In late 2021, McKinsey did a study to find out how customers felt about the current state of their interactions with salespeople. We just went through over a year of what we thought was a radically altered buyer/seller relationship, but it turns out maybe it wasn’t as radical as we thought.

Some people want to get into management to have power. Others want to get into management to give other people power.

The art of the in-person meeting has been discussed and refined for years, but video calls are relatively new and most of us spent 2020 and 2021 sitting in on hundreds (even thousands) of them - many of which were a terrible experience. Salespeople in particular need to be sharp for any client meeting - it plays a big role in their livelihood.

As we’ve transitioned to do more work from home, many of us our missing these “microbreaks” which is a significant contributor to the burnout that many of us our feeling. I know I’ve felt it, and I’m sure you have too.

So many people think of “closing a deal” as this pressure cooker moment, putting on the heat, or some strong arm tactics to win a project. But the truth is, it’s an almost surgical effort to find the little obstacles to customers making a decision on the path to victory.

Many salespeople who are early in their career have aspirations to grow into the leadership ranks one day. I know I did. Part of this was driven from looking up to my Dad who was a salesperson turned sales leader, and part was by observing a few people that I looked up to that were in leadership roles.

How do you measure the performance of a salesperson? That’s a pretty easy question to answer… how much business do they bring in. It’s the ultimate measure. In today’s age of sales technology, there is an endless number of data points that we can pay attention to. The challenge when we can measure anything, is that we try to measure everything and then we get lost in data.