Would you invest 45 minutes every day in training your sales people?  That's at least 10% of their time every day!  Listen to Tory Hornsby, COO of Power Sports Marketing discuss how he invests this time every day in developing the skills of the team.

The payoff?  Over 25% growth year over year, and huge increases in sales productivity.

This is one of the most fun interviews I've done.  Tory shares his formula for success in driving the highest levels of performance from his sales teams.  It's not only the time they invest, but it's the structure of how they conduct the training meetings, the value of repetition in cementing skills, and how they get ownership within the team for the training and new skills development.

Listen to this interview, outright copy Tory's approach--but commit to the investment in developing your people for the long term.  I'm certain you'll see your results skyrocket!

As a separate podcast note, I'm pleased to introduce you to Chris Frascella.  Chris is our podcast manager.  He's really going to up the quality of each podcast and help me up the volume of materials we make available for podcasts.

Is selling SaaS solutions different than selling other complex B2B solutions?  Certainly, the business model and revenue stream looks different.  Rather than making money in a single transaction, the revenue stream is spread over the period of a subscription.  As a result, customer retention and renewals become critical in order to maintain the revenue stream.

But how different is it really?  As we discover in this discussion with Chris Palmisano, the fundamentals remain the same.

I couldn't think of anyone better to discuss this topic than Chris Palmisano.  Chris is current Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Business Development at Solarwinds.   Prior to that, he was a sales executive at Google.

Chris has a wonderful, pragmatic perspective.  I hope you enjoy listening to him as much as I enjoyed the discussion.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of participating in a great discussion on coaching with Thierry van Herwijnen.  Thierry had asked me to participate in his series of podcasts on his Sales Enablement Lab Site.

The core topic of our conversation was on Coaching.  We had a wide ranging discussion on how sales managers could integrate coaching into their daily activities, how to leverage reviews as powerful coaching opportunities, different approaches to coaching, and finding the time to coach.

The original of this podcast can be found at Thierry's site--along with a number of other outstanding interviews.   If you want perspectives from some of the leading sales enablement people in the community, make sure you visit the site and subscribe to his podcasts.

In the mean time, enjoy this discussion!

There are 3 questions that are critical to your ability to win a deal.  Do you know what those questions are?  Do you know how your customer would answer them --- for each deal in your pipeline?

If you don't know the answers to these 3 questions, then you ability to win a deal is seriously compromised!

Pardon my rant in this podcast.  The highest leverage of a manager's time is in coaching their people.  It's the manager's job to get people to perform at the highest levels possible.  Coaching is a key tool for doing this.

So given this, I get a little upset when I hear from sales people that their managers don't coach them.

Enjoy the rant, would love your views.