October, 2019

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Four Four-Letter Words To Banish from your Sales Vocabulary

The Pipeline

By Tibor Shanto. I have often said that the schoolyard taunt “ sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me ,” doesn’t hold up in sales. Words can kill you, your pipeline, and career. We don’t want that, so to help, here are four four-letter words to banish from your sales vocabulary. This will take work, like quitting smoking (how many times have you done that?

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Bad Data: What It Is & How to Better Visualize Sales Performance [+ Examples]

Hubspot Sales

Between developing a scalable sales process, collecting data, and helping your team sell, it can be hard to properly track your sales team's performance. However, bad data and reporting could result in fewer sales, a decrease in customer satisfaction, and poor decisions. In fact, your sales team could be wasting time chasing poor leads due to bad data.

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Beyond the Pay Mix: What Makes Salespeople Tick Today

Sales and Marketing Management

Author: Mihai Popoaca, Chief Operating Officer, WorldatWork The massive shifts in today’s economy are changing what drives salespeople to be engaged and productive. Incentives and bonuses are just the starting point. To retain top salespeople, we need to change the conversation around rewards and work. . The current model is fraught with competing priorities -- increase revenue and optimize costs, while at the same time hiring, engaging, measuring and retaining a sales force that is motivated b

Lead Rank 254
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An Uncomfortable, but Highly Effective Sales Strategy

Jill Konrath

After spending months trying to meet with a perfect prospect, the last thing you want to do is blow the opportunity. Yet all too often, that's exactly what happens—especially when you only have a short time together.

Strategy 264
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Brick & Mortar Retail Relevance: How to Stay Ahead of the Curve

Speaker: Jay Black, Senior Account Executive

Let's set the record straight: in-store retail isn't dead - it's evolving! Faced with the digital age and the demands of omnichannel shopping, some retailers are thriving while others are struggling to adapt. Join Jay Black in this exclusive session as he explores the strategies that set successful stores apart, including: Crafting unique and unforgettable in-store experiences 🛍️ Mastering the art of retail demands 🛒 Navigating inventory challenges in today's climate 📦 an

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How to Sustain While Disrupting: Innovation and Agility in Sales

The Center for Sales Strategy

Today’s consumers are distracted with numerous options and bombarded with loads of information. As a result, they often struggle to find the products or services that best meet their needs. In a rapidly changing industry, tools, and tactics that enabled sales and closed deals just a few years ago don’t stand a fighting chance today. Innovation and agility are keys to staying ahead of altering consumer demands.

More Trending

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The One Behaviour Salespeople And Sales Leaders Need To Stop Hiding From…

Bernadette McClelland

OK, I won’t make you read to the end here so comes an early spoiler alert! For Salespeople, that behaviour is Responsibility , and to complete the equation, for the Sales Manager it is Accountability. Both in equal doses! What if I was to tell you the difference between the top 1% of over a million salespeople evaluated and the bottom 1%, 94% of the top 1% of salespeople choose to take responsibility for their results, yet only 20% of the bottom 1% choose to take responsibility for their results

Account 301
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Getting in the door is hard

Sales 2.0

Getting in the door is the #1 problem for most small companies I know. When I first got involved in sales I was a sales engineer. I supported a technology sales force on their sales calls with semiconductor engineers. I always thought I was pretty amazing. When I got to these meetings I had many engaging conversations with these buyers that our sales team did not seem able to handle.

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Account-Based Success

The Pipeline

The Pipeline Guest Post – Scott Miller. Like most in our profession, I am a big fan of account-based sales and marketing. According to the ITSMA, 87% of respondents agreed Account-Based methodologies deliver a higher ROI than other marketing activities. Account-based isn’t new – but it is en vogue. Quite simply, it is a methodology that focuses on an organization’s sales and marketing efforts on a select number of accounts that are most likely to buy your products and solutions.

Account 251
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How Effective Listening Helps Build Customer Relationships and Close Deals

Sales and Marketing Management

Author: Rafael Lourenco When you work for a B2B company, it’s easy to assume that your customers and colleagues make their decisions based only on ROI and other data. However, the higher you move in the hierarchy of an organization, or the closer you get to sales activities, the more your day-to-day life becomes about interacting with people – colleagues, bosses, investors, board members, employees and customers.

Closing 239
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How to Stay Competitive in the Evolving State of Martech

Marketing technology is essential for B2B marketers to stay competitive in a rapidly changing digital landscape — and with 53% of marketers experiencing legacy technology issues and limitations, they’re researching innovations to expand and refine their technology stacks. To help practitioners keep up with the rapidly evolving martech landscape, this special report will discuss: How practitioners are integrating technologies and systems to encourage information-sharing between departments and pr

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65+ Statistics About Artificial Intelligence

Zoominfo

Artificial intelligence may seem like a new edition to the business world– but it’s already transformed the way we sell B2B products and services. Early adopters of AI have achieved significant benefits – including increased efficiency, cost reduction, improved customer experience, revenue growth, and more. But, many businesses still question the effectiveness and practicality of AI.

B2B 247
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Does Size Really Matter?

No More Cold Calling

If you’re in data overload, you may not need to be. You’ve heard the phrase: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” I know it’s a disgusting mental image, but there’s wisdom in this metaphor. How often do you take on large projects and get mired down in the details—rather than breaking the project into small, digestible, actionable chunks?

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What 84% of Companies Get Wrong About Annual Planning

SBI Growth

You see it all the time. An executive leader is scared to make bold decisions required to grow the firm. We call it “Incrementalism.” They quickly review minor successes of the past year and re-up. The meagerly reallocate funds towards.

Company 218
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The Parallel Between Prospecting and Leading

The Sales Hunter

This morning, during a call with a business owner, he shared with me about their latest product upgrade. As he talked, I could hear passion in his voice about how his product could help others. Without hesitation, he stated why his solution was better than his competitor’s offering. In this compelling conversation, he convinced me to believe. There is a major parallel between prospecting and leading.

Leads 217
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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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The Telephone In The Age Of Asynchronous Prospecting

The Pipeline

By Tibor Shanto. We all know the expression “the calm before the storm”, but most of us in sales experience the reverse. Selling can feel like the storm before the calm, with the calm is always “just around the corner”. This is always the case in a fast-changing environment, which adds to the storm like conditions. As technology continues to accelerate the pace of advances, other elements of prospecting are not keeping up.

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What is the Sales Stack and Do You Need it?

Understanding the Sales Force

You bought a really nice, new, laptop computer and you thought to yourself, "Now I'm all set!" But are you? You needed a case to carry it around, a thumb drive for quickly moving files from your laptop to another, and a printer and if you have a Mac notebook, a port that will serve as adapters to your various cables. These are your accessories.

Sales 205
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Get Your “Foot in the Door” with this Sales Cold Email Template

Zoominfo

Cold email is one of the most common and tested tactics in a modern salesperson’s repertoire. And yet, sales reps still look for ways to improve their sales email strategy. It’s not hard to see why — after all, only 24% of sales emails are opened ( source ). Fine-tuning your cold email strategy might not make your open rates skyrocket to 90%, but it can make a major difference.

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How Robust Is Your Q1 Pipeline? [September Referral Selling Insights]

No More Cold Calling

Here’s what you might have missed from No More Cold Calling. Q4 has now begun, which means it’s time to build your sales pipeline for Q1. I know what you’re thinking: “Hold on, Joanne, that’s not how it works.”. Yep, it’s counterintuitive, but Q4 is 25 percent about closing business for this year and 75 percent about building business for next year.

Referrals 209
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Gone in 8 Seconds: Overcoming Buyers’ Shrinking Attention Spans

Speaker: Jake Miller, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Allego

Buyers are savvier, buying teams are larger, and new research shows that buyers' attention spans have dropped to just 8 seconds. This means that the old approach of blasting buyers with email-heavy, generic communications no longer works. Instead, buyers need to be surrounded with relevant communications and personalized, self-service content throughout their journey.

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How Customer Journey Mapping Can Save Your Marketing Budget— and Your Brand

SBI Growth

Mapping the Customer Journey Is Complex – but It’s Worth the Effort.

Customer 193
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How Can I Tell If I Have a Qualified Prospect: Confidential Information

The Sales Hunter

So, you think you have a great prospect; however, why do you think they’re even interested in you or what you sell? Sales is a two-way street. You can have all the feelings you want, but the customer’s feelings are really what matter. Get over yourself and your feelings, because they don’t count! A key way to measure how the prospect feels about you and your potential to help them is by how much information they’re willing to share with you.

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Timing In Prospecting is a Mug’s Game

The Pipeline

By Tibor Shanto. At one time, I had a co-worker who had a bit of a problem with the horses. He always knew just the right horse, in the right race, cause “today was the day.” He handicapped it, and every day he knew why his timing was just right; each day, it was not. A lot of people in sales remind me of a conversation I had with Leon. They seem to be convinced that not only is sales about timing, but they have divined a way to leverage it to their advantage.

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9 Insider Tips for Closing More B2B Sales

Hubspot Sales

It’s no secret that selling to other businesses is tricky. You simply won’t succeed if you don’t take B2B selling for what it is: a high-stakes selling game that requires an entirely unique approach from direct-to-consumer selling. Before we dive into the insider tips, let’s get crystal clear on what B2B selling entails. When done right, B2B sales have the potential to be both extremely lucrative and deeply rewarding.

B2B 133
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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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45 Quotes from LGBTQ+ Leaders about Diversity and Inclusion in Business

Zoominfo

Statistically speaking, companies who employ a diverse staff achieve more financial success, attract better job candidates, and are more likely to capture new markets than less-diverse companies ( source ). But— the term diversity doesn’t just speak to a person’s skin color, ethnicity, or even their skill set. True diversity is achieved when a group of people who have a wide range of perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds are given a chance to openly collaborate and voice their opinions.

Lead Rank 187
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Why True Leadership Is a Transfer of Belief

No More Cold Calling

Have you ever been confused about your company’s vision? I have. I’m not surprised that communication is the #1 driver of exceptional leadership. It’s common sense. It’s also becoming a common problem, considering effective communication is in increasingly short supply. We see lack of communication in our companies, when we travel, when we shop, and at home.

Travel 207
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The call of the machine, or how to make selling more human

Membrain

You know that scene in The Matrix when Neo wakes up in a metal tank and discovers that his entire life has been a lie and that he is merely a battery helping to power a world run by machines?

How To 122
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Why Sales Is Not a Profession

The Sales Hunter

Recently, I had a discussion with a sales manager about how to connect with customers. This was no casual conversation; it was serious, because he was with a start-up company who had 18 months at best, to achieve critical mass. The sales manager knew me well from my work with him at a previous company. The longer the conversation, the more animated we both became.

Hiring 178
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Guide to Using Buyer Need Data

This guide explains how to use Buyer Need Data to identify prospects who could use your solution *before* they demonstrate intent.

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Letting Your Prospects Train You

The Pipeline

By Tibor Shanto. Over the years, I have found that some of my best prospect interviews have come as a result of something another prospect asked me. If you approach sales with the right attitude and outlook, you can help customers, make money, and get a free education. As a bonus, your prospects/customers will help you sell your next deal without them even knowing or caring.

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15 Tried and True Ways to Improve Your Sales Skills

Hubspot Sales

Just like Liam Neeson in " Taken ," to be a successful salesperson, you need to have a particular set of skills. As your sales process evolves, it's important to keep your skills relevant and up to date. Plus, it can increase your sales. In a case study by Rain Group , a global sales training organization, they discovered that a client who went through sales training closed 15.2% more deals and the profit margin on sales-won improved by 12.2%.

Film 132
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The 6-Step Unicorn Startup Blueprint: How Tech Superstars Break the Mold

Zoominfo

Once upon a time, startups with a billion-dollar valuation were so unique that they were deemed unicorns. However, the unicorn startup landscape has shifted dramatically since the term was coined by VC Aileen Lee in 2013. . Many of today’s unicorn companies are younger, more diverse, and experiencing faster growth than the startups of yesterday. And, they’re multiplying at a staggering rate.

Scale 182