Expert Tips & Actionable Insights

Developing a more meaningful experience for your customers takes more than just first-party data. Imagine if you could uncover more pieces of the puzzle to create a holistic CX.

There are new tools out there to help sales reps cut down the amount of time it takes to find the right content, organize it and put it into a pitch that is going to be compelling and move a sales cycle forward.

Often discussed but rarely understood, Account-Based Sales (ABS) and Marketing (ABM) are the buzzwords of the industry. How has this new approach changed B2B Sales?

Sales professionals are interested in making their deals larger, increasing the revenue gains and hitting quota with fewer deals. The challenge – few know how to consistently accomplish this. There are tactics and approaches which have proven effective and continue to be table steaks for sales professionals selling today.

Sales and hustle are often considered synonymous, but that’s not always a good thing.

Sales is a rollercoaster profession – everyone who’s been doing it for a long time knows there’s days where you feel like you’re on a treadmill going nowhere.

“How do you plan to maximize your income?” We get asked this question a lot by sales leaders and coaches.

A few weeks ago we discussed five things that make a great comp plan. It’s still early in the year and comp plans are a hot topic. Many sales reps don’t believe they can negotiate their comp plans, but that’s not always true.

With the onslaught of artificial intelligence and new technologies impacting the sales profession, the question is often asked: “Will people still be relevant?” It’s generally agreed that yes, salespeople will still be needed – at least those that are the A players.

Demos play a critical role in every sales process. Oftentimes, just being prepared to give a demo isn’t enough. Sales professionals need to be mindful of other factors besides knowing their products to have their demo be a success.

Sales Managers are often faced with ever-increasing challenges, only one of which is making sure the team is delivering the results the company demands. Working to understand their perspective, we are diving in to identify five key things sales reps should be aware of in order to be not only an A-player, but a valued member of the team.

It’s the beginning of the year and companies are beginning to roll out new comp plans. For salespeople, especially ultra high performers, comp plans are one of the primary motivators for structuring out the year and harnessing focus.

It’s common for sales professionals to move around a lot. In fact, the average tenure of a sales executive is just 18 months.

While curiosity may have killed the cat, it also helped the sales rep close the deal … Successful sales professionals are curious by nature. They are interested in learning about their prospect’s business, their circumstances, challenges, and the situations in which they find themselves. When sales reps authentically engage with a human-to-human connection, they are much more effective than reps who only focus on presenting and pitching their solution.

There are times when sales reps identify opportunities that, for whatever reason, they just can’t win.

How do you have a conversation with a prospect that focuses on value, rather than the “P” word – price? We all understand that price will be a consideration when making a purchase, but when you compete solely on price, you’ve pigeon-holed your offering as a commodity. The first step to competing on value is to make sure your solution is differentiated in the buyer’s mind.

Renewals, especially when it comes to the “as a service” business model. After all, we’re living in a subscription-based world. A friend of mine just had a baby, and she gets her baby food via subscription. That’s how I get my multi-vitamins. We even have an associate who’s wild about a sock subscription service!

It’s time to get back to basics. That means developing the sales prospecting techniques to reliably fill the pipeline with qualified opportunities. Here’s a real-world example of what I’m talking about.

When it comes to digital experiences, B2B buyers are drifting through a sea of sameness. In his opening keynote for the recent Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference, Brent Adamson shared a shocking statistic: 64% of B2B buyers cannot differentiate one brand’s digital experience from another’s. Yikes.

Pitch verb; gerund or present participle: pitching to throw or fling roughly or casually. “He crumpled the can and threw it into the alley.” By definition, “pitching” is done without care and often ends with a lackluster result. While the definition we use in sales may be more targeted, the outcome is the same.

As many of you know, our headquarters is in Southern California — an area famed for its breathtaking coastline, beautiful beaches, fantastic restaurants and traffic, lots of it.

When you hear the word negotiation, what comes to mind? It likely conjures images of your CRM, a ring light shining in your eyes, a giant cup of cold brew and a computer monitor covered in sticky notes. Your palms might even start to sweat a little at the thought — and that’s only natural.

’Tis the season of the double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s exciting to look forward to the holiday season. On the other, the end of the quarter and the year loom large, with the finish line already in sight.

What better way to kick off winter in the northern hemisphere than with something a little tropical? Specifically, a tropical thought experiment. Now, I know it’s not as exciting as the giveaway for an all-expenses-paid trip to some exotic locale that you were hoping for — but stick with me.

How do I be me virtually? Sure, if you’re a remote worker who has one weekly stand-up on Zoom, you may be tempted to laugh that question off. For sales professionals, it’s another story.

Think back to the last time you shared a meal with a good friend. You likely recall the restaurant and the food, the little sensory details like the man smoking the cigar across the street or the squawking birds in the background.

You’re scrolling through your LinkedIn feed when you receive a request to connect from an account executive. They recently saw you speak at a sales conference, and your talk resonated with them — seems harmless enough.

Accurate and reliable forecasting will transform a sales organization. When it comes to a process as vital as this, you would assume there’s no room for guesswork — but the reality plays out differently:

I attended the Sales 3.0 Conference in Philly last week, where many of the talks had a shocking theme running through them: Discovery is dead. The premise was that buyers hate it. They view sales discovery calls as an annoyance — a roadblock to the demos and nuanced answers they crave from vendors.

Summer means sailing adventures off the coast of Crete and golfing holidays in southern Portugal — and executives anxiously checking emails and monitoring economic developments.

Over the past two years, the sales profession has seen more than a few headlines that turn heads:

Early in my sales career, my company hired a phenomenal negotiator to put us through a rigorous one-day training. We learned how to focus on the other individual, generate a feeling of safety, use their language to increase rapport, and tactics for isolating and overcoming obstacles

The understatement of the year? Selling in 2022 has been difficult. As we look to the end of Q4, external factors continue to play havoc with our ability to win new business. From the lingering effects of the pandemic to supply chain disruptions to continued inflation, we’re fighting an unpredictable economic environment – and yet, there are reasons to be hopeful.

Generating reliable, top-of-funnel activity is notoriously difficult these days, not to mention expensive and time-consuming. After all, your outreach must be hyper-personalized, timely and add value to the potential buyer. We all agree on this – at least, in principle

You’re the SVP of Sales at an engineering firm that designs braking technology for major car manufacturers – and you’ve been tasked with growing revenue 20% YOY.

What do revenue operations, buyer-centric selling and value-based selling have in common? At their core, they are concerned with one principle: aligning the revenue engine to the way buyers want to buy. And while most organizations understand the concepts and their theoretical impact on customer experience (CX), there remains a significant gap between theory and practice:

Three weeks ago, I attended the Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference in Las Vegas – let me tell you why it was the ideal location.

When you’re sick, what do you do? Google your symptoms, right? Instantly, you’re presented with a slew of information: A headache is most likely a headache – though it could be hay fever, a sinus infection, the flu or even the prelude to a rare neurological condition.

On the surface, strategic account planning seems simple. You have access. You have the relationships. And the customer has a vested interest in meeting with you to ensure they receive the value they expect – what could go wrong?

Over the past several months, I’ve spent more time at my satellite office on the East Coast. It’s a beautiful location that sits along a tidal river whose shores I walk most evenings.

What’s the biggest misconception about value selling? A good business case is the only thing needed to win the business.

When it comes to objection handling and sales negotiations, there’s much overlap and important moments of nuance. We’ll start by covering the types of objections you may face, along with a proven process for overcoming them. Then, we’ll dive into dependable tactics for negotiating a win-win with your most demanding buyers.

The world is changing. If you’re a B2B marketer, you know that one of biggest challenges facing marketing professionals today is meeting the buyer where they are.

The uncertainty and challenges surrounding COVID-19 are impacting every business right now. Company leaders everywhere need to make difficult decisions quickly. This is no time for sentiment. Wait, no. Scratch that. This is actually the perfect time for sentiment.

One thing I’ve always been fascinated by is the way most companies usually approach promoting sales reps to management.

When it comes to sales, everyone talks about driving more pipelines these days. However, to stay competitive and meet the ever-evolving customer needs and expectations, businesses must constantly adapt and refine their messaging strategies.

If you have ever wanted something you saw in a science fiction movie to be real, you are not alone. For most of us, it’s a pipe dream. For Adam Honig, Founder and CEO of Spiro, it is now a business that he believes can slay Salesforce.

Sales effectiveness is not a new theme on our podcast, nor in the sales world in general. But for many salespeople, it’s still something mysterious, and they don’t quite understand why they should even bother about it.

The bounce rate on requested demos on websites is 85%. That’s…wow. It’s a sign that 85% of people are fed up with filling out a form before finding out what they want to know about your product.

Keeping employees around is not at all the same thing as keeping them engaged. Creating the right culture, setting goals, and motivating your teams requires so much more.

When you’re doing a puzzle, do you just pick up any random piece and start looking for one it fits with? Obviously not. Everyone knows you start with the corners! Prioritizing them makes the rest easy.

In Q1 you’re setting the stage for your success in the coming year – at least, you should be. There are typical mistakes we see sales reps make again and again that get in the way of their ability to achieve an ultra high performer status.

In a world where more B2B buyers are demanding a refined sales experience, enterprises have an opportunity to achieve differentiation with their sales process if they are willing to make some changes. Regardless if you are a Chief Revenue Officer or an individual sales professional there are five key elements you need to be focused on.

Sales has become an increasingly dynamic profession – from AI, to the evolving use of social media, to ever more complex decision making from buyers. As a result, team structures that used to work, will not work in the future.

Owning a service-based business is hard. Not only are you expected to be a master of your product, you’ve also got to be a professional at marketing and getting your service out there in front of people. And if you’re not careful, you can take the habits that you’ve had to establish in your beginning years as a scrappy start up and never grow past them.

I don’t know how many of you have developed a TikTok addiction recently, but anyone with small children could probably spot the symptoms of the newest social media obsession. Even if you don’t have kids, you’re probably familiar with social media addiction. More than half of us use Facebook or Instagram every single day. Which means you can use social media to reach half of your market every single day. Sounds like a no-brainer, right? No one ever says they couldn’t use more leads.

Oftentimes, we forget that for the sales enablement function to really work, there has to be a little give and take. Of course, sales enablement’s purpose is to, well, enable sales. However, sales reps need to know that they can go to sales enablement for valuable insights and clarification.

It’s not that sales and marketing are out-and-out fighting with each other. It’s more that they just won’t acknowledge that the other one exists. As if they don’t desperately need each other to achieve even the basic level of competence at their jobs.

You may have a game-changing product, but if you don’t know how to sell it, that level of awesome is a moot point. On the other hand, having a more mundane product isn’t a death sentence if you know how to sell the hell out of it.

One of the top challenges executives cite when asked what’s getting in the way of them hitting their growth goals is finding and feeding the top of the funnel.

Hiring for SDRs that hold out for the long haul, can be a daunting task. Maybe you’ve had bad luck in the past or have seen colleagues struggle to fill SDR roles. Even so, try not to feel discouraged if hiring SDRs is your responsibility. There are a few misconceptions that tend to sway our opinions about SDRs.

“The most important and most valuable service you can provide is an excellent experience.” – Cindy Kennedy, District Manager for Corus360 Customer service is a critical component to driving revenue and account expansion. In this episode, Cindy Kennedy tells us why listening, trust, and responsiveness are inseparable from sales success.

We’ve all been there…the company with the negative culture. The one where you’re afraid to raise issues to your boss. And the one where you secretly search for a new job.

There’s never a shortage of people complaining about their clients. You can get stuck in that kind of thinking, but there is another way of looking at things. It all comes down to the way you think about yourself and your client. After all, you can’t do a great job taking care of clients until you’ve taken care of yourself.

When you’re sick, what do you do? Google your symptoms, right? Instantly, you’re presented with a slew of information: A headache is most likely a headache – though it could be hay fever, a sinus infection, the flu or even the prelude to a rare neurological condition.

When you’re sick, what do you do? Google your symptoms, right? Instantly, you’re presented with a slew of information: A headache is most likely a headache – though it could be hay fever, a sinus infection, the flu or even the prelude to a rare neurological condition.

On the surface, strategic account planning seems simple. You have access. You have the relationships. And the customer has a vested interest in meeting with you to ensure they receive the value they expect – what could go wrong?

On the surface, strategic account planning seems simple. You have access. You have the relationships. And the customer has a vested interest in meeting with you to ensure they receive the value they expect – what could go wrong?

Over the past several months, I’ve spent more time at my satellite office on the East Coast. It’s a beautiful location that sits along a tidal river whose shores I walk most evenings.

Over the past several months, I’ve spent more time at my satellite office on the East Coast. It’s a beautiful location that sits along a tidal river whose shores I walk most evenings.

This guide covers virtual selling best practices: You’ll learn how to authentically connect with decision-makers, hold a prospect’s attention, build a powerful business case for the value provided by your solution in real time, and move deals to close.

There is a cause-and-effect relationship between developing your people and your sales results. Sales coaching is all about looking forward and developing your people to increase their performance, and it’s growing in importance. High-revenue growth companies invest more in coaching and get better results than lower revenue growth companies. Learn all about Sales Coaching and why it’s a must have for any organization.

The Guide To Powerful Sales Prospecting is the definitive source for up-to-date sales prospecting techniques and best practices.

Research by LinkedIn revealed that while 65% of salespeople (and 72% of top performers) say they always put the buyer first, only 23% of buyers agree. That’s a serious discrepancy — what’s to blame for the mismatch? The single biggest roadblock to implementing a truly buyer-first approach: “Lack of the right skillset among existing sales talent.” The solution is obvious: Sales training that embodies the five principles of the buyer-first mindset — a value-based approach to sales training that creates customer-obsessed sellers who forge long-term relationships. Luckily, that’s what this guide is all about. In it, we’ll cover the fundamentals of value-based selling and how to build a customized sales training program, drive adoption and measure its impact.

For revenue executives concerned about hitting ever increasing targets, generating more qualified leads, increasing the return on their sales teams or creating world-class sales organizations, one of the most effective approaches is to focus on their B2B sales experience – but what does this really mean?

It’s time to get back to basics. That means developing the sales prospecting techniques to reliably fill the pipeline with qualified opportunities. Here’s a real-world example of what I’m talking about.

Renewals, especially when it comes to the “as a service" business model.

Early in the first quarter is the time to focus on building our pipelines to achieve, or even overachieve, our sales goals in 2017. This requires us to market to generate opportunities, nurture current leads, attract new buyers, capture web visitors and drip content to potential buyers, presumably, until they are ready to buy!

While curiosity may have killed the cat, it also helped the sales rep close the deal …

Just listen and you’ll hear it. Towards the latter end of most calls the sales reps starts saying things like, “OK, I’ll send you this”. Or, “sure, I’m happy to set up that demo”. Or, maybe, “no problem setting up the next meeting and I’ll be sure to bring along our technical expert to talk with you”. It happens a lot.

Blustery conditions are expected in Pyeongchang, South Korea for the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics. Even so, the athletes will surely be donning their country colors with pride and preparing to give their best as the competitions heat up. With consideration for elite competition and reaching the top of your game, now is the perfect time to warm up those cold calls to build your pipeline.

Sales training, just as every other initiative in a company, must compete with shifting priorities and an often fluid business climate. When training is delayed there is an impact to the bottom line, to shareholders and to employees – but how many companies spend the time to quantify that impact? What is the actual cost of delaying sales training? While funding sales and marketing training may be a game of managing priorities – there is one priority that never goes out of fashion – REVENUE GROWTH.

For too long in too many organizations, inside sales has been seen as a stepping stone to working in the field, rather than a career in and of itself. As such, it’s often perceived as easier than some other sales roles when, in fact, it can be more difficult to connect with someone without the aid of non-verbal cues and less time to build a rapport.

How do I be me virtually?Sure, if you’re a remote worker who has one weekly stand-up on Zoom, you may be tempted to laugh that question off. For sales professionals, it’s another story.

You likely recall the restaurant and the food, the little sensory details like the man smoking the cigar across the street or the squawking birds in the background.

When you hear the word negotiation, what comes to mind?

We focus a lot of attention on B2B sales prospecting because sales teams understand its importance in achieving long-term sales success. They also know, at least intuitively, that it takes time and tenacity to continuously find and convince prospective buyers to select your solutions. Unfortunately, too often sales professionals aren’t as dedicated to outbound prospecting as they should be.

If you’re in sales you probably think about selling something, right. After all, that’s what you’re expected to do. Problem is, that type of thinking results in what I call “thinking small”. You’re always focused on the short term; the little picture, what you can sell someone.

Every executive I know tasked with hitting a revenue target has the same challenge – getting more qualified leads into the top of the funnel. And just like the rest of us, they all hope there is a silver bullet to effective prospecting – something that will make it easier, less painful, and drastically reduce the chance of rejection of them and their teams.

If the B2B sales cycle is a marathon, Q4 is the final half-mile. It’s a time of triumph, defeat and resiliency — and when you’re in the middle of this race, it’s difficult to find time to reflect.

Reading the sales headlines lately is enough to make any sales professional anxious. Robots taking their jobs, buyers not needing them, millennials not wanting them. I am not surprised some of the professionals I talk to wonder when their career will end.

Salespeople are hunters. We go after the big opportunity and land the sale. Sure, this hard work yields success, but winning new business is only one part of the equation. What are you doing to retain your customers after the initial sale is made? Does your organization have a “leaky bucket” model?

He then stressed the importance of improving seller websites, creating moments of nuance, and focusing on rep-mediated digital experiences — it’s that final point that I want to expand upon.

How can you differentiate your company’s solution, especially in a crowded or commoditized market? First, you must recognize that being different is not the same as being differentiated. Being different is merely a tally of your unique capabilities and attributes. Differentiation means you successfully connect your unique capabilities to your individual prospect’s problems.

July is prime vacation season for those living in the northern hemisphere. Days are longer, and life feels lighter. Prospects also tend to turn on the Out of Office auto-response on email and voice mail.

A sales professional I know landed one of the biggest deals of his career when he least expected it: while vacationing in Hawaii with his family. He was sitting poolside, watching the kids, when an executive he’d met briefly at a trade show sat nearby. He struck up a conversation and before everyone left to get ready for dinner, they’d agreed to meet again to discuss a strategic partnership that remains firmly in place years later.

I’ve been in B2B sales for over 20 years, as a sales rep, sales manager, sales leader, consultant, and trainer. With my career spanning the information-technology revolution, I’m reminded every day how technology has forever changed and continues to change the behavior of both sales professionals and buyers. Since the IT highway continues to accelerate, it will be the survival of the fittest sales professionals who thrive in the competitive marketplace versus those who are passed over with an antiquated skillset of salesmanship.

“Summer breeze, makes me feel fine…” may be the lyrics of a 1972 Seals & Crofts’ tune, but this summer seems anything but fine. This summer, the economy is uncertain and people are anxious.