Leadership, Not Management

In mature markets and interchangeable products, in disruptive businesses and first-to-market situations, …when you need salespeople to do incredibly hard things, when they need to overcome rejection every day, they need to be bought into the vision. That is the fuel that keeps them going.

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The Golden Rules of Sales Do Exist

Now, why are there so many businesses that have a CFO, CTO, and COO, three internally focused functions, reporting to the CEO, but not a Chief Sales, Chief Commercial, or Chief Revenue Officer?

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The Enterprise Sale

99.9 % of all businesses in the US fall into the category of small- and medium-sized enterprises. Consequently, enterprise deals are few, and because of all the factors described above, they are hard to win. And with the obvious big win in sight, the risk is high.

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Creating an Accountability Culture

In a culture of accountability, people demonstrate high levels of ownership to think and act in the manner necessary to achieve organizational results. Rather than having accountability forced upon them, they enthusiastically take it upon themselves.

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What Exactly Makes an Interim Sales Leader Successful?

Van de Groep & Olsthoorn identify nine success factors and, like me, argue that the success of any fractional or interim executive assignment is primarily the result of matching the right leader into the organization. Let me put those nine factors to the test, though, specifically for a fractional or interim sales leader.

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Are You Happy with Your Conversion Rate?

Conversion rates have different definitions or meanings, depending on the nature of the business or the stage of the sales cycle. And in every case, they carry tremendous importance as an indicator of success and efficiency.

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Doing Business in a New Age

What about your greatest asset, your people, your employees? Who is tracking their data? How do we know when they need to be serviced, given a tune-up or a break, physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually? And yourself?

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The Remote Productivity Gain

Having worked from home and having led home-based and hybrid sales teams, these were always myths to me. But I guess it took the pandemic and the forced experiment almost all companies undertook about a year ago to expand the idea beyond sales and beyond those companies that had progressively embraced it already.

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The Ultimate Guide to Pre-Selling

Presales is the entire process of successfully closing a sale of a product that does not yet exist. Like the infamous vaporware, for example, a software or hardware product that has been advertised but is not yet available, either because it is only a concept or because it is still being written, designed or produced.

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The Ultimate Guide to Fee Models for Fractional Executives

Fee models for fractional executives have an art and a science, a balance between multiple factors, and an element of “as-high-or-as-low-as-desperation-takes-you” to it. And that is not too different from the permanent job market.

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