October, 2019

article thumbnail

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?

article thumbnail

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.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

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
article thumbnail

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
article thumbnail

The New GTM Playbook: 18 Ways to Future-Proof Your Sales Team

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.

article thumbnail

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

article thumbnail

How to Use Compensation Benchmarking to Make Your Number

SBI Growth

As Summer wraps up and a successful third quarter draws towards a close, it’s time for sales leaders to start looking towards 2020 and beyond as part of the annual planning process. Amongst the plethora of reports and discussions to.

article thumbnail

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
article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

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
article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

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.

Customer 239
article thumbnail

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
article thumbnail

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 262
article thumbnail

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?

article thumbnail

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

article thumbnail

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
article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

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
article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

How Sales Leaders Leverage Market Listening Paths When Planning for 2020

SBI Growth

Earlier this year, SBI consultant Kirk Snider wrote, “the only way to provide a good experience is to listen to what your customer is saying.” In his article, he shares why implementing different, and numerous types of listening paths are.

Marketing 207
article thumbnail

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
article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

Connect, Care, Convert: Secrets to Establishing Trust with Niche Markets and Turning Them Into Clients

Speaker: Lynnette Khalfani-Cox, The Money Coach®

Niche markets represent a huge opportunity for the financial services industry in America. From college students and women to communities of color and low-to-moderate-income households, niche populations have specialized financial needs – but they often underutilize many valuable financial products and services. How can you better connect with these consumers?

article thumbnail

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 138
article thumbnail

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
article thumbnail

Mobilize Your Team to Your Long-Term Vision with Your 2020 GTM Plan

SBI Growth

Studies have shown that up to 90% of strategies fail to implement. The key reason for lack of implementation comes down to business execution and the inability to mobilize the entire organization towards a common outcome. You probably read a.

Study 204
article thumbnail

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
article thumbnail

Strategic ABM Gifting: A CMO’s Silver Bullet to Engage the Enterprise

Today’s customers are hungry for human connections, but how do you break through the digital noise? How do you connect on a more personal level? A strategic ABM gifting campaign can help. You can target accounts and prospects by sending gifts or direct mail. It will help you stand out from the crowd and increase your chances to connect. Download Sendoso’s complimentary eBook to learn: Effective ways to level up your gifting strategy for the enterprise customers.

article thumbnail

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
article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

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 137