We’ve worked with hundreds of companies and thousands of sales leaders and owners over the years. With that being said, there are always six common questions we get asked all the time. We decided to break them down into three of the most common questions from sales leaders and three of the most commonly asked questions by owners.

The holiday season brings with it warm food, ugly sweaters, family and friends, and personal time commitments. Soon family obligations start to consume our lives and of curse our time. Yet, we know the holidays are coming, and still, we hear from our salespeople who don’t make their goal, “Well, the holidays got in the way.” Like they didn’t know the holidays were coming in December this year? Here’s how to work around that.

A player-coach in sales is someone who owns and sells to their accounts and is also responsible for leading their team. It is by far one of the hardest jobs out there and by far one of the most poorly executed ones. Here is why:

Salespeople retention is often overlooked. Many companies will see that a salesperson is good and assume that since they are making good money, they should be happy, and they will stick around. That's dangerous thinking. What happens if that's not the case?

Many people who are responsible for bringing in revenue for their organizations do not see themselves as salespeople. This is especially common in the professional services industries such as engineering, architecture, accounting, financial services, and law firms. We have a theory on why we think that’s the case.

If we were to walk through your company front door and go up to anyone in your sales department and ask them what their client retention rate is, would they know the percentage? We challenge you to do just that. It’s shocking the number of times we’ve done this, and someone couldn’t give us an accurate percentage.

We’ve worked with many companies who are family owned and operated and thought we would address some of the most common issues and how to handle them respectfully.

Sales forecasting is the process of estimating accurate future sales. Accurate sales forecasts are absolutely critical to companies and enable them to make informed business decisions and predict short-term and long-term performance. It is needed to manage cash flow, make decisions on expenses, manage capacity and resources, etc. Yet, we’ve found that many companies struggle with accuracy.

There is often a divide between Marketing and Sales. Both departments have the primary focus to generate revenue for the company. However, the primary goals of marketing are to look at the big picture, promote the company, product or service, and brand and generate leads for the sales team. For sales, the goals are to leverage the brand and tools and hit sales volume goals by executing on the leads generated by marketing. So, with similar but different purposes, why are companies always looking for a VP of Sales and Marketing?

CEO's and owners are willing to spend $10k to $25k, sometimes more on sales training if they think it will help their sales team reach the quota by the end of the year. But how likely are sales leaders willing to invest time, resources, and energy, on improving themselves? The answer, slim to none. At Pivotal, we […]

Quite often, when people put together their strategic plan for the upcoming year or years, they make a fundamental mistake – they jump right into the tactics they will employ before really developing a strategy. Strategy is the "what" part of the equation that helps you answer the question, "What are we trying to accomplish?" […]

Have you heard of the Antecedent-Behavior-Consequence (ABC) Model before? In layman’s terms, it’s a Behavioral Science model that can be used to help people examine behavior, the triggers of those behaviors, and what drives those behaviors to happen again and again. Today we are applying this model to our sales teams and sharing what we’ve witnessed.