If there’s one thing that all sales leaders can agree on, it’s that the industry has changed. 

Long gone are the days where buyers are beholden to salespeople for information. They do their own research and expect salespeople to help them learn. 

To keep up with changing buyer perceptions and trends, the modern sales leader dissects every part of the sales process. There are a lot of data, technology and new concepts involved, which begs the question: Is sales becoming more sales and less art? 

We asked a few experts. Here’s what they said.

How Sales Performance Is Becoming A Science

As Guy Kawasaki says, “Sales fixes everything,” which means the role of sales leader is essential in every organization. 

But let’s be honest here: Being a sales leader is hard. 

According to the Sales Benchmark Index, the average tenure of a sales leader is 19 months, and no other member of the executive suite fails as often as the sales leader.

For those of you in the role, all of this can make it extremely hard not to burn out. Use these expert tips that follow to help.

Featuring: 

-Noah Dye, VP of Sales and Marketing at Lewis Global Communications
-Kyle Oden, Director of Business Development at Capital Compliance Experts
-Jessica Magoch, CEO of JPM Sales Partners
-Mike Minelli, Chief Revenue Officer at LevelEleven
-Geoffrey James, author of the "Sales Source" blog on Inc.com
-Dr. Matt Barney, organizational psychologist and founder of LeaderAmp
-Eric Bohren, VP of Business Development at Conversica 

How To Not Burn Out as the VP Of Sales

Activity-based sales KPIs are the window to the soul of your sales team. 

At least, that’s according to Versature VP of Sales Dwayne Mansfield. 

Dwayne told us that when he started the sales team at Versature, it was imperative that the key performance indicators were based on the behaviors needed to reach revenue goals set by the organization. 

“By creating a minimum threshold for calls, meetings, opportunities and demos, and tying those into monthly and annual compensation, we rewarded the behaviors needed for success.” 

Sales leaders like Dwayne across the globe are reaping the benefits of managing and motivating their teams with sales KPIs. After releasing our inaugural Sales KPI Report, we decided to learn more about the state of sales KPIs in modern sales teams. 


The State Of Sales KPIs

As a sales leader, you’re probably really burnt out on the topic of the sales stack because there’s so much noise around it, but there’s one thing we really need to talk about: 

According to research from TOPO, sales rep adoption remains the number one challenge when it comes sales technology. And only 15% of sales technology purchases result in increased revenue. That’s pretty crazy when you think about the millions of dollars invested into sales stack technology. 

For that reason, we’re presenting you with a simple guide of 10 sales stack rules to increase rep adoption and ROI. 

10 Sales Stack Rules to Improve Rep Adoption

Research from Vantage Point Performance and the Sales Education Foundation found that 24% of metrics used by sales leaders are business results like this. However, there’s a problem with results-based management: 

As a metric, business results cannot be directly managed. 

Business results reveal the impact of what your sales team has done in the past, not what you can manager or control in the present. Every day, sales reps perform a cascading chain of activities they hope are going to ultimately lead to results. 

If you’re only results-oriented, there’s a danger there of creating a high-pressure system where people get disengaged very quickly, as 10-year sales veteran Ashley Shaw warns. Reps are busy responding to emails, talking to customers and dealing with support issues, but they aren’t really sure where to focus their time to get the desired results. 

The good news is that you can reach desired business results by managing those sales rep activities that precede them. This is the idea behind activity-based selling. 

The Case For Activity-Based Selling

Welcome to the Modern Sales Leader podcast, an investigative series that features real sales leaders addressing real problems in today’s sales environment. Live from the heart of downtown Detroit, this podcast is brought to you by LevelEleven, the sales activity management system that helps companies unlock maximum revenue potential by engaging salespeople in the behaviors that matter, and creates a culture of performance. 

The Modern Sales Leader Podcast

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