Optimizing Your Sales Team

We really enjoyed reading CSO Insight’s latest ebook, Sales Management 2.0 — Optimizing Sales Performance 2010. It’s filled with terrific insights from sales leaders Kenneth Powell, Vice-President of Worldwide Sales Enablement at ADP; Kevin Joyce, Chief Sales and Marketing Office at Miranda Technologies; Jim Dickie, Managing Partner at CSO Insights; and more.

Some our favorite takeaways include:

• The most effective sales leaders are not necessarily the top-performing sales performers! Before hiring any candidate into your sales force, perform an assessment to ensure you have a balance of great sales talent and future sales leadership on the team.

• Sales organizations are under-investing in and under-developing their sales leaders. Finding and mentoring excellence in sales leaders takes time – shortcuts do not work! Plan to spend 12 months grooming your future sales leaders for success.

• Tight integration between sales and marketing groups requires close management of the sales process. The feedback from sales to marketing is a vital step to achieving sales success.

• Sales teams need to more thoroughly understand the markets they are selling to, determine their strategy for specific accounts, and then start calling on stakeholders. In other words, we need to earn the opportunity to sell to our customer.

• This recession may have changed the way we sell forever. It is time to focus on the best available opportunities and only call on those accounts. We need to become even more strategic and leverage all of the data available to us in the Web 2.0 world.

There is so much more in this free download… we highly recommend you get your own copy today at CSO Insights.