John Treace

John R. Treace has over 30 years experience as a sales executive in the medical products industry. He spent over 10 years specializing in the restructuring of sales departments of companies that were either bankrupt or failing. Investor groups and venture capital firms hired him to manage turnarounds of pre-IPO companies. In 2010 he founded JR Treace & Associates, a sales management consulting business. Treace is the author of the new book, Nuts & Bolts of Sales Management: How to Build a High-Velocity Sales Organization.

How Core Values Drive Sales Performance

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Posted on 2011-12-15

As a senior sales officer charged with effecting business turnarounds for bankrupt private and pre-IPO companies, I witnessed firsthand the importance of core values. A strong set of core values is crucial to driving corporate performance, and without them, companies suffer.

Core values define company culture, which is a big part of why they're so important to driving performance. We can represent the relationship this way:

core values -> company culture -> actions/performance

For any sales team, the primary objective is to predictably and consistently produce sales, within budget and in accordance with our forecasts. Core values, and the company culture they support, are the most important ingredient in achieving predictability and consistency in the actions that bring about the results we want.

Defining Core Values

Core values are simple action statements that express the business attributes management...

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Morale Versus Execution - The Ultimate Sales Team Debate

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Posted on 2011-05-25

Morale-the esprit de corps or "spirit of the body"-is the capacity of a group of people to hold a common spirit of loyalty and comradeship. We think of morale as being deep-seated in the psych of the individual or group. Execution, on the other hand, is the process of reaching an objective as the result of performance. A team's ability to execute is more of a surface measurement that's easily evaluated by an outside observer.

Morale and execution are the cornerstones of powerful sales organizations. Most organizations recognize the importance of a sales team's ability to execute, since that is measured by numbers. However, some underrate the importance of morale, which is difficult to measure and is often confused with enthusiasm or situational motivation generated from, for example, a spirited sales meeting. Situational motivation is generally short-lived, but morale is ingrained and tends to have a lasting quality, unless conditions degrade it.

I once asked an...

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Five Common Afflictions of Sales Teams

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Posted on 2011-03-29

I've been a part of many sales teams in my career, and over and over I've noticed five common afflictions that affect them, each of which reduces morale and sales performance. They can be found to some degree in most almost every organization. Smart management teams are aware of these afflictions and work to avoid their potentially destructive impact. Any one occurrence of these problems will not necessary hurt the sales effort, but if allowed to progress to extremes, or if multiple conditions exist at once, they can be extremely harmful.

Affliction 1: Wasting sales representatives' time

One of the prime afflictions of sales teams is forcing them to spend time on non-sales tasks, for example making accounts receivable collections, managing product recalls, or filling out reports that do not directly relate to the sales process. Non-sales management often requests that reps perform these tasks, but great care should be taken before delegating them to valuable...

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