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This weekend we visited the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown NY and I was struck by a few things:

1) Why don’t we have a Hall of Fame for Salespeople? I know that companies provide awards for their own salespeople but is that limited recognition enough for those who are motivated most by recognition?

This afternoon, Chris Mott and I were discussing Obama and McCain. Since I don’t like either candidate, I feel somewhat protected and free to provide my political sales correlation. I’ve never dared to venture into a political editorial and I don’t mean for this to be one either. Please read the following thoughts as they would apply to competing salespeople fighting for the same big account.

When companies attempt to improve sales they often look first to sales skills. If you’ve been reading this Blog for a while, you know that I believe skills are important, but only to a certain degree.  The problem with putting an emphasis on developing only the skills is that without the proper combination of strengths and incentive to support the use of those skills, the skills alone don’t get it done.

Introducing my Rule of Conflicting Sales Realities: Weak sales organizations have little awareness of their ineffectiveness which instills a false sense of greatness.  I believe that this is why generally ineffective sales forces remain that way.

Salesperson number one shows up, fails to develop a relationship, assumes he (or she) knows everything, makes a presentation that the prospect doesn’t care about and leaves, believing he did a good job.  The prospect has eliminated this salesperson.

When a company, vendor, provider, salesperson, sales manager or business leader exceeds your expectations, you will tell somebody, try to get them excited and create buzz. 

Yesterday I spoke to the executive team for a Fortune 100 company whose issues are exactly the same as those faced by small and medium sized businesses – except for one difference.  Their dynamic leader wants to attack the market as the economy sputters whereas many who lead smaller companies choose to wait it out. 

So how much of this is economic leverage because they have the money to attack? And what can you do?

This is a longer post than usual but I urge you to read through to the end for the useful lesson.

I conducted a webinar for a client this afternoon and at the conclusion my client thanked me for taking the time to prepare. He said he was grateful. Perhaps he’s simply an individual of high integrity. Perhaps he appreciated the extra time I took to read the materials he sent so I could guide his team in the context of his materials. Perhaps he thanks everyone he works with. Perhaps his compliment stood out because most clients don’t express their thanks when they pay a lot of money for my expertise. Perhaps my client doesn’t often receive this kind of service.