Suzanne Paling - The Sales Leaders Problem Solver: Practical Solutions to Conquer Management Mess-ups, Handle Difficult Sales Reps, and Make the Most of Every Opportunity

Praise for The Sales Leaders Problem Solver

What Suzanne Paling does in The Sales Leaders Problem Solver is provide a step-by-step process for how to attack the myriad of unique management issues faced by sales management. As a sales manager I would keep this book close by as a reference and starting point whenever a sales management issue was recognized.

Pat Pallentino, director, FSU Sales Institute, Sam Walton Fellow, Florida State University

This book is both comprehensive and pragmatic. Suzannes approach and content is relevant, and her examples are real-world. This would be a great tool for virtually anyone in sales management.

Robert Nadeau, director, Professional Sales Program, Plymouth State University

Selling sales managers can play a critical role in small, but developing sales organizations. There were several great tips within this book about who best to put in the role, how important setting the right expectations are, and how to develop their sales management skills for success.

Johanna Rivard, executive vice president, Pure B2B

I couldnt agree more that a Selling Manager role is at best a very challenging approach and at worst a costly endeavor. Suzanne offers valuable advice on how to successfully establish and manage the Selling Manager.

Steve Gunderson, principal, Transitional Data Services

Recognizing sales problems is easy. Knowing how to address and solve for them is where every sales manager earns their keep. This book pragmatically addresses several sales challenges in ways that are easy to understand and execute on.

Johanna Rivard, executive vice president, Pure B2B

Suzanne Paling has presented a number of real world examples of sales and sales management problems and followed them up with realistic, common sense solutions. These solutions addresses both qualitatively and quantitatively the different elements of each challenge typically experienced by both sales and sales management.

Mike Waldron, director, Enterprise Sales, Xactly Corporation

Each chapter takes an in-depth look at difficult, yet often too common, situations a sales manager will face. Clear and actionable step-by-step instructions provide everything a sales manager needs for creating, communicating, implementing, and documenting a measurable plan. At the end of each chapter youre reminded of your most important job as a sales managerhiring the right people for the right job!

Brian Donovan, North America sales trainer, HomeAway

The Sales Leaders Problem Solver provides sales managers with a targeted and essential resource for recognizing and handling situations faced by all sales managers. Suzanne provides a step-by-step guide to properly diagnose each situation and actionable advice with detailed instructions for sales leaders. This book helps to remove some of the mystery around managing a sales force and provides a playbook required to address critical situations that frequently derail the most seasoned sales teams.

Frank Costanzo, senior vice president of sales and business development, Caliper

SUZANNE M. PALING

Practical Solutions to Conquer Management Mess-Ups, Handle Difficult Sales Reps, and Make the Most of Every Opportunity

Copyright 2017 by Suzanne M. Paling

All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher, The Career Press.

THE SALES LEADERS PROBLEM SOLVER
EDITED BY ROGER SHEETY
TYPESET BY KARA KUMPEL
Cover design by Rob Johnson/Toprotype
Cube image by ip studio/shutterstock
Printed in the U.S.A.

To order this title, please call toll-free 1-800-CAREER-1 (NJ and Canada: 201-848-0310) to order using VISA or MasterCard, or for further information on books from Career Press.

The Career Press, Inc.
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Wayne, NJ 07470
www.careerpress.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

CIP Data Available Upon Request.

Robert F. Paling
19292011
We all miss you, Dad.

Jim
Thanks again for all your help.

Thank you to the following people for their generous assistance in the pre-publication effort: Jill Konrath of Jill Konrath, Inc., John Willig of Literary Services, Inc., Lori Richardson of Score More Sales, and Robert Holland, PhD, of Vistage Michigan.

For their help in providing valuable information for the book, I would like to express my gratitude to David Sawyer of Safer Places, Bob Perkins and Brooke Niesen of the AA-ISP, and Sherry Acque and Frank Costanzo of Caliper.

Finally, I appreciate all the efforts on my behalf from the entire Career Press team.

In this book, The Sales Leaders Problem Solver, Suzanne Paling identifies 15 perplexing problems that sales leaders continually confront, but seldom successfully solve. She shows how to accurately identify the problem, find its multiple causes, and drill down into alternative solutions. This book is a pleasant read and there are no wasted words. Each chapter starts with a vignette to illustrate the problem, then the necessary data to identify its possible causes, and examples of meaningful dialogues with salespeople that will successfully solve the problem. Solutions from these meaningful dialogues vary from better hiring and training practices to changing compensation incentives to changing sales force organization.

As a sales leader your job is to make the salespeople successful, but there are common road blocks, such as bad salesperson and sales manager habits, which prevent that. Suzanne provides practical, step-by-step methods to successfully remove these road blocks and correct the bad habits. The methods are based on her many years of experience as a sales management consultant. Each chapter contains checklists, templates, worksheets, and narratives custom designed to help you navigate these situations.

Sales drive profits and good sales management drive sales. Good sales management properly applied is the least expensive and most effective way to increase revenues, market share, margins, cash flow, and ROI. The book deals with growth busters, frequent frustrating problems that sales leaders have to deal with. You will meet sales reps you all know. The book saves you time and money by giving you a proven hands-on formula for dealing with these common problems.

Your job as a sales leader is to get work done through other people, your sales team, but when they are prevented from being successful by common problems, you need a guide on how to turn the problem into an opportunity. Each chapter of The Sales Leaders Problem Solver deals with proven step-by-step ways to deal with one of these common challenges.

The solutions to these 15 major sales leaders problems are broken into bite-sized pieces that are easy to apply from a list of dos and donts. If a particular solution is not effective, suggestions are made on alternative courses of action. The book shows that sales force management is a process and that one step logically follows another. Control the pieces and you control the whole.