Sales Management | How To Save A Ton Of Time Hiring A Sales Superstar

sales recruiter

With the hundreds of sales resumes you will likely screen for the position that you have open, you really need a methodical way to screen a resume and get the sense of what the candidate is all about.

The problem is if you list your openings on any of the online job posting sites like monster.com or hotjobs.com , you’ll end up getting deluged with resumes and just get muddled in the muck, so to speak.

A lot of companies have an internal recruiter, which is a great help…however you still need to have direct contact with the person who’s actually talking to the candidates initially.

Whether you’re using an internal recruiter or and external recruiter, you’ll need to teach the recruiter about the essential qualities you are looking for in your ideal candidate. In The Sales Management Mastery Academy, we call those “The Fabulous Five”.

After you’ve done Step 1 and have written out your “Fabulous Five”, now you’re ready to find a good recruiter.

Here are a seven steps to getting a great sales recruiter: Continue reading

Essential Skills To Becoming A Top Sales Manager: Sales Planning

sales manager holding a building planDo you remember Robert Goizueta? The “visual leader“?

Robert was a different breed of leader. He knew how to rally his troops into working together to achieve a singular vision. He had talent.

But Robert also had one thing in common with many of today’s successful sales managers – he always had a plan. Robert Goizueta recognized the power of good planning and modern sales managers must do the same.

Good sales planning is done before the call—not during and not afterward. Too many average sales managers show their faces during sales calls without a cohesive plan of their own in mind. They may figure that since they are believers in sales rep empowerment that the sales reps has it all taken care of everything.

Top students of sales management know that this is a recipe for disaster. Continue reading

Sales Management | How To Be A Flexible Sales Leader

dancing sales managerSales managers are hired to solve problems. They’re also hired to lead, but they end up spending an enormous time solving problems within the sales team. Say a sales person is showing consistently poor performance? Take it to the sales manager. Quarterly sales stink? Let the sales manager handle it. Hiring a new sales person? Let the sales manager take that one.

You can’t solve everything, although you may feel that you should – your ability to coach your salespeople so that you help people solve their problems instead of you solving people’s problems.

All sales managers believe in the magic behind good sales coaching. But an amateur or an average sales manager’s coaching style is rigid. It is solid and won’t budge. The sales people under him are forced to adapt to his specific coaching style. Continue reading

Masterful Reprimands – The Best Sales Management Training

reprimanding sales managerAs effective as Masterful Praisings are in reinforcing good behavior, reprimands are as effective at curtailing bad behavior.

We call em, you guessed it…”Masterful Reprimands”.

Although they are basically concept, just on opposite ends of the spectrum, there are big differences in the approach.

For your “veteran” salespeople, this tactic is particularly effective in changing ingrained bad habits and behaviors. How many of these guys have you got? Continue reading

How To Transform Your Underperformers By Teaching Them To Be Confident

confident sales personThe gym trainer tells you to do three sets of basic crunches, 15 counts each. Why is that? Why not make it 45 counts of basic crunches and get it over with?

There are times when breaking something down into smaller portions make it a lot easier to perform the feat. A top-performing sales manager is someone who catches his sales person doing something approximately right, and praises him or her to guide the sales person on the path to doing it exactly right.

Take note a top-performing sales manager doesn’t wait for something exactly right to happen before he starts giving out praises and kind words. Almost no one gets something exactly right the first time they do it, especially not underperformers.

The best example I could think of is teaching a baby how to walk. Continue reading