Changing Role of Ortho Sales Reps
Sales Training Connection
MARCH 18, 2016
ORTHOKNOW (March 2016) shares insights from six experts on how the orthopedic sales rep role is changing – including Richard Ruff. Changing-Role-Rep_ORTHOKNOW_March-2016.
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Sales Training Connection
MARCH 18, 2016
ORTHOKNOW (March 2016) shares insights from six experts on how the orthopedic sales rep role is changing – including Richard Ruff. Changing-Role-Rep_ORTHOKNOW_March-2016.
Sales Training Connection
MARCH 18, 2016
Join me as Andy Paul and I discuss the fundamentals of major account selling in today’s market. Click here to listen to the blog on Accelerate!
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Sales Training Connection
SEPTEMBER 19, 2019
Sales coaching can make a difference, and it should be a priority. In fact, pros agree that sales coaching is a critical piece of the puzzle in developing a world-class sales team. Yet, when it comes to giving coaching feedback, most sales managers don’t do it enough. Many times it’s water off a duck’s back, and sometimes it makes matters worse. There are many reasons why giving feedback often fails to make a difference.
Sales Training Connection
SEPTEMBER 19, 2019
No one likes to make mistakes. What’s to like? At best, they get you off track … at worst, they lose you the sale. Mistakes run the gamut, from corporate issues, like defective products or billing issues, to mistakes generated by the salesperson themselves, like sharing faulty information or missing a key player involved in making the buying decision.
Sales Training Connection
APRIL 26, 2017
New Sales Reps. What would successful sales reps and sales managers tell a new salesperson on how to gain credibility? We posed that question to our customers and heard many great recommendations, like: Listen to the customer’s needs. Determine what you should do, and then do it 100 percent of the time. Do what you say you’re going to do, always follow through, stay true to your word.
Sales Training Connection
FEBRUARY 22, 2017
Listening in sales calls. While most salespeople have come to agree that asking questions is a key skill, many still underestimate the contribution of good listening to achieving top performance. It is the forgotten twin in the proposition – ask, listen and then talk. For them, the first step is awareness. The second step is actually becoming more skilled.
Sales Training Connection
JANUARY 31, 2017
Sales performance. Constant change has always characterized the business world. Looking in the rear view mirror has never been a recommended strategy for determining future direction. However, from time to time the nature of the change takes on a different look. The scale and speed of the changes during these periods can truly be labeled disruptive.
Sales Training Connection
DECEMBER 31, 2016
Happy New Year. Wishing you a successful sales year. Keep an eye on the Sales Training Connection for new ideas that may help you improve your sales performance. To a smashing 2017, Janet and Richard.
Sales Training Connection
DECEMBER 14, 2016
Selling to C-Suite Puzzle. In major accounts sales success at the C-level is a “do or die” proposition. What makes it particularly challenging is “one strike and you’re out.” There’s no second chance to get it right. Successfully selling to senior executives is a book with many chapters. However, three footnotes are particularly important: When do you sell to senior executives?
Sales Training Connection
NOVEMBER 24, 2016
Wishing everyone a Happy Thanksgiving … and for many a long weekend filled with fun, football, and perhaps some shopping.
Sales Training Connection
NOVEMBER 10, 2016
Companies spend a tremendous amount of time, money and effort every year to improve the productivity of their sales teams. The intervention strategies range from sales training efforts to coaching initiatives to sales tools to marketing materials. These efforts tend to be laser focused on helping sales reps enhance their ability to sell more effectively.
Sales Training Connection
NOVEMBER 3, 2016
Sales training. If you look back over the last decade, a number of industries have gone through dramatic change. They have changed what they buy, how they buy, and what they are willing to pay for it. The future will produce more of the same with the changes likely to be even more dramatic. If your customers are making changes of substantial magnitude, then the case is made that it’s no longer business-as-usual for your sales team.
Sales Training Connection
OCTOBER 4, 2016
Sales Process. Listen to a conversation about the need for improving sales process and it usually begins like this: “We have very aggressive sales targets and we’re just not getting there.”. “We’re not leveraging our own best practices – a lot of our sales reps are simply doing what they did the last time.”. “Our customers’ buying process has undergone dramatic changes but we’re still selling like we always did.”.
Sales Training Connection
AUGUST 17, 2016
Sales Management Excellence. Herminia Ibaraan, an INSEAD professor, published a provocative book arguing that in today’s market if you desire to get better at management you must venture outside your comfort zone. Being stuck in outdated mindsets or ways of doing things will not lead to success. The message is: to achieve success, managers must learn to pivot – that is do something different rather than just getting better at doing what they are doing.
Sales Training Connection
AUGUST 1, 2016
Sales Training – 2026. As a way of exploring the future of sales training, let’s time travel to the year 2026 and examine the major trends of the day. Suspending disbelief, assume you have time traveled and have arrived in the summer of 2026. You are journeying south on Highway 1 towards Big Sur in your Apple Titan 2.0. You have preprogramed your new Titan including a stop for lunch at Nepenthe.
Sales Training Connection
JULY 27, 2016
New sales managers. Congratulations! You’ve done it! You have crossed over! You are now a sales manager. So, what do you do now? Even after some initial guidance from colleagues, most new sales managers find themselves struggling to figure out how to balance the requirements of the position. The mountains of paperwork about HR concerns and other administrative requirements take most new sales managers back a step or two.
Sales Training Connection
JULY 13, 2016
Sales Strategy. When you listen in on strategic account review sessions between Sales Managers and sales reps all too often the conversations is primarily about what has gone wrong – “Why did we lose that big sale?” or “How come the forecast figures are off?”. While it’s certainly important to diagnose what’s gone wrong – it’s equally important to analyze success.
Sales Training Connection
JUNE 30, 2016
Complex Sales. When comparing small transactional sales to large complex sales, the differences in the buying process are difficult to overstate. In a complex sale the buying cycle is longer with more twists and turns; more buyers are involved both as individuals and as committees; and the competition is keene r. Everyone knows it – some because of a leap of faith and others because of experience.
Sales Training Connection
JUNE 21, 2016
Millennials and Sales. Millennials, born between 1982 and 1993, are 80 million strong. In 2015 Millennials passed Generation X to make up the largest share of the workforce. In 2020 they will be nearly half of the workforce. Some important facts about Millennials as reported by the Council of Economic Advisors are: Millennials are now the largest most diverse generation in the U.S. population.
Sales Training Connection
JUNE 1, 2016
Sales Training Investment. It is also not about the elapsed time since you last did it. The strategic “it” in this case is the decision about whether you should make an investment in sales training. If you traveled back in time and drop in on some of the conversations about sales training, you might hear: “We are not knocking the ball out of the park but things are okay plus we have a lot of other things going on so let’s think about that sales training thing next year” or “We just did some t
Sales Training Connection
MAY 18, 2016
Sales Training and Start-ups. Why do some start-ups make it and some don’t? As one might suspect, given the staggering number of start-ups formed every year, there is no shortage of information on critical success factors. Some common ones are: Timing, working capital, and the leadership team. In addition, the ability to develop and sustain a viable growth plan is seen as one of the more difficult and tricky success factors.
Sales Training Connection
MARCH 15, 2016
Power of Storytelling in Sales. One of the most common traps in selling is talking too soon and talking much about your product. Now, if you travel back in time there was good reason why many sales reps fall into the “product pitch” trap. They were constantly being taught the “101 tips for doing a perfect feature pitch.” They were just doing what they were taught.
Sales Training Connection
FEBRUARY 23, 2016
Sales coaching. When top sales managers are asked what advice they would give to someone wanting to improve their coaching, a pervasive answer is – stop trying to teach your sales team and start trying to help them learn. . This is hardly new news. Back in the day, 400 BC, Socrates is reported to have said to one of his Athenian colleagues – “I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.”.
Sales Training Connection
FEBRUARY 16, 2016
Sales and the elevator speech. As the story goes from time to time you are alone in an elevator, the door opens and in walks someone you have been trying to schedule a meeting with forever. You now have an opportunity for a 2-3 minute conversation – so what is your message? If you find yourself face-to-face in a similar situation– are you prepared for a short conversation that your “new found friend” will find compelling?
Sales Training Connection
JANUARY 27, 2016
Sometimes great short-term sales success can be a bad predictive of future sales excellence. Let’s take a look at why that might be and examine the consequences. There are a number of market and company specific reasons why this troubling dilemma tends to materialize at various times. In most cases when these factors are the source of the problem, sales reps has very limited ability to manage and correct the problem.
Sales Training Connection
JANUARY 13, 2016
Recent years have seen a tremendous disruption in how customers buy. And if buyers change how they buy – salespeople need to change how they sell. Customers want fresh ideas and creative insights for addressing a set of needs and opportunities that are both new and challenging. They expect sales reps to be knowledgeable about their industry, company, and issues at a higher level of proficiency than ever before.
Sales Training Connection
JANUARY 1, 2016
Wishing you a successful sales year. Keep an eye on the Sales Training Connection for new ideas that may help you improve your sales performance. To a smashing 2016, Janet and Richard.
Sales Training Connection
DECEMBER 25, 2015
Thank you for reading the Sales Training Connection. We wish you a happy holiday season, Janet and Richard.
Sales Training Connection
OCTOBER 28, 2015
Whether or not you have put in place a sales process – it is happening everyday. It is whatever your salespeople are doing Monday morning to navigate the customer’s buying process. The real problem is not, therefore, a lack of sales process. The problem is too many companies do not systematically manage and evaluate their sales process. In today’ markets buyers are changing how they buy but sales organizations often fail to adjust and adapt their sales process to the new reality.
Sales Training Connection
OCTOBER 21, 2015
Sales excellence. Major account selling is truly a highly skilled and information-intense profession. Just like any highly skilled profession one must not only master skills; you must also understand the principles upon which success is built. In major account selling, the most important underlying principle is the following – sell the problem before you sell the solution – the horse must be in front of the cart.
Sales Training Connection
AUGUST 17, 2015
Product sales pitches. If you are an avid reader of sales blogs, it’s likely you will come across three or four blogs a week about the secret sauce for creating a winning product pitch. If sales blogs had been around 25 years ago, you would have encountered even more of them because the product pitch has been around for a very long time. Way back when, companies spent an inordinate amount of time crafting product pitches for their major product offerings.
Sales Training Connection
AUGUST 10, 2015
Sales Mastery 2015. According to Bain & Company, B2B sales executives have seen tremendous disruption in how customers buy in recent years – and they see no reason to think it won’t continue. And if buyers change how they buy – salespeople need to change how they sell. How well are companies meeting the challenge? The folks at Bain surveyed 550 B2B sales executives.
Sales Training Connection
JULY 27, 2015
Sales Coaching. Today having a superior sales team is more important than ever. Good is no longer good enough. Several factors are driving this need for excellence – two stand out: You can’t sustain a competitive advantage by product alone. Because of advanced manufacturing technologies and global competition even if you have a great product, the competition is likely to come out with one that is just about as good (or sometimes better), in half the time compared to yesteryear and it’s likely
Sales Training Connection
JUNE 3, 2015
Sales Coaching. Sales leadership talks about it all the time. Sales consultants advocate it and sales managers say they would like to do more of it if they had the time. The “it” of course is sales coaching. Yet if you nose around, you will often find less sales coaching is occurring then might be expected given all the voices of advocacy. Why? Well there are a number of reasons but four seem to be particularly telling: Conflicting Demands.
Sales Training Connection
JUNE 1, 2015
Salespeople like everyone else can succumb to the temptation to stay busy. Research tells us that most people have an aversion to idleness and a bias toward taking action – especially when facing uncertainty. The rub is it doesn’t seem to matter if the action is a productive effort or not. People just feel better “doing things.” In an interesting HBR article, Francesca Gino and Bradley Staats reported people said they feel more productive when executing tasks than planning them – even th
Sales Training Connection
MAY 27, 2015
Internal Champions. In major accounts a lot of the selling is going on when you are not there. So developing internal champions is a key to sales success. When talking with sales reps about internal champions, it’s clear that in many cases once they’ve developed an internal champion, they mentally “check off the box” and move on to other things. But is one enough?
Sales Training Connection
MAY 20, 2015
Sales Success. Constant change has always characterized the business world. Looking in the rear view mirror has never been a recommended strategy for determining future direction. However, from time to time the nature of the change takes on a different look. The scale and speed of the changes during these periods can truly be labeled disruptive. In the early 19 th century the Industrial Revolution changed everything.
Sales Training Connection
APRIL 27, 2015
Sales Coaching. Sales coaching can make a difference and it should be a priority. In fact, pros agree that sales coaching is a critical piece of the puzzle in developing a world-class sales team. Yet, when it comes to giving coaching feedback – most managers don’t do it enough, many times it is water off a duck’s back, and sometimes it makes matters worse.
Sales Training Connection
APRIL 10, 2015
'Time Management. A new medical device salesperson emailed us last week interested in one-on-one coaching. We talked and learned that he wasn’t interested in working on sales skills, sales strategy, or even sales presentations. Fortunately, the salesperson had a sales manager who was helping in those areas. What the salesperson was interested in was: How can I do a better job managing my time?
Sales Training Connection
MARCH 25, 2015
'Given the substantial amount of money that companies commit to training every year, the notion of learning more about how to get it right is a question of interest. With that in mind, McKinsey & Co conducted a survey of 1,400 executives worldwide to explore the question. Major Finding. When asked about their companies’ biggest challenge with training programs, the respondents reported that the one growing most in concern was the lack of metrics.
Sales Training Connection
MARCH 23, 2015
'A Classic – ’63 Corvette. As the first quarter comes to an end, it’s a good time for salespeople to take a look at their performance to date – and looking towards the end of the year. The same is true of sales managers. If you believe front-line sales managers are the key to a team’s sales success – and we do – the end of Q1 is a good time to look at what’s working, what isn’t working and why.
Sales Training Connection
MARCH 18, 2015
'Selling Value. When I started in the sales training industry about 25 years ago, I had the good fortune to start with a great company and work with a really smart guy. At the time we were selling sales training programs that helped our clients do a better job selling value in major accounts. The programs were well received worldwide because not only did we highlight the notion of selling value, we taught the skills necessary to do it.
Sales Training Connection
MARCH 16, 2015
'Avoid sales mistakes. Like most rational people sales reps, I dread dealing with mistakes. What’s to like? At best they get you off track … at worse they lose you the sale. Mistakes run the gamut from corporate issues like defective products or billing issues to mistakes generated by the sales rep themselves – like sharing faulty information or missing a key player involved in making the buying decision.
Sales Training Connection
MARCH 9, 2015
'A Classic – ’63 Corvette. There’s little doubt that sales managers are the pivotal job for creating a superior sales team. And, a critical responsibility for the sales manager is coaching. Most people agree that sales coaching is important and can make a difference. They also know it isn’t so easy to do. There are lots of traps along the way for getting it right.
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