When sales figures aren’t meeting projected goals, your sales representatives’ performance is often the first thing that’s scrutinized. Though there are a multitude of well-documented reasons why selling issues may exist, hiring the right sales professionals is one of the most important remedies to improve an under-performing sales team. And paying those sales professionals properly is another.

External guidelines are critical in the design process, needed to assure alignment among all parties involved in your sales efforts. The development and use of a Creative Brief can be an extremely valuable tool in achieving message consistency and clarity.

When it comes to the topic of B2B sales collateral resources, certain questions are frequently asked:

Most business leaders dread budgeting and forecasting as it falls into the "necessary but painful" work category.

In Part I of this article, we identified four separate "mindsets" associated with the typical salesperson. To a high degree, success in a sales role is all about three things -- the ability to build a relationship, being able to organize and execute against a defined sales process and finally being comfortable with the assigned sales mindset/role.

Being an effective sales leader with a high-performance sales team requires many skills. It most certainly requires coaching, development, sales training, leadership, and administrative skills. Depending on the level of leadership, it may also require an ability to build sales processes, handle commission and territory planning, create channel strategy, manage sales incentive planning, and more. In its totality, these disciplines comprise only 60% of what a sales leader needs to manage a sales staff with impact and results. So, what about the other 40%? Frankly, it comes down to one essential factor – hiring. We’ll start with this truth:

As a young graphic designer, I came up in the agency world as many of us do. I worked on typical projects such as packaging, collateral, websites, branding, etc. without much involvement in the "why" of what was being designed. My main goal was to “impress my boss” and “prove my worth” by creating aesthetically pleasing work.

Ed Hagen and Dan Sills founded OMiga in St. Louis as way to tailor back-office support for small to medium-sized businesses. Their expertise in finance, accounting, bookkeeping, payroll, human resources, and records management has helped businesses nationwide focus on their business while OMiga takes care of the rest.