Carla Harmon is a 20-year Sales Director who has been repeatedly recruited to build, lead, and assess sales teams. Working in the telecommunications industry, Carla has built productive sales teams for Fortune 500 public companies, start-up tech firms, and non-profits. She’s been tapped to consult retail, telecom, tech, trade groups, and high-growth SAAS firms. Praised for her ability to coach and develop other sales leaders, Carla has improved sales team performance using data insights to assess and align sales activities that impact revenue. She’s joining me today to share some stories from her people management journey and walk us through a couple of key techniques she uses with her staff. You’ll hear her discuss her diagnostic framework – People, Process, Tools, and Insights from Data.   Carla also shares her definition of paying “quality attention” is essential when managing people.

I’ve invited Carla to the ManagerMirror because she’s worked hands-on building sales teams and delivered results that have scaled her impact to strategic sales leadership over her career. Carla spent 11 years at AT&T, and her first assignment was to help build out their retail distribution channel. She moved to Enterprise sales and delivered top performance as an IC. Carla was then tapped to train the national Enterprise sales team on Miller Heiman’s Strategic Selling before being promoted to her first sales leadership position. She joined two start-ups, built sales teams from scratch for Hyphen Technologies, and established the sales enablement program for @Link Networks. Then, Carla was recruited to Nextel to build the sales operations program for Custom Networks Solutions, a scaling sales team emerging from ‘Nextel’s incubator, and later for Sprint, where she orchestrated a turnaround for the B/W Enterprise sales team. She joined start-up IoT firm Velocita Wireless where she built an enterprise sales team that achieved early funding milestones and was sold to United Wireless. She continued to invest in her sales leadership skills by attending ‘Maximizing Sales Force Performance’ at Kellogg School of Management. Today, she’s the Managing Director of Sales and Business Development at Monroe Mitchell, LLC in Washington, DC, and ‘she’s joining us to share her story, and hopefully a few techniques aspiring people managers can put into practice.  Follow Carla on LinkedIn to stay current with her leadership and business writing content!