They don’t manage their business in a static manner; a significant part of any business stakeholder’s job is to find ways to improve their business whether they’re an end-user of products or a CXO. In late November, we released the first five trends of our annual “10 Trends” blog post. Thanks for sharing those as extensively as you did! And thanks to the many readers who insisted we publish these 5 more quickly. Without much fanfare, let’s dive into the remainder of the list. As usual, we look forward to your thoughts and feedback. Your customer becomes your biggest competition. Why not? MORE >>

A member recently shared with me that they’ve estimated the average cost of a single failed sales manager to hover around $4 million, calculating all the direct and indirect costs of lost productivity, attrition or poor team engagement and lackluster customer experience, not to mention recruitment, salary and training costs. Simply put, bad sales managers are toxic. So, how can we build better managers? Well, what if we all started with better raw material in the first place — surely prevention is better than cure, right? rst-line sales managers. within the first 4 years. MORE >>

Most sales organizations spend a considerable amount of time reporting various performance and productivity metrics. Has your sales team met its quarterly target? metric can tell you that. But, why did your sales team miss its quarterly target? That’s something a metric cannot tell you. That said, they often struggle to use the data and information to understand the underlying causes of performance gaps. As a result, metrics seldom inform sales strategy and business decisions. Specifically, they focus on six guiding principles:  . Narrow the scope of metrics. MORE >>

The difficulty lies in two separate but related issues: Tacit Skills —Unlike the ability to know products’ features and benefits, Challenging requires judging the unstated needs and signals of the buyer. The ability to teach , tailor , and take control is what distinguishes sellers in the Insight Selling era. But these skills are difficult to develop and even more difficult to coach. This can be difficult to develop as it’s often situation-specific and the ways that reps’ internalize requirements can vary widely. MORE >>

As our members begin this journey, many have come to us and said: “ we need a Challenger Message for every product, every vertical segment our company calls on – immediately! ”  Yes, eventually you will want to have Challenger Messages aligned with your entire offering. However—start As your organization moves from a “product-first” focus to insight-driven, customer-focused messages, prepare for a learning curve that will feel very steep at first. The This is the second in a series of three guest posts about CEB’s solutions for sales effectiveness ( read the first one here ). MORE >>