Author: Steve Ainslie

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…

Meaningful sales metrics will deliver an accurate assessment of how Sales is performing at any point in time and will identify what needs to be done to stay on track (or reverse course). They also provide a high-level perspective for the executive team, a mid-level perspective for the sales managers and a tactical perspective for the reps. Poorly…

Call coaching is essential to transforming an Inside Team into All Stars. For my teams, call coaching has generated stellar returns in lead development, opportunity management and bookings. It’s allowed me to be directly involved with what’s happening on the sales floor. It also builds strong bonds within my team and is yet another opportunity for upleveling my reps.