The trending topic these days is sales coaching.
Topics: inside sales management, mentoring
I was digging through Evernote earlier this week and stumbled across a file titled: Killer DF12 Sessions for Sales.
I vaguely remember creating it after Dreamforce 2012 and decided to take a look at a few of the videos I'd clipped. I’m so glad I did!
Out of the dozens of sales cloud sessions now on youtube, I want to share 3 quick clips that deliver three major ideas.
#1 - Coach to Move the Needle
Mark Roberge, HubSpot’s VP of Sales, shares a bit about how he develops leaders and reps in his 250 person sales org.
To set up the clip, Mark is talking about his team of 20 (mostly 1st-time Managers). He lays out the case that one thing newly promoted Sales Managers tend to get wrong is trying to coach too many things at once.
The big takeaway for me is that rep development doesn’t happen by serendipity. Many sales organizations have a coaching 'strategy' in place, but as the saying goes, culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Topics: inside sales management, inside sales motivation, mentoring
I recently sat in on a vendor presentation and let me tell you, it was a disaster from hello.
(By way of backstory, my client had received a high level overview of a vendor’s technology and scheduled a 2nd call to dig into the value the technology would bring to the Inside Sales team.)
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From the start, the Seller launched into a canned pitch - essentially a 10 minute monologue about their product. She sounded like Billy Mays, the Infomercial king. When I was able to interject, she provided a slightly varied version of her canned pitch. I never received a direct answer to my questions.
Needless to say, I was quite frustrated. Here’s a company with a seemingly good product (at least from what their website suggested) but the seller failed at moving the process forward. After the call, my client commented that he would not evaluate the product because he couldn’t envision working successfully with the sales rep.
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Topics: inside sales management, mentoring
The number of Inside Sales departments is projected to grow from 800K (in 2009) to over 2M (in 2013) - according to SKKU/infoUSA research (PDF).
Steve Watts from The Sales Insider argues:
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But what happens when an Inside Sales Rep is ready for something new and different? Does their career path always mean staying “inside?”
Some view Inside Sales as a stepping stone. But the days of "hungry", first job out of college-Reps pounding the phones are largely gone.
Topics: inside sales management, best practices, mentoring