February, 2019

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9 Things Terribly Wrong With Sales Today

A Sales Guy

Sales is suffering from 9 brutal ills: The Bro Culture, Lack of Coaching Too Product-Centric Not enough sales people understand the game/rules of sales Too much reliance on selling tools. Not enough training in the industry/space Too much activity management Little respect for prospects and buyers time Not enough humility. Sales is the greatest profession in the world in my opinion.

Sports 150
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Is Your Current Sales Opportunity Real?

Anthony Cole Training

In this article, we discuss and identify the three main reasons why salespeople get duped into believing a specific opportunity will close and why some deals are not worth chasing. They are: Weak pipeline. Failure to ask tough questions. Afraid to pull the plug.

Pipeline 146
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18 Best Sales Blogs to Follow in 2019 (As Voted-for by 50+ Sales Leaders)

Gong.io

Looking for a list of the BEST sales blogs to read in 2019? Then look no further. If you want to level up your sales game, your best bet is to read the best sales blogs the pros are learning from. BUT, instead of making a list of my own favorite sales blogs, I did something different: I asked over 50 sales leaders and professionals which sales blogs THEY rave about.

Sales 133
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Email Copywriting 101: Five Steps to Better Converting Emails

ConversionXL

“Email marketing is dead.” That’s what a digital marketer told me while trying to sell me his messenger bot software. But email isn’t going anywhere. Customers who buy through email spend 138% more than those who don’t sign up for email offers. And email marketing has an ROI of 28.5% compared to 7% for direct mail. If you’re unpersuaded by statistics, also recall that: If you own your email list, you pay nothing to reach subscribers.

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AI in Marketing & Sales: Today’s Tools, Tomorrow’s Potential

Speaker: Kevin Burke

AI is reshaping marketing and sales, empowering professionals to work smarter, faster, and more effectively. This webinar will provide a practical introduction to AI, focusing on its current applications, transformative potential, and strategies for successful implementation in your organization. Using real-world examples and actionable insights, we’ll examine how businesses are leveraging AI to increase efficiency, enhance personalization, and drive measurable results.

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Over hiring is the startup kiss of death. Here’s how to avoid it.

Openview

Growing a business can often create a complicated conundrum for entrepreneurs: How do we get the people who have what it takes to help us believe in our mission enough to take a risk and join the cause? This situation can often lead us to do some questionable stuff – like biting off more than we can chew to get them on board: Bigger titles than they’re ready for or we can support.

Finance 131
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Stop Chasing Customers You Can’t Help!

Partners in Excellence

I’m often asked the fastest way to improve sales productivity. The answer is simple and should be obvious, “Stop Chasing Customers/Prospects You Can’t Help!” That statement is likely to elicit a resounding “Dugghhhh!” The reality, however, is that sales people waste too much time chasing customers they can’t help or worst, customers that don’t want/need their help.

More Trending

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5 Commonly Overlooked Sales Tools

Anthony Cole Training

In a business world filled with an abundance of technologically advanced CRM tools, there are 5 tools that salespeople must use and sales managers must implement throughout their day-to-day activities and agendas, in order to be successful.

CRM 146
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7 Elements of “Insanely” Persuasive Product Demos

Gong.io

If doing a product demo FEELS easy and intuitive, watch out. Even if you have lots of product knowledge, doing a product demo persuasively is hard and counterintuitive. That’s right, COUNTERINTUITIVE. What do I mean? I mean that what feels right during a product demo usually causes failure. For example, it probably feels right and intuitive to do a “ramp up” product demo.

Product 132
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How to Use Social Media for Market Research

ConversionXL

Social media isn’t a perfect source of market research: It’s not a representative sample and, for small businesses, it’s simply too small of a sample. But for large organizations, it’s still a critical one. Why? Because it includes your most passionate fans. It’s also a rare source of candid consumer opinion: 80% of social media posts are about ourselves, and those opinions and beliefs—expressed individually and within a community—are not interrupted or biased by participation in a formal

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How to handle the many-headed hydra of sales technology

Membrain

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5 Ways You Can Win Faster with Gen AI in Sales

Incorporating generative AI (gen AI) into your sales process can speed up your wins through improved efficiency, personalized customer interactions, and better informed decision- making. Gen AI is a game changer for busy salespeople and can reduce time-consuming tasks, such as customer research, note-taking, and writing emails, and provide insightful data analysis and recommendations.

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Great Habits Start With Simple Things

Partners in Excellence

This post is another of my learnings on my personal learning journey on micro improvements. There are two habits I’ve realized are critical to my productivity that are enormously simple, but it’s taken a long time to recognize them. One is hugely simple to implement–it really focuses on my mindset. The other is theoretically easy, but takes a lot of practice to make it real.

Start-ups 116
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Sell #LikeAGirl

Women Sales Pros

There is an infamous Superbowl commercial for some of us that played in 2015 called #LikeAGirl and in honor of Superbowl weekend I’d like to share a great blog post sales strategist and best-selling sales author Jill Konrath wrote about that commercial. With no further ado, please enjoy, I Sell #LikeAGirl. Lori Richardson is President of Women Sales Pros and is working to see more women in sales and sales leadership in companies where there are male-majority sales teams.

Sell 117
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Solution vs. Budget

Anthony Cole Training

Typically, when a salesperson doesn't win an account it's due to a few different factors; the prospect didn't have a compelling reason to make a change, the salesperson didn't do enough to uncover their capacity to invest, or the incumbent wasn't properly eliminated from the running. In this article, we discuss the 3 Rules every successful salesperson must follow in order to eliminate stalls and objections during the sales process.

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How To Treat Your Largest Customer. TL;DR: With Honesty, Insane Commitment and Transparency.

SaaStr

Recently for the SaaStr Annual, we were “the largest customer” for 3 vendors. All 3 lied to us: One vendor was a friend of a departed contractor. This is a pretty common way deals are done, even today. The champion’s favorite vendor. They misled us in terms of scale and capabilities. One vendor was a well-established software vendor, but misrepresented their experience at scale.

Customers 110
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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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The State of Marketing Training in 2019 [Original Research]

ConversionXL

U.S. companies spend billions on training each year. What about marketing departments? How much do they spend? What are they getting out of it? And what are they struggling to solve? We surveyed 462 marketing leaders—CMOs, VPs of Marketing, Marketing Directors—to find out. Respondents completed a 10-question survey that covered: The perceived skill level of marketing teams.

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7 Actionable Tips to Re-Engage Old Sales Leads

Sales Hacker

Have you considered reconnecting with your old sales leads? You’re not alone. Getting traffic and leads is the biggest pain of 63 percent of all businesses. Source: HubSpot. But MarketingDonut says 44 percent of salespersons give up after one rejection. Albeit, 80 percent of the time, business leads need about five follow-ups to convert to paying customers.

Technique 106
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This Is How to Uncover Hidden Stakeholders and Win More Deals

Miller Heiman Group

Wouldn’t life be easier if the only stakeholder a seller needed was the main point of contact? If only. Stakeholder management is complicated—because it involves an ever-expanding number of roles who influence purchase decisions at an organization. According to CSO Insights’ 2018 Buyer Preferences Study , the average salesperson must now navigate six or more buying influences to close a single deal (which can take five months or more).

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We Rise by Lifting Others

Women Sales Pros

I never aspired to enter a career in sales, but I had a natural gift for connecting with people, which made sales a natural fit. My non-traditional path to sales started early in my professional career when I lost my first marketing job in NYC. It was during this challenging time that I became fascinated with what motivates people, what keeps some moving forward in times of great stress and what makes others fold under pressure.

Education 110
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Prepare Now: 2025s Must-Know Trends For Product And Data Leaders

Speaker: Jay Allardyce, Deepak Vittal, Terrence Sheflin, and Mahyar Ghasemali

As we look ahead to 2025, business intelligence and data analytics are set to play pivotal roles in shaping success. Organizations are already starting to face a host of transformative trends as the year comes to a close, including the integration of AI in data analytics, an increased emphasis on real-time data insights, and the growing importance of user experience in BI solutions.

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Asking “Is It Over?” Can Lead to Greater Sales Success

Anthony Cole Training

Part of being a highly successful and effective salesperson is having the ability to walk away from an opportunity. After numerous attempts to contact a prospect and close a deal, there will be a time when you as a professional must determine when and how to call it quits.

Contact 134
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5 Reasons Not To Raise Prices on Existing Customers. And 2 Better Ways to Do It Anyway.

SaaStr

I remember the first time I tried to do the Old Price-Raise-Without-Notice tactic. We’d closed Qualcomm in Year 1 for the grand total of $10,000. Not all of Qualcomm, but a nice division. It was a great logo in Year 1, and our champion and buyer did 3 webinars for us, an external case study — and an internal case study at Qualcomm. They were magic, these pieces of content.

Price 109
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Knowledge Retention: How to Protect Your Competitive Advantage

ConversionXL

You invest in your employees—mentoring, conferences, training. Yet over time, unused knowledge fades. Employees take other jobs. How do you protect your investment? Marketing had the highest turnover rate (17%) of any profession in 2018. It isn’t the only cause of knowledge loss. Retirements, promotions, intracompany transfers, and “the forgetting curve” all play a role, too.

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Hiring Salespeople Should Not be Like a Coin Flip

Understanding the Sales Force

Hiring the right salespeople has always been problematic for most companies but with the shortage of quality sales candidates, it's more difficult than ever. The pressure to fill a role often causes sales management to hire the best of the pool of candidates instead of the right candidate. What's the difference you ask? The difference is huge, especially if you have a complex sale, a long sales cycle, or a lot of competition.

Territory 105
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Don't Let AI Pass You By: The New Era of Personalized Sales Coaching & Development

Speaker: Brendan Sweeney, VP of Sales & Devyn Blume, Sr. Account Executive

Are you curious about how artificial intelligence is reshaping sales coaching, learning, and development? Join Brendan Sweeney and Devyn Blume of Allego for an engaging new webinar exploring AI's transformative role in sales coaching and performance improvement! Brendan and Devyn will share actionable insights and strategies for integrating AI into coaching and development - ensuring personalized, effective, and scalable training!

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How to Overcome Resistance to Sales Coaching

Selling Power

Get great sales coaching outcomes with these expert tips.

Sales 103
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Why Your Losing Customers

Women Sales Pros

Strategies to Increase Retention, Expand Relationships and Drive Referrals This week I moved my business from one of my long-time vendors – hired someone new. The new vendor is not any less expensive, does not have a better product and is actually slightly less convenient to work with in terms of availability and response time. So why did a move? Good question and an important one to know the answer to if you want to know how to succeed in today’s marketplace.

Customers 107
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Win a Signed Copy of Gap Selling!

A Sales Guy

FREE Signed Copy of Gap Selling. The post Win a Signed Copy of Gap Selling! appeared first on A Sales Guy.

Sell 20
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6 Things To Look for When Reviewing New Account Exec Resumes

SaaStr

Here’s what I look for to try to get a sense if they’ll perform: Do they call out top performance with metrics ? The best reps are often quite precise. E.g., hit 152% of Quota last year, 143% year before, etc. Maybe they are exaggerating, that’s besides the point. The question is, do they love to win and have a history of it? Metrics are a good indicator here.

Quota 107
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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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Increase Repeat Purchases with Cohort Analysis

ConversionXL

In my daily work with ecommerce brands, I see two types of companies: The first type focuses on acquisition and conversion. The second relies on retention. The second type is winning. Why? Overall acquisition costs for both B2C and B2B have gone up by 50% in the past five years. Sooner or later, relying on new customers will break you. To offset these costs, you need to earn more repeat purchases from existing customers.

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How to Use the Your Experience with Turbulence to Overcome Resistance

Understanding the Sales Force

We were on a JetBlue flight from Florida to Boston and the turbulence was much worse than usual. More dramatic, longer lasting, and bad enough for the flight attendants to remain seated for the entire flight. You've probably experienced a flight like that too. Fun! The jet was probably traveling 500 MPH but it's funny how when the air is smooth, it doesn't even seem like you're moving, but when you add some serious bumps, you can feel every single one of those 500 MPH.

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First Impressions Count!

Partners in Excellence

One of the biggest issues we hear from everyone involved in sales and marketing is capturing the customer attention. Whether it’s that first communication, an email, text, or social engagement, that first phone conversation, or that first meeting. Getting that first contact or engagement is something nearly everyone struggles with. Given the difficulty we have with these first contacts, one would expect we would be driven to create the very best first impression we possibly could.

Contact 102
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How to Craft a Brand Manifesto [Guide + Examples]

Hubspot

In Simon Sinek ’s famous Ted Talk “ How great leaders inspire action ”, he fleshes out a concept that some of the most inspiring leaders and organizations -- specifically Apple, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Wright Brothers -- leveraged to build loyal followings. It’s called Start With Why. Start With Why suggests that if your brand truly wants to inspire an audience to follow you, your core message should focus on your organization’s purpose -- not how you make your product or what your produ

Sports 101
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How to Improve Email Deliverability and Optimize Each Send

Learn how to optimize email deliverability and drive greater email ROI. What lands your email in the customer’s inbox? Understanding those factors, otherwise known as email deliverability, is critical to getting the most return on your campaign investments. But the “rules” around which factors land you in the spam folder aren’t always easy to keep up with.