Our Top 10 Sales Management and Leadership Posts of 2021

It's been quite a year for sales leaders across the country. Before we gaze ahead to 2022, we want to take a quick look back at 2021, and remember how far we've come. We entered the year with so many challenges and opportunities and tried to share with you what we were learning along the way.

Here are some of our most-read posts of the year. We hope that implementing some of these strategies and tactics made your sales teams run more smoothly in 2021.

• 4 Key Mindsets for Successful Sales Leadership: Ray Makela helps summarize research from GP Strategies, which looks at what it takes to bring leadership attitudes and their associated behaviors to life. 
• What Ted Lasso Can Teach Us About Leading a Sales Team: If you already love Ted Lasso, you'll love this post. If you don't know Ted Lasso, consider this an introduction to something you can't believe you've been missing.
• The Sales Manager's Role in Building a High-Performance Team: This is a great reminder for people adapting to a remote environment. You still need to define your key roles, hire well, and coach everyone up to expectations. 

Sales Management

• How to Fix Stalled Leads in Your Sales Pipeline: Norman Behar provides tips for leaders who need to bust the clogs in their systems and get their sales processes flowing again.
• What I Learned Talking to 53 Sales Managers: Once is an occurrence, twice a coincidence, three times a trend. But what do you call it when 53 sales managers say something?
• 3 Predictions for Selling in a Post-COVID World: We published this early in 2021. Did our predictions come true?
  

Sales Coaching

• How To Bust Through a Resistance to Coaching: You want your people to succeed. You assume they want to succeed. Is the problem them... or you?
• Leveraging Conversation Intelligence to Improve Sales Coaching: In the past few years, sales teams have increasingly leveraged conversation intelligence technology (e.g., Gong and Chorus) to analyze sales calls. This article details how to execute on “why,” “what,” and “how” to improve performance.

Sales Training

• 4 Key Factors to Create a Sales Training Program that Delivers Results: Read how to incorporate Problem Identification, Solutions, Behavior Modeling, and Program Measurement into your efforts. 
• Sales Training That Sticks: Five Key Success Factors: Learn how to build a program that includes Executive Sponsorship, Consultation, Engagement, Enforcement, and Continuity.

We hope you had a wonderful 2021, and we look forward to working with you in the coming year.