Category Search

The Daily Conundrum
If you’re like most sales professionals working in today’s hyper-connected, always-on environment, you struggle on a daily basis to meet your goals. The concept of work-life balance is a dated one as we continue to raise the bar on performance and financial expectations.

This struggle is real, because essentially your salespeople are tasked with 4 jobs, each of which could be a full-time job including; 1.) Outbound prospecting to ensure they have enough pipeline to meet coverage targets. 2.) Working and developing existing opportunities to meet quarterly and annual sales targets. 3.) Seeing to the needs of existing customers as they use your solution. 4.) Finally, and perhaps most tedious of all, managing internal expectations. It’s the last one where many folks desperately seek ways to simplify the process, trying to avoid duplicating updates to the various systems of record and to the many layers of sales management.

game chang·er
noun
an event, idea, or technology that causes a significant shift in the current manner of doing or thinking about something.
“a potential game changer that could revitalize the entire US aerospace industry”

There have never been as many game-changing sales technologies as there are today.
These game changers can help you sell more, in less time, at the right price, and with fewer salespeople. What we call the 4 Golden Goals of sales organizations.

In our 2018 Sales Tech Game-Changers series, we ask Executives several questions about how their solution can change a sales organization in a significant way.

There are plenty of reasons why deals stall. In today’s post, I’ll talk about a biggie: Skepticism.

When people begin to feel skeptical, fearful, dispassionate, or insecure, they invariably retreat behind a plume of questions.

The Sales Signals We’re Ignoring Could Be Worth Millions

We’ve all heard the line, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” It typically leads to discussion on observations and perception, and the idea that if something is not heard, is it even there? 

Now, let’s apply it to sales. “If data about your customers and prospects isn’t entered into your CRM, does it even exist?”

I asked this question recently to a handful of sales executives and the answer was “we have mandated that all info needs to be entered into the CRM, but quite frankly, the reps aren’t doing it.”

The Sales Tech space has grown dramatically as evidenced by the publication of our 2017 Sales Tech Landscape with 500 solutions. The buzz words for the year were predictive analytics, AI, ABM, ABS, and Coaching. Here are some of Smart Selling Tools stats for 2017:

– Published over 100 articles on our blog
– Hosted 17 of our own webinars and participated in about a dozen others
– Recorded 39 Sales Software video reviews

Oh, year-end analysis. How I love thee and hate thee. Let me count the ways…

This is the time of year when executives become hyper-sensitive to numbers and are asking a flurry of questions.

What revenue will we close the year with?
What was our ROI on that new tech investment?
What did we do this past year that was most effective at moving the needle?

When your customer is ready to sign, you want to close the deal ASAP—not be slowed by a paper-based signing process. And yet that’s exactly what happens in many organizations. According to an IDC report, Bridging the Document Disconnect in Sales, although most business today is digital, 56 percent of executives still rely on paper to sign contracts and close deals.