Author: Steve Ainslie

Last week I arrived at my airport gate only to see FLIGHT CANCELLED on the screen beside the gate.  I approached the agent and was told, “Don’t worry. There’s no problem. Instead of flying you to Orlando for your connection to Fort Lauderdale, you’ve been automatically rebooked to fly into Baltimore and from there catch a connection to Florida. You’ll arrive in Florida by…

One of my personal rules is to give 150% effort whenever I can. This first came into play for me when I had started a new position as the Manager of Information Systems for an Advertising Company. I had talked my way into this job of supporting Macs, Windows PCs, and the website for this agency….

When I am hired, my clients always say two things: “Our Sales Team isn’t selling enough!” “We’re not sure if our Sales Team is doing all the right things.” To address either of these, I begin by assessing the reps.

At my first home-office based sales job I spent the 1st Quarter hustling 10 hours a day prospecting for new customers, learning how to sell our solutions, and dealing with the challenges of working from home. In the 2nd Quarter, having made little progress and having almost no contact with my manager & coworkers, my motivation dropped significantly. I still prospected most mornings and…

Almost every sales team recognizes it’s top performers by revenue or quota attainment. We have stack rankings, leaderboards, President’s Club, and “Rep of the quarter/year” awards. Today, I want to talk about recognition for the other things our reps do that make our jobs, our teams, and our companies better. As I discussed before, it’s critically important that I catch my employees doing…

Despite the classic scenes with the Bobs in the movie “Office Space“, firing an employee is no laughing matter. Today’s post will cover how I fire sales reps. I hope you find it helpful.

I Don’t Treat All My Reps the Same. I’ve written about how important it is to always be recruiting for All Stars, to hire weirdos, and how to interview to build teams with diverse skill sets. Today I want to talk about how I treat each of my employees differently by focusing on their strengths and by not rewarding everyone equally.

“Mentoring is a process for the informal transmission of knowledge, social capital, and … support perceived by the recipient as relevant to work, career, or professional development; mentoring entails informal communication, usually face-to-face and during a sustained period of time…”   (source Wikipedia. Bozeman & Feeney)

When used wisely, meetings can be extremely effective for communication, collaboration and team building for any sales organization. When used unwisely, they can be a frustrating waste of time and resources. In this post, I’ll cover how to identify which meetings to eliminate, which ones to attend, and how to make the most of them when leading Inside Sales.

Death by PowerPoint was one of the funniest phrases I’d ever heard – until I started experiencing it after taking a sales management job in a large corporation. Up until then, I had worked for startups and small businesses where we didn’t spend time in meetings listening as presenters droned on reading their terrible slides. We were too busy…