The move to digital selling is accelerating. Will your sales organization be left behind? Does your sales organization have a plan of action in place to remain competitive by employing digital selling platforms, tools and processes?

5 minute read

Time to “ELAvate” your sales team for record breaking revenue generating 2022. Here are my favorite planning and execution tools to drive and motivate your sales teams in 2022.

January 2022 will soon be upon us and many sales teams will start the year with increased sales targets founded on the vision of a positive post Covid world. I recently received two research papers from Korn Ferry and Allego on the state of sales enablement and sales team productivity. In this blog I will focus on six research insights that may affect your sales team success and actions that can increase your sales team competitiveness.

Recently the blog post from the Growth Institute showed on how to model your business, or in this blog, your sales team to perform like world class winning sports teams. Jack Daly, the blog author, says “ If most businesses learned how to run themselves the way sports teams do, I guarantee they would achieve more sales and faster growth with lower costs and operating expenses.”

Over the past 30 years I have observed and coached very successful B2B salespeople. Here are my observations on what characteristics, or competence, a world class B2B salesperson has to have to consistently win and exceed sales revenue targets.

Sales strategy experts have determined during Covid the number one strategy to protect and grow revenue is to focus on keeping your existing customers loyal. The B2B salesperson does this by demonstrating excellent customer service skills with an attitude of servant leadership. Excellent customer service is the doorway to farm accounts to expand revenue.

The effective sales coaches differ widely in their temperaments and abilities, in what they do and how they do it, in their personalities, their knowledge, their interests—in fact, in almost everything that distinguishes human beings. But all effective sales managers perform only necessary tasks and eliminate unnecessary ones to achieve sales revenue targets.

Research indicates the top competency for B2B sales manager success is the “willingness to train and coach.” This is buttressed by the three pillars of “focused on quantitative results,” “conducting joint calls” and “taking initiative for sales success.”

Clarity through Covid is crucial in our B2B marketplace. A recent study by Tamara Schenk of Showpad is telling on the difficulty of closing B2B deals:

Doing research for my next sales training workshop, I assembled sales motivational quotes and pass them to you. Have a good read!

The Covid sales environment has spawned a lot of social media and marketing hype on how to sell virtually. Here are my insights (and those I have gleaned from McKinsey, Gartner, and Korn Ferry) on what I have gleaned is important to you as a B2B salesperson in the “Post Covid-Hybrid” marketplace.