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How do we not break what is already working, but keep improving what we have and outperform the others? I recommend applying the growth hacking approach. Take a broader perspective and evaluate your funnel as a whole. Come up with hypotheses about each part of your funnel and then...
- Dreamforce is an exciting event. It's hard to keep up on all the exciting activities and announcements. To make it easier, I'll be following these 20 Twitter handles during the 4-day event. From the top industry names to top sales solution providers, you'll stay in the know.
- One of the great things about working for a relatively small company is that it trains you to be very pragmatic. You’ve basically got to operate and manage all the same tasks and processes as in a bigger shop -- only you’ve got much less resource to do it...
- The selling landscape has changed. In today’s digital marketplace, buyers have an abundance of information at their fingertips, more distractions, and numerous reasonable options across just about every vertical. Sales process excellence will solidify your strategic advantage and ensure sales activities are productive.
- Ensuring that your process is fluid and enabled by the right tech stack is critical to building a high functioning, high growth sales org.
- Crafting a powerful value proposition that resonates with a C-suite audience is as much an art as it is a science. A well-presented value proposition not only articulates the unique benefits of your products or services, but it also personally addresses the specific needs of that audience. To help...
- Every neighborhood has one of those houses! You know the kind I’m talking about: the one that gives out the really good candy at Halloween.
- Sales Tools to Increase Tradeshow ROIThere’s been a lot of excitement around Sales Enablement solutions (for the purpose of this post, I’m referring to solutions that help sellers find and deliver the right content for each prospect). Marketers are realizing that it’s not enough to create content, they have...
- When companies think about transforming their sales organizations, they need to first understand what outcomes they are seeking, where do they need to improve or accelerate. What we find is that top line revenue is always the most important thing. Maximizing revenue in your biggest accounts and identifying cross-sell...
- When you think of a “sales playbook”, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?If you’re thinking of a plan or guidebook for your sales team to follow, you aren’t too far off. Most of us will agree that planning your work and working according to plan is a...
- You have to look at sales effectiveness holistically to successfully drive change. And it all starts with understanding your customers and what needs to become YOUR WAY OF SELLING.
- The world is moving to a peer-to-peer selling environment that also now includes the sharing of experiences. Whether it’s finding a good restaurant, choosing a hotel or purchasing a new laptop, reading about other buyers’ experiences is a prerequisite to buying.
- The current segmentation process in Excel sheets is rigid. We take accounts, filter them against our current ICP hypothesis, add some flavor of firmographic, demographic, or employee size segmentation, and put our best resources to go work against them.
- A sales transformation doesn’t just happen for the heck of it; there’s going to be some specific challenge or weakness driving that change. With that said, there are certain areas in which most organizations could benefit from taking a transformative approach:
- To continue to engage buyers during a time when B2B and B2C buyer demands are converging at a rapid pace, personalized, relevant content has become king. Sales enablement solutions are built to help facilitate a more productive buying and selling experience by ensuring the right content is available at...
- Marketing and sales both work to drive demand and grow revenues. The problem is that they each focus on different areas of the buying process. They do so in silos, guided by a linear process that dictates marketing works on the first part and sales works on the second.This...
- To participate in the next generation of sales tech, sales organizations will have to consider their data strategy. High-growth teams who want to keep a competitive advantage and continue to drive efficiency need to take a good hard look at where their data is coming from.
- I have distilled down my discussions with Bob and peers and summarized my views into some practical take-aways. I am calling these the 3 Cs — collaboration, continuous learning, and customization — and how, together, they lead to better sales training and greater sales results.
- Defining the role Sales Enablement plays in your organization is a multi-faceted exercise. First, there’s a small matter of defining what Sales Enablement even means. It also involves answering the question, “What processes, technologies and responsibilities should the role envelope and which should it not?" Already, with just those...
- Research shows that as much as 90% of professional learning is informal and experiential, done out in the world and not in a classroom. It’s intuitive and natural, and it’s what people do every day when they access Google, YouTube, Yelp, and TripAdvisor.Yet formal learning comprises 90% of most...
- All our experience is showing that the biggest thing people will be doing right out of the gate is making sure they have the best possible visibility into the total active demand in their marketplace. You get this by augmenting your 1st party information with great sources of 3rd...
- The numbers are telling. Teams who coach with film review are 30.2% more likely to hit quota. After analyzing the behaviors of 100 sales managers, we found that top managers spent 30% more time on film review. In fact, a 3X increase in film review drove a 50% increase...
- There’s so much research out there now which points us to some key areas of change, and the companies that don’t respond to them will fall behind. The good news is that buyers are telling us what they expect and will continue to.
- Here’s the scenario. You’re on a ship in a vast sea. Somewhere out there on the horizon is a land of opportunity, solid ground on which to build a beautiful, sun-soaked empire–if you can get to it. But right now, you’re tossed by the waves of the ocean and,...
- I think the first priority is taking control of the tool stack. There has been an explosion of tools in the sales ops world and we feel that today, sales operations professionals are spending more time integrating systems than performing sales operations. It’s death by a thousand tools....
- If you asked 10 different business leaders to describe how digital transformation applies to their business, you would probably get 10 different responses. As CMO, when I think of digital transformation, I am applying it to the buyer journey and the new way in which prospects expect to be...
- This new software solves the biggest sales issues of all: Knowing who to call, when to call, what to say, how to follow up, when to follow up, how to get answers, how to schedule more appointments, what to do next, who to focus on, what to up-sell, where...
- Finding the right sales talent isn’t easy – but even when you hire the perfect candidate, keeping them for the long-term can be a whole different challenge.New reps must be supported from day one with sales readiness programs that prepare them with the skills and knowledge to effectively...
- An ongoing investment in and commitment to sales training is at the heart of any successful sales transformation effort. Most businesses make a significant time and financial investment at the start of the year to bring together the sales team for annual planning and training. However, the momentum coming...
- Customer experience has become the basis for competition in the modern world. If you look at the major disruptions that are happening in the business world, in many cases the product itself has not been the basis for disruption, but instead it’s the experience that has changed.
- Nearly every week in 2018, we interviewed a different SalesTech company asking them how their solution changes the game for sales. Each quarter we summarized their answers in this easy to read magazine. In this 4th, and last, issue of our Sales Tech Game Changers magazine, we ask 5...
- We have an enablement problem… People think we suck at enabling our reps because we can’t prove its impact.Many SaaS companies struggle with ramp time, and it’s getting worse over time. The Bridge Group reports that on average, it takes 5 or more months for new sales reps to...
- As buyers get harder to engage, competition grows, and markets accelerate, ensuring sellers bring their A game to each and every sales interaction becomes ever more critical. Sales leaders simply can’t afford for their team to waste at-bats, especially with swings that are so wildly off that they not...
- There are a number of considerations to weigh when deciding to implement a Sales Enablement platform. The goal of implementing a Sales Enablement platform is more than boosting productivity or ensuring compliance – it’s complete business transformation. Often times, an investment in Sales Enablement can only come with the...
- Sales organizations will have to be sure their people, processes, and technology are all working together to meet their sales goals. In the coming months, I see companies focusing on the following areas: optimizing sales processes, reviewing sales tools, and training sales teams.
- If you’ve ever bought a house, you know the drill: Location, location, location!But in the world of B2B sales? It’s timing, timing, timing!“Bad timing is the worst objection you can get!” says DiscoverOrg’s Manager of Sales, Brandon Battey. “It’s a true reason. You just have to move on.”Unfortunately, it’s...
- As a child, you learn the “golden rule” is to treat others the way you want to be treated. But as an adult in the post-digital world, I’m not sure that still rings true. In an era of Netflix, Amazon, and Uber, isn’t it more important to treat people...
- While working on the real thing, you cannot rely on a haphazard collection of outdated notes and a motley crew of tools to keep track of what you are doing. Unfortunately, for some sales reps, digging through notes in the way real miners do, became daily routine. Due to...
- Why Buyers Resist Your Perfectly Logical ProposalsDoes it ever feel like your prospects are irrational?After all, if you present compelling information that clearly demonstrates how and why your solution addresses their needs, the rational thing would be to sign on the dotted line (or at least move toward a...
- Have you ever made a sale that you felt slimy about? I’m talking about something that went above your need to hit a monthly sales quota. Have you ever sold a product you didn’t believe in or didn’t believe could adequately meet your customer’s needs? If the answer is...
