How To Pace Your Coworkers

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The DISC assessment provides volumes of invaluable information for dealing with others.  One key aspect is understanding the pace of others as it can create tension in any office…or sales situation. There are certain aspects to pace that are specific to individuals including whether they focus on people or tasks first.  Are they detailed or rapid fire?  What drives the pace they prefer? TTI provides a terrific description of how the differences in styles presents a difference in pace.  A few, quick takeaways: The D of DISC is called Dominance. A person possessing this behavioral style will tend to be fast paced a majority of the time. Direct in their communication,… Read More

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Creeping Mediocrity In Your Hiring Process

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Past behaviors are the best indicator of future success. This point is crucial when hiring salespeople for your team.  The difficulty lies in deducing if the candidate has the right set of skills to be successful in your specific sale. Here’s the ugly truth – “bad” salespeople can still have good interpersonal skills…skills good enough to get past your hiring process. Every sales leader, and I mean every, has a sales hiring horror story.  The sales leader thought they were hiring a superstar and they ended up with a dud.  These fantastic flame-outs are memorable and disappointing for sure.  But there is a more odious error that eats away at… Read More

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Finding Sales Talent In Tight Markets

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The labor market is tight today as you assuredly know if you have been attempting to fill open sales positions.  The issue in sales runs deeper than that as you are typically attempting to find strong sales candidates.  “Attempting” is the key – many hiring managers are unsure of selecting the strongest salesperson.  How do you know they will be successful?  Are they the right candidate?  Can they sell?  Will they sell? The issue gets compounded by the fact that most sales leaders do not spend their days hiring salespeople.  In fact, most of them complete those activities on an infrequent schedule in the margins of their day as needed… Read More

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The Creativity of Sarcasm

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Sarcasm leads to creativity.  Creativity is a needed trait in most leadership positions today. From INC.com: What did the researchers find?  Sarcasm, it turns out, is a pretty good mental workout. “To create or decode sarcasm, both the  expressers and recipients of sarcasm need to overcome the contradiction (i.e., psychological distance) between the literal and actual meanings of the sarcastic expressions. This is a process that activates and is facilitated by abstraction, which in turn promotes creative thinking. … The result was “those in the sarcasm conditions subsequently performed better on creativity tasks than those in the sincere conditions or the control condition. I have had the opportunity to assess… Read More

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The New Office Attire – Startup Casual

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Seriously, this is a thing – startup casual which is replacing business casual as the trendy office attire.  Here it is from Entrepreneur: The whole trend has become so popular, among founders as well as employees, that it has a name: startup casual. All of you who are  slave to fashion are probably wondering what is the proper attire to achieve startup casual.  I suppose if you have to ask….  I did find myself aligning with this tidbit from the article: Mark Zuckerberg claims that he wears the same jeans and gray T-shirt every day so he doesn’t expend any unnecessary mental energy on a decision that doesn’t matter. That quote… Read More

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The Leadership Revolution of Gen X

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We’re at an interesting place in our country’s generational gap. The large Baby Boomer generation is flowing out of the workplace daily while the largest generation, Millennials, are ascendant.  However, before we turn the leadership keys over to the Millennials, there is a generation with something to say…Gen X. Gen X now accounts for 51% of leadership roles globally according to this CNBC article.  In fact: With an average of 20 years of workplace experience, they (Gen X) are primed to quickly assume nearly all top executive roles. Now isn’t that interesting?  The forgotten generation will be in charge so what does that mean for everyone?  Here are some highlights… Read More

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The Non-Verbal Advantage

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Sometimes successfully closing a sale comes down to slight advantage. One of the overlooked aspects of selling is communication, specifically nonverbal communication.  I get the chance to discuss this topic with salespeople often…and often it is overlooked.  This Inc.com article provides a good reinforcement to nonverbal communication’s importance. Consider this fact: …there are three elements that account for how well we receive someone’s message and they impact us differently: 7 percent words 38 percent tone of voice 55 percent body language I’ve read articles recently that bring up these topics in different forums.  Smile while you record your voicemail greeting, tell your story to your prospects to connect on a… Read More

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4 Pillars Of Successful Sales Selection

Derrick MoeNo Comments

Successful sales hiring, in any company, is one of the most difficult tasks in which to achieve repeatable success.  From unexpected outbursts to terminal tardiness to woeful incompetence, every company has a sales hiring horror story regarding employees who interviewed strong but performed poorly. Perhaps a subtle, but more dangerous occurrence is the all-too-common hire who performs their job in the gray twilight of mediocrity.  They never rise to the occasion and they never catastrophically fail.  They interviewed well but now simply perform their role in a nondescript manner within the company. Amass too many of these employees and your company will be overwhelmed with mediocrity…or worse.  How do you… Read More

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Best Salesperson Traits

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Two crucial salesperson traits that rarely get discussed. Ok, not my list but Bill Golder’s article on LinkedIn:  Top 5 traits of the best sales people I’ve ever seen The list hits on two traits that I believe are crucial to sales success.  The first is curiosity.  This trait sounds insignificant, but it is far from it. From the article: Every salesperson knows that you have to ask good questions and be a good listener. Unfortunately, far too many simply go through the motions based on some type of training or methodology they’ve adopted vs. truly demonstrating an interest in solving a customer’s problem. The best sales people are not… Read More

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