The best sales teams seem to just do amazing things together. What differentiates them? Well, they do tend to work at some of the best companies, so there is that. But it’s more than that. A few factors that contribute to high-performing sales teams:
High quota attainment. The best startups invest in their sales teams and work hard so most of the reps hit and exceed quota. It’s no fun and demotivating for everyone to miss their goals.
When employers promote workers to manager without training and support, the consequences are not good for anyone. It’s that time of year when leaders get together to hash out their strategic plan for next year. It’s the time when they look at who’s performing well, and who they should and shouldn’t promote. It can be an exciting time, but it’s also a time that comes with considerable risks. A leader sees the individual’s potential when they’re exhibiting mastery in their craft: top designer, best strategist, highest-performing salesperson, and most senior engineer. They’ve excelled year over year and progressed within their discipline.
There are many parts to a high-performing sales organization – the right people, processes and strategy, to start. But today, the underlying backbone of all of it is the right data as a foundation for customer acquisition. That’s not to say there’s no art to practicing sales. Much of what defines our most outstanding sales reps is their ability to deeply understand our prospects’ and customers’ business needs and speak directly to them. They often care about far more than just their sales quota. While science has always been part of sales, it’s hard to ignore the increasing importance of taking a data-driven approach to growing your business.
Why It's Necessary for Organizations, and When to Make Exceptions. A chain of command, or command hierarchy, is the relationship between personnel in terms of responsibility and authority. It’s a ready-made structure for delegation of authority to accomplish the organization’s mission. That’s true in most large organizations and broadly applicable, though examples here will be drawn from my experience in the military. In the military’s chain of command, a commander will have a series of subordinate commanders and staff who report directly to him/her, and each of those commanders will have subordinate commanders who have the same relationship to them.
Bonobos’s director of talent acquisition and The Muse’s VP of people and talent share why its crucial for companies to pay closer attention to their hiring experience from start to finish. It’s a great time to be a job seeker. Unemployment rate is low, and there are more open positions than there are candidates looking for work. That means that employers are always competing with each other for top talent, and it’s no longer enough just to post vacancies on job boards and wait for applications to come in.
3 Things to Remember When Things Go Wrong. Former BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward could have immediately and swiftly announced that the explosion of the British oil giant’s rig, Deepwater Horizon, had led to an environmental disaster that dumped 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. But he didn’t. Over a 10-day period, Hayward would go from downplaying the explosion as a “relatively tiny” situation to finally admitting that it was a “catastrophe.”
While I don't wish an event like this on an executive, if you're a senior leader for any significant length of time, you will have to deal with this type of situation at some point. Recently I was speaking with the CEO of a company I coach. She called me in a bit of a panic as she just found evidence that one of her key employees was stealing by ordering items online and shipping it to their house. Employee theft is an unfortunate situation, but sadly this was not the first time or the last time that it will ever happen.
It's called Project Oxygen. Beginning in 2008, Google researchers wanted to understand what makes a manager great at Google. Here's what they found. Google sought to identify the common threads among Google's highest performing managers. Based on internal research, Google then applied its findings to its manager development programs. Over time, Google found that by publicizing and training managers on these central principles, Google experienced improved team outcomes such as turnover, satisfaction and performance.
One aspect of leadership many people don’t talk about is loneliness. As an executive leadership coach, I have access to concerns and issues that are rarely discussed in the open. Loneliness in leadership is real and causes significant difficulty and isolation for those who are experiencing it. The higher up you go, the more pervasive loneliness becomes. In a recent study, half of the CEOs who responded reported feelings of loneliness.
The Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (BCFP), formerly known as the CFPB, announced that it plans to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) by March 2019. The NPRM will likely have a dramatic impact on collection practices for debt collectors. But, what about first party creditors? Did the Supreme Court’s decision in Henson v. Santander Consumer USA, Inc. obviate the necessity for first party creditors to comply with the BCFP’s debt collection rules?
You have a good pipeline of prospective customers. You pitch them but things aren’t working out. You can see it in your low close rates. They are below 15-20% conversion from sales accepted lead to closed customer. You need to answer an important question: are you losing these opportunities because of sales execution or product insufficiency? Those are the two possibilities. Either the company’s sales techniques are failing to persuade customers to buy the product.
While posting a job ad online can generate a ton of responses and likely lead to identifying potential candidates, collection agencies should be looking outside of the traditional hiring pipelines to identify the best possible talent, a panel of industry executives shared during a webinar recently. The webinar shared tips and ideas for hiring in a difficult labor market, such as the one that much of the country is currently experiencing, thanks to record-low unemployment rates.
One of the most difficult things I have to do as a business owner is interview people. Whether I’m looking for a new virtual assistant, or whether I’m hoping to find someone to work with for an ad campaign, interviewing people can be tough. Among the most common things business owners start with during an interview? “Tell me about yourself.” What usually follows is a litany of career highlights. How will this help you find the right fit for your business? Well, the good news is that it can help. Standouts tend to provide you more than a checklist of the positions they’ve had before. Here are some things to look for:
Spam filters bogging you down? Use these eight strategies to make sure your sales emails always get read by your prospects. It's no secret that the marketing landscape has drastically transformed in recent years. Yet, one thing that has remained constant is the importance of email outreach in outbound marketing strategies. From Fortune 500 companies to scrappy startups, sending sales emails on a regular basis is a reality, so a large amount of time, strategy and effort goes into the process of sending these emails.
Taking a proactive approach to building a culture that matters starts with your hiring process. Then you’ll build trust by sending a consistent message every day that those values are more than just words. When I hired Jeff at Digital-Tutors, he seemed like a perfect candidate. He was a talented designer and he quickly fit in with the rest of his team and the entire company’s culture. One day, I was baffled to discover that he harbored a prejudice toward a black co-worker. It manifested itself through inappropriate jokes that only Jeff found funny.
Giving an opinion is a common way of interacting with other people in formal and informal settings. Unsolicited opinions may be unwelcome, but most leaders find themselves being asked to express an opinion fairly often - and those with a reputation for wisdom are asked constantly. Leaders are asked opinions about all kinds of things, from day-to-day affairs like What should we do about this situation? What’s the best way to handle this difficult client? Does this person look like a good hire?
Even in a tough economy, finding skilled workers can be difficult. In any economic environment, though, human resources professionals, hiring managers and the companies they work for need to ensure that the application, interview and hiring process is appealing, professional and geared toward selling the company and position to potential candidates. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case. What are some job candidate turnoffs that may be hindering your hiring success?
I would roll my eyes when I heard that a company should know the cost of employee turnover. Okay, I thought, for a particular business the cost is $14.3 million. What would anyone ever do with that figure? An economist wants something a bit different: How much would the cost increase if turnover worsened by one percentage point a year? How much would the cost fall if turnover were improved by one percentage point? Now we have data for a profit-maximizing decision: how much is it worth spending to improve turnover?
In order to do anything meaningful, you have to know where you are going. Strategy and tactics are two terms that get thrown around a lot, and are often used interchangeably in numerous contexts. But what exactly do they mean, what is the difference, and why is it important? In this article, we will look at the contrast between strategy and tactics, and the most effective ways to use each. While strategy and tactics originated as military terminology, their use has spread to planning in many areas of life.