Filling a sales position means finding a candidate who understands the sales pipeline and their role in managing it. After all, the sales pipeline is an important part in a company’s success, as creating and maintaining it is essential for earning new sales and delighting customers.

Sales pipelines help business owners discover five key insights, one of which is where they have resource gaps and overallocation. This means sales managers and owners have data on where they need more salespeople — and why. The pipeline has multiple stages, starting with prospecting, then continuing through lead qualification, demos and meetings, proposals, and beyond.

As with any part of the sales process, or running a business in general, data is key. When considering the sales pipeline, metrics matter. These metrics include lead source, deal size, and a lead’s current location in the pipeline. For more on sales pipelines, check out this infographic.

Read the full article at: www.salesforce.com

Read the full article at: strongcloser.com

How many open positions are on your team?  Open positions are an opportunity to improve the talent level. You want to make your goals more attainable and hiring top-shelf people is the best way to do that. 

However, building a high-quality sales team isn’t easy. It typically requires a lot of time and money to assemble a team of top performers. What if we told you that there’s a proven system that would help you get a list of great people to interview? Would you be interested?

How to Obtain Qualified Sales Candidates

First, to get a list of qualified candidates to interview, you need to understand the qualities of the person that you need on your team.

Read the full article at: blog.thecenterforsalesstrategy.com

I've been managing and leading salespeople and advising sales organizations for over 30 years.

During that time, I've identified two trends.

1. Sales technology and sales force automation has increased in prominence, price, and company investment.
2. Sales rep productivity — the time salespeople actually spend selling — has decreased.

Research shows that today, good salespeople spend less than a third of their time selling. On the other hand, more and more time is spent managing various administrative tasks surrounding sales and demand generation.

Basically, salespeople spend more time managing their sales than making them.

Whether you’re a salesperson, sales executive or other investor or stakeholder in a growing organization,I don’t need to tell you the direct and collateral damage done when salespeople aren’t selling.

Read the full article at: blog.hubspot.com

The world of virtual business, including virtual selling, is here to stay. It’s an adjustment, but there’s no doubt that it’s happening. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, corporations have seen the ongoing value of working from home (WFH), and 74 percent of CFOs have already indicated that WFH will become part of their staffing strategy moving forward. To increase sales, tactics have to evolve to suit the new world of virtual work, and using outsourced support for B2B selling can help.

Understanding the Virtual Workplace

Along with more employees working remotely, corporate priorities and structures are evolving.

Read the full article at: impact.marketstar.com

Sales professionals are approaching the coming year with a sense of guarded optimism because the next months are an opportunity to return to normalcy. As a result, more sales teams are gaining the confidence to finally start making long-term plans again. For most, these plans include developing new selling skills to capitalizing on a global recovery.

As the recovery takes shape, selling organizations will need to become:

1. More agile to track changing customer needs
2. More influential to guide the customer’s thinking
3. More adept in virtual outreach

These three skills will be critical for success in the environment that awaits in 2021. Customers change direction faster than ever, more factors shape their thinking, and their expectations for streamlined virtual engagement are high.

Read the full article at: www.richardson.com

As business slows down across industries, it’s likely that your team is facing thinner pipelines and longer sales cycles. But that’s no reason to sit idly. How can you help your sales team stay motivated through this crisis?

Your management style is critical. Keeping your team engaged now ensures they’re set up for success when the situation recovers.

Lead with empathy and action

Leading with empathy and action is the best way to support your team right now.

Read the full article at: resources.doubledigitsales.com

While many states and countries are gradually in the process of re-opening, there remain restrictions and a need to navigate a new sales normal. Additionally, an economic crisis is clearly part of the COVID-19 fallout. All of this has created a business environment where sales can be achieved, but through a different process than we are used to. However, it’s important to remember that, regardless of the state of the world, your industry, or business in general, there is a path forward to sales success.  

1. Adapt your skills to the current environment 
The sales process has likely changed. We are connecting with customers in different ways, there’s a greater emphasis on remote selling, and there is a vital need to think creatively in meeting the unique challenges of an economy overshadowed by a pandemic. But the good news is, you’ve developed core selling skills that can be applied to the new environment – just a bit differently.  

Things like knowing how to open and close, being a trusted advisor, identifying needs, tailoring a solution, offering insights and ideas to get customers to think differently – these are all core selling skills sales professionals have honed over the years and are still critical in today’s unique environment. They are applied a bit differently, as the communication medium has changed. Lean into Web-based tools with video, if possible, and get comfortable working phone and email. While face-to-face interactions will be limited, you still can connect deeply with your customers by leveraging the core selling skills you’ve learned to rely on.  

2. Pay even more attention to communication style preferences
Communication styles are one of the most critical gateways to understanding and connecting with buyers. In times of stress and strife, like COVID-19, they become even more important. Being able to talk to someone who is in sync with you in your preferred communication method is a huge relief, and it’s an opening that sales professionals can use to establish trust, build rapport, and engage in a productive sales dialogue. 

However, the environment has changed. Even with the relaxing of some restrictions, face-to-face is still less likely to take place. Consequently, sales professionals will need to use other strategies to discern communication styles – verbal clues like tone and words used, and writing elements such as content, length, and syntax. When possible, the use of video can be a tremendous asset. Being able to read the body language of your customer – and them being able to see the same – is a significant advantage. 

3. Short-term problems could take priority over long-term solutions
Because pandemics involve a great degree of future uncertainty – no one knows precisely how long it will last, for example – long-term strategizing will likely downshift to a lesser priority for buyers. After all, if you don’t know what the world will look like in the future, it can be difficult to make plans based on that.

Thus, sales reps may find they need to align with buyers’ most pressing short-term concerns over long-range issues. That doesn’t mean future scope is completely out of the equation, of course – one can make models and projections based on an array of possible futures – but addressing immediate problems could not only represent a win now but strengthen your position on future deals as well.    

4. Resist the trap of diving too deeply into non-business discussions
The pandemic response at the local, state, national, and international level has tragically become politicized. One of the things sales professionals need to be aware of is buyers who have strong opinions about the strategy employed to deal with COVID-19. Sales professionals need to be aware of the risks associated with diving too deeply into this dialogue.  

Despite the chaos affecting the entire world of business and sales, core selling skills are still critical to engaging and influencing buyers. Shifting strategy to work through different communication channels, emphasizing relationship building, strongly considering communication styles, and balancing both short-term and long-term goals are all ways to effectively keep the sales pipeline full.

Is there a secret you need to know in order to recruit and select the best sales talent? It’s easy to think so since McKinsey analysts report that “superior talent is up to eight times more productive” than the rest of the employees on your team. These superior folks are hard to find. If you’re fortunate enough, you’ll hire one and watch their impact on your bottom line. How do you know if the candidate sitting in front of you truly is the best? You can improve your odds by using a sales assessment test instead of relying on the usual methods.

The Power of Technology and Data

I like to remind people that one way to find top talent is to incorporate technology and data into your process. That’s exactly the path described in the book and the movie "Moneyball." For those who are unfamiliar with the story, it’s about the effective use of data in assembling a baseball team. We all know baseball people fixate on statistics, but back in the day, managers weren’t using data to recruit players. That changed when Billy Beane came along. Using statistics, Beane put together a winning team for the Oakland Athletics. Today, several baseball teams rely on sabermetric analysts to evaluate players.

More of the Same or Something New

One lesson from Beane’s approach was that disrupting the power of personal relationships can improve outcomes. Many sales professionals believe in personal relationships and their ability to drive business success. But should personal relationships also drive how you hire your sales reps?

Studies have pointed to the positive outcomes when employees recommend friends for open positions. In fact, many organizations reward employees if a recommended person is hired. Studies also show that these new hires often last longer in an organization and may be a good fit in the culture. While that may be true, the word-of-mouth hiring strategy won’t bring you the best sales talent, unless you’re very lucky. The truth is that people tend to recommend friends who are similar to themselves.

If you want to change the mold and break through barriers, you’ll need to use a sales assessment test to find the best sales talent.

The Interview Bias

The best aspect of a good sales assessment test is the lack of bias. Tests that ask questions designed to reveal sales aptitude, motivations and work practices focus on the whole candidate. During an interview, candidates can shift the focus to what they want you to know. If they’re not particularly good team players, they’ll highlight their rainmaker qualities. And sales professionals who have been recommended by a friend or co-worker may try to play the relationship angle and appeal to your emotions. Before you know it, they’ll have sold themselves to you.

You can protect yourself against that kind of influencing by asking candidates to take an assessment before they qualify for an interview. With the data in front of you, asking questions about a candidate’s potential weaknesses will be a more productive use of your time.

Reference Checks and Personal Branding Limitations

Some hiring managers believe that reference checks can be the best way to confirm that the candidate they want to hire is top shelf. Unfortunately, many organizations will only confirm a candidate’s title, dates of employment and the kind of work they did. This dilemma might lead to you conduct a backdoor reference check.

You might know an individual who worked with the candidate in the past but who wasn’t listed as a reference. In talking with the off-list reference, you’ll hope to learn about a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses. Unless you know the reference well, consider what they say carefully. They may have a hidden agenda, such as wanting to push someone else they want to see hired into your position.

Emotional intelligence is a valuable skill in any career, but even more so in sales.

To succeed in sales, you have to be an extrovert and a natural at it. That’s straight-up nonsense!

• Many sales professionals get into the profession because they’ve been told they’re a natural. And sometimes, aspiring salespeople think they’re not cut out for the job because they’re introverts. 
• Both of these assumptions are myths, according to sales leader Kevin “KD” Dorsey, who says there’s nothing natural about selling, and that introverts are often better suited to a career in sales.
• KD clears up other popular misconceptions about sales, including money as motivation, the need to be passionate about products, and relying on a company to propel you forward.

Introverts, unite! (Separately, and in your own home.) 

Has there ever been such a prescient, perfect slogan for 2020? After all, this is the year of the virtual convention, the Zoom happy hour, and the “bubble” NBA.

Throw out misconceptions if you want to succeed in sales

But when we think about high-achieving sales rockstars, we assume they’re naturally outgoing, outspoken, and super social.

Read the full article at: www.vanillasoft.com

Ask any sales leader whether they want to build a high-performing team, and the immediate answer will be “Yes.” But what are the specific best practices that support this goal? Here are three that we have seen in organizations that are thriving in 2021.

First and foremost, create clarity about the salesperson’s role. A simple and effective way to begin to do this is to invest a little time in a KARE analysis. Is the role you are looking at primarily responsible for KEEPING existing customers, for ACQUIRING new customers, for RECAPTURING customers who have been lost, or for EXPANDING business within a current account? These are four very different priorities, and a written job description should clearly identify for you and for the sales professional exactly what the expectations are for the role in question.

Next, identify the high performers on your current team. Taking the role you have just identified into account, ask yourself these questions: Who would you most want to hold on to? Who would you replicate if you had the power to do that? Who would you most want to serve as a role model to other sales professionals in your organization?

Read the full article at: www.sandler.com

What do you consider the greatest job in the world?

Maybe I'm biased, but I'm convinced I have that job. Why? Here’s what I do every day:

• Talk with people who are actively engaged in sharing important information with me
• Figure out what makes those people “tick”
• Work with sales managers to understand the talents of the people they are interviewing
• Help them to hire the very best people for the job
• Focus on the unique strengths of individuals
• And, help managers to coach their direct reports to become wildly successful

And best of all, I have the privilege of working closely with some of the greatest managers out there. After all these years, I can tell you that there are 15 things that every great manager knows. 

Read the full article at: blog.thecenterforsalesstrategy.com

You want your sales team to dominate their quotas and close deals. But there's a challenge: due to the  COVID-19 crisis, all of a sudden your all-star sales team is now working and selling remotely from home. Now what?

And to be frank: for a first time manager, managing a remote team is not a walk in the park.

As of 2019, the amount of companies with a remote workforce is getting larger. 66% of companies allow remote work, and 16% are fully remote.

Read the full article at: blog.close.com

When COVID-19 first hit the United States in March, many sales organizations thought the adjustments they had to make would be temporary. But as the crisis continues, it’s becoming increasingly clear that many of the changes brought on by the pandemic will be permanent.

Mary Shea, Principal Analyst at Forrester, addressed this in a recent Sales Hacker webinar.

“Many, if not most of these trends were already in play before COVID hit… I thought these trends were going to play out over the next 24 to 36 months, but now I think they’ll play out over the six to 12 to 18 months.”

Here are five significant sales trends that are here to stay and are only being accelerated in their adoption due to the current environment.

Listening to Your Customers Has Never Been More Important

Sales has always been about paying attention to your customers’ needs, but the current situation has made listening paramount. In LinkedIn’s recent State of Sales report, they revealed that the top trait buyers wanted from salespeople was active listening.

However, sales managers often don’t prioritize this trait when hiring salespeople.

While it’s the most desired trait that buyers want, it didn’t even crack the top five characteristics sales managers require from their sales teams.

Mary Shea said active listening is even more important in the current climate because the opportunities for listening to buyers face-to-face have disappeared.

“We’re not walking the halls of our corporate clients anymore,” Shea said on the webinar. “… You’ve got to roam the digital halls on social, right?”

One way we can demonstrate that we’re listening to buyers and are trying to fulfill their needs is to speak their language.

Every company has its own corporate word culture. When we talk with the buyer, we should frame the solution in the customer’s corporate language, not ours. When we talk about our solution, we should use the word that our buyer uses internally to discuss their priorities and strategy.

So, do your research. Learn your buyer’s language, and make sure they’re feeling heard when you talk with them.

The Difference Between Inside and Outside Sales is Disappearing

The distinction between inside and outside sales is becoming less obvious. “You’re already seeing folks remotely closing seven-figure deals,” according to Shea.

Sales Hacker’s Scott Barker put it this way,

“Field sales teams have always hung their hat on, ‘No, no, no — you can’t sell this digitally. For six-figure deals, we need to go shake hands.… It’s being put to the test. Can it all be done digitally?”

Some of our customers at LinkedIn have been closing huge deals without ever meeting buyers in person.

And while there are some sectors where the complexity of the solution will require on-site visits, as long as businesses have needs to solve and sellers have solutions to those issues, big deals will continue to happen — whether it’s in-person or in a virtual environment.

The ROI Component of the Deal Is Essential

Right now, we’re seeing budgets cut at about 50% of companies. That means a large number of your potential customers are struggling with budget.

So, when your buyers are in this position, trying to sell them on your product or service’s vision and dream isn’t enough.

Our litmus test is, would this pass muster with the CFO?

In today’s world, that isn’t just a hypothetical. In the webinar, Scott Barker said that sales professionals are seeing more CFOs from the buyer side joining sales calls. He said…

“It’s kind of a double-edged sword. If you’re doing the right things, that’s awesome, because no one can move a deal faster than a CFO. But if you’re doing the wrong things… that (deal) is going to get blown up very, very quickly.”

Sales Professionals Must Act as Advisors

These days, it’s not about winning the deal every time. Of course, we want to win more than we lose, but these interactions are also about earning respect, trust, and ultimately referrals by offering useful advice and acting as a trusted advisor.

It’s not hard to imagine that in the near future, we may have reviews of individual sellers posted by buyers online, similar to reviews of business software offered by platforms such as G2 Crowd.

In the webinar, Barker had this to say…

“[Reviews of salespeople] would reinforce all the good behavior, right? It would hold people really accountable. It also empowers the buyer and the seller. If you’re doing the right things, and you have done your homework, and you’re an industry expert, and people are raving about you, then when you ask for that meeting, people will take one look and say, ‘Yeah, of course, I’m going to learn something.’”

The Buying Committee Grows Increasingly Powerful

It’s no secret that buying committees are growing larger. There are more decision makers and influencers in every deal than ever before, and the trend isn’t likely to stop anytime soon.

But this has caused another change that few people saw coming. As buying committees grow, we’re also seeing turnover increase as well — beyond the typical 20% of annual decision maker turnover.

In the current climate, sales professionals need to be more effective at multithreading and building relationships with as many members of the buying committee as possible.

As Shea put it in the webinar, “I will say the days of the single-thread buyer and the lone wolf seller are well behind us now.”

Prepare for The World of Tomorrow

In such turbulent times, no one knows what tomorrow will bring, but one thing is clear. The salespeople and businesses who keep track of the trends and adjust to their buyer’s needs will come out ahead.

So keep an eye on the winds of business, and keep your business sailing through the storm.

One of the variables to success in sales is self-confidence. You create a sense of certainty for your clients when you are convicted about who you are, your ability to help produce better results, and the advice you provide them. When you are not confident, you create a sense of uncertainty, your contacts wondering if they are taking too great a risk buying from someone who isn’t sure of themselves.

1. I am a large part of the overall value proposition. Your prospective client is deciding who to buy from according to the experience they have sitting across the table from you, engaged in a conversation about change. The way that they’re judging your company and your solution is through that conversation. Your ability to successfully engage in a conversation that creates value for your client is what generates a preference to work with you and buy from your company. This makes you a rather large part of the value proposition.
2. I believe that I belong at the table when my prospective clients are considering a change. One of the factors that provide an immense amount of confidence is believing that you deserve the right to sit at the table when your clients or prospective clients discuss the kind of change you can help create. When you recognize that the value you create by engaging in this conversation can help them solve their problems, address their challenges and take care of new opportunities that will improve the results, you recognize how important it is that they consult with you before making any decision. If your presence would provide a better outcome, you should have the confidence that you deserve a seat at the table.
3. I believe that I can help my prospective clients identify areas where they may be able to improve the results, even when those better results are unknown to them. When you have the business acumen and situational knowledge that allows you to see areas where your prospective clients can improve, you can act with certainty in pursuing a meeting, knowing that the conversation will allow you to find an area where better results are available to them.
4. I believe that I can create value for any contact who will provide me with an opportunity to meet with them. The operative words here are prospective clients. When you know for sure that you are going to be able to create value for your prospective clients, even if it’s only perspective that helps them understand some variable component of their business, they will leave the conversation with some new possibility.
5. How I sell is a greater factor in winning deals than what I sell. When you know how to sell using a modern, consultative sales approach, you recognize the advantage that you have over your competition in the position you occupy for your prospective client. When you are playing the game at a different level, your approach is the defining, differentiating experience that allows you to win over your rivals.
6. My experience allows me to recognize patterns and quickly understand some of what I might need to teach my prospective client to compel them to change. This is a very difficult dichotomy. Your experience may allow you to recognize a pattern long before your client is aware of their challenge. At the same time, you need to provide your prospective client with the experience of discovering the need to change and the better outcomes available to them. Most of your situational knowledge is subconscious, picking up the patterns without recognizing that you are doing so. This provides a very high level of confidence.
7. Because I have sold the outcomes I help my clients produce many more times than my prospective client has decided to buy those results, I am the one who should lead the conversation. This idea is very similar to belonging at the table with your clients and prospective clients. Not only should you be there to give them advice, but you should also offer them advice on how to decide to change, what options they should explore, how to manage the internal process, and how to ensure they achieve the outcomes they need.
8. Because I’m a consultative salesperson, I am a peer to any contact sitting across a desk for me. If you do not believe that you are a peer, you believe that you are less than that. The desire to become your client’s trusted advisor means that as it pertains to the outcomes you sell and produce for your clients, you are more knowledgeable than your party across the table. Confidence in sales comes from not believing that you are inferior to your prospective client, nor should you be servile or overly deferential. You believe you are a peer, and your client will feel like you’re a peer.
9. The information I share with my clients is valuable enough to them that they would have to pay a consultant to obtain a similar set of insights and experiences. At some point, you will walk out of a sales call and recognize that you just provided your prospective clients with insights and ideas that are worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. You may discover that you’ve done this in an early conversation exploring change and because you haven’t won their business, you’ve delivered value a consultant would charge for without providing the solution. The fact that you can provide that kind of value gives you the confidence necessary to sell and win big deals in B2B sales.

Your confidence is one factor in providing your prospective clients to buy from and take your advice, and isn’t something you are going to learn in sales training. You have to work to get this for yourself. If you lack any of these beliefs, working to gain confidence in those areas will improve your approach and your results.

If a salesperson hit quota at their last job, they’re much more likely to hit quota at your organization, right?

Not so fast.

According to statistics from our sales professional user base here at RepVue, only 46.7% of sales professionals globally are achieving quota. And it’s even fewer in software sales organizations.

It turns out that quota attainment has become the exception, not the rule.

So that tried and true approach of, “Walk me through your attainment over the past few years,” is not only uncomfortable, it can turn the interview into a dance of half-truths and excuses.

And that’s not where hiring managers should be spending their time during the candidate evaluation process.

Where Hiring Managers Get Off-Base

As someone who has hired sales professionals for over 15 years — both as a sales leader/hiring manager, as well as a consultant helping start-ups with their early-stage sales hires — I made the decision a while back to stop asking candidates about their quota attainment in prior roles.

I didn’t make this decision because quota information was difficult to get. And it wasn’t because I believed they didn’t achieve quota if it wasn’t on their resume. I stopped asking because of a more important reason: I don’t care if the candidate hit quota in their last job.

That’s right. I don’t care. And if you’re a hiring manager, you shouldn’t care either.

The Question of Quota

In today’s market, if a candidate missed quota in their most recent sales role, it likely doesn’t have much, if any, bearing on whether they can hit quota in the role they’re applying for.

What hiring managers should care about is if they can hit quota in THIS job.

So, hiring managers, let’s stop wasting time trying to determine if the candidate hit quota in the past. Put all of your effort and energy into something much more important — asking questions to determine if the candidate has the potential hit quota in this, their potential future role.

This task isn’t easy, but if you truly believe the candidate’s selling skills are a fit for your organization, you’re already doing better than most hiring organizations. And if you can find that perfect fit, they’ll likely be set up to crush their quota in your organization regardless of whether they hit quota in the past.

6 Key Fit Factors When Hiring for Sales

So, how do you uncover if that perfect fit between the candidate and your organization exists? Let’s start with 6 critical fit factors that you can dig into during the interview process.

Is the role primarily an outbound or cold-calling role?

If you ask your new hire to make 60 cold calls a day when they’ve never made more than five in the past, they’re going to have a hard time succeeding.

How does the candidate’s sales methodology align with the vision of sales leadership? Does the candidate subscribe to, or have they been trained in, any specific sales methodologies? Their sales style should fit with the culture and vision your sales leadership is trying to instill.

How transactional is your sales process? A highly successful sales professional, closing 3 deals for $250k per year, may struggle transitioning to hitting that same size quota via 40 deals with a much smaller AOV. The deal cadence, or pipeline velocity, needs to fit what the candidate is comfortable with.

How does the candidate learn? Do you have a training program that will support them in the way they prefer to learn?

Is there an issue between big company vs. start-up dynamics? Many candidates who thrive in the chaotic world of a start-up would run screaming for the exit after a week at a company with 5,000 reps. And the same goes for a candidate who’s used to the formal structure of that 5,000-rep sales organization. They will struggle as the first sales hire for your start-up.

What about inside vs. outside sales? Has the candidate only thrived in roles where they’re in front of the customer or prospect? If your process is primarily phone-based, that’s potentially an issue. They should have experience in the type of selling you focus on.

It’s important to remember that if there isn’t a fit for some or all of these factors, it doesn’t make this sales professional a bad hire. However, they may certainly be a bad hire for YOUR organization.

There will always be areas that you’ll need to compromise on, but don’t rush to fit a square peg in a round hole. Know what those areas of concern are upfront, be open about them, and manage against them.

On the flip side, it’s as important for the candidate to deeply understand your organization as it is for you to understand the candidate. This can only happen when the hiring organization and manager practice extreme transparency during the interview process.

How to Discover “Fit”

The first place to start is to allow more time for questions in all phases of the interview. Try setting aside a separate call for key candidates for THEM to ask questions.

Provide important resources up front, after the candidate gets to a certain stage of the process, like:

• A sample comp plan structure
• An org chart
• Details on territories
• Quota capacity vs. TAM

All of this information is designed to allow the hiring manager AND the sales professional to determine if they’ll be successful in that role, hit their targets, and advance their career. Both parties need to be equally confident that this partnership will work out, as both parties have a lot at stake.