How many times has this happened to you? You think you've found "the one" -- the new sales superstar -- and within a few weeks to a few months they just don't work out.

You're smart. You're successful. You know how to run a business. You hire people for other roles in your company all the time and it works out fine. So, what the heck is going on with these sales hires?

There are many reasons you're not accurately predicting the effectiveness of your sales hires and we will be covering all of them in our upcoming webinar on June 7th but let's take a look at a few of the biggest reasons you're betting on the wrong sales horses.

Reason #1 - You're Just Guessing

Would you buy a house or a piece of commercial property without an accurate inspection? Well chosen salespeople are at least as valuable to you as any other business asset. Inspect what you expect.

Can they do the job? In other words, you must test them for the specific set of skills they need to perform...

I am proud to be Irish. And I must say that I have experienced a great deal of luck in my life and in business. I try to lace that luck with hard work and smart decision making too. It's paid off. And every day, I go to work for my family and my clients and I try to use my combination of luck and hard work to help others get lucky too. I really believe the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is infinitely deep enough for all of us.

So when clients do silly things that push them farther away from the pot of gold it gets my Irish up -- especially when things are going well for them. But that's when people, even smart people, make silly mistakes.

Here's an example of one of them from my colleague at Objective Management Group, Dave Kurlan. You can read about it here.

Thanks for reading and I hope you have a very lucky St. Patrick's Day! 

If you'd like to schedule a Quick Chat with Cheryl, click here.  Please consider following me to read more of the content I...

"Nothing happens until somebody sells something."

That makes getting sales recruitment right one of the single most important things a company must do to grow. And it's not easy - for many reasons. Not the least of which is that even a terrible salesperson is probably better at controlling the interview than you are. They've done it more and they will focus all of their energy on telling you all the things that make you want to believe that they'd be perfect for the position.

And you believe them. Why? The answers to that question run the gamut and I think I have heard them all. When clients hire my firm to help them with their sales and sales leadership hiring initiatives, the most difficult part of my job is to get them to stop falling in love with candidates who haven't been fully vetted.

"The most difficult part of my job is to get them to stop falling in love with candidates who haven't been fully vetted."

But thinking wrong feels so right. Until it doesn't...

Warren Bennis, one of my teachers and one of the world's finest business scholars, said, "Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality." And in our lifetime we have witnessed great feats of leadership and we have benefitted greatly from it. As I sit in my Aeron chair, typing on LinkedIn's publishing platform on the Macbook Pro that sits on my desk, listening to Mozart's Requiem streaming from my iPhone, I am in awe of the vision held by the creators of each of these things I have come to rely on to accomplish my work.

I think about Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick as they set about designing a chair like no other. Can't you hear the critics? Does the world want another chair? For goodness sake, it's not even upholstered! And who's going to spend that kind of money on it? But Stumpf and Chadwick stayed with the vision and "owned the problem" as Bill Stumpf was fond of saying. And what came out of their vision and their process for the Aeron chair...

Look around any company this time of year and you will find executives and managers preparing for year end inventory counts.  It’s imperative to know exactly how much capital your business has tied up in inventory and if this is a good investment. If the business has too much inventory or too much of the wrong inventory, it can negatively impact cash flow and put future business opportunities at risk.

But what about the other inventory?  The one that doesn’t get counted.  The one you’re sinking cash into regularly but without any analytics on whether or not it’s a good investment.  I’m talking about taking stock of your sales organization.

This is the inventory of inventories because this is the collective asset responsible for turning the physical inventory you have invested in.  You know it’s true yet you spend exponentially more time and money analyzing what’s in your warehouses than you do analyzing the...

In Part 1 of this series, I discussed some staggering statistics about sales management. You can read the article here.  

1 out of 5 sales managers don’t meet the criteria to effectively manage a sales team

1 out of 3 sales managers are not able to be trained or coached to perform more effectively

Only 1 sales manager 15 is considered elite

4 out of 5 sales managers are ineffective at coaching

In today's economy, you must understand the impact this has on your business. 

Why Don’t Sales Managers Manage Effectively?

There are many reasons for these sales management failures, all of which can be traced back to skills, specific sales and management weaknesses, and core beliefs around selling and management.  Most sales managers got to where they are by being great salespeople with leadership traits.

Unfortunately, leadership traits are not the same as management skills and sales is quite a different job from sales...

My friend and colleague, Dave Kurlan, wrote an article earlier this year that debunks the myths about what elite sales professionals really do differently that make them so successful.

I am sharing it because no one else I know can so clearly and eloquently shed light on what really matters to sales success. Dave is the father behind the science of sales performance. I refer to his work every day in my own business and have used these concepts to transform sales organizations.

This is not a listicle. It's a tome, so be sure to bookmark this article because you are going to want to save it until you can sit down and really read it.

You can find the article here.

Don't try to skim thorough it. Take your time and read all of it, even the comments. It will take you about 45 minutes, about the time takes to stream your favorite show on Netflix. But, unlike what happens after the Netfilx escape, you will be changed for the better. And more than that, hopefully, you will be empowered to...

Sales Leaders play a pivotal role in a company’s ability to reach targets and satisfy the needs of their customers and their shareholders. That means their primary job is to put your products and services in the hands of more of the people who will use them to solve their biggest problems, while creating profits for the people who own the company. That’s a problem when most sales managers don’t qualify for the job.
Here are the statistics:

1 out of 5 sales managers don’t meet the criteria to effectively manage a sales team.

1 out of 3 sales managers are not able to be trained or coached to perform more effectively

Only 1 sales manager in 15 is considered elite

4 out of 5 sales managers are ineffective at coaching

But the statistics only point to the real issues.  The real issues are about what is getting missed and what missing means for your revenues and profits.  So, how are your sales managers keeping you from having the business...

A CEOs job is execution. In the book, Execution, Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan define it as a discipline that is integral to strategy; a major job of the business leader; and a core element of the business.

“Execution is a systematic process of rigorously discussing hows and whats, tenaciously following through, and ensuring accountability.” ~ Execution

In our work with clients prior to implementing a new initiative or installing a new system or process, we evaluate their sales organization -- their strategies, systems, processes and people. We do it in the context of their industry, their business model, their marketplace and under their unique challenges. And we do it for the purpose of providing the company leaders with the information they need to make better decisions and become better at executing on their goals and their their vision. Every recruitment or training and development program begins with this step.

Our analysis goes deep and wide and answers the...

In yesterday's article, I wrote about the first 10 of 39 ways CEOs can perfect their sales recruitment. If you didn't see it, you can find it here. Today I will focus on the next 10 best practices, most of which have to do with effective sales leadership. But it all begins with you, the CEO, taking a deep dive into your strategies, your systems and processes, and your people.

If you were buying your sales organization today and had to evaluate it, what would you find?

How effective are you at generating more of the right kind of business?

How much more effective could you be?

What would it really take?

How long would it take?

And what is it worth?

In other words, what is the opportunity in dollars and cents for you to get the answers to some pretty difficult questions and commit to making the changes you need to make for those dollars - typically millions of them - to manifest in your business?
These are just a few of the answers we provide our clients before they launch a...