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
