The Street Savvy Sales Leader

You are competing in a highly fragmented, highly competitive marketplace where decision makers are more knowledgeable, less risk averse, and busier than ever. As a result, making your numbers is tougher and more challenging than ever. You’re trying to figure out how to get the attention of new customers and to add value along the sales process to close business. And you’re coping with a potentially underperforming and unengaged sales team, despite investments in sales resources, such as training and technology, marketing content, CRM, and other tools to increase sales effectiveness. But you, like other sales leaders you talk with, are not getting the payoff from these investments. You see the data: • Businesses are spending more on training, but there is little correlation to ROI (ATD, 2015) • Without follow-up and coaching/mentoring, salespeople fail to retain 80% to 90% of what they learned in training within a month (Sales Alliance, 2014) • CRM holds a <50% adoption rate, and between 25% and 60% of CRM projects fail to meet expectations • 70% of marketing content is not used by sales (Sirius Decisions) Mark Welch understands your pain points. He’s been there. He has led sales organizations out of the morass and turned them around by following a process called the “10 Imperatives.” This process is the foundation of this book and has been a powerful tool for Mark, a tool built out of trial and error, success and failure, and one that puts the salesperson first in building a best-in-class team. The Street Savvy Sales Leader is a toolkit for you—the sales leader—who has to lead change by identifying the root problems that are the cause of less than optimal performance, addressing those problems, and building a best-in-class sales team that is equipped and coached to consistently hit and exceed targets. It is Mark’s goal to support the sales leader as effectively as he can by providing an end-to-end sales solution based on his own extensive experience and that of more than 100 sales professionals across many industries whom Mark interviewed.