January, 2018

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The Real Competition

Bernadette McClelland

We think it’s the company that sells the same as us, Or the paperwork we have to do, Or the meetings we have to run, Or the slackness of our admin team, Or the lack of urgency of our buyers. The real competition is ‘no change’. If we don’t move with times, Predict the future, Be prepared to read and learn, Ask better questions, If instead, we just…” Believe the world is flat, Or smoking won’t kill us, Or mindfulness is for hippies, Or our brains don’t need fuelling, We will become ou

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Even Realistic Videogames like Call of Duty Won’t Help Us Win Wars

Sales and Marketing Management

Opinion: Research shows that millennial cadets' digital skills don't help them on the virtual battlefield.

Research 336
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Top 3 Sales Strategy Priorities of CEOs

SBI Growth

Our guest today is Rob Hornish, the President of Americas Sales for Polycom. Rob has 20 years of sales leadership experience in the high-tech industry sector, with a proven record of building, scaling and developing high performing teams. Rob and.

Scale 321
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Sales Strategy #5: Develop a Coaching Culture

Steven Rosen

Develop a Coaching Culture. Hi, this is my fifth video on Sales Strategies to Crush Your Sales Numbers, I call it Develop a Coaching Culture. . In the last four video/blogs, I covered: Sales Strategy #1: Upgrading the skills of your front-line sales managers because you have a multiplier effect when their skills get better. Sales Strategy #2 Execute with Excellence because most companies do not execute with excellence.

Coaching 307
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Streamlining Complex Sales Processes: The Ultimate Guide for Industrial Companies

Are you struggling with slow quoting cycles, complex product configurations, and disconnected data in your manufacturing/distribution business? This article will help. Learn how industrial companies are revolutionizing sales processes with an integrated platform that includes quoting, inventory, and service, providing real-time data and offline access for field teams.

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Don’t Slam the Door on Your Friends

No More Cold Calling

What’s your gratitude meter? As we begin the New Year, now is the perfect time to pay attention to what’s most important—the people in our lives. That means our clients and prospects, our families and friends, our colleagues. It’s time we remember the value of getting personal. Think about it this way: We don’t regret the text messages we don’t send or the work we don’t do.

Referrals 287

More Trending

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The Science of Basic Selling Skills

Bernadette McClelland

And the basics of selling are….? It’s a question I’ve asked a couple of times in workshops and online, and it’s a question that was triggered by a few ‘posts’ I read, stating that. salespeople today don’t execute on the basics. And my response was, what are the basics then? And as would have it on social, there was a plethora of responses, from which I randomly collected this bakers dozen: 1.

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Rocking the Boat to Drive Team Success

Sales and Marketing Management

Author: Kevin F. Davis In a SMMConnect webinar I delivered to over 100 sales managers recently, I talked about eight instincts they developed as salespeople that are now harming their effectiveness as team leaders. Interestingly, about 30 percent of the participants said that the sales instinct they struggle with the most is “avoiding conflict.”. What does that mean?

Hiring 260
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Did You Set the Right Sales Quotas?

SBI Growth

Did you set the quotas right to drive revenue growth? The purpose of today’s show is to demonstrate how to link the company objectives to sales targets through quota setting. Leverage this use-case to evaluate how you set your quotas. John.

Quota 320
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Sales Strategy #2: Execute with Excellence

Steven Rosen

If you want to crush your sales numbers Sales Strategy #2: Execute with Excellence is guaranteed to help. Number one, your marketing team is ready to go, they have their strategies, their plans in place and their budgets. As the Head of Sales, you are still in 2017 my friend but you really need to have your head in 2018 deciding what you are going to do.

Strategy 307
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How to Create Sales Email Sequences That Convert

Modern go-to-market teams know it takes more than one email to break through the noise. Multiple touchpoints means more ways to get your pitch right — and, potentially, more ways to be wrong. The good news? Once you know how to write compelling, one-off emails to entice prospective customers, you can easily do the same across a short sequence of emails.

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2 Reasons Your Account Based Sales Reps Leave

No More Cold Calling

Sales leaders must take the rap. We used to hire account based sales reps, indoctrinate them with product knowledge and a smattering of business culture, and give them a few lead generation tools. Then we gave them a phone, a list, and, a desk, and expected them to figure out how to book meetings. They ended up cold calling. Frustrated, many of them left, and we started the process again.

Account 272
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A Winning Game Plan for Writing Cold Prospecting Emails That Sell

DiscoverOrg Sales

My love of all things college football comes in handy – even when it’s not football season. As DiscoverOrg’s Manager of Strategic Accounts, I’m always looking for ways to use personal touchpoints to engage prospects via email. It works. I consistently gets a response rate of 60% – and an engagement rate of 80%. (Check out my post, How to Heat Up Cold Emails with Personalization.).

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17 Sales Tips A Buyer Would Give You If You Would Listen

MTD Sales Training

Many salespeople ask us for our best tips on how to sell. How do I overcome price objections? What should I do with someone who ignores my emails? These questions and countless others often show salespeople are looking at sales from an old, out-of-date, perspective. These days, it isn’t about how good you are at selling; it’s about how good you are at determining the needs and wants of your buyers.

Buyer 257
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3 Most Effective Ways to Further Engage Your B2B Leads

Sales and Marketing Management

Author: Jason Kulpa Successful B2B marketing is all about saying the right thing through the right channel at the right time. In fast-paced marketing, the right time usually means right away. According to the Demand Gen Report’s 7th Annual B2B Buyer’s Survey, 97 percent of B2B buyers believe the timeliness of a vendor’s response to inquiries is an important aspect of the buying process.

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The Trends You Need to Succeed This Holiday Season

October Prime Day is usually an early sign of how consumer spending trends ahead of the holidays. This one was no exception. Our October Prime Day Report breaks down what’s working: the products flying off the shelves, the categories winning big, big brands, and the search terms defining demand. All brought to you via Similarweb’s Shopper Intelligence platform.

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Key Mistakes CEOs Make When Allocating the Sales Budget

SBI Growth

Top CEOs understand that their role is to provide their company with an executable strategy. Strategy is the allocation of time, money, and people. The best CEOs are masters of where to place bets, invest their time, and divest from.

Strategy 310
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Sales Strategy #3: Invest in Yourself

Steven Rosen

Invest in Yourself . Like most sales executives you cognitively understand the importance of developing your leadership skills and the advantages of ongoing networking. You find yourself too busy due to ongoing meetings, conferences, telephone calls and emails and you rarely find the time to develop yourself. Reality is, the higher we go in organizations the fewer opportunities there are for networking and fewer people to actually network with.

Hiring 291
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When Good Prospects Can be Worse Than Tough Prospects

Understanding the Sales Force

I was on the way to a meeting and the traffic was stop and go - not moving for a minute, then back up to 30 MPH, and then back to a dead stop. I've been driving since 1972 and have driven in all kinds of conditions. Pitch black on a moonless night on a narrow winding road with no street lights; on a 4-lane highway in white-out conditions where you can't see where the sides of the road are, down-hill on black ice with zero control of breaking and steering; snow-covered, two-lane road with cars st

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2 Big Reasons for Abandoned Sales Opportunities

Score More Sales

We walk away from sales opportunities every day - abandoned sales opportunities. You do it, I do it, and a few of us have the discipline to identify why our deal didn’t come to closure.

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AI Strategies for Sales Managers: How to Cut Down on Tedious Admin Work

What if you could help your sellers stop wasting 72% of their day on non-selling activities and focus on bringing in revenue? Incorporating AI in your enablement workflows can help you cut down on busy work, get projects done faster, and let your team (and you!) focus on making a bigger impact. We put together this guide to show you how to use AI to cut time and costs for projects, including collateral creation, development of training videos, and automating tedious processes.

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[VIDEO] 40% more Demos & 2.5x bigger ACV: The Results of Our Account-Based Everything Experiment

DiscoverOrg Sales

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is all the rage in the B2B sales and marketing world … and it’s evolving into something more : Account-Based Everything (ABE) aligns sales and marketing teams with multi-touch campaigns on target accounts. We did an experiment to see just how effective this person-first approach was, using the launch of a new product – an HR dataset – to a market that doesn’t have much experience with our offering – marketing and sales intelligence.

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Making Your Brand Stick: How to Define Your Business Through Consistent Visuals

Sales and Marketing Management

Author: Adrian DeGus When it comes to starting up a company and building a brand, visuals and an overall visual representation of your brand is very important. How your company is perceived depends a lot upon how it's seen. So when it comes to branding your company, first you need to take the time to think about an image for your company, both in branding and an overall visual that gives potential customers a specific perception of what your company offers.

How To 253
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It’s Time to Tie Product Team Compensation to Your Revenue Goal

SBI Growth

You are launching a new product this quarter. As CEO, you ask yourself a question. “How are we going to make the year 1 goal with this new product?”. Here’s an answer based on experience. Don’t over-compensate the Sales team.

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5 Ways to Create a Successful Sales Coaching Program

Steven Rosen

Effective sales manager coaching is one of the key levers that leading sales organizations utilize to achieve their revenue targets. Sales manager coaching is the #1 sales management activity that impacts performance. Study after study has shown that sales manager coaching has a significant impact on performance. Here are a couple of my favorites: CEB Coaching Effectiveness Survey Findings: Coaching effectiveness: 19% improvement in performance.

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Buyer’s Guide: 5 Tough Questions To Ask a Salesforce Managed Services Provider

This guide is for leaders who recognize the importance of Salesforce but would rather trust a team of external experts to do the heavy lifting. Choosing the right managed services provider is a significant decision that impacts your business's efficiency and success. In this 10-minute read, you'll find 5 essential questions to ask any potential provider.

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What You Should Know When Your Cold Prospect Suddenly Returns From the Dead

Understanding the Sales Force

Last week I wrote about the deep freeze, why prospects suddenly go cold , and how you can prevent that from happening. That article was instantly as popular as any I have ever written. I also posted a 6-minute cold-calling rant on LinkedIn that had more than five-thousand views after just a couple of days. The video, like the article, was about mindset, not scripting and tactics.

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Sales Empathy and Emotional Intelligence in Selling

Score More Sales

It was time to visit a newer client of ours and this meeting would be at least two hours to go over our findings about their sales leadership, sales reps, sales process, and pipeline. Because we leave plenty of time as a buffer so that we are never late to clients, we ended up with thirty minutes to spare.

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A CEO Mind-shift for Scaling Growth: An Interview with Henry Schuck

DiscoverOrg Sales

As a business grows, the role of the CEO changes. Leaders who are able to evolve their mindset from survival to strategy are a lot more likely to find themselves among those 20% of businesses who survive beyond the first 18 months. It’s a transition Henry Schuck knows well. DiscoverOrg’s CEO has led the company for a decade – since its creation in 2007.

Scale 113
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The Six Secrets to Superior Sales Kickoffs

Sales and Marketing Management

Author: Jim Ninivaggi Many companies have their annual sales kickoff (SKO) meetings approaching. A good kickoff successfully blends motivational elements, education, team building and fun – setting the tone and momentum for the year ahead. Here are six secrets to make your meetings a hit and not a miss. Secret 1: Form the right planning committee. It’s easy and tempting to simply repeat the general format and agenda of past meetings.

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Beyond the Basics: How to Develop and Retain a Top-Performing Sales Team

Speaker: Brendan Sweeney, VP of Sales at Allego

Maximizing sales rep performance is no easy task. 📈 Traditional sales training methods focus heavily on the first few weeks in the sales role. Companies dedicate time, resources, and budget to onboarding new hires, only for them to forget what was learned in those first few weeks, lose motivation, and struggle to come to grips with their role.

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How Marketing Helps Sales Win the Must-win Deals

SBI Growth

Our guest on SBI TV is Mike Volpe, the Chief Marketing Officer for Cybereason. Mike is a who’s who among CMO’s. Often called the “godfather of inbound marketing” for his work in taking inbound marketing from an idea to a movement.

Marketing 296
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5 Ways to Create a Successful Sales Coaching Program

Steven Rosen

Effective sales manager coaching is one of the key levers that leading sales organizations utilize to achieve their revenue targets. Sales manager coaching is the #1 sales management activity that impacts performance. Study after study has shown that sales manager coaching has a significant impact on performance. Here are a couple of my favorites: CEB Coaching Effectiveness Survey Findings: Coaching effectiveness: 19% improvement in performance.

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How to Write a Sales Email That Works

Understanding the Sales Force

I receive so many unsolicited emails each day that it makes my head spin. Most of them, like the cold calls I get, are simply horrible. Delete. Delete. Delete. Junk. Block. Unsubscribe. This week I received the daily double - a cold call with an identical, corresponding email. The email read like this: Hi Dave, I hope this message finds you well. We spoke in the past regarding the copier equipment in your office.