The Mansfield Sales Blog

Sales and marketing are constantly evolving, but the truth remains: to generate pipeline, you still have to pick up the phone. In the digital age, businesses must go beyond face-to-face meetings to achieve their sales growth targets.

In a company's early stages, the heavy lifting of sales often falls to the founder and core team. They step into multiple roles, from finding opportunities to qualifying leads to managing the customer after the sale. Driven by passion for the product and vision for the company, founders often enjoy astronomically high conversion rates—thriving on their deep expertise and experience to close deals.

At its most basic, a sales strategy is all about demonstrating to your market that your product or service can fulfil a need. And yet, even when your product is good and the need is urgent, there are numerous reasons why a potential customer may walk away. Among them, is simply a breakdown in effective communication.

Over 40 years ago, Xerox established the world's first sales operations unit: a dedicated team to help salespeople sell faster, better and more efficiently. Their job? To take on activities such as forecasting, sales planning and territory design. Or in group leader J. Patrick Kelly’s words, “all the nasty number things that you don’t want to do, but need to do to make a great sales force.”

A common misconception is that if you have certain skills and a good bit of experience, you can move between business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) sales with relative ease. However, selling to retail and corporate markets require completely different approaches and skillsets.

Chances are, you’ve had at least one of these thoughts about business-to-government (B2G) sales:

The process is too complicated.

The sales cycle is too long.

There’s only a small chance of success.

Congratulations. You have been put in charge of a baseball team made up of the top players in the country. Here are a few thoughts that are not going through your brain.

A job interview is the ultimate sales call, so when you’re interviewing for salespeople, the interview process should be used to gain insight into how a candidate sells, from qualification to close. To the extent possible, a business leader must dig into how candidates have prepared for the interviews, in order to gain insight into how they would prepare for an important sales meeting.

As a CEO and founder, I know how tough it is to find and hire great salespeople—and I’ve been in the business for decades. According to Manpower Group’s recent Talent Shortage Survey, sales positions (including sales representatives, sales executives, and sales advisors) are the third-most difficult roles to fill and retain. 

Hiring is both an art and a science, and arguably the most important aspect of any business. Not surprisingly, research shows organizations that spend more time recruiting high-caliber people earn 22% higher return for shareholders than their less discerning peers.