Latest Articles
Make Quota Setting a Strategic Sales Management Process
During a drive from Atlanta to Chapel Hill, Mark Donnolo was interviewed about his forthcoming book: Quotas! Design Thinking to Solve Your Biggest Sales Challenge (due October 15, 2019). The following is a summary of that conversation. What motivated you to write a book on quotas? The topic of quotas has become something of a […]
Effective Selling Is a Lot Like Improv
Selling today is more like Improv than the old pitch-and-close message delivery of the past. Nobody wants to be “shot” by a hunter-salesperson, or “harvested” by a farmer. Executives want a conversation where they are listened to, and the other person builds on what they say and offers new ways to think about their situation. […]
The Key to Selling Big Accounts: Generosity
Over the last two decades, I have successfully built consulting relationships with senior executives at large corporations. I have served half of the top 30 most valuable brands in the world and have built a specialty in helping the best of the best consumer companies grow, like Anheuser-Busch, Gillette and so on. I’ve also served […]
Play Moneyball to Reduce Churn and Form a Better Sales Team
In Moneyball, Michael Lewis taught Major League Baseball to dig deeper than conventional metrics like batting average, RBIs, and home runs to understand how to build their teams. They did rigorous data-based analysis and found metrics like on-base percentage and slugging percentage were better indicators of offensive success. Today we might call this artificial intelligence […]
Social Selling 2.0—Arm Sales with Social Media Tech
Social media is having a profound impact on the sales profession. For decades, an important way to verify a salesperson’s claim to an extensive business network was to find out how many names, phone numbers and email addresses they had in their contacts lists. That’s old school now. To compete for the best jobs, salespeople […]
The One Question You Must Ask Every Sales Candidate
Hiring account executives is hard since all too often they’re judged on criteria that don’t predict sales success. This includes affability, first impression, how assertive they are and how well they communicate. Regardless of this group of seemingly fine traits, none of them predicts the person’s ability to achieve remarkable sales results. Finding out if […]
AI In Sales: Unleashing Human Potential
AI is everywhere –– everyone is talking about it but it’s not well understood. Do we really get it? People frequently focus too much on the application of AI, when in fact, the power of prediction comes from data. Today, predictive algorithms are powerful and can, for example, find compatible personalities among prospects and reps to […]
Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing — v2.0
In 2006, Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham, and Suj Krishnaswamy published the classic “Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing” in Harvard Business Review. Have things changed? Christian Sarkar caught up with Kotler and Rackham to get an update. How have things changed since the 2006 article? Is there still a war between sales and marketing? […]
How to Accelerate Organic Growth in a Tough Market
The core logic of the conventional sales approach is that if a brand is sufficiently different and better than competitors’ brands, consumers will come to prefer it, and actively seek it out for purchase. But it very often doesn’t work out that way. Customer Buying Process Every customer goes through some type of buying process […]
Dimensions of Sales Performance: A Practitioner’s View
Here are some of the top reasons for poor sales productivity, as identified by sales managers and practitioners: Lack of focus on target accounts. Poor design of the sales coverage model. Absence of relevant sales methodology and support for the sales process. Inefficient territory design and uneven distribution of accounts. Misaligned sales commission plans. Lack […]
Executive’s Guide to Sell It Like Serhant
As a senior sales executive, you live by two principles: Focus and Follow-up. You use the 80/20 rule to identify the largest sales opportunities with the highest probabilities of closing — the “whales.” You focus attention on the whales and relentlessly follow-up doing whatever it takes to close enough of them to make your sales […]
Digital Disruption and the Sales Strategy Imperative
While Daniel Pink had many powerful insights and recommendations for the sales profession in his book To Sell is Human, in one key respect he was wrong. He asserted the sales profession was flourishing, but it is actually struggling. Digital technology is fundamentally disrupting the sales function. Sales Jobs are Stagnant A rigorous analysis […]