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Tag : sales skills

By Marguerite Zimmerman

Best skill testing question when hiring a sales manager

When hiring a sales manager ideally you want someone who is wired to coach and grow your team.

Many sales people are wired to compete and win, not to be nurturers and coaches. When interviewing for sales managers, I’ve found this one question is a tell all.

The fact is, I’ve had only a small handful of candidates answer this question really well.

By Marguerite Zimmerman

Powerful Questions

Abraham Maslow said in 1966: “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

My observations when working with sales teams is that they know they need to ask questions, yet they have rarely thought a lot about their questions. While they may use some open-ended questions, most of their questions aim at getting information about the current state of the prospect. Without realizing it they have one tool and they are treating every question like a nail.

The outcome is simply this – few of the questions are powerful.

By Marguerite Zimmerman

Powerful questions increase conversion rates

Landing great questions takes some practice

Anyone in a role where influencing matters most of the time or some of the time can drastically improve their communication effectiveness through improved question asking skills

Being in the business of sales and sales development, my role over the years has required that I wear many hats During a typical week I often wear the hat of sales leader, salesperson, trainer, coach,

By Marguerite Zimmerman

Why I see training as the key ingredient to organic growth

No matter what your organic growth strategy is, having well-trained talent to support that strategy is a key ingredient.
Recently, I read a Harvard Article, How We Made our Sales Training More Effective by Making it Harder by Jeff Winters, it made me chuckle. So many companies view training as simply a box they need to check. It looks good if I give my team some training, or I’m expected to give them training, etc. Consequently, companies typically chose training that is easy for everyone involved.

By Marguerite Zimmerman

Continuous Improvement – Protecting Margin

Protecting margin is one of the key aspects of “perform” for a sales force.

Recently we were gaining insight into one of our customer’s sales goals. To do this we explored the current Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) they used to measure sales success. We then asked them to share how top performers were doing against the KPI’s.

What we heard was not as uncommon as you might think. The senior team shared that they were having challenges around defining their top performers. Why? There are several reasons top performers are mislabeled. In this case, it was one of the most common mistakes.

By Marguerite Zimmerman

Driving Organic Growth

Do you find your focus on current accounts at the cost of acquiring new ones?
On one hand, it’s good business to focus on customer retention. Studies cite that the cost of acquiring a new customer ranges from 5 to 25 times the cost of retaining a current customer.

By Marguerite Zimmerman

The Sales Manager As Coach

How important is sales coaching to your team’s success?

Our results show that when the sales manager is actively involved in Momentium and reinforces what is learned, sales lift is increased and into the double digits

As it turns out, 74% of top performing companies say that sales coaching is the most important factor in sales enablement and readiness

And perhaps most importantly, 46% of sales representatives

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Best skill testing question when hiring a sales manager
Coaching on effective communication
How advanced communication skills impact productivity
Powerful Questions
Powerful questions increase conversion rates
Why I see training as the key ingredient to organic growth
Continuous Improvement – Protecting Margin
Driving Organic Growth
3 Ways to Avoid the Price Vortex