The Perfect Salesforce: The 6 Best Practices of the World's Best Sales Teams » (Bargain)

Derek Gatehouse has spent thirty years as a sales rep, sales manager, sales VP, and sales trainer at companies in many different industries. He's currently the CEO of Vendis Inc., a New York-based consulting and training firm. This is his first book.

How any company can build an incredibly effective salesforce by learning from the best in the world

Despite billions spent every year on personality profiling, sales training, motivational experts, coaches, and incentives, there's never been a proven formula for building a salesforce of top performers. Finding such a "holy grail" of sales has been Derek Gatehouse's obsession for decades.

To identify what makes a top-producing salesperson the kind who sells four times more than everyone else and why some sales teams have a high percentage of top producers, he interviewed more than two thousand executives in many different industries. His findings challenge the conventional wisdom about hiring, training, managing, and rewarding a sales team.

Gatehouse has tested virtually every personality assessment tool, sales process, training methodology, and management system available, only to conclude that the vast majority of those systems don't raise performance in a lasting way. Instead, the world's greatest sales teams share six simple but critical practices. For instance, they all:
Hire for talent, not skill or even experience
Blend positive and negative motivators
Measure results instead of micromanaging process

The book features dozens of anecdotes and clear lessons for any company seeking dramatic improvement in its sales performance.

Foreword     ix
Introduction     1
The Perfect Salesforce     5
The 6 Best Practices of the Perfect Salesforce     19
Best Practice #1: The 10 Selling Talents     33
Best Practice #2: Sorting Sales Stages for Talent     55
Best Practice #3: The Talent-Based Hiring Process     77
Best Practice #4: The Pay Plan and Quotas     101
Best Practice #5: Sales Behavior Training     159
Best Practice #6: Result-Based Management     181
Growing the Perfect Salesforce     201
Acknowledgments     209
Case Study     211
Perfect SalesForce Online Support     265
Index     267