January, 2019

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Would you like to buy some Girl Scout Cookies? I did!

Jeffrey Gitomer

Paula Kearney just spent the weekend selling door to door. She made more than 150 sales. Paula is 7. Paula's success has her so pumped to sell more, her parents have to dampen her enthusiasm with the reality of homework, school, household chores and bedtime. What kind of saleswoman will this kid be when she's 21? So, what does this 7–year old kid have to do with your sales success?

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The Science of Strategy – What Steve Jobs and I Have in Common

Bernadette McClelland

Strategy is one of those words that, to a right brain creative like me, every now and then sends ‘this does not compute’ messages through the brain. Not dissimilar to a strategist hearing words such as ‘creativity’, I guess. With the definition of science being: ‘a systematically organised body of knowledge on a particular subject’, and Michael Porter’s definition of strategy in the Harvard Business Review, ‘the creation of a unique position involving a distinct set of activities’. then th

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How to Write a Winning Direct Mail Sales Letter

Sales and Marketing Management

Author: Warren Fowler Sales teams and marketers focus on digital communication so much that they seem to forget the power of offline promotion channels. While online tools are often more convenient and practical than traditional marketing techniques, the fact remains that the latter usually perform better. For instance, reports reveal that up to 90 percent of direct mails get opened, while emails average 25 percent at best.

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You’re No Different Than Your Competition

No More Cold Calling

Don’t believe everything you hear about selling in a digital world. You’ve probably heard the often-quoted statistic that says 57 percent of the buying process is complete before a customer talks to a salesperson. Rubbish. Believe that, and you’ll look like everyone else to your buyers. You’ll get in way too late. Your prospects will be confused about how your solution is different from the next guy’s.

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Streamlining Salesforce for Maximum Impact: A People-Focused Pocket Guide

Step inside the world of Salesforce consulting, stripped of fluff and jargon. Our guide provides a detailed exploration of five key success criteria, complete with actionable steps for immediate implementation. Elevate your Salesforce investment with insights on goal setting, system design, core object utilization, user adoption, and crafting a system tailored to your needs.

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Dave Kurlan's 10 Surefire New Years Resolutions For All Salespeople

Understanding the Sales Force

Like most people, this year I intend to make good on my New Year’s resolution. It’s actually more of a life resolution than it is a New Year’s resolution in much the same way that salespeople should make theirs a career resolution. If it’s important enough then it shouldn't be for only one year. I’ve compiled a list of resolutions that all salespeople should make and follow.

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Are Small Business Owners Salespeople in Disguise?

Jeffrey Gitomer

YES! The success of a small business rests on the owner's ability to sell. Small business owners have about 50 different hats to wear, but sales is the biggest hat an entrepreneur wears. Actually without the sales hat, the other hats are useless. When I say sales, I'm not just talking, "Hey, please buy my stuff." Sales is not just selling your product or service.

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Crikey, I Shipped It!

Bernadette McClelland

I have always said to my kids, ‘behave yourself because you never know who’s watching’. Like all kids, without fail, they listen to their mum (she says tongue in cheek!). But the point I am making is you never know who is watching you. Not from a creepy, stalking way, but more an observational perspective. And today, our personal branding extends way past a name on a building, a copyright mark that we might put against our initials, or the bio we choose to add to any profile we put on the web.

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4 Negotiation Strategies to Help Your Sales Process

Sales and Marketing Management

Author: Dean Kaplan As the head of a collections agency, I work with many different kinds of businesses. One thing many businesses with collection issues have in common is that they focus too strongly on making a sale, and not strongly enough on improving their sales process. Although it’s obvious that any business needs sales to survive, organizations that become too focused on sales at any cost tend to overlook warning signs that a client might not be creditworthy.

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Why Curiosity Is Critical for Sales Success

No More Cold Calling

What is 7427466391? Imagine if you saw this on a billboard along your commute route …. What would you do? Roll your eyes, think this is nonsense, tell others about it, or go to the site and find out what’s going on? The curious solved the equation (answer: 7427466391.com) and went to the site, where they found another equation. The few who solved it learned the secret to the strange billboard.

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How to Improve Email Deliverability and Optimize Each Send

Learn how to optimize email deliverability and drive greater email ROI. What lands your email in the customer’s inbox? Understanding those factors, otherwise known as email deliverability, is critical to getting the most return on your campaign investments. But the “rules” around which factors land you in the spam folder aren’t always easy to keep up with.

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The Top 8 Requirements for Becoming a Great Salesperson

Understanding the Sales Force

If you're young enough, some of the questions in the first few paragraphs won't apply because you haven't experienced the world without the innovations mentioned below. Don't let that prevent you from reading this because after the milestones, we'll get to the good selling stuff. For those of you who are my age or older, do you remember the first time you saw color TV?

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A Critical Mistake In Handle Prospecting Objections

The Pipeline

By Tibor Shanto. People will tell you that the number one reason sellers do not like to prospect, specifically telephone prospecting, is rejection. However, if we step back, there is no less rejection in other means of prospecting, say e-mail or LinkedIn prospecting; when you look at the numbers, the phone is more effective than e-mail, (better together), it’s just not in your face (ear), like the phone.

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Don't Dread Cold Calls, Laugh Them Off.

Jeffrey Gitomer

You will no longer dread the dreaded cold call after you read this column several hundred thousand times. There is a fear and dislike many salespeople have when it comes to cold calling. John Whittington at the Lake Norman SalesMasters ® club mentioned that he had a big fear of being thrown out of a company when making a cold call. It was suggested to him that his strategy should be to only cold call on one-story buildings.

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5 Components Of A Successful Salesperson’s Belief System

MTD Sales Training

What is a belief system? Wiki would have it described as a mental representation of an attitude oriented toward the likelihood of something being true. I like that concept, because it identifies a model that supports the way someone likes to behave, based on a system that supports those beliefs. That means it can’t always be supported by empirical formulae, but is determined by someone’s confidence in an opinion or belief.

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ABM Success Recipe: Mastering the Crawl, Walk, Run Approach

Shifting to an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy can be both exciting and challenging. Well-implemented ABM motions build engagement with high-value accounts and drive impactful campaigns that resonate with your audience. But where do you begin, and how do you progress from crawling to running? Watch now as Demand Gen experts delve into the essentials of each stage of the ABM process.

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Why Consultative Selling Does Not Work for Prospecting

Sales and Marketing Management

Author: Wendy Weiss, The Queen of Cold Calling™ I was recently working with a new client. His mission is to set up appointments on behalf of his manager. My new client was stressed and frustrated and having no success. He told me that he was reaching and having brief conversations with some prospects but those conversations went nowhere. He said he was trying to be consultative, to elicit details and to drill down on prospect objections.

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The Best Cold Calling Tip Is Stop Immediately (Do This Instead)

No More Cold Calling

. Have you ever met a salesperson who enjoyed cold calling? (Well, maybe one in 100.) How about a buyer who enjoyed receiving cold calls? (Yeah, me neither.) Not only is cold calling tortuous for everyone involved, it’s one of the reasons that only 54.3 percent of sales reps made quota last year. Cold calling doesn’t address the top two challenges that sales teams face.

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Top 13 Requirements to Help You Soar as a Sales Manager

Understanding the Sales Force

In my last article I shared the t op 8 requirements for becoming a great salesperson. Wow, did that resonate with people and there was a great discussion about it on LinkedIn. In addition to that, I received a number of emails asking, what are the requirements for becoming a great sales manager? I'll share those in a moment but first, since they were so popular, a few more "do you remember the first time" questions: Do you remember your first cell phone that didn't need to be plugged into a roof

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How Do You Measure Customer Experience?

SBI Growth

Recently, my colleague Sid Nakappan wrote an article on How the CEO can jumpstart the Customer Experience Transformation. If your boss put this article on your desk, you are probably getting started. With the interest of beginning with the end.

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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 Be a Memorable Salesperson Part 2: Collaborate With Buyers

Connect2Sell

Being memorable in sales translates into making more sales. This 12-part series on how to be a memorable salesperson includes specific ways you can make yourself stand out to buyers. Each post in this CONNECT2Sell series includes research from a study with 530 B2B buyers and in-field observations from a sales coach. This post describes how to be more memorable by doing more collaborating with buyers.

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Nine Attitudes for Sales Success

The Sales Heretic

Ask any sales expert, and they’ll tell you that the right attitude is essential for success. But it’s not just one attitude that’s necessary—there are several. I would suggest there are nine different—but related—attitudes you need to nurture in order to be successful in sales. 1. Optimism I have never met a successful salesperson or [.].

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Beat Your B2B Competition Like Einstein Would: A New Theory of Relativity

Sales and Marketing Management

Author: Ken Rutsky Albert Einstein thought about big things: space and time; the size, origin and destination of the Universe. Most of us business-to-business marketers are a bit more limited: Customers and competitors; the size and future of our market share. But one thing is pretty clear, it’s all relative. "Relativity teaches us the connection between the different descriptions of one and the same reality.". – Albert Einstein.

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Too Much Drama per Dollar

The Pipeline

By Tibor Shanto. Professional who excel understand that there is more to that success than just core skills. Beyond how they execute their craft, other life skills can enhance the experience for participants and the outcome. One element many top performers employ is a touch of theatre. Whether you call it “bedside manner,” “courtroom presence,” or good old swagger, there is no question that little theatre art in high school can pay big dividends down the line.

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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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Do the Least Informed Salespeople Have the Loudest Voices

Understanding the Sales Force

Do the least informed among us have the loudest voices? This article is about salespeople but to set the stage, we'll start with the news. When I listen to and watch the news, it seems that those on the fringes and representing special interest groups get the most attention, benefit of the doubt, dictate how everyone else should think and act, and cause tremendous tension and stress.

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Why Are You Still Cold Calling? January Referral Selling Insights

No More Cold Calling

Here’s what you might have missed this month from No More Cold Calling. I hadn’t bought a car in 17 years. Yep, that’s how long my Acura 3.2 TL with 162,000 miles lasted—until the transmission went out. I dreaded buying another car because of the pushy, in-your-face car salespeople, who are just like B2B sales reps cold calling you. But I told myself that perhaps things had changed in the past 17 years.

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How To Set Big, Hairy A * Sales Goals

MTD Sales Training

We’re always told to think big, aim high and challenge ourselves. It can give us motivation and drive to go where we might not have thought we could and achieve things we might not have thought possible. How can we give ourselves that massive push to go for something that would inspire us to tap into our potential? One way is by setting ourselves a BHAG!

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Is Buying From You Too Risky?

The Sales Heretic

I have weird feet. Seriously. My forefeet are wide, I have very long toes, and my right foot is nearly a half size larger than my left. Which makes shoe shopping a challenge. Roughly 98% of the shoes I try on don’t fit comfortably. So when I recently purchased several pairs of shoes online, I [.].

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Contact vs. Company Intent Signal Data

Contact and company intent data both have their advantages. Contact-level intent leads can be acted on immediately to reach active buyers, while company-level leads improve outcomes for account-based marketing and other programs. This infographic unpacks the advantages of both contact and company data and gives details about how B2B marketers can benefit from both.

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The Missing Key Element to Sales Success

Sales and Marketing Management

Author: Rory Christian According to IDC , despite a "typical" $1 billion company spending a large amount of resources devoted to training for customer-facing people, poor sales enablement results in around $14 million of wasted sales and marketing expenses, and $100 million in lost sales opportunities. Where could they be going wrong? Imagine for a moment that you’re a sales manager evaluating how to deliver a sales enablement program that will benefit both new hires who need to hit the ground r

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The Top 5 Technologies to Support Revenue Enablement

SBI Growth

Your buyers are behaving differently. Now more than ever, they have access to increasing amounts of intelligence and will scrutinize every aspect of your solution against your competitors. Recently, HBR identified 40 unique points of value that your buyers consider before.

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An Easier Way to Coach Salespeople - For a While

Understanding the Sales Force

One of the challenges that sales managers have is their trepidation around transitioning from very little coaching to daily coaching; and at the same time, moving from coaching light (ineffective coaching) to coaching pro (effective coaching). Why? They aren't masters of role-playing and role-playing is one of the primary tools to demonstrate best practices and how effective sales conversations should sound.

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