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12 Sales Trends for 2020 – The Time is Now

2020 marks 25 years in business for Barrett, our parent company, and over this period of time we have seen many things – good, bad and indifferent – when it comes to managing businesses and sales teams, successfully or otherwise. Fads, trends, myths, hype, well-worn facts, new innovations and home-truths have all been a part of this 25 year journey. We’ve talked with over 10,000 business leaders from the C-suite […]

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The Holy Trinity of Selling

This post has been inspired by Ben Shute, who wrote about the Holy Trinity of Procurement Skills. The profession of selling requires a whole range of capabilities. It’s hard to know where to begin to define the 3 core elements for sales – the Holy Trinity of Selling.   Let’s start with the master categories of Knowledge, Skills and Mindset from Barrett’s Sales Competency Dictionary. Knowledge What do a salesperson

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Sales – the new team sport

The future of the individual ‘solo’ salesperson is coming to an end for most businesses. What is taking their place is an integrated team of people working on sales together. Sales leaders do not need teams of individual B2B salespeople, they need people with a diverse range of skills working as integrated teams across a range of sales disciplines and capabilities. Teams who can cover areas such as sales and

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7 things you can do immediately to improve your sales results in challenging markets

The overall current economic and market conditions are soft at best according to the latest reports. And even though the Federal Government is putting a positive spin on the latest quarterly figures by comparing us to other countries who are worse off than us, it doesn’t help those of us who are finding the current conditions challenging. Just ask any retailer at the moment and they will tell you just

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The Sales Juggling Act

Sales is integral to business. Without sales we don’t have a business. But running a sales operation, leading the sales effort and guiding and directing a sales team can be a constant juggling act. Sales operations have many moving parts and they all require constant vigilance and effective decision making. The execution risk is always high. Sales operations and teams are also fragile ecosystems. Set up well to perform to

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Trust improves the Learning and Development culture

Building trust is key to sustainable long term sales relationships. This is surprisingly true even for very large B2B sales, despite the availability of hard facts on the buying company’s reliability, cash flow, payment morale, etc. Trust is still key to long term relationships that don’t require controlling and compliance functions all the time. Creating and earning trust is, therefore, a skill salespeople have to master, and indeed, a lot

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Check the ‘Sales Fitness’ of your Sales Operation

In order to achieve peak sales fitness, business and sales leaders and their sales teams need to adopt a Systems approach to sales operational excellence. Sales operations are complex variable systems with many moving parts—they do not follow a straight line; smart companies get this. They recognise that oversimplification is their enemy when it comes to developing and deploying effective sales strategies and functioning sales operations and teams. However, in

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Are you becoming a ‘Professional Visitor’?

A research paper from the US market from early 2019 stated that more and more sales teams are relying on renewals in revenue from their existing accounts which is giving them around 70 per cent of their annual sales revenues. On one hand, this sounds like good news. Sales teams understand the importance of retaining existing business with their clients. But you’ve got to ask yourself though, what does “retaining

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Is Consumerism past its use-by-date?

Is Consumerism past its use-by-date? This is a very interesting, perplexing and vexing question which is now being discussed at all levels of society. This question is not only an economic and business question but, increasingly, a moral question challenging the very nature of how we make a living, how we make money and how we function as communities, economies and societies. At this very point in our existence when

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The rise of Ethical Selling

The History of Sales Methodologies Whitepaper, revised & updated Selling is a hot topic, especially the louder calls for more ethical, fairer, purpose driven business and selling practices. This got us revisiting our whitepaper, The History of Sales Methodologies – why some work and others don’t which we published in 2013. We wondered if there were enough significant changes in the last 6 years to warrant an update and revision.

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