The Most Important Item To Measure With Your Elearning Management System

What's most important - measuring completion, enrollment, satisfaction or how your training is impacting job performance and business objectives?

Taking Part In A Trade Show? Then Ban Your CEO!

Trade Shows can sometimes bring out the worst in people. This couldn't happen to you... could it?

Sales Prospecting Tools

Prospecting and making cold calls does not take a lot of work. We just need to add a few things to our skill base and we can have all the prospects we need.

When Mistakes Happen - Do What You Are Trained To Do

In my story, we admitted our mistake and were able to show the results of my error. We simply performed what we needed to do to resolve the situation. I remember willing to do just about anything we could if the customer would have asked. The customer didn't ask and remained a key customer for years because we were human and continued to perform for them.

Stop Shaking A Stick At Sales Training

Corporate America has come to rely on Sales Managers, who were in many cases top performers themselves, to develop their team's talent. The problem is these people were promoted because of their excellent sales skills, not their employee development skills. In other cases we rely on HR or T&D to develop these programs when they don't have a sufficient understanding of the dynamics of sales to do so. How do we fix that?

Time Management - It is an Impossibility

I believe in telling it 'like it is' using language and concepts that strip away misleading social conditioning. A few years ago I realized that the whole notion that people could somehow control or manage time was ridiculous. It is an impossibility, however, there certainly is something that we can control and we must if we are to be masters at selling.

Control of Your Personal Destiny, Part 2

Control of your personal destiny might very well be be contained within your awareness of the incredibly simple concept revealed in part 1 of this article. In this part, I hope to provide you with the equally simple strategy to take that newfound awareness and alter your life.

Selling Slumps, How to Pull Out Before You Crash and Burn - Tip 5

It matters very little whether you are a selling rookie or a seasoned professional, sooner or later, you will find yourself mired in a selling slump. There are a number of actions you can take to shorten the duration of the slump, lessen the financial impact and reduce the emotional drain that a slump can cause you. This is 'Tip 5' in a series.

Pre-Qualifying Prospects

The service business is a great deal different than businesses that offer lines of merchandise. Thus, transforming a prospective client into a paying customer is much more challenging. A client that signs a service agreement is agreeing to pay for something they can't see or touch, with the assurance they will receive services rendered within a specified period of time.

Preparation in Sales

The adage 'If you fail to prepare, then you should prepare to fail' rings true in sales and in all other professions. Many sales professionals expect to surpass sales quotas, become top producers, and achieve success without adequate preparation. This lack of preparation results in frustration and discouragement.

Receptionist or Personal Assistant, Getting Past the First Line of Defense,

Many salespeople experience a great deal of frustration when making an initial attempt to reach the proper decision maker in an organization. They are met first by a receptionist or personal assistant whose primary job is to protect their boss's valuable time from being wasted. This can create an adversarial situation between them and the salesperson. This two pronged strategy can defuse it in many cases.

Set the Proper Pace of Your Sales Cycle with this Important Tool

The higher the speed at which a salesperson moves through the sales cycle, regardless of the reason, will inversely affect his or her overall performance in terms of closing ratios, customer satisfaction statistics and referral business. Because of this fact, it is vital to establish the slowest effective speed for each individual prospect. It's quite simple really. Here is how to achieve it.

Casual vs. Business Dressing for Success

As late as the 1870s surgeons could be seen performing open operations on their patients while dressed in Brooks Brothers suits with full Bemberg lining, corozo buttons, and double besom flap pockets. They would wear a white pinpoint cotton dress shirt with French cuffs, forward point collar, and the tie would be optional. Today’s doctors don a pair of Wal-Mart scrubs in the color of the season and a pair of Nike Air tennis shoes to perform a three-hour operation.

Tools for Selling Success, Measuring Your Ratios

Master salespeople are always looking for a performance edge. One of the tools that they employ is measuring their performance ratios. The average salesperson works hard to avoid dealing with those measurements. In organizations that try to track performance, many salespeople are either afraid of the process or they actively try to fudge the numbers. Here is why they do that along with why it is so beneficial for individual salespeople to track properly.