Fred Diamond‘s work at the Institute for Excellence in Sales (IES) and advocacy for Lyme disease awareness highlight how personal challenges can enhance one’s professional capabilities. In a recent conversation with Collin Stewart on the Predictable Revenue podcast, Fred shared how an unusual path involving his battle with Lyme disease made him a better sales leader.

Sales leaders are the lever for a high-performing sales organization. One study cited in the Harvard Business Review found that 69% of sales reps who exceeded quota rated their managers highly. The same study showed that just 3% of reps who gave their leaders low ratings then turned around and gave their organization a high rating. In other words, how a rep views their leader is how they view the organization.

One of the best ways to set your sales team up for success is to create an action plan. Instead of simply assigning target sales goals and leaving them at that, an action plan reverse engineers how your team will reach those numbers, laying out the best tactics and strategies. This post will walk you through four steps to create an action plan to improve sales performance, along with sales action plan ideas and tips to keep your team on track to achieving the target.

According to Hubspot Research, only 3% of people consider sales reps to be trustworthy. If you want prospects to consider buying from you, first, you need to overcome that skepticism and win their trust. That’s where sales rapport comes in. Building sales rapport is an essential part of the outbound sales process. If prospects don’t believe you’re telling the truth about your product, they’ll never convert into buyers.

There’s a lot of advice on how to be better at cold calling, but the best cold call tips focus on the conversation over metrics. Cold contact tends to put prospective customers on edge; the key to booking more meetings is to approach each call to make a genuine connection. As the world’s leading experts on sales development, we’re sharing our favorite cold calling methods, on-call best practices, and must-haves for effective cold calling.

Whether you call them New Year’s resolutions or goals, many of us are setting action items to help us improve in 2022. Scrolling through LinkedIn recently, I saw several sales leaders sharing their goals. One common theme: They want to empower their sales teams to succeed.