The competition is trying to poach one of your top players. Another superstar is threatening to leave. Your top two are wrangling over territories and making the John Cena gesture at each other in sales meetings. It’s as bad as the recent NCAA drama. What’s a leader supposed to do? Well, there’s a lot you should be doing. Ensure your assigned territories make sense. ( See my previous blog post .) Align your compensation with your strategy and market. (That’s a future blog post.) Lead by example and behave professionally. (Hmm, let’s put a pin in that, too.) Enough of the shameless self-promotion, let’s tackle another aspect of leading salespeople to championship performance: Incentives and Bonuses. Salespeople are coin-operated. Not that other aspects of their role don’t motivate them, but money really motivates them. So does customer satisfaction, the thrill of the chase, and beating the competition out of an order. However, for now, let’s focus on Sales Incentives and best pr...

The Tarnished Territory (Part 3 of series on new territories) Tarnished Territory - The Action Plan Over the last couple of weeks, we have spent some time exploring the amazing revelry and rigors of being assigned to a new territory.  We've outlined some of the strategic data tied to better understanding your situation.  In the case of a seller assigned to a formerly neglected territory, our journey has touched on who might help us better focus on accounts capable of generating faster results for our efforts; most of our discussion might be summarized as strategic lots of thought but nothing tied directly to sitting face-to-face with a customer.      Let’s get tactical Before we start, what we are laying out is not an all-inclusive list for selling.  Allow me to share a bit about my own experience so many years ago.  I had experience in sales.  I started selling tires and batteries for my fathers business at age 14 and I sold encyclopedias i...