Small Business Marketing Plan

If your small business marketing plan includes salespeople--whether 3 or 3,000--there are some things you need to know. It's a shame this stuff isn't covered in college, or even business school, but it just isn't. When it comes to the optimum approach for hiring salespeople, training them, paying them, managing them, motivating them--we're left to take our chances in the sea of consultants and trainers out there who each claim to hold the key to sales performance. But most don't.

I know that sounds a little jaded, but I have spent my 30 years in the corporate sales world checking out every hiring, training, motivational and management system there is, and I guess I feel I've earned the right to speak my mind--particularly when most of these systems do nothing to produce a sustained increase in performance. And that's the only measure of success in the sales consulting world--a sustained increase in performance.

So what's the answer? Is it the individual? Is natural talent all we have to look for and if so, which talents? There are after all, many different types of sales. I can't imagine that selling private jets to oil sheiks requires the same sorts of talents as selling ink cartridges to small businesses. (cont'd below)

Or is talent over-rated? I mean, every trainer out there will tell you they can take any salesperson and turn them into a super-producer. Is training the answer and if so, what is the best sales training?

These are the questions that plagued me my whole career and ultimately, are the reason I do what I do. It bothers me that someone can look you in the eye and tell you that, following this sales training session, your sales team's productivity will go up--and then it doesn't.

My life's work has been to identify exactly which practices, in what measure, are required to build a top performing sales force. My findings very much contradict much of the conventional thinking on the subject, but they work anyway. I have studied top sales teams extensively and there are 6 things they do differently from everyone else; 6 things that, when properly applied, have seriously increased sales in every company I have worked with; 6 things that led Penguin Publishing to offer me a book deal to talk about it.

I have outlined this approach and you can get your free report from the form above (16 pages is a bit long for a Squidoo lens...). So here's to those of you who want to approach this sales performance issue properly, once and for all.