November, 2012

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Applying Sales 2.0 in Real Life

Sales 2.0

Every now and then I like to go check my own view of the world by talking to smart people who are out there actually selling. This week is one of those weeks. I interviewed sales manager, sales person, sales trainer and all around smart guy Jorge Soto. I asked Jorge about how he uses Sales 2.0 and how it is impacting Silicon Valley startups (an environment where he’s spent a lot of his career). 1.

Hiring 384
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Why Your Candy Dish is Killing Your Trade Show Sales

The Sales Heretic

“When I attend a trade show, I only stop at booths that have candy dishes. Because, if you have candy, you must be a terrific company. And the greater the variety of candy you have, the more likely I am to buy your product or service.” This sentiment has never been expressed by anyone, ever. [.].

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The Worst Sales Call of 2012

SBI Growth

In 2012 our consultants attended 438 live sales calls. Two weeks ago, we participated in the worst sales call of the year. I thought I would share this story with you. I hope to help you avoid some mistakes. The story begins with the EVP of Sales of a large technology company. He hired our firm. The purpose of the engagement was to understand why The Challenger Sale was not working.

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How The Social Media Movement Has Changed The Face Of Selling

MTD Sales Training

I have spoken many times on this blog about how the sales process has changed, and that the modern day buyer now makes their purchasing decisions in a completely different way to their predecessors. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]].

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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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FREE Kindle Sales Management Book

Steven Rosen

Monday Nov. 19th, 2012. As part of a special one day promotion I am offering my new eBook 52 Sales Management Tips – The Sales Manager’s Success Guide FREE. Click here to get your FREE copy. Visit my website and go to the FREE BONUS GIFT section to sign up for hundreds of dollars in FREE resources. Whether you are a sales executive, senior sales leader or a new, experienced or aspiring sales manager I’m confident you will find this book to be a valuable guide to consult whenever you are experie

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Schedule It!

The Pipeline

What’s the old saying about the road to hell being paved with good intentions? Well there should be a variation of that for sales people and how their road to failure is paved with plans not captured. Every day sales people set out “to do things” that have to be done to succeed, some they like, others (like cold calling) they don’t. Some they see as important, these get scheduled, and get done; ones they don’t see as important, or do not like to do, do not get scheduled, and guess what.

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How Sales Is Changing Before Our Eyes

Sales and Marketing Management

Issue Date: 2012-11-12. Author: By Herb Greenberg and Patrick Sweeney. Teaser: The future belongs to salespeople who can thoroughly understand, embrace and take advantage of new technology to enhance their relationships with their customers. Selling, as always, is about understanding the way your customers want to buy. What is most important now is that those ways are changing.

Customer 295
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Direct Content Marketing is Born – Prepare for 2013

SBI Growth

The biggest impact to acquiring new customers in 2013 will be Direct Content Marketing. This is the adoption of Content Marketing principles into outbound direct marketing. Direct Content Marketing is born. Content Marketing works. B2B Marketing teams are seeing fruit from their investment in content marketing to fuel Lead Generation efforts; 2-3x increase in the quantity of inbound leads.

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The Top 5 B2B Prospecting Mistakes To Avoid At All Costs

MTD Sales Training

Prospecting mistakes are the most deadly errors you can make in professional selling, in large part because they are so difficult to quantify. Sales mistakes and blunders in the sales process or in. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]].

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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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52 Ways to Improve Sales Performance

Steven Rosen

New book helps sales managers unlock hidden sales potential (available in paperback). Now available in paperback. The sales manager is the pivotal person in the sales-driven organization, and Steven’s book shows you how to excel!” said Brian Tracey , author, Getting Rich Your Own Way. When a company hits a sales slump, most look at the sales staff — but that’s a mistake, says Steven Rosen, author of the new book 52 Sales Management Tips: The Sales Manager’s Success Guide ( Amazon ; $10.9

Hiring 296
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Zig Ziglar's Legacy to the Sales World

Understanding the Sales Force

Understanding the Sales Force by Dave Kurlan Zig died today at the age of 86. Seth Godin memorialized him here. I wrote about our chance meeting here 6 years ago. I want to talk about Zig's life and his sales and selling impact. He paved the way for people like me by almost single-handedly creating the motivational speaking industry. Today, motivational speaking has evolved to include sales and sales management training and coaching, sales consulting, sales force development, sales enablement, s

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Plan It and Write It – Sales eXchange 175

The Pipeline

As we head into the home stretch of the year, we are faced with the usual rituals and customs of the season. Closing business, failing to prospect, and ensuring the traditional lull in the pipeline and related activity at the start of the year. In this headlong rush to the end of the year, you need to carve out a bit of time to plan for next year.

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5 Lessons I Learned from Zig Ziglar

Score More Sales

You don’t meet too many people who make an impact on your career and your life. It was sad to hear that sales legend and motivator to millions, Zig Ziglar, has passed on. At the same time, thinking of Mr. Ziglar evokes all sorts of memories and lessons early in my sales career. When I started out as a technology sales professional, I had little idea what I was doing – just the words of my grandmother, who was my mentor in business.

Apparel 276
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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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39% of Marketers Do Not Have a Defined Content Marketing Strategy

SBI Growth

In the Future of Content Marketing survey, 39% of nearly 60 respondents indicated they did not have a defined content marketing strategy. If you have read my past three articles on content marketing ( article 1 , article 2 , and article 3 ), then this percentage number is strikingly similar. This percentage further validates the findings of a recent survey by eConsultancy , which found 38% of 1,300 businesses, did not have a defined content marketing strategy.

Marketing 314
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People Love To Buy, But Hate To Be Sold

MTD Sales Training

You did everything right. You maintained an excellent prospecting track and qualified the decision maker. You got through a tough gatekeeper screen, set a good appointment and sealed it with cement. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]].

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Face to Face Cannot Be Replaced

No More Cold Calling

No matter what our technical communication capability and comfort, we must be confident in the original medium—in person. Susan RoAne is The Mingling Maven®, and my go-to person for tips on networking and building strong connections. Susan understands that when we network effectively (as she teaches in her seven books), we build strong connections, increase sales, and easily identify referral opportunities.

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Do Prospects Lie to Your Salespeople Like the Airlines Do?

Understanding the Sales Force

Understanding the Sales Force by Dave Kurlan We've all been on planes when they tell us to put our electronic devices into airplane mode so that the devices - your laptops, ipads, ipods, kindles and phones - do not send a radio signal looking for a connection. They tell us that these signals can interfere with the plane's instrumentation. Scary stuff!

Airlines 269
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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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Who Cares What You Would Do – Sales eXchange 173

The Pipeline

It has always been a challenge to get sales people to call high, not high as in stoned, but high in the hierarchy of their target companies; in fact I sometimes think the former happens more often. One reason is that they are not comfortable engaging with senior executives, I hear things like “ho, you can’t call them”. To which I say I have checked in Ottawa, DC, all the provincial and state legislations and there is currently no law on any books preventing a sales person from calling senior

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How would you Coach the Self-Doubter?

Steven Rosen

We all know self-doubters in our personal and professional lives. Despite they’re lack of apparent confidence, many of them are highly successful. From a cognitive perspective the self-doubter can only see what they don’t do well. They are their own worst critics. Given a lack of self-awareness they are extremely difficult to coach. Can you think of anyone on your team who fits this tag?

Coaching 260
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How CEOs Can Teach the Board to Evaluate Sales Performance

SBI Growth

This post is written for CEOs who want to teach the board how to properly evaluate sales performance. According to Spencer Stuart , the average age of a board member in corporate America is 62.4. Many of these individuals made their fortunes in their 40s. When they were running businesses, life was vastly different. They used the information available to them to make decisions about the future of the business.

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Top Five Reasons Sales People Fail

MTD Sales Training

Sales people can find dozens of reasons for failure, as can many sales managers and supervisors. However, there really aren’t a whole lot of reasons for failing in professional selling. The reasons. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]].

Sales 297
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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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3 Tips to Keep Your Sales Focus

Score More Sales

Working hard in sales but not accomplishing enough? Last week I was interviewed on the OpenView Lab blog about ways to keep focus through the end of the year. If you’re bogged down by lack of closed business, upcoming holidays, relatives, and distractions like Cyber Monday, you might want to listen to the interview since it is audio and easy to listen to.

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Salespeople Who Give Discounts are Not Salespeople

The Sales Hunter

It’s time for me to rant about salespeople and discounts. When a salesperson offers a customer a discount, what they’re saying is they have not been able to do a good enough of a job demonstrating value to the customer. To offset their inability to do what they’re supposed to be able to do, they feel the way to close the sale is by offering a discount.

Discount 262
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Never Let a Good Plan get in the Way of Success

The Pipeline

Success is not a straight line, there is give and take, the tried and true, and the ability to improvise and deal with the unexpected, good or bad. This is why process is vital to sales success regardless of natural born talent a sales professional may have. It serves as a road map that allows you to better navigate the routine aspects of a sale, and it also allows you to better improvise when faced with the unexpected.

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What the Huge Patriots Win Teaches us About Sales Momentum

Understanding the Sales Force

Understanding the Sales Force by Dave Kurlan Perhaps you watched the Thursday night Thanksgiving Day football masacre between the New York Jets and the New England Patriots. The Patriots scored 35 unaswered points in the second period and in one 52 second timeframe, scored 3 touchdowns. Unbelievable! Incredible! Unheard of! The more common reaction though is, "How quickly it all unraveled for the Jets".

Lead Rank 252
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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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Persona Ecosystem – High Impact Exercise to Dial-in your 2013 Marketing Plan

SBI Growth

Marketing leaders can gain a competitive advantage by executing a high value exercise Develop a Persona Ecosystem. For marketing leaders tasked with acquiring new customers this is the most valuable exercise you will perform all year. This exercise is a standard component of the SBI Lead Generation playbook for our clients and I want to share it with you.

Exercises 310
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How To Overcome The Fear Of Cold Calling

MTD Sales Training

You are all ready to go. You have all of your leads for the day prepared and lined up in front of you. You have all of your rebuttals ready, and you have rehearsed your main talking points. You are. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]].

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New Leads Study Supports Quickness and Follow Up

Score More Sales

A sales leader asked me yesterday, “What do we do with the sales reps that are not following up on the 50% of leads coming in that don’t get called more than once?”. He was commenting in response to the fact that 50% of all leads coming into a company are never called a second time. This fact is from research previously done by Leads360 , a cloud based leads management and sales automation company.

Follow-up 250