SALES INSIGHTS
Explore. Educate. Expand.
Don’t let travel restrictions or canceled events impact your numbers.
Get weekly insights on how to sell through. Sign up today!
Looking For Something?
Topics & Categories

Sales Leadership And Bringing Value To The Table With Mike Ondrejko
Being a great salesperson doesn’t always equate to being a great manager or a great leader. You need to have grit, you need to be selfless, and you need to bring value to everything you do. Your host, Lance Tyson, teams up with Mike Ondrejko, the President of Legends Global Sales. The two have a spirited discussion about what it takes to be successful in sales, the importance of authenticity, and making the transition from an individual contributor to a leadership role. Stay sharp! This episode is packed with information. …
Sales Leadership And Bringing Value To The Table With Mike OndrejkoRead More »

Building Sales Team Values with Chad Estis
—
Listen to the podcast here:
Against the Sales Odds Interviews Chad Estis on Building Sales Team Values
I’m here having a riff session with an old friend of mine and business partner, Chad Estis, with the Dallas Cowboys. He is gracious enough to spend a little time with me. What we are doing in this show is talking to sales leaders about their approach and their outlook on things in this day and age. Chad is going to talk. I’m going to ask him a lot of questions. He has one of the best stories I know. Not only is he somebody I do business with, but I also consider him a coach. Welcome, Chad. Thanks, Lance. I’m looking forward to spending some time with you in a new format. Let’s jump in. For people that don’t know you who might be outside of pro sports or maybe some people don’t know your story, give us a few minutes on your rise coming through sales and to what you’re doing now. The quick story is I was upwards to my junior year of college. I had no idea what I wanted to do post-college career-wise. I had always loved and played sports. I was fortunate and lucky enough to be at Ohio University and got exposed to the fact that they have a Master’s in Sports Administration, which I didn’t know what that was and what that meant. As soon as I gathered a little more info about that and realized, “There’s a whole business career in sports that I was unaware of at that time,” then I got pretty focused on trying to get into that program. That’s how it started for me. One of the first things they told me was, “If you want to get into the program, go get an internship that’s going to have to put on your resume.” I was able to use a family relationship to get an internship at the Cleveland Cavaliers. That was my first exposure to the inside of a business of sports. I did that for the summer. I liked it and got a chance to ask a lot of people in the organization what they did and how they did it. I watched, learned and that set me off. People told me to go into sales. That wasn’t something I probably would have come up with on my own. I didn’t consider myself a salesperson. They said, “That’s how you should start.” My first job was an entry-level sales job at the Cleveland Cavaliers. I got committed to it, worked pretty hard at it and made some different moves. I went up to the Detroit Pistons and worked there. I got an opportunity to get into sales leadership and then went down to the Tampa Bay Lightning and back to the Cavs. I had a long stint where you and I met. I worked there for eight years. It has been many years now that the Cowboys opportunity came up. Legends became a part of my responsibility as well. That’s a bit of the quick career history. Between you and I, you use some real specific language. What did you suck at in your first sales job? Honestly, I remember it well and it’s an easy question for me to answer. This was pre-computer and the internet. This was in the mid-’90s and I was at the Cavs and in one day, they set you up. They had me sit next to another rep and listen. They handed me a computer printout stack that if you’re bored, you could peel the sides off. I had a ruler, highlighter, phone and script. The expectation was around 100 calls a day. I was extremely uncomfortable. I lacked confidence. I didn’t feel like I was good at it. I wasn’t having much success. I didn’t like it. There was nothing about it to report to you that was positive on the early sides of that. How many times were you ready to quit in the first couple of months? The problem with the quitting idea was that it was difficult for that to enter into the mind because I invested a lot to get there. I had done an internship and then I had a Master’s Degree. I had told everybody in my circle I was going to work in sports. You create that own pressure. What are you going to do? In two months, “I didn’t like it and I quit.” That wasn’t part of my DNA. You had enough out there. It’s like how we always talk, “Are you the chicken or the piggy?” The piggy commits his life for the breakfast. The chicken just contributes to you.
Sales is a great teacher of life. It’s got a little bit of everything.At the earliest stages, I was good at nothing. I’m being honest with you about that. What I became decent at was my work ethic. When I had no skill, the one thing I knew I could do was work. Honestly, that was a page out of my athletic book. I worked hard to be a college basketball player and had some success and I thought, “I know I can do that.” I was like, “I’ll outwork everybody.” I was a grinder. You know a little bit of this story. My brother was two years ahead of me out of school. He was in a sales role and he said, “You need to start self-educating and reading these books. There’s a material out there that you can teach yourself how to sell to be a good salesperson.” I started to do that. Self-education became something that I valued greatly back then. The first time I started reading about what you teach, the skill of selling, it became a different mindset. I started worrying a little less about what people were saying on the other end of the phone. My anxiety dropped, my feelings of failure. If I wasn’t making sales lessons, I started to treat it as more of a game. Some of that stuff mentally and emotionally was helpful to me.

Success means too many things to too many different people. Only you can define your own success.Let’s flip this over then. As you started to move your way through your career, you started getting some more sales leadership. How did sales prepare you to be a sales leader? What did it not do to prepare you to be a leader? My belief now and I have been selling my whole career. Sales is a great teacher of life. It’s got a little bit of everything. One thing is at the very heart of it, if you can develop the skill of selling, there’s a place for you in the world. It’s a little bit of that security and comfort that no matter what happens and thinking of it in this weird time, you can think about that a little bit. I feel like if my career didn’t work out how I had hoped or expected, I’d be able to sell something somewhere to somebody. It’s a baseline that gave me a little comfort.

Success will come to you if you just put your head down at all costs. You will get there eventually.I have seen it manifest in a whole lot of ways. That to me, probably more and more as I go. A good salesperson that’s overly selfish has no place with me. I’ve addressed that with people over the years in a whole variety of different ways and seen different versions of it. A lot of salespeople want to become the next leader. It’s not everybody but a lot of them do. That’s a quick way in my eyes to take yourself out of the running for that.

Important Links:
5 Sales Leadership Essentials That You’ll Need for the Coming Year
Observations on Sales Leadership Essentials for the Year
Being a top-producing sales rep doesn’t automatically make you a candidate for sales leadership. I’ve seen many cases where a sales rep was hitting their numbers and killing it in the field. But when they were promoted to sales management, …
5 Sales Leadership Essentials That You’ll Need for the Coming YearRead More »
Use This One, Simple Email Tactic to Improve Your Team’s Sales Performance

Increase Your Team’s Sales Performance by Integrating Sales Emails into Their Opening Strategy.
In one of my sales coaching sessions, someone asked how to follow-up with a buyer after sending an introductory sales email. He asked because, according to him, no one was opening—let alone reading—his emails.
…
Use This One, Simple Email Tactic to Improve Your Team’s Sales PerformanceRead More »
How to Open a Sales Call: Use the Affinity Rule to Improve Sales Effectiveness

Coaching your Sales Team to Set More Meetings, Close More Deals, and Surpass Their Performance KPIs
As a sales manager, you’re always looking for ways to improve your sales process and improve the performance of your sales team. One of the ideas that we constantly coach salespeople on in our sessions is that the most important part of the sales call is how you open. As mentioned in a past article, if you open a sales call correctly and follow your sales process, the close will follow as a natural part of the process.
…
How to Open a Sales Call: Use the Affinity Rule to Improve Sales EffectivenessRead More »
Sales Leaders: How to Effectively Delegate Sales Tasks and Assign Projects

Identifying and Establishing an Effective Sales Delegation Process
As a sales leader, you'll want to spend time reviewing your process for delegating sales tasks and assigning projects. If you want to make your team as effective as possible and free yourself to address the problems only you can address, then you’ll want to learn how to delegate effectively so that each member of your team can expand their skill set and be coached through the process.
…
Sales Leaders: How to Effectively Delegate Sales Tasks and Assign ProjectsRead More »

What is a Sales Methodology and Why Yours Needs to be Gold Medal Worthy
What is a Sales Methodology and Why Your Team Needs One
Back when I ran several training franchises, I encouraged my people to go after anything and everything. I gave them a solid sales process to work, but back then we didn’t have a well-defined …
What is a Sales Methodology and Why Yours Needs to be Gold Medal WorthyRead More »
Reduce Your Sales Cycle Time by Strengthening Your Sales Process
A Strong Sales Process is a Vital Tool for High Performing Sales Teams
Back in the early 2000s, we sold and trained a lot of people in the manufacturing industry: steel manufacturers, companies that manufactured parts for the …
Reduce Your Sales Cycle Time by Strengthening Your Sales ProcessRead More »
Use Sales Enablement Technology to Extend Your Ability to Accomplish More
Sales Enablement Extends the Power and Performance of Your High Performing Sales Team
Sales Enablement is one of the most overlooked elements of the Sales Team Science drivers. And it’s often taken for granted. It’s like …
Use Sales Enablement Technology to Extend Your Ability to Accomplish MoreRead More »
What Beach Volleyball’s A-Team Can Teach Us About Sales Management?
The Difference Between Sales Management and Sales Leadership for High-Performing Sales Teams
In my coaching sessions, I sometimes ask, “Which has more appeal, sales leadership or sales management?” Often, sales …
What Beach Volleyball’s A-Team Can Teach Us About Sales Management?Read More »
Are Your Coaching Skills Strong Enough to Motivate the Australian Terminator?
Motivation is Key When Coaching High-Performance Sales Teams
It’s been over a week since the closing ceremonies of the Tokyo Olympic games, but the contests and the displays of determination and individual grit …
Are Your Coaching Skills Strong Enough to Motivate the Australian Terminator?Read More »
Focusing Solely on Your High-Performing Salespeople Can Impact Your Medal Count
Coach ALL Members of Your Sales Team to Increase Performance Metrics
The Olympics. Arguably the biggest stage in the world for an athlete. Even if you’re a casual fan, you likely know the superstars everyone is watching, like elite gymnast Simone Biles. But you might not have heard …
Focusing Solely on Your High-Performing Salespeople Can Impact Your Medal CountRead More »
Selling as a New Olympic Sport?
The Common Ground Between Olympic Superstars and High-Performance Sales Teams
A marathon runner. A gymnast. A relay swimmer. A fencing champion. A salesperson.
What do all these people have in common? …
Sales Leaders: Your Salespeople are Not Hats
Micromanaging is a Surefire Way to Undermine the Efforts of High-Performance Sales Teams
Here’s a riddle for you: What sound does micromanaging make? Footsteps. As in, the footsteps of a …
Unleash the Potential of Your Sales Team
Help your salespeople lead masterful sales conversations, build their pipelines, resolve rebuttals, increase win rates, negotiate the best agreements, and drive growth for strategic accounts with Tyson Group sales training and performance systems.