By Gretchen Gordon Archives - Braveheart Sales Performance

Can Your Team Become Challenger Types?

Ever since CEB (now Gartner) published The Challenger Sale in 2011, the book has attracted much publicity. It provides five different profiles (detailed here) based on research of 6,000 individuals. They are:

Challenger
Lone Wolf
Hard Worker
Problem Solver
Relationship Builder

The research in the book indicates that individuals with a Challenger profile will outperform all other profile types. Good so far.

Constructing Tension

The book also presents the concept of Challengers building “constructive tension” using three elements:

Teach – Offers unique perspective and maintains two-way communication
Tailor – Knows customer value drivers and identifies economic drivers
Take Control – Is comfortable discussing money and can pressure the customer

The premise is […]

Six Simple Steps to Pipeline Predictability

It’s very common for companies we work with to have a pipeline management and review process in place. It’s also very common for us to find that the process is broken. It’s important that management keeps salespeople focused on the right activities to move deals through the pipeline. Here are some good ideas to help.

Some Facts:

I reviewed data on 417,000 salespeople from the OMG (Objective Management Group) database, and discovered that 41% of these salespeople are not following a predictive sales process! And only 54% are adequately CRM savvy!

Just following a process and using CRM isn’t enough, of course. […]

A New Insight into Motivation and How to Inspire Your Salespeople

I’ve been talking about it for years: The ways we measure salespeople’s motivation levels and why. By understanding what motivates salespeople, sales managers can tap into an individual’s type to help him or her succeed.

Historically, when we’ve analyzed the motivation type of salespeople and candidates alike, we’ve found two main categories: Extrinsic and Intrinsic.

Latest development

Well, thanks to Objective Management Group’s never-ending quest for improvement and precision predicting success in a changing world, a new insight has been discovered. There’s now a third category: Altruistic motivation and we’ve been evaluating the impact of this new type.

The three motivation types:

Extrinsic – Salespeople […]

Finding “Elite” Entry-level Salespeople

Hiring entry-level sales people is something we’ve been working hard on lately for many of our clients. Our goal is to teach them a process to improve their sales talent acquisition effectiveness through use of the #1 rated Objective Management Group Sales Assessments.

While doing this, we’ve noticed that far more candidates are not recommended for entry level positions than the number not recommended for more experienced sales positions. So, I decided to do some analysis and see if I could find any insights into why this was occurring.

Drilling down the data

The OMG Assessments uses a variety of components to provide […]

The Mind of a Champion

I was watching the final round of the 2017 British Open this weekend with my college-age son. We both were truly impressed by, the winner, Jordan Spieth’s incredible come back from, as my son put it, “a not great start.”

An unbelievable save

If you missed it, Spieth hit his final round tee shot 100 yards right of the fairway on 13. The ball landed in a terrible spot, and Spieth had to take relief for the unplayable lie. Amazingly, he only bogeyed the hole, but it took him out of the tournament lead by a stroke. I apologize if you’re not […]

First Comes Vacation – Then Comes Sales Slump. NOT!!!

Memorial Day is right around the corner. While the seriousness of this holiday recognizing the men and women who serve in the United States armed forces, especially those who have made the ultimate sacrifice, should not be taken lightly, the weekend has also come to unofficially mark the start of summer.

Readying for retreat

Depending on what part of the country you live in, Memorial Day also signals that the school year is either over or will wrap up in a few weeks and vacation season will get into full swing. For those of us in sales, vacations lead to prospects vanishing […]

Sales and The Need to Purge

When was the last time you did some purging in your professional life, or personal life for that matter? There’s a reason I wonder. Recently, I helped both my mother and mother-in-law move. Each had accumulated over the years both great personal treasures and a lot of junk. Faced with helping them get rid of what they no longer needed (or perhaps ever needed), I reflected deeply both about the value of things, and eliminating things. And while I carried boxes, packed treasures and discarded junk, I realized that the process was completely applicable to the world of sales and […]

Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks

It has been said that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. As this axiom relates to salespeople, it is sometimes true and sometimes untrue. The outcome can be determined by which category the salesperson falls into. In other words, in which kind of dog we are dealing with.

Dog Training and People Training

Here at Braveheart, we are in the human performance business as it specifically relates to sales effectiveness. And the businesses of people training and dog training are really quite similar.

Okay, before I go on, let me apologize if by comparing salespeople to dogs I offend anyone, but […]

Fix the 5 Reasons Sales Hiring is So Hard to Get Right

We work with many companies, both small and large, who suffer from the same issues when it comes to hiring. They all have difficulty attracting, selecting and onboarding the right salespeople.

Repeatedly, we hear the frustration of executives who have wasted countless hours and thousands of dollars hiring salespeople who don’t work out. Compounding the problem is that when the market is tight for good sales talent, hiring managers feel pushed to just fill positions, not understanding that hiring poorly likely will cost the company three to five times the hire’s annual compensation.

Sales hiring is the most difficult to […]

Low Closing Rates? Here’s What You Can Do About It

It’s another of the most common complaints we hear from business owners and sales leaders: Our salespeople can’t close. And they’re right. Most salespeople, unfortunately, are not great at closing.

The closing facts

This isn’t just an opinion, it’s backed-up by some impressive data. Using the Objective Management Group’s vast database of over 1,000,000 salespeople, I pulled information on 359,000 to determine how many had the traits of a proficient closer (see sidebar). On average, these salespeople only have 31% of the necessary characteristics. 31%! Having so few of these traits, it’s no wonder we hear complaints about salespeople closing.

Closing isn’t intimidation

A […]