers

I remember the day when my daughter and her Girl Scout friends received their awards for cookie sales. These girls were on fire and as I look at the reasons they did so well, individually and as a team, I couldn’t help but notice that the factors contributing to their success are the very same factors that will make or break your sales force.

They were motivated and goal driven.

Beyond the satisfaction of knowing their world would be a better place with more Girl Scout...

Most CEOs are well aware of the costs associated with generating new customers. Few, however, are able to accurately predict exactly when those potential customers will become actual customers. That’s a real problem for CEOs who want to significantly grow revenue and are faced with inaccurate, stagnant, and bloated pipelines that are less reliable than the local weather report.

There is a famous quote by John Wanamaker about half the money spent on advertising being wasted and not...

Warren Bennis, one of my teachers and one of the world's finest business scholars, said, "Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality." And in our lifetime we have witnessed great feats of leadership and we have benefitted greatly from it. As I sit in my Aeron chair, typing on LinkedIn's publishing platform on the Macbook Pro that sits on my desk, listening to Mozart's Requiem streaming from my iPhone, I am in awe of the vision held by the creators of...

by Cheryl Powers

In the movie Hoosiers, coach Norman Dale has led his team to the regional finals and is delivering a pre-game motivational speech. He knows these guys are excited. He knows they are nervous. He knows they are preoccupied with both hopes of winning and fears of losing. And he wants them centered, focused, and present to the game they are about to play.

Isn’t that how it is for your sales management and every salesperson on your team? Every day they are responsible for...

We have all been there. The stakes are high, the pressure is on, and we have to perform at our best. And instead, we choke. Maybe you were playing golf. Maybe it was an important meeting with your bank or an investor. You blew it and now you're kicking yourself because you knew you could have done better. It's happening to your salespeople too. They're in the middle of a selling situation, and BAM! The prospect says something or does something that catches them off-guard and they panic or...

Much has been written about the cost of low employee engagement. But keeping customers and prospects engaged in your sales process is equally important to the success of your business.

We know a great deal about the high cost of low employee engagement. We know that there are over 20 million disengaged workers in America alone and that the cost of this problem is nearly $350 billion dollars per year in lost labor and output. We know that the root cause of this disengagement is employee-job...

Facts, while indisputable, merely describe the state of something. They point to things which are real, which exist but which don't necessarily explain why or how they got that way. And which, if viewed from another vantage point, may even seem to prove something else entirely.

Sherlock Holmes knows this well. Holmes out-sleuthed the police detectives time after time. He was especially fond of showing Detective Lestrade, who always seemed confused by the facts of a case, the errors...

by Cheryl Powers

Sales Leaders play a pivotal role in a company’s ability to reach targets and to satisfy the needs of their customers and their shareholders. That means their primary job is to put your products and services in the hands of more of the people who will use them to solve their biggest problems, while creating profits for the people who own the company. That’s a problem when most sales managers don’t qualify for the job.