Blog - Braveheart Sales Performance

For CEOs: What You Need to Know About Sales AND Marketing

What CEOs & Sales Managers need to know about the relationship between sales and marketing and how to make both components work for your business. […]

18 Critical Questions CEOs Need to Ask Their Sales Managers

Written by Frédéric Lucas. This was originally posted by our OMG Partner affiliate in Canada, Prima Ressource and has been translated from French with minor adaptation.

As a CEO or business leader, you need to have regular conversations with your sales managers. This is true regardless of your managers’ skill level.

These conversations allow you to get an accurate understanding of the current state of your sales force while mentoring and coaching your sales managers. To get the answers you need, you have to ask the right questions at the right time. Here is our time-saving list of questions that every leader should ask of […]

Is Your Pipeline a Pipe Dream? How to Tame Your Sales Pipeline

I facilitated a Sales Swap Meet™ this week with a collection of business owners.* If you aren’t familiar with a Sales Swap Meet, it is where business owners and CEOs bring their questions, concerns, and problems regarding their sales organization and swap them for ideas, suggestions and answers.

The topic we spent the most time on was what to measure and how to measure it. I thought I would recap for you what we discussed since it is of high importance for any business. What I heard was that the majority of the folks keep track of a pipeline and some […]

Our Top 5 Sales Management Blog Posts of All Time

Some of our readers have been loyally following our posts from the beginning, way back in 2012. Others have discovered Braveheart’s Sales Management Blog more recently. If you stumbled upon us in the past year or two, you likely missed some of our most popular posts.

Here are our top five most widely-read posts of all time (plus three of our favorites). If you haven’t read these Braveheart classics yet, I think you will find them still relevant and full of useful insights.

1) Sales Managers Need to Spend 50% of Their Time Coaching Salespeople

Published on December 5, 2013, this post is short […]

What Are the Elements of a Quality Sales Conversation?

Written by Frédéric Lucas. This was originally posted by our OMG Partner affiliate in Canada, Prima Ressource and has been translated from French with minor adaptation.

The ability to lead a quality sales conversation as a salesperson is more difficult than it seems. More than that, the bar for a quality sales conversation today is very different from what it was five or 10 years ago.

The current environment requires reprogramming a large part of the sales concepts that have prevailed in recent decades.

During sales conversations in which a salesperson goes above and beyond what other salespeople might, prospects might say things like:

“I had not seen it from […]

How to Cure 3 Pervasive Sales Management Ills

Are you overwhelmed by an incessant barrage of questions from your sales team? Frustrated because they aren’t doing the things you did automatically as a salesperson? Perhaps you are exhausted from hounding them about meeting their obligations.

Never fear, sales managers . . . each of these three pervasive sales management ills has a relatively simple remedy. The best part? The solutions are in your grasp, and have been all along.

#1: The Avoider Disorder

You tend to avoid conflict. In a sticky situation, your art of avoidance may elevate to the level of Where’s Waldo?

The Problem:

You’ve let one (or more) of your […]

Sales Digest: How to Effectively Manage Millennials in Sales

A while ago, we curated content for a sales digest on “Old-School Salespeople.” This week, we tackle the opposite end of the generational spectrum: Millennials in Sales. What do sales experts have to say about Millennial salespeople? What are their strengths and weaknesses? Read on to see the range of viewpoints.

But first, who exactly is a Millennial? Here are some key facts:

In 2015, Millennials are projected to surpass Baby Boomers as the largest living generation in the U.S. (U.S. Census Bureau).
Boomers are aged 51-69 in 2015; Gen Xers are 35-50 and Millennials (Gen Y) are 18-34 in 2015 […]

Why the Name Braveheart?

We frequently get asked “Why the name Braveheart?” Here is the story.

I have owned a couple other businesses, but none that had appropriate names for what we wanted to accomplish with this business. When the business was formed, we immediately had a need to produce a proposal for a potential client. We needed to form the business first, and we needed a name. Our attorney persuaded me not to use any personal names and another friend and mentor also insisted that one should never put her name in the business name. Our attorney urged us to use my Scottish heritage.

So […]

Is Your Pipeline a Pipe Dream? How to Tame Your Sales Pipeline

I facilitated a Sales Swap Meet™ this week with a collection of business owners.* If you aren’t familiar with a Sales Swap Meet, it is where business owners and CEOs bring their questions, concerns, and problems regarding their sales organization and swap them for ideas, suggestions and answers.

The topic we spent the most time on was what to measure and how to measure it. I thought I would recap for you what we discussed since it is of high importance for any business. What I heard was that the majority of the folks keep track of a pipeline and some […]

How to Know if A Manager is Sabotaging Your Sales Transformation

Written by Frédéric Lucas. This was originally posted by our OMG Partner affiliate in Canada, Prima Ressource and has been translated from French with minor adaptation.

When business leaders implement a sales force transformation program, they inevitably meet resistance within their organization.

A certain resistance to change on the part of company executives is common. On the other hand, if it is followed by closed business and increased accountability, this resistance should disappear within a few weeks.

What is problematic is when resistance to change comes from managers and sales directors of the company. Some of them might even want to derail the transformation program or discredit […]