By Cheryl Powers

Building a high-producing sales team is vital to scaling revenue and your company's value. Getting this right and doing it quickly hinges on your ability as an owner to navigate essential questions that shape an effective sales strategy. Let's explore 25 critical questions that, when addressed thoughtfully, pave the way for assembling a sales force capable of propelling both your business growth and company value to new heights.

But before we dive into the...

By Cheryl Powers

Assembling a sales team filled with A-Players is not just an advantage; it's a necessity. For lower mid-market and mid-market business owners, the journey toward sustainable growth and profitability hinges significantly on the caliber of your sales force. But here's the catch: not all hiring processes are created equal, especially when it comes to sales. That's where a Sales-Specific Hiring Process comes into play, a game-changer that can set your business on a trajectory...

By Cheryl Powers

Your Sales Leaders play a pivotal role in a company’s ability to reach targets and satisfy the needs of their customers and their shareholders. 

That means their primary job is to put your products and services in the hands of more of the people who will use them to solve their biggest problems while creating profits for the people who own the company. 

That’s a problem when most sales managers haven't been trained for and don’t qualify for the...

Hiring the right salespeople is crucial to developing an effective and dynamic sales force. Developing an effective sales force is the most important job a leader has because your sales force is the vehicle through which you serve the world. No sales, no company. No company, no need for employees. Poor sales, poor company. Poor companies tend to have poor service, which also leads to no customers. You get where I'm going here.

There is an ideal candidate profile for every sales role and...

It didn't take very long for this to happen.  When Objective Management Group (OMG) announced that it was making its findings data available to the public, we knew that it wouldn't take long for someone with a flair for analytics to dig in and come up with something cool.  Last week, John Cousineau, creator of Amacus, got me on a video conference and shared what he came up with.  Hint:  Another way to differentiate top performers.

He...

by Cheryl Powers

How do you know for sure before you hire them that a salesperson or a sales leader can and will do what it takes to succeed? Their resume can't tell you. The headhunter doesn't want you to ask. The candidate will try to convince you in the interview and will likely be a more skillful interviewer than you are.

If you are serious about the success of your sales force and the success of your new hires, you simply can't wing it. You must know the specific sales skills, sales...

Warren Bennis, one of my teachers and one of the world's finest business scholars, said, "Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality." And in our lifetime we have witnessed great feats of leadership and we have benefitted greatly from it. As I sit in my Aeron chair, typing on LinkedIn's publishing platform on the Macbook Pro that sits on my desk, listening to Mozart's Requiem streaming from my iPhone, I am in awe of the vision held by the creators of...

by Cheryl Powers

Sales Leaders play a pivotal role in a company’s ability to reach targets and to satisfy the needs of their customers and their shareholders. That means their primary job is to put your products and services in the hands of more of the people who will use them to solve their biggest problems, while creating profits for the people who own the company. That’s a problem when most sales managers don’t qualify for the job.