Sales POP - Purveyors of Propserity
Leading from the War Room: Building a Battle—Ready Sales Force
E-books / Entrepreneurs / Aug 28, 2017 / Posted by Nikolaus Kimla / 9224

Leading from the War Room: Building a Battle—Ready Sales Force

5 comments Download Ebook

It can often seem that running a sales force is like fighting a war—and in fact it more or less is a war between your company and your competitors. The prize is new prospects, new customers, sales, customer retention, and market share.

As a sales manager, your troops are your salespeople. You want those troops to be as battle-worthy as possible. You want them to return as winners—for their own satisfaction as well as the bottom line.

What are the best methods to make your team battle-ready and lead them successfully?

1. A Competent Fighting Force

Before you can fight a war, you have to have troops. Similarly, to have a sales force you need to have sales reps. If that sales force is going to win, those sales reps need to be skilled and effective at what they do.

2. Withstanding the Heat of Battle

In military maneuvers, there is an enormous amount of difference between battle tactics of even 50 years ago and those of today. It’s a similar scenario in the sales battleground: That traditional sales rep is going to be left far behind in the trenches by a the modern sales force enabled by the Internet, social media and leading-edge sales automation.

3. The Sales Process: Your Tactical Procedure

For sales reps, the sales process brings an orderly progression to sales cycles, and for the sales manager it provides a positive direction through which he or she can supervise the sales force.

4. Sales and Marketing: Run Up the White Flag

As sales manager, you may have limited interest in what Marketing is up to. You may have various beefs with them, but you have been content to let Marketing do its job and let the sales force get on with selling. But Sales and Marketing are like two units of the same overall fighting force.

5. To Win Battles, You Need Great Intel

The stories of battles decisively won or tragically lost due to intelligence are legion. What would be the “intelligence” for you as a sales manager and for your sales force? With the goal of making sales and winning customers, it would be the “intel” of what your product or service could fulfill based on what potential customers need, want and desire. It would be clues to their pain points.

6. The Skill of Leadership

You’ll hear many stories from combat veterans about that sergeant they could always count on—the leader that would bring them through hell so they would survive to tell the tale. Such leaders learned to lead—and so must sales leaders.

7. The Safe Base Camp

A combat military leader knows that there must be a safe base camp—a place troops are as safe and secure as possible, and from which they venture out to battle and back again. As a sales manager your “base camp” is your sales department—the environment you create in which your salespeople can thrive and sell to their fullest. This safe place is the crux of efficient sales management.

8. Empowering the Salespreneur

Fighting forces are given little freedom of decision. They are given strict orders on how to proceed, and are expected to follow their orders to the letter.This is one way that a fighting force and a sales force dramatically differ. For as we are now discovering, sales reps require as much freedom to decide and act as they can be given.

Download Leading from the War Room: Building a Battle-Ready Sales Force now.

About Author

CEO and partner of pipelinersales.com and the uptime ITechnologies, which I founded in 1994 and has since played a significant role in the development of the IT-environment. pipeliner is the most innovative sales CRM management solution on the market. Pipeliner was designed by sales professionals for sales professionals and helps close the gap between the requirements of C-level executives for transparency and the day-to-day operational needs of field and inside sales. I am also the founder and Initiator of the independent economic platform GO-AHEAD!, which orientates itself on the principles of a free marketplace in terms of liberal and social responsibility. Connecting people, the trust of business leadership in terms of values such as freedom, self-responsibility, and entrepreneurial spirit, and strengthening their awareness in order to create a dynamic boost within the economy triggered through spontaneity, all stand for the initial ideas surrounding GO-AHEAD! I studied in Los Angeles and Vienna and received my Masters's Degree in 1994. I am married and have 3 children My Specialties are in: Sales Management, Sales CRM Software, CRM Cloud Solutions, SAAS, Business Strategy, Software Development, "Pipeline Management", Social responsibility, outbound sales, b2b sales, inside sales, sales strategy, lead generation, sales process, entrepreneurship, coaching, mentoring, speaker, opportunity management, lead management, Austrian School of Economics

Author's Publications on Amazon

This is a practical manual covering the vital subject of Sales Management. I firmly believe that sales are the most important profession for dealing with today’s turbulent world and Econo my, for salespeople create wealth and produce peace. But salespeople need a competent, stable leader—and…
Buy on Amazon
Inside this eBook, you’ll discover a series of chapters dedicated to some of the most important areas facing sales today. From the sales process definition to measurement, lead generation, and proven sales techniques, this comprehensive eBook will provide you with the information you need to…
Buy on Amazon
A common term in sales today is EQ, which stands for “emotional I.Q.” It means the skill a salesperson has in reading emotions and utilizing them in sales. It means empathy and a number of other abilities. The short version is, it’s an I.Q. when…
Buy on Amazon
People are smart to question the future of automation, for it has become part of everything we do. With the quantity of applications and technology around us, we yet still crave more. We become convinced of its power when our package is delivered from Amazon…
Buy on Amazon
Sales management isn’t a simple subject by any means. But at the same time, it does have some basic and somewhat simple fundamentals—and that is what we are bringing to you with this book. First come pain points of sales management, and how to overcome…
Buy on Amazon
Today the Internet has transformed a seller's market into a buyer's market and author Nikolaus Kimla states that the role of sales has never been more crucial. It is now time to give salespeople the role they factually can play: entrepreneurs within the enterprise. They…
Buy on Amazon
This is our public declaration of the intentions behind Pipeliner, and our objectives and motives for the product and for our company. Behind the development of that CRM application and, in fact, behind everything we do, we have a real cause. The story begins with…
Buy on Amazon
For the future, there must be a perfect balance of humans and technology. You have to have the perfect technology, andthen the perfect human being in application, performance and presentation. Today and into the future, it’s a 50-50 balance. In the past it was perhaps…
Buy on Amazon
The salespreneur is based on the concept of the entrepreneur. Before we can explain the salespreneur, you have to have some understanding of the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur plays a crucial role in any economic system. The entrepreneur seeks out information that can be utilized for…
Buy on Amazon
A seasoned captain would never leave port without a competent navigator. In a similar way, a sales manager might be a total ace at "commanding the ship" – at inspiring and coaching sales reps, pointing out and getting agreement on making quotas, and keeping everyone's…
Buy on Amazon
Comments (5)

1

Biruk Kumsa commented...

This book is very nice especially for leadership .
i get from a book more education to increase my knowledge.
I’ll give my admiration to book writer. Thank you.

..
This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this website you are giving consent to cookies being used. For information on cookies and how you can disable them, visit our privacy and cookie policy.