Sales Culture Development: Take-Aways from TAG Panel
I attended another TAG Sales Leadership event last week — “Sales Culture Development”. I’m appreciating all these events as I continue to develop as a sales professional (should never really stop learning) and as we, at SalesWise, develop our own sales team.
Given the panel discussion was about sales culture, there was heavy emphasis on how to engage sales professionals as well as reviewing the metrics that sales professionals are evaluated on.
The panel included:
- Tom Snyder, VorsightBP
- Paul Schmitz, Transportation Insight
- Scott Miller, CEO RampedUp
- Frank Tumminia, QGenda
- Johnny Walker, Walker Group/ Integrity Solutions (host)
Here were the main topics I took away:
- Technology presents great opportunities and challenges. It’s important to recognize the dependency we become on technology and how personal effort and attention “disrupts” mass sales efforts. However, in a day of technology bombardment, personalization can be the key to sales.
- 50-50 training on soft and hard skills. Much of sales comes down to effort, and yet, there are far more resources on teaching sales pros the hard skills to sell, rather than how to address the person and relationship. “Listen through the solution”, don’t “sell through the solution”.
- Measure with balance. Tom Snyder, Founder of Vorsight BP and accomplished speaker, shared the importance of task clarity. It’s curious how much of sales metrics are based on outcomes (close X-many deals by the end of the quarter) which is akin to a football coach who tells his players to “score!” That’s obvious. What coaches really do is speak with players on the HOW and WHY.
- Focus on the funnel. Especially focus on, yes, the bottom of the funnel to ensure deals close, but then, focus on the top of the funnel. Everything in the middle tends to sort itself through effort.