There’s still a lot of talk these days in the sales enablement community and the market at large about the need for sales and marketing alignment. I wish I saw more of it actually happening, but the concept is out there and there are examples of what good looks like. When it happens, the results […]
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Senior sales leaders and C-suite execs, this one’s for you. Pay attention. This is free consulting. Background & Context Enablement is Booming In an expanding number of vertical industries (but not yet everywhere), the concept of “enabling the sales force” has exploded. According to Paul Krajewski’s blog, where he tracks the profession, there were 15,000 […]
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This is a post I never wanted to write. I originally posted it as a LinkedIn Article in August of 2020 and unfortunately, find it relevant again already in mid-2022. At the time I published it initially, I had hoped the worst of the pandemic-fueled layoffs were behind us. Unfortunately, many company executives still needed […]
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Sales Transformation. It’s a term that means different things to different people. I’ve been involved in sales transformations that were entirely focused on getting the best-possible performance out of the sales force (ranging from a 30 to 600 percent increase in sales), independent of retooling the rest of the organization. In my experience, the potential […]
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It’s a cruel twist of fate for senior sales and revenue leaders that as the year barrels toward a close with urgency to maximize the remaining time, that strategic and tactical planning for the next year must happen at the same time. At a minimum, these leaders must tackle quota setting, territory optimization, account assignments, […]
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In the first post in this series, I defined Learning, Training, Development, and Education. Learning: Learning is the act of acquiring new knowledge and skills. Training: Training is job-related learning about what, why, and how (and maybe when and where) to do something (or multiple things), to be successful in a specific role. Development: Development […]
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One of the things that’s been on my mind lately is the difference between education, learning, development, and training as they relate to sales talent development organizational learning strategies for Sales. Why? In the past three months, I’ve had this conversation (“this” meaning talent development and organizational learning strategy for Sales) with four different company […]
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[This article was originally published as part of the Sales Education Foundation 2018 Annual Magazine, co-authored with Robert M. Peterson, Ph.D., Dean’s Distinguished Professor of Sales, Northern Illinois University Professional Sales Program] “The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the […]
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[NOTE: This post was originally published in late November of 2018. I have updated it to reflect a few changes, including the company rebranding, my title, and some cool new solutions that we offer.] The position change announcement feature on LinkedIn has become the birthday announcement on Facebook. Except for anyone with a large network, […]
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It’s unfortunate that role play has a low level of acceptance in many sales organizations. Done well, it’s one of the very best ways to train, coach, and improve skill levels. In this post, I’m not going to attempt to convince you that role play is an outstanding learning or performance improvement tool. For that, […]
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