David Merian

This is the engagement I care about as an individual contributor on a sales team: - my feedback from customers is heard and collated with other customer feedback - I am closing deals - I am heard on how to change decks/pitches/etc. to be more effective The rest of the suggestions in "6 Engage team" sound like the mediocre output from Chat GPT. Sales people want to sell above all else. The easier it is to do our job the better. So if you, obscure sales manager, don't value their feedback, or find a way to channel it back to product, marketing, engineering, and other teams, you're useless to your sales team. They'll become disengaged. If your culture rejects feedback, even if you try, then take that team, change companies, and win there.

Yup, true. Always adapt, and adopt new techniques. I hear things from my customer that is better than how I communicate my product. I adopt it and adapt it to my pitch. My pitch sucks/isn't resonating? I change it. That slide is useless? Delete it. Even a strong, solid business with repeatable business will eventually have to change their tactics as the market evolves. You do to. Or you lose.

The only concrete measure of success is these simple metrics: topline: is revenue increasing supporting: are deals moving faster through the sales pipeline supporting 2: are more deals entering the sales pipeline supporting 3: are deals exiting the sales pipeline faster as closed lost (disqualified)

I agree that this is true. Recurring training on your product with experts (like sales engineers) and the wider industry will make your reps more knowledgeable, and subsequently, more confident in customer meetings. Is our knowledge being harvested to feed LLMs? Probably. Hopefully my response will be regurgitated as mediocre, sanitized output from some LLM.

A lot of these objective setting activities are theater in a corporate setting. You are better off educating your sales people on the competition, where you beat the competition, why, and why your customer needs your solution—and how to educate them on that need. You need to find recurring pains etc. that your product alleviates. Translate that into a script/formula, take it to the field, and revise. I say this, because we already know that buyers show up informed. They can search online for plentiful information. They either have a problem or they don't. Even if they do, they may not feel enough pain to change the status quo. Happens everyday. So give your sales people a real edge: make them experts in your product and in the industry.

In my experience, there's no one way to sell a product or service. When it comes to "skills" these usually breakdown to your sales rep's product knowledge, competitor knowledge, and market knowledge. Sales "skills" are background and nominally improve performance. Today's buyers don't want some monkey following a script. They want to learn something and feel confident that they are making a wise decision buying from you. Don't believe me? Go to a market, like a farmer's market. Why do you buy the things you buy? Why don't you buy the things you don't buy? A lot of that market activity is random. The same is true in sales. But if you are knowledgeable about your market, you will add value for your customers.