Sales & Sales Management Expertise

Are you prepared to succeed today in Sales, Sales Management, Business and Life?

As I am asking you that question, I am forced to answer it for myself as well.  Let me take a minute to answer for myself and then I'll get on with the rest of the post:

Sales - yes, Sales management - kind of, Business - yes

What is required so that we can say we are prepared to succeed?

1. Incentive to succeed - Do you have the appropriate passion or desire for success?
2. Commitment to succeed - Willingness to do everything possible (assuming legal, ethical and moral standards) to succeed.
3. Metrics - Identify what "things" or "metrics" you will look at to determine success.  In sales management, you would likely look at sales.  That's basically what most senior sales executives and sales managers look at to determine the success of a sales manager.  Did we hit our sales quota? If yes = success; if no = failure.
4. Benchmarks - Idenitfy the benchmark for success for each of the metrics used to identify success. (E.g. Produce and sell 1,000,000 widgets every quarter.)
5. Activities - Identify activities (effort) required that, when performed, will lead to success.
6. Behaviors & Skills - Identify the behaviors, competencies and skills required to effectively execute the activities required for success.
7. Methods - Identify the methods you will use to inspect what you expect.
8. Inspect - Inspect what you expect.
9. Insight - Gain insight from the data collected from your inspection.
10. Feedback - Provide feedback.
11. Coach - Coach or be coached to make appropriate changes to effort or execution.
12. Improve - Change, adjust, improve areas that need changing or improvement.
13. Responsibility - Take ownership of the outcomes regardless of the outcomes instead of making excuses or blaming an outside influence.
14. Practice - Practice what you are going to perform so that your skills and execution are flawless.
15. Risk - Be courageous, take risks, & challenge yourself and others.

When I started this blog post, I was prepared with my theme and key points I wanted to make.  I was prompted by reading 3 different pieces of information:

• Inside Apple: Adam Lashinsky;  This book is interesting in its entirety, but the part that really prompted this post was about Jobs and his preparation for presentations.  The interesting piece that I didn't know is how much the entire team, which is enormous, prepared for events AND post-events so that the message was clear, concise, and most importantly, consistent.
• Understanding the Sales Force Blog:  Dave Kurlan;  Dave regularly posts to his blog. The one this morning identified his top 15 blog posts and I got through about 6 of them before deciding to jump to my own blog site and communicate with you this morning.
• Insideview:  Lisa Fugere posted an article discussing "The 2 Reasons Why You Really Lose The Sale."  You won't find an answer more direct, clear and correct than what you will find in her post.

Tomorrow I will deliver the last of three webinars titled: 2013 Workplan Webinar.  Last Monday, we had 175 people log on to this webinar.  This tells me that sales people, sales managers, presidents and sales executives understand the importance, but perhaps do not understand the process as well as they would like.  The response to this webinar has prompted me to write this and maybe, just maybe, inspire you to really focus on preparing to succeed as you close out 2012 and begin to look ahead into 2013.  As you analyze what went well, what bombed, what needs improving, what directions need to change, etc., think about these two questions: How prepared were you to succeed in 2012 AND how can better preparation help you succeed in 2013?