Dave Stein's Blog for Sales Leaders

As I mentioned in my earlier Springsteen post, I’m in Ireland, “on tour” delivering a series of workshops for sales executives.  One module covers hiring sales people.
Directly responsible for hiring the wrong sales people are the sales leaders who haven’t developed that skill and don’t have a process. At the root of the problem, however, [...]

Filed under: Hiring | No Comments »

I’m in my hotel room in Dublin, Ireland.  It’s Sunday evening.  Tomorrow morning I’m with a group of sales executives as part of the Dublin Institute of Technology’s International Selling Programme sponsored (in part) by Enterprise Ireland.  I’ve got two days here in Dublin, then off to Cork.  Then back to Dublin next week.
I arrived [...]

Filed under: On the Road | 1 Comment »

Among other things, we work with companies in facilitating an understanding of their own sales performance improvement requirements as well as guiding them through the sales training vendor selection process where appropriate.  
One client of ours issued RFPs to a long list of six sales training vendors.  The RFP included significant sales process work, sales training [...]

Filed under: Sales Training Companies | 3 Comments »

That’s a question I’ve been asked again and again, by journalists, CSOs, training company CEOs, CLOs, consultants and our clients, when they first engage with us.
When I tell them that’s not a question I can easily answer, they may think I’m trying to sell them something.  Well, in essence, I am. I’m trying to sell [...]

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From phone calls we keep receiving it’s apparent that there is a boatload of sales VPs out there who still don’t understand that long-term sales effectiveness improvement doesn’t come from shrink-wrapped speeches or out-of-the-box, stand-alone, sales training programs.
I spoke with the distressed training director of a large company who told me that he was given a [...]

Filed under: Sales Training Companies | 1 Comment »

I’ve written and spoken alot about the subject of the fitness of salespeople with respect to their jobs.
Brian Lambert, who is both the Chairman of the United Professional Sales Association, and Director, Sales Development & Performance for ASTD, invited me to contribute to a whitepaper on the subject of salesperson competency.  (In fact I’m a [...]

Filed under: Hiring | No Comments »

I read a lot of books.  I just got a Kindle as a gift.  It is one of the coolest pieces of technology I’ve had in my hands.  In case you don’t know about Kindle, it’s a device on which you can read books.  The books get downloaded from the Kindle (it’s an Amazon brand) site via EVDO. [...]

Filed under: Book Recommendation, Technology | No Comments »

I get emails and calls from people writing books about sales and selling.  Here is some of what I learned and experienced as a result of writing How Winners Sell:

It was harder to produce my 256-page book than the 512-page one I started out with.  I spent almost as much time taking the book down to a sellable size [...]

Filed under: Marketing | 3 Comments »

Too many companies (especially SMEs–small to medium-size enterprises) have either no formal analyst relations function or one that is managed by someone who is not qualified for the job. An approach like that leaves those companies unprepared for the ongoing and very competitive battles for positioning that take place within some industries.
How a company manages [...]

Filed under: Industry Analyst, Marketing | 7 Comments »

In my recent post about the fragmented sales training industry I wrote about the hundreds of smaller sales training/consulting shops out there.  Salesengineering.com is one worth noting. (ESR published a piece on them a while back when they were still TechSellEnts). 
The reason I’m excited about them today is their most recent newsletter with presents a case study quantifying the [...]

Filed under: Measurement, Sales Training Companies, Technology | 1 Comment »