No one ever said the sales profession was easy. That’s why it’s so difficult for sales managers to recruit and retain highly productive, professional salespeople. Improving sales performance and stemming the tide of defectors is a hot topic, although managers have few answers or plans to address. The 80 – 20 rule is often…

How Dell, Splunk, Glassdoor, GitHub, RingCentral and Others Cracked The Code   Today’s massive, complex sales organizations need to have the flexibility to see their quarterly and bi-quarterly forecasts in lots of different dimensions. In many cases they need to see their rollup forecast by product, region, geography, territory, sales VP, sales director AE, splits…

Some companies are changing the game on how they execute their sales operations. They have found a competitive advantage that their competition just hasn’t had the discipline to implement. These companies are relying on data in a very different way. Every company has plenty of data and in many cases too much data. What is…

Customer facing selling time is precious every quarter. Sales teams have to quickly determine which deals will close and can’t afford to spend a lot of time on ‘what if’ scenarios. Time is equally valuable on the Hubble Space Telescope. Every operational second is reserved months to years in advance. So, imagine the response when…

For many B2B technology sales leaders, it’s “nail biting” time. Many of us have an April 30th quarter end and we’re all trying to close as much as we can to help make our forecasts and quotas. Much of the outcome of the next few days will be achieved the old-fashioned way, with hard work,…

In many industries, the chief revenue officer (CRO), also known as the VP of worldwide sales, and the chief financial officer (CFO) are typically not the best of friends. This isn’t great, because these two roles need to get along for companies to thrive and succeed in a competitive marketplace. In fact, in healthy companies,…