August, 2018

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Sell Slower

Sales and Marketing Management

Author: Paul Cherry I was working with a manufacturer of medical instruments that use lasers to measure blood flow. The products cost upwards of $50,000 and are sold primarily to medical research facilities. With a niche product like this, the pool of potential customers is small, so you have to make the most of every opportunity. Unfortunately, the closing percentages for this company were low.

Buyer 294
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Why the Science of Our Decision Making Is Not Always Black and White

Bernadette McClelland

It was a very simple decision between two very simple choices – Do I choose the carrot cake or the friand? I chose neither, and it had nothing to do with calorie counting. In fact, I don’t actually know what it was that made me so uncertain. Whilst I wasn’t an anxiety driven mess because of my indecisiveness, it did cause me some angst for a few seconds.

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A Guide to Getting the Most Out of Networking Events

John Barrows

With Q4 around the corner and event season (September) upon us, we here at JBarrows will be making the rounds at all the events coming up like Tenbound , HyperGrowth , INBOUND , Digital Sales World and of course Dreamforce. In order to get the most out of these opportunities for us and for you, we’ve developed this guide. Read it below or download your own copy here.

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Relationships Rule, but Data Drives Sales, Too

No More Cold Calling

The odds might not be in your sales team’s favor … yet. I’ve interviewed many sales reps over the past two months, trying to better understand the challenges they face in today’s fast-paced, digital-first sales environment. They tell me they’re overwhelmed. Projects get thrown at them with no additional support or designated priorities. They recognize that customer experience is key, but they’re burdened down with reports, cold leads, and spending time with clients who are losers, which makes it

Data 297
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Sales & Marketing Alignment: How to Synergize for Success

Speaker: Carlos Hidalgo, Co-Founder & CEO of Digital Exhaust, Author, International Keynote & TEDx Speaker

Recent research shows that only 50% of B2B organizations state that they have good alignment between their marketing and sales teams. This lack of alignment tremendously impacts the ability to meet business goals, and is a limiting factor for building and maintaining customer relationships. While many B2B organizations continue to struggle with aligning their marketing and sales teams, they can take practical steps to unify both teams and simplify their overall approach.

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35+ Marketing Jokes to Brighten Your Day

Zoominfo

A little bit of humor can go a long way– even in the marketing world. Today’s marketing professionals must juggle a number of high-priority tasks throughout the day, and often, they find themselves under a significant amount of stress. In these cases, a few lighthearted jokes can ease the tension of the day-to-day marketing job. And, believe it or not, humor does more than just relieve stress– it can actually make marketers better at their jobs.

Marketing 272

More Trending

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Taking Customer Service from Cost Center to Profit Center

Sales and Marketing Management

Author: John Larson How many times has one of your customers approached you with an issue or a problem? For instance, “I purchased this product from you and it does not work.” Or, “I thought this product had feature X, but I found out it doesn’t and I want to return it.” Or possibly, “You told me my order would arrive on Wednesday and it came on Friday.”.

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Do the Best Sales Managers Have the Best Salespeople?

Understanding the Sales Force

We all see the effects that strong leaders have when they surround themselves with either strong, mediocre or weak people. What happens when strong leaders inherit a mixed team? What happens when they hire a mixed team? What happens when we ask the same questions about weak leaders? I dug into a subset of data from Objective Management Group's (OMG) evaluations of the salespeople who report to more than 15,000 sales managers to determine whether the best sales managers actually have the best sal

Hiring 230
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If the Whole Company Supported Revenue Generation

Score More Sales

If the whole, entire company supported revenue generation, how strong would your customer care or customer service team be? Would nothing ever slip through the cracks? If everyone supported revenue generation, how easily could we detect a disgruntled customer about to leave us?

Revenue 215
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There’s No Such Thing as a Warm Call: August Referral Selling Insights

No More Cold Calling

Referrals are HOT, HOT, HOT! Stop rationalizing. There’s no such thing as a warm anything in sales—an email, phone call, social media outreach, or even a knock on the door. Unless your prospect knows who you are and expects to hear from you, you might as well step into a freezer. Your outreach is cold as ice. Reps fool themselves into believing that they’re not sending cold emails or making cold calls because they’ve researched their prospects and sent emails with catchy subject lines about why

Referrals 258
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How Intent Data Helps Marketers Convert A-List Accounts

One of the biggest challenges for any B2B marketer is understanding your prospects’ next move — who is most likely to buy and when. Without these insights, marketing campaigns can feel more like guesswork, with high investment and little return. We’re here to tell you there’s a better way. By tracking buyers’ digital footprints and online activity, such as website visits, product reviews, and spikes in content consumption, you can engage prospects with a message that really resonates.

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How to Increase Sales Productivity [Infographic]

Zoominfo

For many sales reps, productivity is key to sales success. The more calls you make, the more deals you close. So, if your goal is to increase sales productivity, start by asking how much time you waste on non-selling activities. In a typical day, we’d be shocked if you spend 8 hours on the phone. After all, you’re not a robot. And even before you can pick up the phone to contact decision-makers, you must conduct a significant amount of research. .

How To 214
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Fine Dining Serves Up a Great Example of Positive Sales Technique

Connect2Sell

Next time you’re enjoying a relaxing meal in a fine dining restaurant, observe these six sales lessons in positive sales technique that will help you get follow-up business from your customers, too.

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Imprisoned by PowerPoint: A Foolproof Escape Plan in Five Steps

Sales and Marketing Management

Author: Chris Westfall It’s no secret that the richest man in modern history, Jeff Bezos, has outlawed PowerPoint for all employees at Amazon. Replacing the venerable Microsoft product with multi-page memos may or may not be a future-proof strategy, but it’s now the law at Seattle’s largest company. At Amazon, meetings begin with a narrative-style memo (no bullet points) that’s handed out to all participants.

Sage 197
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The Best Way To Generate New Leads

MTD Sales Training

A salesperson on one of our workshops was bemoaning the fact that he had to make between 100 and 150 cold calls a week. He wanted our opinion on how to get more leads without having to cold call. My trainer was very diplomatic and said that, even though cold calling wasn’t the most efficient use of a salesperson’s time, you have to sometimes get hold of prospects some way or other, or your pipeline will be as empty as it possibly could be.

Leads 197
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Supercharge Your Sales: 5 Steps to Effortless Selling

Sales teams often lose precious time hunting for updated sales materials, while marketing struggles to keep these assets accessible and current. It's not just about managing; it's about seamlessly finding, presenting, and sharing critical sales content. All of this takes place within an intuitive, unified platform. Dive into Showell's groundbreaking content management realm.

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Your CRM Isn’t Cutting It; How to Prepare for the New Wave of Analytics.

SBI Growth

It’s Crunch Time – the Beginning of Q4. Are you going to hit your 2018 number? What’s your forecast for 2019? Do you have the heads, processes, and funding to ensure a successful 2019? Only a handful of Sales Ops leaders can.

Analytics 190
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Seeking New Sales Techniques? Look Beyond Digital

No More Cold Calling

The best prospecting strategies require a human touch. Buyers know everything about our companies, products, and solutions before they ever speak to a salesperson. Believe that? Far too many sales reps do. They think that digital rules. So, they spend most of their time staring at screens—doing demos, sending emails, and interacting on social media.

Fashion 219
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It’s A Process Not The Bible

The Pipeline

By Tibor Shanto. A sales process is a document that attempts to bring a roadmap, some objective order to an otherwise all too subjective affair. It is not a divine document passed on to Chuck Heston by a white-bearded guy or your VP of Sales. Following the process blindly is not a recipe for success. I know many of you are shaking your heads saying “duh, we know that Tibor.

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Buyer Personas: The Missing Piece of Your SEO Strategy

Zoominfo

The digital nature of our current business landscape has caused a dramatic shift in the way companies market their products. More customers are turning to the internet to research, test, and purchase products and services. As a result, SEO has become an essential skill for all modern marketers. Yet, if you’ve worked in marketing for any length of time, you know bridging the gap between traditional marketing and SEO isn’t that simple.

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Redefining the CDP: 8 Data-Driven Designs for Successful Customer Journeys

In this guide, discover 8 use cases for how a customer data platform can tackle common challenges faced by marketing, commerce, service, and sales teams. With helpful diagrams and simple explanations in each use case, see how Salesforce’s CDP, Data Cloud for Marketing, powers personalized, real-time experiences across marketing, with capabilities that include: Optimizing ad spend Powering dynamic website content Increasing upselling and cross-selling Resolving service cases with marketing data B

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Can Artificial Intelligence Make Sales More Human?

Sales and Marketing Management

Author: Steve Woods, Nudge.ai Co-founder and CTO The fear-mongering is everywhere; artificial intelligence will replace humans and kill jobs by automating the things that we do. It’s effective click-bait because it seems like the plot of a Hollywood action movie pitting robots against humans. But, is it reality? To get to the answer of that question, we need to dig beneath the surface and understand what artificial intelligence is all about, and what it is likely to do to each industry that it a

Scale 195
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3 Ways To Handle Clients That Won’t Stop Negotiating Discounts

MTD Sales Training

There are many times when a client tries to intimidate or get the better of salespeople. Whether it’s because they feel they have to in order to get a better deal, or their ego is associated with getting one over someone else, or some other rationale, they feel the need to do something that gains them a ‘win’ of some sorts. One way they do this is to keep negotiating a discount , no matter what figure you have dropped or discounted to.

Discount 189
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Does Being a Strong Qualifier Correlate to Having a Strong Pipeline?

Understanding the Sales Force

My latest data mining project reveals that the answer to this question is a partial correlation. Check out the two tables below and you'll see just what I mean.

Pipeline 195
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Social Selling: What You Should and Should NOT Do

No More Cold Calling

A Complete Guide to Putting the “Social” Back in Social Selling. Social selling has finally (and dangerously) reached buzzword status. Dangerously, because there are misperceptions about what it means, how to do it, and just as importantly, how not to do it. Misperceptions, because salespeople have forgotten the social part of social selling. Instead, they pitch, spam, annoy their contacts, and think that’s actually helping them sell.

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Retail Tech: Empower Associates, Optimize CX, and Boost Productivity

Speaker: Andrew Regan, Managing Partner at BlueSeed Retail Ltd.

Did you know that 70% of new retail technology fails to deliver expected benefits and can often decrease customer value, service, and experience? With that in mind, how can we empower our store associates to leverage new technology to optimize the customer experience and boost productivity? This exclusive webinar with Andrew Regan will dive into strategies to empower retail associates for success with new technology.

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How to Excel as a Sales Manager and a Sales Leader – At the Same Time

Women Sales Pros

If you are a sales manager, you probably received some solid training, read lots of books,and learned from experts in the field through seminars, webinars and blog posts.And all along the way, you learned that your primary job as a sales manager is to develop and coach your team. But then management tells you that you also need to be a sales leader.

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35+ Statistics About Dirty Data

Zoominfo

There is no greater asset to your organization than your B2B database. However, when your database becomes cluttered with outdated, incomplete or inaccurate contact information, it can prove to be a costly obstacle along your route to success. From marketing, lead generation and customer relationships, to sales and even revenue, dirty data can have an insurmountable impact on all areas of your business.

Data 189
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Beyond A Buzzword: How to Do CSR Right

Sales and Marketing Management

Author: Lain Hensley Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a management concept which strives to ensure that companies conduct their business in an ethical and responsible manner. Although once considered a strictly voluntary business strategy, over the past few decades CSR has come to be a mandatory policy at hundreds of organizations worldwide.

Policies 185
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The 7 Best Phrases To Use With Your Prospects

MTD Sales Training

Trying to get your prospect to interact with you can often be a frustrating nightmare. Making a call that is interrupting their day, especially when it sounds like a typical sales call, can be the quickest way to get a slam-dunk from the other end of the line. What can we suggest, then, that will at least get the prospect listening for a few moments?

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How to Leverage Intent Data for Better Outcomes

Speaker: Susan Spencer, Principal of Spencer Communications

Intent signal data can go a long way toward shortening sales cycles and closing more deals. The challenge is deciding which is the best type of intent data to help your company meet its sales and marketing goals. In this webinar, Susan Spencer, fractional CMO and principal of Spencer Communications, will unpack the differences between contact-level and company-level intent signals.

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3 Ways to improve Your Customer Retention Scorecard

Babette Ten Haken

Do you have a customer retention scorecard? You know what I am talking about. Any of the plethora of scoring systems which measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. Chances are, your organization already has a scorecard or two. And your own performance is measured and compared with the ratings customers provide on a quarterly basis. Do you know which factors these scorecards measure?

Retention 154
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This Is Why Your Lead Generation Process Isn’t Working

No More Cold Calling

Find out how to unclog your sales pipeline. Let me guess. Your lead generation process plays out like this: You don’t have enough leads in your pipe, and your reps aren’t calling high enough. You can’t count on accurate forecasts when pipelines are unqualified, so you’re never really sure whether your team will make quota until it’s too late. Big problem—the kind of problem that will keep a sales leader up at night, or worse, get a sales leader canned.

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6 Sales Closing Techniques and Why They Work

Hubspot Sales

Closing is a make-or-break moment in sales. Choosing the right phrases to seal a sales deal is crucial. And this moment is likely the final verdict determining whether or not your efforts will amount to anything at all. You're not the only salesperson who feels apprehensive about the close. However, without that feeling of risk, successfully closing a sale wouldn't be so thrilling -- which drives salespeople to continually strive for more.Because sales professionals are expected to generate the

Closing 145