Understanding the Sales Force

MARCH 25, 2024

They played for the same showcase team over the four years prior to college and this home/away series would probably be the last time they see (or play against) each other. It was 2pm, well past the lunch-hour rush, and the new host asked if we had a reservation. We didn’t.

Decision Maker 182

Decision Maker Hotels Cancellation Travel 182

Partners in Excellence

FEBRUARY 8, 2024

Every day I think we have reached bottom with the level of stupid advice I see in my social feeds. Every day, I’m surprised that we can find new depths of stupidity. In others it’s “customers want rep-free buying experiences.” What would happen if we change this?

Buying Cycle 123

Buying Cycle Outbound Data Channels 123

Mr. Inside Sales

FEBRUARY 19, 2024

Ah, the amorphous, “I want to think about it.” What you need to do is find out what’s behind this objection and whether or not you can compete with what the real objection is. You’d better find out what it is. ] You’d better find out what it is. ] Listen here to what they’re really going to think about.]

Face-to-face 201

Face-to-face How To Gatekeeper Decision Maker 201

Understanding the Sales Force

MARCH 13, 2024

Personally, I substitute Baseball for the middle topic because college baseball is in full swing and we’re traveling to watch our son, in his senior year, play college baseball. He started strong which you can see here. ” Or, “If you want to do business with XYZ then you have to play by their rules.”

Decision Maker 170

Decision Maker Proposal Distribution Territories 170

Partners in Excellence

MAY 1, 2024

Andy Paul and I were having what I’ve labeled “The Old Fart Conversations About Selling.” ” Neither of us feel we are out of touch with modern selling, the challenges both buyers and sellers face. But every once in a while we get on a call to discuss “What’s happening in selling?”

Revelation 114

Revelation Lead Gen Scale Face-to-face 114

Partners in Excellence

DECEMBER 14, 2023

It’s interesting to see continued predictions of the death of selling. Some focus on PLG types of approaches, where the product sells itself–at least until one wants to scale that to the enterprise level. I actually never see anything about this other than within the selling community. Hmmm, what am I missing?

Retail 120

Retail Scale Margin Promotion 120

Partners in Excellence

FEBRUARY 29, 2024

We were talking about his prospecting challenges. Like all of us, he was struggling to get the engagement he wanted. ” We talked about some of his strategies. He researched others, understanding their roles and what their companies did, creating personalized emails. “What is he interested in talking about?”

Ideal Customer Profile 126

Ideal Customer Profile Face-to-face Trade Show Prospecting 126

Partners in Excellence

JANUARY 25, 2024

We don’t have a set agenda, we talk about what we are seeing, usually it’s me whining about the state of professional selling. I’m afraid too many people will latch onto that concept and miss the real point of this post which is the revenue/growth potential we lose.

Competition 116

Competition Customer Buying Cycle Vendor 116

Partners in Excellence

SEPTEMBER 27, 2023

I don’t think we consciously commit to doing just good enough, I suspect it’s a gradual process that impacts so many of us. Without a doubt, we face more turbulence, complexity, volatility, and uncertainty than we have ever experienced. We look at the marginal return, particularly on very small issues.

Social Media 136

Social Media Face-to-face Margin Media 136

Partners in Excellence

FEBRUARY 16, 2024

The argument the author was making was the technique that produced 1.25% was the best approach (which aligned with what they sold). What troubled me was the view that these levels of response rates were acceptable. But in what world do we consider that acceptable? It’s like so much other data we see.

Scale 114

Scale Outbound Sales Cycle Up-Sell 114

Smooth Sale

APRIL 10, 2024

Learning new transferable skills is a confidence booster that reminds us that what we’re currently doing is not the end of our career. A job is an opportunity to get paid and learn skills that you can take with you, but sometimes we can forget this.

How To 106

How To Benefit Motivation Lead Rank 106

Partners in Excellence

OCTOBER 23, 2023

To connect and engage effectively, we have to meet people where they are at. This requires us to focus on them, where they are, who they are, what they face. To the degree that we can, we have to imagine ourselves in their shoes. Often, however, we listen with an agenda. One might ask, why do we need to do this?

Meeting 119

Meeting Face-to-face Coaching Objections 119

Partners in Excellence

DECEMBER 15, 2023

We often gauge the quality of our conversations by the responses we get in those conversations. How do we provoke this level of engagement? How do we engage people in ways that encourage deeper questions? Do the questions we ask provoke great questions from others? Conversations shut down, there is no engagement.

Lead Rank 117

Lead Rank Discount Conversion Lead Scoring 117

SalesProInsider

OCTOBER 18, 2023

“ You get what you’re looking for.” And now as an adult, I can see how true this statement is. We do get what we’re looking for in many life circumstances, and in sales efforts. What are the too-common concerns or objections where advisors might lack conviction? So, what can we do?

Objections 139

Objections Conversion Face-to-face Research 139

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 8, 2024

” The increasing difficulty–perhaps–inability to engage our customers, with many claiming “outbound is dead,” and others seeing PLG and other inbound strategies as critical to making the numbers (forgetting PLG applies to only a small set of solutions). ” But, we shouldn’t be shocked or surprised.

Top of Funnel 116

Top of Funnel Face-to-face Data Buying Cycle 116

Partners in Excellence

JANUARY 18, 2024

As we spoke, it struck me how we revel in these questions. Customers asking us about the product capabilities, drilling deeply into what the products and solutions do. These are the discussions we strive to get since it is all about us and what we sell. Why shouldn’t we be answering those questions?”

Customer 128

Customer Revelation Buying Cycle Lead Rank 128

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 2, 2024

There seems to be no passion for what sellers do. We fail frequently, despite doing the best we can do. We are constantly driven (or drive ourselves) to do more. Given this, I’m just stunned by the number of “sellers,” that seem to get no joy out of what they do. First, their stories are AMAZING!

Trends 110

Trends Resources Sales 110

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 25, 2024

This seems to dominate so much of the conversation I see. We seem to overlook the questions, “How do we know what ‘Top of Funnel’ we need? How do we shift that in our favor?” ” We cannot focus exclusively on Top of Funnel. ” We cannot focus exclusively on Top of Funnel.

Top of Funnel 112

Top of Funnel Funnel Sales Qualified Lead Leads 112

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 19, 2024

Dave: We were scaling aggressively. We grew ARR tremendously past two years that I’ve been there. Last year we hired and onboarded 80 SDRs and AEs. At the end of the year we had grown to 50 AEs and sales people. We drove the performance of those people, reducing CAC payback by 20%! Dave: About 40%!

Scale 119

Scale Hiring Margin Churn 119

Partners in Excellence

FEBRUARY 27, 2024

AI is changing the world (“Wow, what an astute observation, Dave.”). One of the biggest mistakes I see sellers and marketers making is depending on AI for answers. It reduces what may have taken hours or even days to seconds. We talked for hours about how a 0.1 And it provides tremendous insight.”

Face-to-face 125

Face-to-face Journal Research Tools 125

Partners in Excellence

OCTOBER 27, 2023

We were being taught how to “mirror” our customers. We learned that if a customer leaned forward in their chair, perhaps indicating interest, we should lean forward. It was a conscious manipulative behavior to establish rapport and gain the interest of the person whose behavior we were mimicking.

Call-back 132

Call-back Energy Groups Prospecting 132

Partners in Excellence

OCTOBER 5, 2023

We know trust and trustworthiness are critical in our ability to engage prospects and customers. We know what happens when, inadvertently or purposefully, we betray that trust. We’ve all seen massive inaccuracies produced by the LLMs. We’ve created a new concept, “Deepfakes.”

Scale 124

Scale Ideal Customer Profile Face-to-face Construction 124

Partners in Excellence

NOVEMBER 29, 2023

I’ve noticed a huge gap in how we equip and train our sellers, how we help them engage our customers in high impact conversations that focus on them and their problems, not pitching our projects. This gap became bigger with Challenger, as we equipped our people to provide “Insights.”

Analysis 122

Analysis Conversion Training Examples 122

Partners in Excellence

FEBRUARY 17, 2024

We talked about some fascinating concepts: Mis-diagnosis and Missed-diagnosis. What is a Mis-diagnosis? For instance, as sellers, we are looking for customers that have the problems we solve. We ask the questions to identify “the problem.” In this article, I’ll focus on Mis-diagnosis.

Cancellation 77

Cancellation Face-to-face Inbound Opportunity 77

Partners in Excellence

DECEMBER 21, 2023

As our conversations often go, we were talking about the state of selling and how we improve. The conversation got me thinking about the issue: “Our customers desperately need help, but do we want to be helpful, do we know how to be helpful? We face issues we may not have experienced before.

Customer 121

Customer Face-to-face Buying Cycle Loyalty 121

Partners in Excellence

JANUARY 19, 2024

We live in worlds of constant interruption. Our attentions are drawn to those, we go through them, dealing with each one. Some one has asked a question, we have to respond with an answer. Someone has raised an issue, we have to address it. We are busy, our days are filled with reacting and responding.

Channels 114

Channels Course Data Meeting 114

Partners in Excellence

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

” All of what I see from sellers leveraging ChatGPT and similar tools are well written, most are unimpressive. As I look at how too many sellers are using Generative AI, I wonder if we are using it to its full potential? Or are we misusing them, tragically? We will move beyond this.

Engineering 116

Engineering Ideal Customer Profile Lead Rank Airlines 116

Partners in Excellence

MAY 8, 2024

The people that remain are exhausted, not interested in talking more, they just want to escape. The people that remain are exhausted, not interested in talking more, they just want to escape. But we don’t understand what has happened. We don’t understand how/why they have gotten to the point that they have.

Buying Cycle 68

Buying Cycle Maximizer Call-back Sales Cycle 68

Partners in Excellence

SEPTEMBER 12, 2023

We see so much of this now, with the former “darlings” of the VC/PE world. We see similar things with many of the largest, “most successful” organizations, the high performers of Wall Street, NASDAQ, and other global markets Suddenly, these “successful” organizations start to falter.

Scale 119

Scale Tools Up-Sell Strategy 119

Hubspot Sales

JANUARY 9, 2024

Table of Contents What is door-to-door sales? 20 Tips for D2D Sales What is door-to-door sales? 20 Tips for D2D Sales From getting hands-on experience to building trust, we share 20 D2D sales tips based on data and expert advice. The art of door-to-door sales is timeless — even during the rise of modern sales strategies.

Face-to-face 103

Face-to-face Up-Sell Research Sales 103

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 17, 2024

As much as we tire talking about the constancy of change, our jobs as sellers only exist because of change. As much as we tire talking about the constancy of change, our jobs as sellers only exist because of change. We want the customer to recognize and exploit a new opportunity, which mandates the use of our products and services.

Lead Rank 119

Lead Rank Analysis Incentives Incentive 119

Partners in Excellence

JANUARY 29, 2024

He opened with, “We see this challenge…… impacting organizations like yours. We think you can be doing better……” Intrigued, it was an important issue (it always is for small businesses), I responded, “What causes you to say we face that issue and can do better?”

Conversion 81

Conversion Microsoft Face-to-face Google 81

Partners in Excellence

NOVEMBER 9, 2023

We want to get a desired outcome without doing all the work one would normally have to do to achieve that outcome. In work, we constantly look for shortcuts. Some of the time is we are overburdened, we need to find a more efficient way of doing things. Sometimes, we need to compress the time to results.

Discount 128

Discount Pipeline Opportunity Tools 128

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 11, 2024

Very few people care enough to say, “Dave, you can do so much better… ” Jill and I share a common dream, how to make a difference—in the people/companies we work with, in our communities, and in society. In the past year, Jill has shifted her focus to a very important mission: What’s Really Possible?

Face-to-face 115

Face-to-face Sales Methodology Compensation Segment 115

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 15, 2024

We always exchange stories of sitting at those tables, doing designs on paper. More than once, I’ve been in the audience at a sales conference when the speaker would ask, “How many people here, growing up said, “I want to be in sales?” It always surprised me to see I was one of just two or three hands raised.

Lead Rank 120

Lead Rank Lead Scoring Retail Engineering 120

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 1, 2024

“Selling Bad Breath” repulses the people we are trying to reach. Somehow when we open our mouths or send an email or do an outreach, all it accomplishes is driving our prospects and customers away. Prospects and customers can always sniff it out, regardless how we try to cover it up. What is Selling Bad Breath?

Ideal Customer Profile 73

Ideal Customer Profile Face-to-face Social Media Up-Sell 73