Incentra Insights

New Focus on Sales Training and Development

 As sales leaders continue to cope with the myriad of changes after the pandemic, one issue is beginning to emerge as a critical challenge to overall sales success. Due to the proliferation of working remotely and virtual selling, many sales teams have experienced a lack of sales training, product knowledge, and staff collaboration.

Marketing your channel incentive program is essential to the program’s success. It won’t matter how great your program is if only a small number of people are participating. Continually recruiting new participants should be one of your top priorities.

The past two years have totally upended everything we thought we knew about the sales process. Both sellers and buyers have had to adjust to a totally new system of prospecting, sales approaches, interactions, and contract negotiations. Sellers have to adopt completely new sales techniques, and buyers are learning to expect much more from the companies and sales teams that approach them. So what have the past two years taught us, and how do we go forward with sales processes that work in this remote sales model?

Back to Basics

Based on the chaos of the past several years, many sales managers are wondering if we will ever return to a normal sales environment. The answer is probably not. However, as we are slowly entering our new normal world, this may be a good time to reflect on the fundamentals of a successful sales incentive program. Despite the tumult in the marketplace, some basic concepts of recognizing and rewarding your sales team’s efforts will inexorably remain the same. So this is a good time to recall those essential concepts.

It’s a new year and 2022 has already shown that we will have to deal with labor and supply shortages among other challenges. That’s why it’s essential to evaluate your current channel incentive program and make the necessary changes for your business to thrive this year.

As a new year begins, we want to share our top 5 blog posts (by the number of page views) that were published in 2021. If you missed any of these posts, be sure to check them out here. They feature the latest topics in the industry as well as helpful information on employee recognition and channel incentives.

There is no denying that we are living in a brave new digital world that dominates virtually every aspect of our lives. This of course has had a massive impact on not only the ways we sell products and services but also how we compensate and reward our salespeople. The old sales incentive models just won’t work in today’s virtual environment. It’s time to do some serious updating if you’re using an outdated plan. But where do we start?

People who enjoy sales as a career like that there is some control of their schedule and their compensation. Typically good salespeople do not like to be micromanaged, and they shouldn’t be. However, the pandemic brought on so many challenges for outside salespeople, and companies continue to have restrictions that affect the way salespeople schedule their time.

It’s hard to believe that there are less than 5 months remaining in 2021. Since we are more than halfway through the year, we wanted to share our top blog posts (by the number of page views) that were published in January through July 2021.

Moving Past the Recovery Phase

By now, most of us have climbed out of the rescue phase of the COVID pandemic. Now we have to focus on moving beyond the recovery phase and resetting our course toward a successful sales rebound in 2021. With the aid of the vaccines and the financial help from the government, most businesses are seeing their way to return to vigorous sales activity as a distinct possibility, but how about our sales teams? Are they ready to charge forward?