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Unleash the 10X Factor to Close the Sales Gap. Do you want to close the sales gap? Doing nothing is not an option! Businesses are starting to open, which hopefully is a good thing. You are still responsible for generating your company’s revenue, and your colleagues are counting on your efforts and that of your entire team. Now is the time to get sales on track.
Why do so many of my salespeople fail to perform as expected? It's a loaded question. Or, is it? In our corporate sales training experience, we've seen that evaluating underperforming salespeople in the pre-hire sales assessment is crucial for success in your business.
By Tibor Shanto. Urgency is always a battle cry at sales meetings, one on one or the team. As though creating urgency was like adding volume, “turn it up, let them hear you mean business.” While there is no escaping the logic and allure of leveraging urgency, trying to create it fraught with risk for sellers. Careful what you wish for, creating the wrong sense of urgency may just accelerate unwanted outcomes, like losses.
Author: Paul Nolan. Under normal circumstances, you may have been able to set a competitive but fair price for your company’s goods or services and stick with it. These are anything but normal circumstances. In a blog post about pricing in the pandemic for marketing research firm Forrester SiriusDecisions, Lisa Singer says companies trying to rebound from the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic must look for opportunities to offer low-cost or free offerings.
Today’s buyers expect more than generic outreach–they want relevant, personalized interactions that address their specific needs. For sales teams managing hundreds or thousands of prospects, however, delivering this level of personalization without automation is nearly impossible. The key is integrating AI in a way that enhances customer engagement rather than making it feel robotic.
Customer Experience is more important now more than ever, as lockdown orders remain in place across the country, many companies are being forced to serve customers outside of traditional channels. Customer Experience is no longer a buzzword or the next.
By Tibor Shanto. Some years ago, I wrote a piece about how you should lead a sale in a way that resembles a four-legged stool. The idea is to establish contact and some relationship with people across both the buying and selling organizations. This way, if one person on either team leaves, the stool can still stand, and things continue to move forward as a new person comes on.
By Tibor Shanto. Some years ago, I wrote a piece about how you should lead a sale in a way that resembles a four-legged stool. The idea is to establish contact and some relationship with people across both the buying and selling organizations. This way, if one person on either team leaves, the stool can still stand, and things continue to move forward as a new person comes on.
What makes a call “ cold ” is that the person you are calling is not expecting your call. Because they are not expecting your call, you interrupt their day, even if they aren’t doing anything important when you call them. You can never know who you are calling, and even looking at Linkedin before dialing the phone doesn’t provide any information about their general disposition or their current mood.
What’s the biggest mistake sales reps make with prospecting or cold calling? They call with what a client of mine once called, “commission breath.”. You know, that desperation sales people have when they finally get someone on the phone. It’s the same kind of attitude that you feel and don’t like when a salesperson gets you on the phone.
By Tibor Shanto. There are a lot of blurred lines in business and sales, leading to blurred conversations, and longer sales cycles. One blur is the line between who is a buyer and who is a prospect. Assuming buyers and prospects are the same and the words interchangeable perhaps explains the output numbers year after year. You need to accept that prospects are not buyers, which is a good thing for us.
A global pandemic. Record unemployment. Business closures. Racial protests. To say these are tough times is an understatement. We’re all stressed, frustrated, anxious, and discouraged. Which means we can all use some words of encouragement. Here are some of my current favorites for helping me stay in the right frame of mind. 1. “Don’t let [.].
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.
How to stop ignoring your best source of new revenue. Remember the Johnny Lee song, “Lookin’ For Love”? The lyrics perfectly sum up the most common B2B lead generation mistakes: “I was lookin’ for love in all the wrong places, Lookin’ for love in too many faces, Searchin’ their eyes and lookin’ for traces, Of what I’m dreaming of.”. Are you looking for your B2B sales leads in all the wrong places?
By Tibor Shanto. Now that almost all of North America is back on the path to complete reopening, the hype machine is about to go into overdrive. As people ascend from their quarantine, fix up their hair, and realize their sales, or specifically quota retirement, needs attention. The tendency will be to go to all the usual sources, usually determined by volume, not quality.
Cold calling is great—if your prospects actually pick up the phone. Many buyers are more comfortable with texting than phone calls, which means you have to get comfortable with it too. Learn to leverage this underrated communication channel, and SMS sales just might become the secret weapon in your selling arsenal. Here are a few quick facts to prove it to you: The average American checks their phone 96 times a day.
Back in the old days, when you wanted to copy something, you would have said, "I'm going to Xerox this." And for years when you needed a tissue you would have asked for a Kleenex. And when you wanted to clean your ears you would have asked for a Q-Tip. All three of these are examples where the brand and the product were one in the same. We're getting to that same point with Zoom video, where more than half of all salespeople are now using Zoom!
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.
Sales pipelines are similar to the story of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears. " This one is too fat, this one is too skinny, and the rarest one of all; this one's just right.
The dojo where I’ve been training in aikido for the past dozen years recently reopened for class on a very limited basis. Despite numerous safety precautions, however, a lot of students are—understandably—not yet comfortable returning to train. In fact, at a recent class, I was the only student. Which was awesome! I got a full [.].
One of the ways you stay ahead of your competition is to stop sounding like them. I don’t know about you, but all my LinkedIn requests and emails from vendors now begin the same way: “I hope you and your family are staying safe…”. This was an appropriate sentiment three months ago, when we were all hunkering down and sheltering in place, but times have changed—and you need to change with them.
Author: Paul Nolan Editor’s Note: Just as I resolved to live with the unending loop of coronavirus-themed commercials from the Walmarts and Amazons of the world praising their frontline employees (whom they had to be pressured into paying something close to a livable wage), the George Floyd murder and subsequent protests happened. The flood of protesters in the streets was followed by a steady flow of corporate messages expressing solidarity with Black Lives Matter.
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.
Do you credibly walk your story talk through every phase of each project? Not only to create a compelling business case or project narrative. End of story. But also, to build strategic relationships throughout the breadth and depth of your own and your clients’ organizations? The never-ending story. Similarly, do you spiel the sales blah-blah-blah long enough to close a contract?
In today's blog post, we discuss the importance of calling a sales audible at the line of scrimmage. Like an elite Quarterback, an elite salesperson must be willing to change things up when they're not working and be open to trying something completely different in the field.
Would you like to start a business? Can't figure out what business to start? I have three ideas for you: In the past four weeks, I have tried and tried and tried to get a glass company to replace the tabletop for a large outdoor patio table after the glass exploded in an early April storm. Four weeks laster, we still don't have the glass replaced. One of our garage door openers needs to be replaced because in every five out of six attempts to lower the door, the opener sends it back up again.
The sales world just lost one of its wisest women, and I’ve just lost one of my best friends. I wasn’t sure what the answer would be when I made the call. I’d always wanted to visit St. Petersburg, Russia. I was speaking in London in May of 2016, and I figured it would be a hop, skip, and a jump from there. At the very least, it would be much closer than flying from California.
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.
Sales Scrum Podcast Episode #13 – Guest George Brontén. Lucky 13, I am speaking of my guest on Sales Scrum, George Brontén. As the founder & CEO of Membrain.com, the B2B Sales Enablement CRM, George Brontén is passionate about the art and science of sales. In this episode, George and I explore some of the faulty assumptions people make in sales, the selection of CRMs, and other areas of selling.
For a CRO leading a transformation, one of the major challenges of evolving a product portfolio is preserving the core customer base while innovating. In his final interview segment, Steve King, CRO of Hexagon PPM, shares his experience in not only retaining.
When a great new sales leadership book emerges, I want to be one of the first ones to share it. When a fantastic book about emotional intelligence comes out – I want to shout it from the mountain tops. When a book with BOTH comes out – sales leadership AND emotional intelligence, I’m doing a happy dance.
It’s the day of a new product launch. You’ve got butterflies, your team is excited and you know your customers are going to be impressed. Launching a new product stirs excitement for any company, regardless of size. Introducing each new solution is a milestone for a brand’s continuous growth and success. And for that launch’s success, it’s crucial to set goals, plan future steps, and obtain a competitive advantage.
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.
You wake up, the sky is blue, the sun is shining, you open the door and it's freezing cold outside. Or there is the opposite of that, when there are thick clouds, it's drizzling, you open the door and it's hot and humid as hell! Things aren't always what they appear to be. In early April, during the earlier stages of the virus-required lockdown, I wrote this article about some of the remote selling challenges that companies were experiencing.
Author: TIM RIESTERER Sales reps who were selling in person a few months ago are now steeped in a very different (virtual) reality. But how do salespeople feel about remote sales calls versus in-person presentations? Not good. According to our recent industry survey of over 550 B2B sales reps, nearly 70% of salespeople don’t believe that remote selling is as effective as pitching in-person.
By Tibor Shanto. “We are living in interesting times, with multiple transformations triggers all present at the same time, all equally intense,” said Robert T. Vanderwerf, Transformation Strategy Leader, KPMG LLP., “When four or five significant drivers are changing at the same time, the business environment becomes highly complex.” I know, you’re thinking, another voice in the chorus of COVID insta-experts offering sage, yet all too obvious advice.
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