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Facts and Fallacies


When recruiting sales professionals, one must first consider past performance against quota, relationships and rolodexes, industry knowledge and technical competence.

Click Here to View Answer: Hire what you can't change (personality, behavior and intelligence) and train what you can change. Good selling DNA is much more important than anything else and should be screened out first even before resumes are scanned.
- FALLACY


Sales people are born and not made and no sales training or system can make a good sales person.

Click Here to View Answer: sales skill is as innate as athletic talent. Training only improves talented individuals but will rarely do much for those who don’t have natural acumen for selling.
- FACT


Pipelines should show the next steps needed and the activity of the sales professional who is reporting on the opportunity.

Click Here to View Answer: sales activity does not translate to productivity. It is only what the prospect does that matters.
- FALLACY


Sales training should be provided primarily for the top performers within an organization because they have the most to gain.

Click Here to View Answer: like professional sports teams, the resources should be spent to improve the starters and not those riding the bench. The same should be considered when investing in sales performance resources by focusing on the best performers.
- FACT


CRM is best used to track sales/BD activity and give management a view into the progress of each new business opportunity.

Click Here to View Answer: CRM will only be used properly by the best sales/BD professionals if it helps them sell more effectively. No one likes to be watched, so if the tool isn’t designed to sufficiently support the sales/BD professional’s pursuit and is seen as a form of micro management, you will get garbage in/garbage out from your reports.
- FALLACY


Sales training should be provided primarily for the top performers within an organization because they have the most to gain.

Click Here to View Answer: like professional sports teams, the resources should be spent to improve the starters and not those riding the bench. The same should be considered when investing in sales performance resources by focusing on the best performers.
- FACT


Selling products and services require completely different skills.

Click Here to View Answer: sales skill and talent ports to services and products. Sophistication and style are more important determiners of likely success.
- FACT


Channels are motivated by leads provided by the OEM more than the revenue the channel makes from selling the product.

Click Here to View Answer: to successfully motivate channel sales, you must have a direct sales effort and a method to produce leads for the channel before they are likely to take solutions to their own clients.
- FACT


When looking for referrals, one should expect that they will come because you have a valuable offering to the referring source’s client or relationship.

Click Here to View Answer: people don’t refer business to you unless they know you really well and have history with you, but instead refer because they owe you, because they accepted a referral from you first.
- FALLACY


Channels are motivated by leads provided by the OEM more than the revenue the channel makes from selling the product.

Click Here to View Answer: to successfully motivate channel sales, you must have a direct sales effort and a method to produce leads for the channel before they are likely to take solutions to their own clients.
- FACT


A vision statement is designed to reflect a company’s values:

Click Here to View Answer: a vision statement supports a picture of what a company looks like when the leader is done building it. It should dictate rules that govern decision making to support the outcome of realizing the vision.
- FALLACY


Opportunities are mostly lost between calls and presentations.

Click Here to View Answer: once a presentation ends, the recollection of the facts discussed gets distorted with each day that passes. Supporting knowledge transfer and retention between the calls counts for more than the call itself.
- FACT