If you’re the crème de la crème of your sales organization, chances are you’d qualify for your company’s President’s Club (or Chairman’s Club, or Achiever’s Club).  Yes, it’s the one—and perhaps only—time when the rest of the organization wants to be in your shoes.

Want to know what perks other companies include?  Among other things, our recent benchmarking survey on President’s Clubs identified the top destinations and gifts companies select for President’s Club winners. 

Check them out: Read More »

By Andrew Kent

A salesperson must not fear failure.  Neither should executives.  Too often we find ourselves living to “not fail” instead of to succeed. 

As an SEC member smartly commented on my last post, “Business (and media well before that) have evolved to the point where being incorrect is so abhorrent that we will do anything possible to avoid that position – after all, no one has ever been lambasted for being ‘not wrong’.”

If you ever find yourself focused on avoiding failure instead of pursuing success, I found this timeline of Abraham Lincoln’s history of failure inspiring: Read More »

No one ever said introducing and changing sales behaviors is easy work. For our latest study, we’ve been looking at better ways to get sales training to stick, and indeed, it’s tough business.

While the whole idea of grassroots change management is no secret, it’s tough to execute in a sales environment.  So it comes as no surprise when new sales training is rolled out, the top-down change management playbook is often used with heavy emphasis on the sales manager as the change agent.

Consider for a minute what needs to happen for a successful sales training rollout… It involves some degree of rep agreement with the new method, at least in principle. Next comes some degree of actually trying the new method. And finally, and at best, full adoption.

Now as you think about gaining buy-in at each of these steps, what are the greatest sources of influence you’ve seen in your organization? Sharing the results of a pilot, senior leadership visibly supporting the new method, manager coaching and reinforcement, best practice sharing sessions, right? We all know the usual change management paces.

But in thinking through how to actually change behaviors, our research has us considering other sources of influence.  One of the more intriguing ideas we’ve considered is the underbelly of the sales organization itself – rep to rep exchanges: the airport conversations, the emails, the general chatter.  These conversations are where your initiatives certainly make, or potentially break, themselves.

And yes, this should be thought of as a real channel that can be leveraged, even if it’s the same channel that’s responsible for spreading inappropriate jokes and YouTube videos around the office. Read More »

A job in Sales means spending a lot of time on the road. When traveling, even the littlest convenience (or inconvenience…) can make all the difference. In that spirit, we wanted to write a quick post on everyone’s favorite small-talk topic: travel.

We’ve all been there before – that sinking feeling as you’re boarding the plane when you realize that not only is the overhead bin space above your seat non-existent, but you were seated by the bathroom. With the pungent scent of toilet bowl cleaner wafting towards you, do you think, “There has to be a better way to choose my seat”?

Here are three of the best tips I’ve learned from frequent travelers to help make your flight more comfortable:

1) Not All Seats Are Created Equal. There can be substantial differences in airline seat size even on planes of the same model. Take, for example, the Boeing 777-200ER airplane: flying Delta Economy on a Boeing 777-200ER will give you an average of 31.5” of leg room and a seat width of 18” while the same airplane model outfitted by KLM will give you an average of 35” of leg room and a seat width of 17.5”. Doing a little research into airlines’ seat size variations can mean the difference between walking off the plane or being carried off to a chiropractor.   Read More »

Welcome to The Sales Challenger, a new blog brought to you by the Sales Executive Council (SEC). For those of you who don’t know SEC, we are a membership-based organization for senior sales leaders and their teams from the world’s largest B2B companies.  Our value proposition to members, in short, is to provide leading-edge insight on what the most progressive sales organizations are doing to tackle today’s most vexing sales challenges.

While longtime members will fondly recall the days when they received their SEC studies in the mail (you will still find many of those shiny green tomes on sales executives’ bookshelves around the globe), we’ve found over the years that the sales world moves a little too quickly for executives’ needs to be addressed simply through 6-month-long research projects.  While these big studies will always be a core part of what we do, we’ve begun to invest in a number of capabilities to speed up our ability to share insight with members.

We’ve created platforms to put members in touch with one another quickly and efficiently (check out the Sales Ops Forum, our moderated community of more than 3000 sales operations professionals exchanging views and peer-to-peer advice on a wide range of issues) and have now launched The Sales Challenger to allow us to quickly and informally disseminate what we’re learning to sales leaders.  

We will refresh this blog several times per week, so come back often and, by all means, share your comments—positive, negative or otherwise.  In terms of content sections, look for the following:

• The Buzz –our point of view on emerging and newsworthy issues and trends
• From The Road – anecdotes from our recent meetings and calls with members
• Sales Insights – breakdown of our ongoing and existing research
• Practical Advice – tips and tricks to make you more effective in your day-to-day job
• Diversions – light, fun (more random) topics

Until next time, happy selling!