NCAA Basketball has a tremendous impact on my schedule starting now.  I’m looking at the schedule, kind of planning my time backward.  According to the NCAA Basketball site, final selection is on March 14, Opening Round Game is March 16, Fourth Round Completes on March 28 and the final four on April 3rd and 5th.
I’m [...]

Far too many salespeople turn to their boss or company for their personal motivation to be successful in sales. This is a huge mistake, as salespeople need to be responsible for their own motivation if they want to become successful.

You might have had a sales manager or boss that was an excellent motivator in your [...]

Image by Simon Clayson via Flickr

Two weeks ago I wrote a post called What Is The Primary Role Of A Sales Manager?. In that post I basically asserted the primary role of a sales manager is to facillitate an enviroment where people can be productive, but in retrospect I missed one key point. In addition [...]

About a month ago I went to the garden centre and purchased some seeds. I planted the seeds in a tray with some top grade compost and placed it in a prominent position in the green house making sure every day that the compost was watered enough and not dried out. Short of singing to [...]

#sales When we seek a seller of the new, a prerequisite must be passion. This individual should seem eager to get out of bed in the morning; even if they were in prison. The sales evangelist is self motivated. The statement alone is redundant. What need be done is not to inspire, but to make [...]

Professional Services are somewhat unusual in that the key sales tasks are almost always carried out by non-salespeople: the professionals who will supervise or perform the piece of work being bought.
As a result, what motivates them is often quite different from what motivates “normal” salespeople. Often, for example, by the time they’ve reached a stage [...]

In the classic sales movie, Glengarry Glen Ross, there is a scene in which Mr. Blake is brought in from corporate to lead a meeting to introduce a sales contest to the sellers.  And it goes like this:
Blake: We’re adding a little something to this month’s sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody [...]

If you haven’t noticed already the approach of the Sales Bloggers Union is to write every two weeks on a different topic concerning sales. Every day during each two week period a different member of the group puts up their post…. well we are supposed to… and mainly we do. The interesting point about the [...]

Sales managers, if you want to motivate your salespeople, focus less on

The common wisdom is that you use money (incentive) to motivate sales people, and while money is great (please send me any you currently do not want), it is in and of itself not a great motivator.  However coupled with other elements it is definitely a key component.

But if money was all it took, [...]