No one can doubt that today’s technology has changed the buyer-seller dynamic. Some would even say that selling is getting harder because of it. Traditional sales tactics are not as effective today as they once were, even though they are taught with a few modern-day modifications.
No one wants a greasy, sleazy salesperson on their payroll.
In this article, we’ll take a look at the research behind what makes certain personality traits more preferable in the workplace, particularly on your sales team. We have identified five traits that you should look for while interviewing candidates, helping you assess and identify strong salespeople during the hiring process.
When developing a social selling pilot program, age is one of the primary ways sales enablement and sales operations leaders decide who they think is most likely to succeed or not at social selling. Age is a major factor because many organizations will launch social selling pilots with the inside sales or lead generation teams, which are typically made up of millennials. However, only choosing millennials for your pilot program means you’re missing a huge opportunity.
As a sales pro, have you ever sat through a training program and felt like you didn’t learn anything? I’ve been there! In the past, I’ve been in training sessions where the entire sales team was in a boardroom-style setting for two to three days in a row, being lectured to by an instructor who went through the information point after point after point.
Being in sales is amazing. Aside from the massive adrenaline, there’s always the the opportunity to meet new people and learn.
I think this is the core driver behind why sales professionals were so quickly drawn to the allure and promise of social selling. The rush in learning something so new that could impact their performance was important for them.
As a sales operations or sales enablement leader, are you constantly struggling with these two problems in your business?
The incorporation of social selling into any organization’s culture can be challenging. While enablement, marketing and sales leaders inherently realize this, sometimes what we don’t truly know can hurt us in the long run.
While social selling may feel similar to launching other corporate initiatives, beyond this launch phase you will find unique challenges that you may not have prepared for.
When it comes to sales training, a concern that sales professionals cite routinely is the timeliness, relevance and context of what they learn. This is a fair assessment of the industry in my opinion as many training programs haven’t changed curriculum for years. The changes that have occurred are minor and don’t do justice by the learner from a context perspective.
Expertise can’t be gained overnight. If you’re a believer in big data and how stories can be used to identify trends, you’ll agree with Malcolm Gladwell’s analysis from Outliers.
Touted as one of the most definitive trends spotted on expertise gains, it reveals the sheer volume of work required to gain (and claim, for that matter) expertise into a subject matter. Today we know this as the 10,000 Hour Rule.
If you make sports a part of your social life, then you know all about the sweet spot. On a bat, a club or a racket, it’s that area right in the center of the hitting surface where minimal effort delivers maximum impact. Overpower it, and you lose control of the shot. Miss the sweet spot, and you waste your strength. It takes a combination of the right skill with the right tool to hit it out of the park, sink a hole in one or drop a three-pointer.
For Social Selling, LinkedIn is an excellent tool, but you need to find the sweet spot. LinkedIn Sales Navigator can be a powerful addition to your game, but you’ve got to know when to use it. Until you perfect your balance and your swing, overpowering the ball isn’t going to deliver success with anything like precision. In the same way, Social Selling success requires that you nail down the people and the process before you start deploying the technology.
Sales for Life was founded with one goal – to become the most trusted sales resource for its customers. During our journey, we’ve had the privilege of serving thousands of sales professionals and leaders around the world, from start-ups to Fortune 50 corporations.
