When a “sales training session” shows up on your calendar, I’ll bet you immediately call your dentist to schedule an appointment. As my dentist always says, a bad day getting a root canal is better than a good day sitting in training. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been in almost a dozen training…

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XANT customers know how to sell. They make up the best sales teams in the world and operate like high-performance machines. But even high-performing machines can improve. From July 22 to July 24, XANT hosted 13 executives from seven companies for the first Executive Speed Camp. Those in attendance included: Apttus Blue Coat Coupa MarketStar…

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Traditionally, podcasts have been used primarily as news, entertainment, and social commentary. But, recently some key players in the sales industry have taken the time to transform their content into valuable podcasts for sales. Why is this helpful? Sales training can be extremely expensive. While nothing truly replaces a one-on-one, personalized training program, podcast are…

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When determining an inside sales plan, setting up a campaign can be a fun way to increase the effectiveness of your sales reps. While traditionally a marketing tool, a sales campaign helps determine a strategy, a plan of attack, and focuses a team to accomplish a task. It’s important that your campaign be strongly defined.…

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In the movie Moneyball the Oakland A’s baseball team was at the bottom of their game. To quote the movie … “There are rich teams, there are poor teams, then there is 50 feet of crap, and then there is us.” Based on a true story of the 2002 Oakland A’s who used statistics to hire…

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Everyone goes through sales slumps. If you haven’t yet, you’re either too new to the profession . . . . or you just haven’t been doing it long enough.

We’ve got some sharp sales reps here at XANT, so I thought I’d talk to them about what they do to get out of their personal pipeline woes.

  1. Separate the real opportunities from the fluff: “When I hit a slow period, sometimes I’ll throw some stuff overboard and just start over. When your pipeline sucks, it means you’re wasting time chasing stuff you can’t really close. Focus on generating better deals instead of chasing garbage.” — R.J. Tracy
  2. Focus on “touch” quality, in addition to quantity: “Our software [the XANT Lead Response Management Suite] has built-in safeguards to make sure we do enough follow-up, but let’s be honest, not all follow-up activity is created equal. A call is a call, as far as your numbers are concerned, but being ready and engaged . . . .
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As the founder of top-level consultancy High-Yield Methods in Minneapolis, Dick Lee has worked as a sales and customer process guru for over three decades, doing VP- and C-level consulting with companies like Boeing, 3M, and Microsoft.

In an outstanding article entitled “Sales Lead Programs—Another Inconvenient Truth,” Dick tears apart bad lead management practices with a metaphorical sledgehammer, but in the process brings up a just-as-critical side effect: “We now have and have had innumerable clients dying to hire good, experienced salespeople, but the well has about run dry.”

Sales people get paid a lot of money, and perform “hard, essential work,” but in Dick’s mind are often treated as “Joy Riders. Parasites. Necessary Evils.” Sales is the “corporate whipping boy,” he states, because “anyone having that much fun deserves to be punished, eh?” If the well is running dry, it’s because professional sales reps are “treated so badly that most up-and-coming business professionals won’t put up with those levels of disrespect . . . . “

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