Understanding the Sales Force

MAY 1, 2017

Image Copyright Cybrain. It didn't take very long for this to happen. When Objective Management Group (OMG) announced that it was making its findings data available to the public, we knew that it wouldn't take long for someone with a flair for analytics to dig in and come up with something cool. Last week, John Cousineau, creator of Abicus, got me on a video conference and shared what he came up with.

Analysis 258

Analysis Conference Analytics Groups 258

Score More Sales

MAY 1, 2017

I saw a question this week in a sales community on LinkedIn. A member was looking for a referral for sales management training. What struck me hard was that he said he’d reached out to four companies who offer sales management training services. Three days had gone by, and only one of the companies had reached out to him.

Company 200

Company Sales Leadership Training Referrals 200

The Pipeline

MAY 1, 2017

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca . Ask sales people why they lose deals and most will offer either price or some aspect of the product that led to their demise. I bet the over 40% B2B reps who fail to attain quota in a given year will also lean on the same crutch. While I understand the defence mechanism, you have to wonder when they will face the truth, and actually consider that it is the way they sell that leads to the results they get, nothing else.

Face-to-face 174

Face-to-face Buyer Quota Examples 174

Sales 2.0

MAY 1, 2017

Who is your biggest competitor? If you’re in IT sales is it IBM. Apple, Google, Wipro, some dudes in Bulgaria? Probably not. You’re biggest competitor is Status Quo Inc. Boy those guys are tough to beat! The thing is a lot of the time our prospect will choose the status quo, aka do nothing vs. any super-cool company out there, including ours. You thought you had this opportunity rolling.

Prospecting 150

Prospecting Call-back Analytics Google 150

Advertiser: ZoomInfo

Longer sales cycles. Increasingly discerning buyers. More meetings. Intensifying competition. Economic uncertainty. Go-to-market teams of every size, in every industry, are grappling with these challenges firsthand. Thankfully, there’s an answer. We’ve developed an entirely new way for GTM leaders to identify and execute proven, data-driven strategies that drive revenue.

Sales Cycle

Sales and Marketing Management

MAY 1, 2017

Author: SMM Downtown Project (DTP) is Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s effort to rebuild Downtown Las Vegas into the most community-focused large city in the world. He invested $350 million of his own money, started recruiting entrepreneurs in 2012 and put a five-year timeline on the project. Business journalist Aimee Groth lived through the first three years of Hsieh’s “community as a startup” experiment.

Revelation 136

Revelation Loyalty Call-back ACT 136

Sales and Marketing Management

MAY 1, 2017

Author: Erica Abt One of the most common complaints of frontline sales managers is employee turnover. After pouring loads of time and effort into onboarding, coaching, and engaging sellers on their team, frontline managers feel defeated when they hear “I’m leaving.” It stings that much more when the individual is a top performer whose experience fell short of their expectations.

Lead Rank 136

Lead Rank Lead Scoring Compensation Retention 136

Mr. Inside Sales

MAY 1, 2017

Okay. So I’ve been in sales longer than some of my clients have been on the planet. I’ve made thousands and thousands of prospecting calls, and thousands and thousands of closing calls. I teach, train, write books on phone scripts, and develop customized phone scripts and inside sales training programs for sales teams worldwide. You’d think that I would never get tripped up by or neglect the fundamentals of sales, right?

Sales Qualified Lead 120

Sales Qualified Lead Inbound Inside Sales Objections 120

Sales and Marketing Management

MAY 1, 2017

Author: Paul Nolan If reading books by or about great business leaders is enlightening and inspiring, reading about business leaders who have attained significant success almost in spite of themselves is engrossing in a whole different manner. That’s the sort of tale that Aimee Groth spins in her book “ Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia.

Objections 120

Objections Up-Sell Conversion Closing 120

Increase Sales

MAY 1, 2017

This morning I read some interesting research from the Gallup organization on performance appraisals. I believe this research could easily be extended to sales performance appraisals. “Only 2 in 10 employees strongly agree that their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work.” Regardless if in your sales management role you manage a team of salespeople or just yourself, motivation is essential to moving forward.

Motivation 91

Motivation Research Facebook Sales Leadership 91

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Sales

SBI Growth

MAY 1, 2017

Prospecting 180

Prospecting Buyer Marketing Strategy 180

Infoteam Consulting

MAY 1, 2017

Here is today’s blog in a nutshell. It is a guide to writing a letter that will allow you to waste less time on dead horses – RFPs you are never going to win – and use that time to work on opportunities you do have a chance of winning. All this while keeping a good relationship with the customer whose RFP you have declined.

How To 87

How To Opportunity Customer Proposal 87

SBI Growth

MAY 1, 2017

Sales Operations 180

Sales Operations Sales Territories Analysis 180

Partners in Excellence

MAY 1, 2017

If I were to assess the worlds of buying and selling through much of what I read, I would come up with the conclusion that Customers and Sales people are on diverging paths, we are doing as much to minimize our interactions with each other. The Holy Grail of these diverging paths is AI–from a buyers perspective, helping us buy efficiently and intelligently.

Ideal Customer Profile 54

Ideal Customer Profile Customer Survey Inbound 54

Advertiser: ZoomInfo

Even in today’s data-driven sales world, cold calling remains a fact of life for many go-to-market professionals. Fortunately, today’s sales leaders have a crucial advantage over their predecessors: market intelligence and outreach platforms that can warm up virtually any introduction.

Cold Calling

Cincom Smart Selling

MAY 1, 2017

Price optimization software helps you make sure that the price is right. But what is the right price ? Pricing is more than recovering costs and pulling in some margin dollars. Pricing must cover expenses, but there is still more to it when it comes to telling someone how much something costs. That number has to mean something to the customer. It has to relate to some comparative, quantitative metric that makes sense to your buyer or market.

Software 54

Software Software Discount Promotion 54

Hyper-Connected Selling

MAY 1, 2017

Sometimes, even video games become a grind. But that doesn’t mean we stop playing. In fact, for some of us, that’s the goal. Grinding is a term used in gaming (especially for on-going games where you build a character) when you repeat the same actions over and over to increase your experience/in-game cash/equipment or something else. It could mean that you play the same level over and over, or the same mini-game countless times.

Video 45

Video 45

Your Sales Management Guru

MAY 1, 2017

No Challenge, No Change. After spending a day working with a client and their sales team, we normally set up three follow up web based sessions to ensure our recommendations are acted upon and their sales team actually changes. After the second web based training it is my opinion that the organization most likely will not change. Not because our program and recommendation were inappropriate but Sales Management is failing to coach and challenge their team.

Lead Rank 47

Lead Rank Lead Scoring Face-to-face Influencer 47

Sales Gravy

MAY 1, 2017

With all the technology and social media we have at our fingertips, it only makes sense that connecting with our customers & prospects and blowing out our numbers is a piece of cake, right? Think again.

Social Media 40

Social Media Media Prospecting Customer 40

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Close

MAY 1, 2017

In the early days of your startup, the ultimate validation is money.

Sales 52

Sales 52