The year 2002 seems like such a long time ago, yet with memories etched in my brain forever it seems like yesterday. In 2001 we were all rocked by 9/11 – a horrific time in Boston that I’ll never forget. A month and a half later, I left my corporate job as Director of Education for a SaaS company and did contract work until launching Score More Sales in early 2002.
The economy was very tough in 2002 so I decided I’d dedicate my work to helping companies grow revenues – something we still are committed to today here at SMS, although in a different way.
In the past 4 years I’ve spent a lot of time onboarding sales reps – more than 1,000 in a dozen different companies – all tech, telecom, manufacturing, and distribution sectors. In addition to working with lots and lots of sales reps I’ve worked with managers, VP Sales, and CxOs.
Looking back, it was tremendous to spend so much time “in the trenches” – not even from a manager’s perch but down at the phones and in front of PCs helping with prospecting cadences, emails that will get read, phone conversations that offer insight to the buyers at the other end of the phone, reps who felt unsure and in teaching self-management strategies.
It’s a perspective you cannot understand unless you’ve lived it. While I did a lot of training over the past 14 years, it was these past 4 that really kept me focused on the front line sales development efforts and how sales has fundamentally changed.
Now we Start at the C-Suite
Today at Score More Sales we have a “top-down” approach where way before we do any training or coaching on the front line with your reps, we help leadership diagnose what the real sales issues are within your sales ecosystem.
An ecosystem, like a biological community - after all, has many parts – and just like a nature ecosystem, you can’t just drop something into it and expect it to work.
Sales training gets "dropped in" on many sales teams. Training on its own doesn’t grow revenues.
People call us every week and email us nearly every day asking for a quote for sales training or for a single workshop at a sales off-site.
My first question is, “How do you know your team needs training?”
Often people throw training at a team that has other issues – issues that can be fixed, but not by a training class. We don’t do that anymore.
We Launched a New Website Too
In celebration of our newer leadership focus as an organization, we have launched a new website. You can see we are focused on helping teams improve, from the top down. What does that mean?
If the leader(s) of your company do not get involved with sales improvement efforts, they won’t succeed.
If you don’t address your sales reps’ hidden sales weaknesses, they will not be successful.
Most salespeople are NOT highly successful – only the top elite 6% are. The bottom 25% of sales reps are not well suited for a professional sales career and the rest are in the middle. Before you throw sales skills at your team – don’t you want to know if they are both trainable and coachable?
Here’s to many more years of sales improvement for great companies all around North America that we have had the privilege of working with – and those we have not had the pleasure of yet.
In the meantime, thanks for reading our blog – it has been going for ten years – and continues to be dedicated to helping you grow revenues.
We are always open to feedback on how we can be more insightful and better at adding value – just reach out and let us know how.
Lori Richardson helps mid-sized companies grow revenues by solving key issues in their sales department - like recruiting, retention, diversity hiring, process, pipeline and leadership. She speaks at CEO groups on topics of sales growth. Clients include companies in the technology, telecom, manufacturing, distribution, and professional services industries. Subscribe to the award-winning blog, follow her on Twitter
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