The holiday season is almost upon us so as a seasonal treat, I’m going to unwrap my 12 days of Christmas gifts guaranteed to help you accelerate your software sales next year.
- Make sure you are effectively managing remote workers by having regular check ins both face to face and via conference calls. Remote workers can often feel disengaged – even forgotten – and that can affect productivity – Read my top tips for remote management here
- Watch out for virtual vacant territories by looking for the early warning signs of sales reps who may have decided to leave – but have not yet actually tendered their resignation. And make sure you are constantly building a talent pipeline so that you have people that can slot in as and when needed. You can read more about virtual vacant territories here
- Put effective on-boarding processes in place to ensure that new hires make that first sale quickly – Read my tips for effective on-boarding here
- Accept that change is inevitable and mitigate the risk of a fragmented sales team by managing change programmes effectively – see my advice on how to manage change effectively here
- Coach your team on specific deals – check out the two deal coaching techniques that I wish I had known about earlier in my own sales leadership career
- Unshackle yourself from matrix management. I truly believe it to be a complete waste of time – find out why here
- Watch out for signs that your sales deals may be getting stuck. While stuck deals are a fact of life in sales, there are warning signs that you can look out for – check out the main red flags together with seven reasons why your deals get stuck here
- And once you have identified those red flags – and the reasons your sales deals are stalling, you’ll obviously want to know how to get thing moving again. Check out my advice here based on my 30 years in software sales
- Want to know how to build better relationships with resellers – and get results? I have listed the main mistakes that vendors make when dealing with resellers as well as four ways to build effective partnerships
- Want to know what makes a great pre-sales engineer or consultant and the skills that they need to succeed? Check out my top recommendations here
- The Land and Expand sales model is a well-known strategy – but why is it that so many new deals then fail to deliver the follow on ‘expand’ orders once they have been landed? I have outlined seven deadly sins that can block expand here.
- And finally….the big one – I am going to give you three strategies for successful land and expand campaigns
We wish you a very Happy Christmas – and a prosperous New Year.
Do contact us to discuss your next strategic hire or to discuss our accelerate training programme specifically for new hires.