Dave Stein's Blog for Sales Leaders

Short post today.  We’ve got a few clients who are pedaling hard (perhaps peddling hard as well), trying to wrap up Q2, and I’ve been on the phone… BTW If you’re a sales leader and reading this today, June 30, you either work for a privately-held company, are way ahead of your targets for the [...]

Filed under: Hiring, Relationships, Sales Tactics | No Comments »

I get a lot of calls from people who want to “network” or “pick my brain” or “partner with ESR.”  (Translation: They’d like me to spend 30 to 60 minutes on the phone with them and provide feedback on their resume, or introduce them to people in my network, or give them sales leads, or coach them on [...]

Filed under: Professionalism, Relationships | 1 Comment »

Two years ago I wrote an article entitled The Fear and Loathing of Sales Training.  It’s been reprinted again and again on the web (with permission, thankfully).  For those of you that haven’t read it, or would like to read it again, here it is.  Feel free to pass it around.

Filed under: Competition, Research | No Comments »

Approximately 40% of sales people leave their jobs each year, either willfully, or involuntarily.   There are a number of factors that contribute to this terrible situation.  I’ve talked about a number of them on this blog.  ESR has some very strong recommendations, as well, based upon our research.  But that’s an issue for another day.
What [...]

Filed under: Hiring | 4 Comments »

Quite often I get questions about how long it will take to complete various sales performance improvement interventions.  (It’s the business equivalent of, “Are we there yet?”)
I’ll answer some of those questions one by one before I philosophize:
Q: How long it does it take to get a sales team performing at quota (and remaining there…)?

[...]

Filed under: CRM, Methodology, Sales Training Companies | No Comments »

I’m a sales training industry researcher and analyst.  Here are some more of my observations about sales training companies.  In this installment, I’ll discuss vendor evaluation and selection.
Selecting a sales training company is easy to do—incorrectly.  Companies do it all the time.  (One of the reasons I founded ESR is to provide guidance in this [...]

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What will the next guest speaker at your sales kick-off meeting deliver?

Content?
Motivation?
Entertainment?
Results?

If you are planning, attending, expecting results from, or paying $5,000 to $50,000 (or more!) for the privilege of listening to someone talk for an hour or so, you need to think carefully before you answer that question.
As part of my discovery process for [...]

Filed under: Measurement, Presentations | No Comments »

When we ask sales executives how they measure sales performance, 60% of them tell us that they don’t measure it at all.  Of the remaining 40%, a majority depend solely on a single trailing indicator-performance against quota.  If other metrics are even mentioned, they are typically the size/trending of their pipeline or the number of [...]

Filed under: Measurement, Methodology, Research, Sales Training Companies | 2 Comments »

How many sales people do you think regularly seek out tips about selling on websites, in magazines, books, newsletters, etc.?  We have not done any research on this (if someone has, let me know), but I would expect the answer is: “a lot.”
What’s wrong with it?  Same answer: a lot.
Here’s why.  Many salespeople think that [...]

Filed under: Methodology, Sales Strategy, Sales Tactics | 1 Comment »

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