April, 2016

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Your Most Burning Referral Questions Immediately Answered

No More Cold Calling

Who should you ask for referrals to drive lead generation? “You can ask for referrals from anyone you meet, and it’s often easier to get referrals from new contacts than from existing clients.” Never! That’s just some of the nonsense that’s bandied about by people who think they know how referrals work. And they’re dead wrong.

Referrals 227
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Marketing That Gets VIP Meetings

Sales and Marketing Management

Issue Date: 2016-03-01. Author: Stu Heinecke. Teaser: Once you know the key influencers at your prospect companies, it's important to execute a strategy that will allow you to turn a dialogue into a into a relationship and a relationship into deals and referrals. Once you know the key influencers at your prospect companies, it's important to execute a strategy that will allow you to turn a dialogue into a into a relationship and a relationship into deals and referrals.

Meeting 226
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Will You Ruffle Some Feathers or Spread Your Wings?

Bernadette McClelland

Hang on, am I supposed to be this super successful, sales guru/expert/ authority who knows what she wants in the world, is a beacon of hope for salespeople and sales leaders and puts on a mask to show that she has it all covered? I might have toyed with the idea a long time ago, but soon realised it was going to be exhausting and serve no one, especially me.

Up-Sell 203
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5 Ways to Connect With People To Have Greater Influence

Steven Rosen

The art of influencing people and getting them to understand and agree with your way of thinking can be a powerful tool in business. But to become a true influence on people, you need first to create a special connection with them – a deep level of rapport. Once you build this, it’s easy to ask them to work with you on any issue – no convincing required.

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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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What Percentage of Sales Managers Have the Necessary Coaching Skills?

Understanding the Sales Force

I am often asked to explain what we look for when we evaluate Sales Managers. At this point, most experts agree that a good Sales Manager will spend half of their time coaching up the salespeople. Recently, I was asked to share some statistics about sales management coaching - the percentage of sales coaching skills that most Sales Managers have and the amount of time they spend.

Coaching 172

More Trending

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Lead Generation … Here We Go Again

No More Cold Calling

Top Sales World CEO Jonathan Farrington discusses lead generation and other sales challenges in this month’s guest post. “Generating qualified leads is the biggest challenge for my sales team.” That’s what I hear from every sales leader. Ineffective lead generation tactics are a huge blot on sales productivity and revenue. But simply filling the pipeline with contacts isn’t enough to correct the problem.

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Look Who’s ‘Carrying a Bag’

Sales and Marketing Management

Issue Date: 2016-03-01. Author: Paul Nolan. Teaser: Women possess many innate skills that are a good fit for today's B2B sales environment, and studies show as a group they outperform their male counterparts in a number of important metrics. But many companies are lagging in putting women in sales leadership roles. We take a look at how women are making a statement in B2B sales and what more companies should be doing to diversify and strengthen their sales teams.

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Like a Virgin! WOW’d for the very first time…

Bernadette McClelland

I’m 36,000 feet in the air as I write this and have just come off the back of a two day program on how to ‘ Think Like a Customer’. It’s a Friday night, I’m tired and just want to kick back for a couple of hours and unwind with a glass of wine and read. Instead, I’m writing this article because of what I have just experienced for the first time on a Virgin plane, but sadly have seen the pattern on so many occasions elsewhere.

Customer 174
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I’m satisfied with my present source… Why?

Jeffrey Gitomer

We've Moved! Update your Reader Now. This feed has moved to: [link] Update your reader now with this changed subscription address to get your latest updates from us.

Loyalty 169
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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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What You Won’t Learn From Books About Sales

DiscoverOrg Sales

Yes, I am aware a lot of you have spent dozens of dollars – maybe even hundreds – on sales books that intricately detail the savvy art of sales & persuasion. Honestly, they will only take you so far if you haven’t actually spent time talking with real-live prospects. Sure, a book can explain to you how to appropriately organize your day, or outline a strategy you can put to use , but it can’t help you develop the character – or grit – necessary to persevere through th

Hiring 168
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Achieving Prospecting Success by Segmentation – 3

The Pipeline

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca . Thus far in this series we have looked at two prospects segments that are popular among sellers, mostly because they are likely the easier of the three. While most sales people spend 80% of their time and effort pursuing these groups, combined they only make up at most 30% of any given market. The Actively Looking , about 10%, and the Passively Looking , another 20%.

Segment 168
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[URGENT] You’ve Got ONE WEEK to Get This Book for 99 Cents

No More Cold Calling

Don’t miss your chance to cash in on my No More Cold Calling book anniversary! One week from today—April 14, 2016—marks the 10-year anniversary of my first book, No More Cold Calling ™. Yes, April 14, 2006 was the official publication date. The book’s subtitle, “The Breakthrough System That Will Leave Your Competition in the Dust,” says it all. Actually, it should have read “The Breakthrough Referral System That Will Leave Your Competition in the Dust,” but I didn’t catch the o

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The Importance of Understanding Buyer Needs

Sales and Marketing Management

Issue Date: 2016-04-04. Author: Frank Visgatis, President/COO of CustomerCentric Selling. Teaser: Most executives will share their business goals or problems with salespeople that they believe are trustworthy. It is a watershed event when goals are shared and once it occurs the buyer starts to realize there is potential value if a seller’s offering can address their needs.

Buyer 177
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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 Should You Do When You or Your Company is Disliked in Sales?

Understanding the Sales Force

I know. Everyone loves you. You are just so likable that it's inconceivable that you could be disliked. As usual, I see things a bit differently and I'll prove that there is someone that not only dislikes you, but might even hate you. For example, my company, Objective Management Group (OMG) , is universally hated by an entire vertical! I'll share that with you but first, I must ask you a question.

Microsoft 156
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6 Ways to Separate Yourself from Your Competition

The Sales Hunter

What makes you different from your competitor? Why should a potential customer give you the time of day when they already have too much on their plate? There’s a reason why customers don’t see value in salespeople, because to be quite blunt, most salespeople don’t bring value. To many customers, there’s zero difference between […].

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I like the drift of this new sales book

Sales 2.0

I read about an interesting new sales book today, Beyond The Sales Process. One of the authors, Dave Stein , is well known to me and has a long reputation of putting together quality sales content and research. These two points from an interview with Dave and his coauthor, Steve Andersen, hit me between the eyes. I totally agree with these points and I think it’s something we’re starting to lose sight of today–dare I say it driven by Sales 2.0 type thinking!

Research 150
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They’re Not Interested – What Now?

The Pipeline

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca . No one likes objections, the number one reason for sales people hating cold calling is the cold reality of the objections. I get it, but when you think about it there are probably five common objections you will face in telephone prospecting. About 80% of the time, 80% people we are calling will go to one of these five objections.

Handbook 166
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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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5 Ways to Connect With People To Have Greater Influence

Steven Rosen

The art of influencing people and getting them to understand and agree with your way of thinking can be a powerful tool in business. But to become a true influence on people, you need first to create a special connection with them – a deep level of rapport. Once you build this, it’s easy to ask them to work with you on any issue – no convincing required.

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Connecting With Customers In a Way That Scales

Sales and Marketing Management

Issue Date: 2016-04-11. Author: Baker Nanduru, CEO Delighterr. Teaser: When companies connect with customers through emotion, they reap huge returns. And those returns don’t just come from purchases; when companies manage to make an emotional connection, they usually see an increase in customer loyalty, overall customer spend, and referrals. We suggest some basic guidelines that sales and marketing professionals can use to begin doing just that.

Scale 163
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Effective Selling is Less about the Words and More About How You Say Them

Understanding the Sales Force

Two experiences this weekend support something I have been teaching for more than 30 years. Saturday, I walked up to the deli counter and asked the young woman for a quarter pound of imported provalone. She responded, "We don't have impourded, but we have some from Italy." I said that would be fine. Then she grumbled to a co-worker that this guy wanted "impourded" provolone and he explained that the Italian provolone was imported.

Sales 152
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5 Questions to Qualify a Prospect Faster

The Sales Hunter

Few things can take up as much time as spending time with a prospect that turns out to not be a prospect. Every time I speak, someone comes up to me afterward and shares with me their frustration with qualifying a prospect. Problem is we don’t realize it’s a problem until after we’ve encountered […].

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How to Optimize Call Monitoring: Automate QA and Elevate Customer Experience

Speaker: Laura Noonan, Chief Revenue Officer at CallFinder + Angie Kronlage, Director of Program Success at Working Solutions + April Wiita, Vice President of Program Success at Working Solutions

Are you still manually reviewing calls? 🤔 It's time for a change! The traditional method of manual call monitoring is no longer cutting it in today's fast-paced call center environment. Industry experts Angie Kronlage and April Wiita from Working Solutions are here to explore the power of innovative automation to revolutionize outdated call review processes!

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Social proximity account plan

Sales 2.0

A great point highlighted on the Linkedin Sales Blog yesterday. I hope to be saying more about this soon. I’ve used this approach for some of my own startup gigs. It works. Designing your go-to-market plan based on relationships versus ZIP codes is a really smart move for most companies these days. The key point is relationships take more time and energy to establish than setting up a screen share (or worst case jumping on a plane.

Account 150
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Achieving Prospecting Success by Segmentation – 1

The Pipeline

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca . As we start a new quarter, it makes sense to step back a second and think about how you are prospecting f. Few aspects of sales are one size fits all, which makes it a challenge for those who are looking for that one secret to success in sales. Buyers fall into different groups, and how you sell to each needs to reflect that, this does not mean you have to reinvent your sale for each buyer, groups or segments based on their attributes.

Segment 166
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3 Ways Selling is Helping

Score More Sales

Years ago sales owned the conversation. If you were a buyer you got in line to find someone to help you learn enough about a new product or service on the market so you could make a “sound” decision – especially if it was a business transaction where it is businesses selling to other businesses. Unfortunately, a lot of sellers took advantage of that scenario thus giving selling a bad name.

Buyer 148
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Drive Results by Selling Change

Sales and Marketing Management

Issue Date: 2016-04-09. Author: Lou Schachter and Rick Cheatham. Teaser: Leaders, sales managers and professionals have found themselves stuck at a crossroads between the past and the future of selling. By implementing new change management strategies into their unique X→XY→Y selling methodology, Lou Schachter and Rick Cheatham p ropose a new logic for thinking about and executing major sales transformations.

Strategy 163
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Secrets of a Successful Sale: Optimizing Your Checkout Process

Speaker: David Nisbet, Everett Zufelt, and Michaela Weber

Once upon a time, in the vast realm of online commerce, there lived a humble checkout button overlooked by many. Yet, within its humble click lay the power to transform a mere visitor into a loyal customer. 🧐 💡 Getting checkout right can mark the difference between a successful sale and an abandoned cart, yet many businesses fail to make payments a part of their commerce strategy even when it has a direct impact on revenue.

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How Coyotes are at the Heart of Sales Motivation

Understanding the Sales Force

My family lives west of Boston where it is not uncommon for us to see lots of squirrels, chipmunks and rabbits, the family of foxes that live on our property, deer, and on most nights, we hear coyotes. We usually hear them in the early morning hours, and always thought they were celebrating a kill. Recently, I did some research and learned that this is how coyotes greet each other when they are assembling before going out to hunt - before the kill!

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The Leads Are Weak: An Intro to Finding & Working Good Leads

DiscoverOrg Sales

There’s a famous quote from that seminal 1992 movie about sales, Glengarry Glen Ross , in which Jack Lemmon’s character, Shelley, contemptuously dismisses the contact data he’s been given: “The leads are weak!” The movie also coined the unforgettable phrase: “Coffee is for closers!”. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the movie to those just starting out in sales – it’s not exactly a flattering portrayal of the profession.

Lead Rank 143
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Time management is everything in sales

Sales 2.0

In the end the limit to your sales success will be time. If you had an infinite amount of time, you would make an infinite amount of sales. But you don’t. Here’s a useful post from Hubspot on some ways not to spend your day. 12 Bad Habits That Make You Less Productive. Biting your nails. Chewing with your mouth open. Speaking before you think.

Hubspot 150