Sales culture insights to help empower your team
and energize your business.
Can You Delegate?
ToddCohen.com Sales Community,Delegation is a skill and one that we all need to be very good at if we are to be great sales leaders and build sales culture. We all know that our business is well...busy and one of the many things we can learn to do better is to delegate and empower people. Effective delegation is a skill that I have observed great sales professionals do well to it is a strength that separates good from great.
The Most Valuable Component
ToddCohen.com Sales Community~ Here is a question to think about as we enter the last quarter and 2009. How do you leverage the value of your customer relationships, both for yourself and for your customer? You are in this business relationship together and so you are both actually selling to each other, since both will benefit from the others’ success. You, yourself, will make it your business to work collaboratively to establish trust and a sense of interdependence between you. Your customer is the most valuable component of your business, to say the least. You must, I repeat, must leverage that value to create your own success. When a customer complains, expresses concerns or dissatisfaction, or even says “ No” ...
Sales Rep or Sales Professional?
ToddCohen.com Sales Community,The moment of truth has arrived! It is time for you to ask yourself the most important question of your sales career? Who are you? I dont mean in a human sense but in a professional sense.Are you a sales rep or a sales professional? As someone with sales career (and we are all in sales) we need to always ask ourselves which category we fall into. Do you know the difference? This topic has been one of intense and interesting debate lately not only with my clients but in the sales community as well. How do we know? Is it easy to tell? One simple way to think about this is that a sales professional is one who thinks of his or her territory as a complete business ...
The Relationship between 6 – Sigma and Sales Culture?
Hello ToddCohen.com Sales Community! Your company has announced that it will launch a 6-Sigma program or perhaps it launched such a program a while ago. So what does this mean for Sales? How will it be different than the prior alphabet soup of process and quality improvement programs like QMS, SPC, TQM, …? Should you get involved in this and how should you participate? Fundamentally, 6-Sigma says: Make the business processes effective and efficient by making them reliable, predictable, and focused on customer recognized value. This focus and emphasis ties into several recent topics you have seen in these columns and provides opportunities for you: Sales Culture and Value Proposition. Read more in this months article by Geoff Rhine....
What Motivates your Sales People?
Todd Cohen.com Sales Community,As a sales leader we have firmly established your most important role is to develop, coach and mentor your sales team. Right? Right. You will succeed by having well trained and developed sales professionals who deliver revenue. Now, the question I want you to think about is this - do you know what motivates your people? Have you taken the time and really thought about each of your sales people and what is each individuals motivation to be at your company and be successful? Is it money? Is it challenge or the opportunity to work for a solid company? Is it for future advancement? Do you know what actually gets your people up each and every day, brings them to work and motivates them to be successful? If you do not know, then I want to suggest to you that you are accountable to know that. This ...
“I See Sales People”
Good Morning ToddCohen.com Sales Community-Ok, I its time to confess my secret. I see sales people everywhere. Every time I interact with someone I see some element of selling. I have always said that "Everyone is in Sales" and I see it all the time. Do you see it? The Barista at Starbucks, flight attendants and ticket agents ( including one excellent agent from Northwest Airlines who recently went above and beyond to help me) the locksmith I had to recently use and so on.So why do I think that these are all sales people in some fashion? One is that they are all engaged with a client and are trying in some fashion to help and serve. How they handle there duties leaves an impression on me and will certainly influence ...
Energy Management
Hello Todd Cohen.com Sales Community!Are you thinking about energy management? I bet you are thinking that I am talking about how to conserve gas or reduce your energy bills. Nope. I am not.I was in a sales meeting with a client today and the topic was one that I have spoken about with you often. The topic I refer to is time management. Great sales professionals are good at managing and getting the most from the hours each day ( and nights we work). Time management s a key part of being successful and feeling good about what we do. OK, now during this meeting, we started talking about time management as a ...
Systems Driven
Hello Sales Community-How many times have we as sales professionals heard the complaint that we could not get a deal done because there was some issue with the systems at our company? I once worked for a company that had no less than 17 billing systems! Yes, you read that right! 17 separate and discreet billing systems. In this era of mergers and acquisitions, companies are buying each other long before they think about how to merge and integrate billing systems to make it easy for the client to do business. Now, you may be asking yourself...."is this another Todd rant"....? Well, sort of. We as sales professionals cannot let this back office dysfunction get in the way of us bringing great solutions to clients problems. Just today I was taking to a coaching client of mine ...
Sales Culture and Service!
Hello ToddCohen.com Sales Community!Here is a thought for the day.....have you though about the fact that great sales cultures are built on delivering great service? OK, maybe this is not your first and last though of the day, but as sales professionals and part of the overall sales community we must be the ones who are experts at delivering exceptional service to our clients. This is really not a negotiable point.
I believe passionately that there is a strong correlation between the concept of delivering great service (which is selling, albeit subtle) to creating a positive brand image in the mind of the client and this will of course directly affect the revenue line. So, to that end ask
...Starbucks.
Dear ToddCohen.com Sales Community, I love my coffee ( yes, I do actually drink decaffeinated). Yes, this post has virtually nothing to do with sales and I dont care. I was finishing my walk this morning and stopped into my regular Starbucks to get my large decaf coffee. I refuse to say the words "venti" or whatever. Anyway, I am amazed that people can ask for a drink that's at least 16 different words and do it with straight face. I am equally amazed that the people behind the counters can repeat it and it gets made correctly. So, I began to think about how these people who work at Starbucks might ...
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