Category: Sales Performance

Attention Sales Managers : You Don’t Have to be an Expert to Coach your Team

Tiger Woods has a coach.  Michael Jordan routinely lists coaches Dean Smith and Phil Jackson as two of the most influential men in his career. Even the incomparable Frank Sinatra had a vocal coach. I’m sure you’ve heard this before and know the point I’m trying to make; the most successful people on the planet, […]

Weaponizing your Customer Experience Strategy Part III: Coaches are the Critical Link

“Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential…it is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.”  – Timothy Gallwey By now you’ve spent significant time planning through how your frontlines will embrace, try on and adopt these new behaviors so they – and your company – are ultimately successful over the long haul. And almost everyone agrees that […]

How to Get Scratched Off My Daughter’s College Short List

This year, our spring break did not include a beach. Instead, it included seven different college campuses. Our oldest is a high school junior, and we decided that a road trip to a few colleges our daughter was interested in – and a few colleges my wife and I were interested in – would be […]

Health Check: Do Your Customers Trust You?

What a nightmare trip to the doctor’s office taught me about “trust” and what your frontline can do to salvage it. I usually think of the annual doctor visit as a necessary evil, an expensive inconvenience that can just so happen to save your life.  But this last doctor might have fallen more in the […]

Sales Force Competence Directly Impacts Customer Confidence

Who are your salespeople?  Do you know their names? Their background or previous experience? What about their expertise? Does your sales force have high turnover? Are they well educated on your portfolio? Do you really know if your sales force is effectively selling your products? With limited intimate knowledge of your sales force and their […]

What Gets Measured Gets Mismanaged

“A call center may boast high productivity and low costs per call, but that’s irrelevant if most of its activity is mopping up customer complaints about poor service.” – Simon Caulkin With apologies to Peter Drucker, the famous phrase “What gets measured, gets managed” encourages managers to foolishly disregard subjective measures of performance. The proliferation […]

This Call May Be Monitored For No Apparent Reason

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” – Albert Einstein Most call center operations monitor call quality.  Their purpose for monitoring calls is chiefly to manage compliance, i.e., confirming a customer’s ID, giving disclaimers, being clear and articulate about price and billing, etc. Those criteria may have […]

6 Keys to Sales Enablement Done Right

“Every year we make significant investments in TV spots, sales leads, marketing materials, new technology… yet we can’t seem to get any marked improvement in sales results,” says every Sales & Marketing Executive at the end of each year. You are not alone. Companies strive for top-line growth, but can’t figure out how to align […]

The Quality Revolution: Five Keys to Transforming Your Quality Program Key #5: Certification & Continuous Improvement

A Quality Revolution has been emerging in the last two years, transforming underleveraged and underperforming Quality & Call Monitoring Programs into predictors and drivers of performance improvement. The centerpiece of the revolution is Strategic Quality Assurance (sQA), and it works because it blends equal parts art and science. The preceding articles in this series introduced […]