The Competitive Advantage

July 5, 2022

2022 is Half Over…

… Are you halfway toward achieving your goals?

It’s hard to believe that this year is already half over… it has absolutely flown by! And I hope it’s been a good year, so far, for you and your firm. This midpoint in the year gives you an opportunity for a little reflection. To see if you’re on pace to achieve this year what you wanted to achieve.

January 25, 2022

Commission Plans Are Not a Reward for Sales

To be fair, that statement is not 100% accurate. Of course, commission plans are a reward for your salespeople/seller-doers. But that is not WHY you should build them into compensation packages.

Spoiler alert: You implement commission plans to drive the desired behavior you want your seller-doers to exhibit. So yes, it’s a reward for them, but more importantly, it’s a strategic tool for management.

December 22, 2021

3 Examples of Really Bad Selling to Stop in 2022

I guess I’m just a magnet for lousy salespeople… I get exposed to horrible selling almost every day. So, I started keeping a file of examples of this behavior and here are three real instances that happened to me just this month.

November 2, 2021

Take Good Care of Your Small Clients, Too!

I have been saying for years that, “All clients matter… but big clients matter more.” And I still believe that. Strongly, in fact. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore your small clients or small sales prospects.

For one thing, small clients can grow into big ones. And if you take good care of them when they’re small… they’ll remember you when they’re big.

October 26, 2021

The Sales Trifecta… The Core of Your Selling Efforts

Last week, I wrote a blog post about the Marketing Trifecta… the three fundamental marketing things you need to do to help grow your firm. In this post, I want to talk about the Sales Trifecta… yep, you guessed it – the 3 selling things you must do if you have sales responsibilities for your firm.

August 3, 2021

Hiring Your First Sales Rep? Follow These Steps. [Part 3]

Welcome to the third and final installment in this series on hiring your first sales rep. In Part 1, we focused on getting ready internally for the hire, with an emphasis on culture, structure and compensation. Last week, in Part 2, we explored the actual hiring and training of that new rep. In today’s post, we talk about how to best support your first sales rep – the investments you’ll need to make on their behalf and how to best manage them for maximum results.

July 27, 2021

Hiring Your First Sales Rep? Follow These Steps. [Part 2]

Last week, in Part 1 of this series on hiring your first sales rep, we focused on getting ready internally for the hire, with an emphasis on culture, structure and compensation. In this post, we’ll explore the actual hiring and training of that new rep.

Hiring your first sales rep

Most importantly – and everything else pales in comparison – hire for selling skills and sales experience (communication skills, phone selling, presentations, proven sales success, etc.). You can train them on market research once they’re on board. Yeah, I know… that recommendation is going to rub a lot of folks the wrong way, but remember why you’re hiring them… to sell, not to do research. That’s the job of your ops team. If they have some market research background, great! But selling skills and experience are your first priority.

July 20, 2021

Hiring Your First Sales Rep? Follow These Steps.

If you’re like 90%+ of the firms in our industry, your business development efforts are led by seller-doers… business owners, leaders and managers who, in addition to their primary job, have the added responsibility of growing revenue for their firm.

But if that’s not working out for you and you want (or need) to more proactively grow revenue, you might be considering bringing on a full-time sales rep… someone who’s only job is to grow revenue. If that describes you, this series of articles on how to best do that can help.