Maslow’s Guide to Sales Management Motivation

Posted on November 22, 2011 by Ralph

sales management motivation When it comes to sales management, if you cannot motivate your sales force, then you are done.

And when it comes to motivation, no one has gotten more press on motivation than Abraham Maslow.

Don’t know who Maslow is?

Well as a sales management professional, you should.

At the very least you should use a few of his tips to motivate your sales force.

Sales Management Motivation Maslow Style

If you don’t know, Abraham Maslow is commonly known as “the father of modern motivational theory” and is one of the only theorists on motivation whose ideas have actually withstood the test of time…in spite of hundred of eggheads who have tried to dispute his theories.

In short, Maslow states that each person is motivated by a series of physiological and psychological needs that he put into his “Needs Hierarchy Theory”.

These needs are listed from basic to advanced, the lowest common denominator being these five:

1.Hunger, thirst

2. Sleep

3. Safety, security

4. Shelter

5. Health

As a sales management professional, you have to figure that most of your sales force has these five basic needs covered, right?

So what does Continue reading →

Sales Management Training | How to Discipline Without Being a Dick

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Ralph

sales management dick No sales management professional really wants to be a dick.

But sometimes, you gotta be a dick.

And that “sometimes” occurs when your sales reps are no longer listening to you.

It usually happens when they think your sales management leadership is weak.

Don’t worry.

It’s happened to me and it has happened to every sales management professional who’s reading this post at least once (and there are a few of them) :-)

So what do you do when they start “tuning you out”?

Do you:

Crack down hard and make em all “bow to your every command”?

Just continue as if nothing is happening?

It’s a tough choice. A choice that will in fact determine your sales management leadership for months to come.

So as the Elder Knight states in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, you must not Continue reading →

Sales Management Training | How to Achieve Sales Management Nirvana

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Ralph

sales management nirvana After about twenty years of sales and sales management experience under my belt, I finally realized something.

It only took me over twenty years to realize it, but at least I realized it I suppose.

In those twenty years, I was fortunate to have managed quite a few incredible salespeople.

Their performance enabled me to accumulate a solid track record of success; success and skills I later used to start this blog as well as my online sales management training business and other offline businesses.

When I think back on my sales management career, what I am most proud of is that many of my former salespeople went on to have tremendous careers after they were with me.

Many were promoted within their companies, some went on to different careers outside of sales and many just achieved a higher level of success in their current sales role.

Its amazing to me that I still get requests on LinkedIn to do recommendations for salespeople I had the good fortune to manage, sometimes as far back as fifteen years ago. Every time I get one of these requests, I am humbled but mostly, just plain proud.

When I talk to these old sales reps Continue reading →

Sales Management Training | How to Use Humor in Your Sales Management Speeches

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Ralph

sales management humor I once took a sales management training course on how to give speeches. The well-meaning sales trainer told us the best way to “warm up” the audience he said was to open your speech with a joke.

“A priest, a rabbi and a sales manager walk into a bar…”

Excited at the prospect of finally finding the key to great sales management speech-making, I ran out that night to my local Barnes and Noble and bought myself a joke book.

Being not a particularly good public speaker, I memorized a few jokes and then tried it out at my first sales meeting after that sales management training.

When I told the joke it was a disaster. I stumbled on the setup and flubbed the phrasing in the punch line.

I bombed big time.

Why?

First off, Continue reading →

How Mistakes Make You a Sales Management Genius

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Ralph

sales management mistakes I have a very close friend who is an incredibly successful internet entrepreneur.

Despite the fact that he toils in a highly competitive and cut-throat market, he has achieved an unprecedented level of success his peers could only dream of.

Last month, he made an enormous mistake. It was actually a catastrophic mistake. He was doing a project for one of his clients and documenting its success on his blog and he took his eye off the ball and just plain screwed up.

Instead of hiding from it, burying it, never mentioning it, he did the exact opposite of what most people would do:

He discussed it openly on his blog for his thousands of readers to see.

Curious about this decision to publicly “come clean”, I asked him why.

His answer: Continue reading →