Strategy

This week, elevate your nonprofit leadership with insights from Mike Kenny. Discover the essential behaviors and strategies necessary for running a nonprofit like a successful business.

This week, elevate your customer service strategy with insights from Karl Schaphorst. Discover the pivotal role customer care plays in driving business success beyond reactive support.

Uncover the "four elements of sales success": prospecting, creating an ideal client wish list, achieving clarity and confidence in the sales process, and mastering effective negotiation techniques.

To help salespeople wrap up 2023 to best serve their clients/customers, Tim Roberts shares these three key takeaways for selling in an AI world.

A famous selling rule set out half a century ago by David Sandler, the founder of our company, goes like this: Don’t spill your candy in the lobby.

In this new episode of our podcast, we're honored to have the incredible Robin Green, a seasoned Sandler trainer from Richmond, VA.

From forging connections that defy the limits of the transaction to infuse every interaction with the magic of storytelling, Will Guidara unravels the threads of thought that have woven his path to success.

In this episode, Herb Cogliano, an experienced executive business coach who has helped numerous midmarket businesses achieve exponential growth, shares his insights and strategies on how to scale up your business to the next level.

AI will not replace salespeople... but AI-empowered salespeople will replace those salespeople who choose not to embrace the future of selling.

Making buyer-focused conversations happen consistently takes practice. Why? Well, unfortunately, we often fall into the trap of making the conversation about us, our stuff, and our company’s track record. The fact is, we’re hard-wired to do that, for the simple reason that we’re human beings.

In this episode, we sit down with Jennifer Smith, CEO and founder of Scribe, an automatic process documentation software. We discuss how people should go beyond simply looking at revenue when tracking sales success and instead focus on three levels.

In this episode, we sit down with Phil Johnson, the founder of the Master of Business Leadership program, to discuss the importance of emotional intelligence (EQ) and how influential it is to drive revenue, productivity, and profitability.

The intensity of this time of year can make selling for a living feel a bit like the playoff season! Here’s three proven strategies you and your team can use to close more sales opportunities, set the right end-of-the-year game plan, and make the final “inning” of your team’s fiscal year pay off.

Mike Montague interviews Matt Munson on How to Succeed at Doing a Pre-Mortem. Matt is the CEO of Sanity Labs.

Here’s a big question for sales leaders: How do you transfer the level of success that one team in your organization is delivering…so that everyone else on the sales side can find a way to deliver at the same level?

Mike Montague interviews John Rulin, author of Giftology: The art and science of using gifts to cut through the noise, increase referrals, and strengthen retention, on How to Succeed at Giftology.

These days, everyone is using online resources to initiate early prospecting discussions via digital media. Which is part of the problem. How do you avoid looking and sounding like everybody else in the digital realm? Below, you will find three simple strategies that will help you to stand out when you are prospecting online.

There’s been a lively debate among sales leaders in recent years and it centers on a big question: Has the digital selling environment we are all now operating in brought about a fundamental change in what it means to be a professional salesperson?

Create and circulate a documented playbook of best practices for anything and everything that occurs on an ongoing basis.

Mike Montague interviews Jason Ferrara, CMO at OutMatch, on How to Succeed at Digital Hiring.

Whether you are a sales leader responsible for an entire team’s performance or a single salesperson looking to hit your income target, Sandler’s KARE tool is a simple, powerful resource well worth spending some time with in Q4.

You probably don’t need me to tell you that 2020 has been a year like no other. Let’s be honest: there were (and are) no playbooks for magically reversing what’s happened in the marketplace during this historically tumultuous period.

Here is the reality – if you want to emerge stronger from this crisis environment and into the recovery, you’ve got to be spending this time “watching the tape.” That means, analyzing what you’re doing and identifying what you need to change to do better.

Most business leaders have grown accustomed to the comforting concept of “normal” market conditions.

Many of the sales leaders I talk to these days tell me that they are struggling with the issue of keeping the team(s) focused. Of course, this problem, which extends across all industries, comes at a time when many of us are directly or indirectly confronting issues related to the global pandemic, to financial pressures on both the personal and organizational scales, and to questions of social unrest. It's not all that surprising that sales teams are distracted. Everyone is distracted. The question is, what do leaders do about it when that distraction reaches the point where it affects revenue generation?

“The Critical Elements of Proactive Client Retention” is the most recent Sandler Research Center survey project, which closed to survey participants on May 31. We are now performing data analysis and will soon publish our complete findings. In advance of that report, I’ve followed, with great interest, the results from a single question asked among the 25 questions of the survey and want to share the findings.

Although the current unemployment rate has spiked up in many areas, hiring a productive salesperson can still be a huge challenge.

By using the Transactional Analysis model, we’re more likely to have better outcomes from challenging conversations, particularly in challenging times.

Hiring is one of the most important things we can do as a leader… and yet for many of the people, we work with, it remains something of a blind spot.

You are the executive, the leader of your organization. Executives make decisions all day, every day. The decisions you make affect everyone and everything in your organization.

It’s the start of a new year, with new goals, new challenges, and new opportunities. Each sales team is unique … but every team leader in every industry is, we believe, likely to be interested in the answer to a critical question about the year 2020: What can we do to improve closing ratios and margins this year? Here are three proven strategies to consider from the Sandler leadership playbook.

Have you ever wondered why a once-promising new hire is performing far below your initial expectations? From one perspective, what’s happening here is pretty simple: the person you hired is not the person you interviewed. The dynamic at work in an interview situation is similar to the dynamic at work on a first date./blog/how-succeed-onboarding-new-hires-podcast

Lisette Howlett, Sandler trainer and author of the new book, The Right Hire, shows you how to succeed with the attitudes, behaviors, and techniques needed to be more successful at hiring salespeople. Get the best practices collected from around the world.

Listen Time: 23 Minutes

Danny Wood, Sandler trainer, shares his thoughts about the best questioning strategies and how to get to the next level in your sales skills. Learn the attitudes, behaviors, and techniques of top performers, who are masters of this technique. 

Let’s be honest. Training and development initiatives meant to help sales teams succeed often go wrong.

Rule #25: Don't let sales people leave training in the classroom. Use a collaborative, equal partnership inside and outside the training room. Here's the bottom line for sales leaders. You may have other people doing training for your organization and training your people. But, ultimately, you are still responsible for your team.

Rule number 22. Hey, people don't argue with their own data. Use self-discovery to break through performance barriers. I learned this a long time ago. People remember 20% of what they see, 30% of what they hear, but 90% of what they say and do.

The How to Succeed Podcast is a public and free podcast from Sandler Training, the worldwide leader in sales, management, and customer service training for individuals all the way up to Fortune 500 companies with over 250 locations around the globe.

A while back I attended a one-day Prospecting Boot Camp for salespeople in the heart of downtown London. After nine days of visiting attractions abroad, I decided to let my wife do the final day by herself, so I could endeavor to learn the differences (if any) in the mindset of British salespeople from their American counterparts.

Have you ever wondered, “What am I doing wrong?” or, “How can I take my practice to the next level?” If you have, you’re not alone, and you’re in luck. Our newest book release, Asking Questions The Sandler Way, answers both of those quandaries and reveals so much more. In the book, Sandler trainer and author, Antonio Garrido, outlines how he revitalized his practice by changing his approach. Below we have identified a few key takeaways from the book.  

Bill Bartlett, a Sandler trainer and author of the best-selling Sandler book, The Sales Coach's Playbook, talks about his best practices for coaching your team through an organizational change. Bill shares his attitudes, behaviors, and techniques for coaching in this special episode.

Rule #19: Train Your Team. Make sure they get the skills necessary to do the job. Listen leaders, training is one of the four hats of leadership. You're going to spend anywhere from 20 to 30% of your time in your training function. Now, do I train less or more if I have experienced people? Of course, that's why you have a 20 to 30% swing. The more experienced people that you have, maybe the less that you have to train in some of the basic stuff.

Day in and day out, sellers are inundated with sales tips, new technologies, and industry updates. It’s easy to get caught up in the newest trends and forget about the basics. Today, I’ve outlined five simple tasks that salespeople can perform to improve their daily efficiency and make them more effective.

Students of the Sandler methodology quickly learn that selling is not about lists of compelling features and benefits; it’s not about clever closes or flashy literature and expensive marketing collateral. It’s not about hogging all the airtime in the meeting, nor is it about forcing our own agenda into the buying process. It’s not about jazzy presentations or brow-beating the other guy into submission.

Rule #16: Follow the four Goldie Locks steps. Use middle ground management as your strategy. We have two different types of managers if we go to extremes. We've got those who are detail oriented, and they're looking over your shoulders, and they're micro-managers. Micro-managers create an environment where people are afraid to act on their own, where they're afraid to take that next step. That's not a good place to live. 

Summer can be a challenging time for businesses. Reduced productivity from individuals going on vacations or taking time off can lead to slow sales. This common phenomenon is a subject we’ve covered before on the Sandler Blog, with tips on how to combat the slow season.

Sheila Musgrove is the national best-selling author of Hired!: How To Get The Zippy Gig. Insider Secrets From A Top Recruiter. She is also the founder and CEO of TAG Recruitment Group in Canada. She shares some amazing best practices for resumes and job interviews as well as what recruiters and hiring managers are really looking for in top candidates.

Sheila Musgrove is the national best-selling author of Hired!: How To Get The Zippy Gig. Insider Secrets From A Top Recruiter. She is also the founder and CEO of TAG Recruitment Group in Canada. She shares some amazing best practices for resumes and job interviews as well as what recruiters and hiring managers are really looking for in top candidates.

June is Effective Communications Month. With that fact in mind, consider the following cautionary tale for salespeople.

Have you ever lost a sale because of a problem you could have and probably should have dealt with earlier in the sales process? Have you ever lost a customer because you waited too long to tell them about a delay or defect? If you know a problem is going to blow up in your face, defuse it now.

The very best people skills that candidates will ever employ are on display in the interview situation as they try to win a position with your company. If they don’t capture you there, do you really want them in front of your valuable customers?

Within sales organizations, companies often perceive salespeople as a necessary evil, as opposed to an asset. If dollars and cents were attached to that asset, a company’s hiring practices may be taken more seriously and the loss of a salesperson may be seen as an expense.

Prospects will buy based on their needs and how a sales person can accommodate those needs. Are you fulfilling the wants of the customer, or are you just scratching the surface? 

As business leader, you want to build your organization, which requires that you make judgment calls about the best possible candidates for various positions. While fantastic hires are wonderful assets that help to grow your organization, bad hires can drag it down, costing the company unnecessary money and potentially eroding the brand. 

If you’re not getting enough of the right candidates, then you must put the right behavior in place to source “passive” candidates. It’s not enough to just place a job ad and sit back. The fact that they are not explicitly seeking your opportunity presents a bit of a challenge; you have to approach them differently than you would an active candidate.

You are not doing business like you did 50 years ago, so why sell like you did 50 years ago? Learn how your sales team can tackle road blocks in today`s market and break away from traditional selling methods.

A salespersons cookbook is a strategy to reach weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals.  Take your selling to the next level by developing a recipe for successful selling using three simple steps.

As sales managers, we’re all familiar with the conversation. One of your sales reps is making the case to pursue an opportunity and you question why. “It’s a big deal” is the response, “It’s right in our power swing”. Or perhaps, with candor entering the room, “I really need to win this”. And these are all reasons, of course. But what do they really mean? What’s the real business sense for your firm in pursuing the deal? And what’s the business risk?

A cookbook for sales are the “ingredients” or sales activities you should be doing to achieve optimum results. But how do you develop a cookbook?

At times, sales people run into snags when preparing their personal strategic plan for the New Year. They know what they want to say, but find it difficult to put it into words. If that’s you, then why not try something different? How about using pictures to express your strategic sales thinking?

When you meet with a prospect, you may think it’s just the two of you. But watch out. A third element sits there with you. It’s the mutual mystification monster.

If a big-ticket purchase is too intimidating to your prospect, you can use the Monkey’s Paw strategy to sell a small piece of the total sale.

Recruiters and managers know how difficult it can be to fill an open position with a good hire. A variety of obstacles conspire to make finding the right person seem like searching for a diamond in a big pile of rocks. Once you find that perfect hire, get them off on the right foot by spending some time strategically plotting your onboarding process.

Have you ever given a presentation to a prospect who seemed ready to buy … but found that, for some mysterious reason, the opportunity went nowhere once your presentation was complete?

It may be tempting to use a familiar sequence of questions in an attempt to “script out” your exchanges with prospects ahead of time. But it doesn’t work – unless your goal is to get the person’s eyes to glaze over. Check your assumptions at the door, and focus on the motive instead.

Have you ever had a series of good meetings with a prospect … gathered all kinds of information ... and given what you thought was a great presentation … only to receive a response like, “Let me think about it”? Or, “I have to share all of this with my boss”? Or, “We’ll get back to you”? And then you never heard another word?

Have you ever been in the middle of delivering a presentation to a prospect … when you noticed that he or she seemed to have completely tuned out of whatever it was you were saying? If you were delivering the proposal in person, maybe you noticed that the prospect’s gaze was elsewhere, or that his or her body language was closed-off. If you were talking to someone via Skype or join.me, perhaps you noticed that the prospect didn’t pick up on your persistent verbal cues to join the conversation, or only offered short, polite responses.

All prospects (and, for that matter, all salespeople) are unique. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to bonding with people and establishing rapport with them.

Have you ever had an excellent sales call, and discovered that you should be working together, but you have trouble reconnecting, landing in each other voicemails, and have no in the future clear next step? This scenarios are very frustrating for sales people but happen more often than not.

Have you ever had a qualified prospect pick your brain for information – and then turn around and buy from the competition?

Has this ever happened to you? A seemingly “hot prospect” asks you a question that seems to signal interest in working with you. (For example: “How strict are you with quantity discounts?”) You’ve been taught to respond immediately to “buying signals,” and you’re sure you just got one. So you answer the question – at length and with sufficient thoroughness to resolve all past, present, or future ambiguity on the subject. Your contact nods and smiles. Then, for some mysterious reason, your “hot prospect” disengages.

Don’t waste time, effort, and good will trying to “turn around” an objection that may not be an objection at all. Instead, use more effective questioning to get clarity on what’s really being said.

With more than 500 million people on Facebook and 100 million on LinkedIn, social recruiting has quickly surpassed traditional methods for finding the best candidates. Because of this shift, it is important to have a guide to navigate the ever-changing landscape. Use this tool to start your social recruiting search and connect with hundreds, even thousands, of the most qualified candidates

Every person in the workplace has gone through at least one job interview. While preparing for interviews typically leads to Googling common interview questions and answers, do not make the common mistake of using these canned responses. Cliché answers make an interview run smoothly, but they also cause you to blend in with other candidates. Stand out by avoiding these typical responses and creating tailored answers based on your specific past experiences.

The hiring process can be a rocky journey involving dozens of candidates and weeks of interviews. Although a painstaking process, finding the right employee for the job is crucial, and the choice should never be rushed. Carefully studying resumes, checking previous job history, and meeting face-to-face to get to know the contenders takes time. Employees are the ambassadors of your brandMany companies even hold multiple in-person interviews with candidates to decide if they fit the criteria. Once the obvious applicants have been cut because of inexperience or other shortcomings, the hard work starts. Look for these eight red flags to weed out the candidates that may spell trouble for your company

A recent study by the Aberdeen Group showed that Best-In-Class companies, who used Sandler Training, had almost 50% more salespeople hitting quota than those companies who did not. When I meet with owners, CEOs, and sales managers, they often ask me why Sandler Training is different from the sales training they have seen or invested in before.

Q: What's the one thing a salesperson must avoid if they are to be successful? A: I study salespeople for a living. The majority of them don't lose because of product inferiority, pricing excesses or poor sales technique. They lose because of low self-esteem! We all start out with perfect self-esteem. Ever met any three-year-olds with self-esteem problems? Didn't think so