The following is about a CEO who fired his new sales leader after 60 days. He still made the number.

“When do I get it?”

I am being asked this question a lot. I work with CEOs, and their sales and marketing leaders.  They are an impatient group. “It” refers to the deliverables associated with the sales effectiveness project. Things like head count plans, compensation and quotas, methodologies, etc.

I typically get asked this when a customer buys our Sales Productivity Benchmark. There is something about this offering. When a customer sees it they say, “I want one.”   

Sales “problems” make it on to your agenda in many ways. As CEO, sometimes the board feels there is a sales problem that needs attention. The competition is a source of sales problems. It is not uncommon for customers to be a source of sales problems. There is one source of sales problems more active than all of these combined. Your team. 

Hiring great talent is an inhibitor to delivering revenue growth. It’s not easy finding ‘A’ players. Small businesses (<$50M), in particular, need to nail this or risk revenue disruption. This post is for small business CEOs struggling to hire top sales talent.

You’ve just wrapped up the first quarter of the year.  The CEO wants to see you in his office.  Before you even sit down, the CEO asks, “What were the results?”

41% of b2b sales organizations missed the Q1 revenue target.

Lately, I’ve been asked by CEOs how their company compares with the competition. They want to know how they can win. Competitive differentiation often comes down to sales and marketing effectiveness. Marketers and sales reps who understand your buyers can help you win.

Who needs to buy into the “program” for sales results to improve?

Identifying key players is not as easy as it used to be. Consider this scenario. It will highlight how hard it is to get buy in on a project:

                You just lost a big deal.  You perform an exhaustive loss review. It reveals three big reasons why you lost. First, you got into the deal too late.  The prospect established evaluation criteria that favored the competition.  Second, the competitor’s rep did a better job.  You got outsold. Third, the competitor had a lower price. The distributor sweetened the deal on the competitor’s product at the 11^th hour.

This post is written to help educate CEOs on why the number got missed.

Many industries are shifting.  The definition of an industry shift is perhaps best understood by looking at a few examples.  Here are three: