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Business success is a function of brilliant strategies and excellent execution. How are your sales to date? Every sales leader I have spoken with could easily answer this question. I am sure you can as well. Here is a more challenging question: How well are you doing when it comes to strategy execution ? This is a much more challenging question and there is no easy answer.
It’s not uncommon for revenue to slide. It happens to all sales organizations at one time or another. Revenue being down isn’t the most difficult problem. Knowing why revenue is down and where to look is the biggest challenge. This post is gonna lay the four areas CSO’s/Heads of Sales should be looking if their revenue is on the slide. When sales are down there are only 4 levers leadership can pull to improve sales.
Neuromarketing assesses how our brain reacts to stimuli, not simply what we self-report in qualitative surveys. These are truths that our impulses write onto MRIs. Sometimes, as several studies below illustrate, those two systems—the conscious and subconscious—offer conflicting interpretations. Importantly, scientific knowledge is almost always built incrementally.
AI adoption is reshaping sales and marketing. But is it delivering real results? We surveyed 1,000+ GTM professionals to find out. The data is clear: AI users report 47% higher productivity and an average of 12 hours saved per week. But leaders say mainstream AI tools still fall short on accuracy and business impact. Download the full report today to see how AI is being used — and where go-to-market professionals think there are gaps and opportunities.
“It’s Like Deja Vu All Over Again”. Another quarter sales target just barely made. It was a close call. As you go over the numbers with your team you realize that trying to close a sale with XYZ Industries cost you a ton of time, almost made you missed your quota and almost cost you your job (maybe – you never know, but you suspect it). It’s not that you haven’t been down this path before.
What’s selling have to do with project management? It may not be obvious, but strong project management skills are essential for top performing sales people—both for helping our customers buy and for effectively leveraging our own resources in the process. Think about it, a moment. Our customers have a project–not a buying journey.
Technology can be a double-edged sword for sales departments. The promise of greater efficiency and effectiveness is hard to resist, yet many technologies actually make things worse rather than better.
Technology can be a double-edged sword for sales departments. The promise of greater efficiency and effectiveness is hard to resist, yet many technologies actually make things worse rather than better.
Why is selling so #%&@ hard?!? It's a valid question. One that many of us ask ourselves each and every single day. But, does it have to be? In our free e-book, learn from our Founder and Chief Growth Officer Tony Cole as he reveals insightful and practical information on what makes selling so hard today.
I think too many sales organizations, their salespeople AND their sales leaders are playing from the same playbook. Why? I don’t see enough innovation. I spend an incredible amount of time with salespeople and sales leaders, and the most common thing I see is how similar they all are. Most everyone hires based on the same hiring principles. Most everyone prospects using the same prospecting principles.
There’s a building. In a back room, a guy peels potatoes. Out front, two people sit at a table. By the door, a person answers a phone. Does that make the building a restaurant? No? Would it become one if the guy peeled potatoes and oranges? It’s an absurd standard. It’s also the same one we apply to demand generation. You have a website. You blog. Visitors request demos.
Welcome to Sales Hacker’s first-ever Influential Women in Sales list! In this exclusive list, we wanted to honor not just female leaders that promote their own sales platform (no shame in that!) but those that take it even a step further by being incredibly intentional about promoting the next generation of female salespeople and making their path a little easier.
Today’s buyers expect more than generic outreach–they want relevant, personalized interactions that address their specific needs. For sales teams managing hundreds or thousands of prospects, however, delivering this level of personalization without automation is nearly impossible. The key is integrating AI in a way that enhances customer engagement rather than making it feel robotic.
Broad, open-ended sales questions are great for helping you find out what's going on in your prospects' and clients' worlds. They are essential to sales success. In fact, "listened to me" and "understood my needs" are two of the top five factors most separating sales winners from second-place finishers. Sales questions also help you connect with buyers personally, understand what's important to them, reshape their thinking, and create better futures for them.
I got on a call with an SDR recently who was nothing short of lovely. He asked great questions, talked about my goals, what I was looking for, what I wanted to see in their technology, etc. He listened well, was authentic, and was helpful from start to finish. Then I asked to see the technology. Which is when he told me it wasn’t his job and that he’d have to get me scheduled with an Account Executive because he wasn’t allowed to show me.
Coaching salespeople is hard work and it helps to have a consistent and effective process to help keep you on course. As a sales coach, there are five critical steps that you must know and execute in order to get the best effort and results out of your salespeople.
How often do you commit to something and then not follow through? I get it, it happens a lot. We aren’t perfect. But not meeting a commitment scratches the surface of lying. No! You didn’t lie, but it has a similar effect. When we commit to someone, and then break that commitment, it undermines trust. In this video, I talk about a way to improve your ability to keep your commitments.
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.
Talk to any B2B marketer about attribution and they’ll either roll their eyes or rant about how it’s important but hard to get right—long lead cycles, multiple contacts from a single organization, etc. Some might stare blankly and ask what you mean. As a group, we’ve gotten a firmer grasp on top-of-the-funnel metrics. We can prove that social media and SEO drive traffic and top-line conversions, but we still struggle to show the bottom-line impact of marketing.
I read a quote the other day that immediately resonated with me: “Memorizing a playbook is like memorizing a script. When they change the script at the last minute, it’s like changing a play in the game.”. Never has this been more true than in the art of selling. No two deals are the same, though they likely share common DNA. In fact, with so many variables involved in a deal—from unique buyer objectives, to your timing in a deal relative to your competitors— building playbooks for your sales te
If you’ve ever thought about becoming a lawyer, the path is pretty clear: Get a Bachelor’s degree. Take the LSAT. Earn your JD. Pass the bar. The process may not be easy, but at least it’s laid out. You know exactly what steps to take, including recommended classes and exam prep courses, in order to put yourself on a path to success. When I think about sales operations, there is no defined route to take.
I have to admit being consumed with CSO Insights latest Sales Performance Report. If you haven’t had the opportunity to read it, make sure you take the time to download and study it. It’s filled with fascinating analysis, each chart presents huge opportunities for performance improvement.
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.
My wife and I have been watching 24 for the last few months and we've made it to season 7. Once in a while, one or both of us falls asleep during late-night episodes but we are always saved by: PREVIOUSLY ON 24. With that in mind, I will save you if you didn't happen to read last week's article which is a pre-requisite for this one. PREVIOUSLY ON UNDERSTANDING THE SALES FORCE.
What would it mean to you if you doubled your income—with the same number of customers? Think about how it would feel to give the same amount of effort and earn two, three, or many more times as much. Last month, I conducted a training with a large software company and discovered their top rep, Trina, earns more than five times as much as the lowest performer in her company—while talking to the exact same number of customers.
When I last checked, there were 987,119 “thought leaders” on LinkedIn. Soon, there’ll be more than a million. How many of those do you trust? “False expertise” is misidentified competence: We perceive expertise where there is none or evaluate expertise based on irrelevant factors. False experts include legions of self-appointed “gurus” and “visionaries” who saturate social media with bad advice.
Activity metrics are receiving lots of attention. Activity metrics can be very useful, at the same time, they can stimulate a lot of, well … wasted activity. Too often, we focus on the wrong things as we put activity metrics in place. We focus on the “what and how many,” for example, “You need to make 150 dials today,” or “You have to send out 200 prospecting emails,” As a result, the activities become “ends” in themselves, and not means
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!
By Amy O’Connor. ?It’s every salesperson’s worse nightmare – the non-urgent buyer. The buyer who says they are in no rush to make any type of decision. In fact, they may not even buy at all according to them. You know what this typically is? B.S. – buyer strategy! It’s important to understand that the buyer’s number one strategy is to appear non-urgent in front of a sales person.
They say the average human attention span is shorter than a goldfish’s. Yet, a new study just came out saying that the average person watches 18 days worth of Netflix a year. The math doesn’t exactly add up. But what’s the difference? How do you get your viewers to figuratively “hit full screen” and give you their complete attention, instead of Amazon Prime shopping in the background?
A lot of the salespeople I coach have a weakness in their Sales DNA - their need to be liked. Approximately 58% of all salespeople have this weakness and on average, salespeople score 76% in that competency. Elite salespeople have an average score of 87% and weak salespeople have an average score of 69%. What would it look like if we were to pivot this data and look only at the group who have it as a weakness?
Guest Post by Kayleigh Alexandra, Content Writer for Micro Startups. They say time flies when you’re having fun, but it goes even faster when you work in marketing. With summer out of the way and the colder seasons fast approaching, it’s time to start thinking about 2019. The digital world is incredibly fast-paced. From technological advancements in AR/VR to the ever expanding Internet of Things (IoT), B2B marketers have to work hard to stay ahead of the game with marketing trends.
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!
“How can a person be induced to do something he would rather not do?”. Researchers Jonathan L. Freedman and Scott C. Fraser asked that question more than half a century ago. In their era, it usually meant convincing someone to endure a pitch from a door-to-door salesman. In ours, it often means incentivizing web form fills—gently prodding others to part with personal information that, they fear, could spark a swift, relentless inbox invasion.
Imagine you’re part of a Grand Prix race through the winding streets of Monaco. You’ve got the fastest, most exotic car. The best crew. Powerful fuel. And you’ve been training for years. But, while your rivals zip along the harbor like electric slot cars, you sputter along at a crawl. It turns out, your wheels aren’t perfectly aligned. They’re each set in slightly different directions, creating tremendous friction.
By Jeff Shore. ?. ?I am going to propose three scenarios that are similar to ones you might come across fairly often in your sales career. ??Scenario #1: You sell life insurance. You are having a conversation with a friend in a social setting, and the talk turns to your friend’s insurance coverage. He says to you, “I would switch our policy over to you and your company, but my wife picked our life insurance and she likes the agent we are using now.”.
“Send us an invite for 3 PM next Tuesday,” said the VP of Sales. “I’ll get my CFO to join. But send your ROI study beforehand. He won’t join unless he knows how you’re thinking about ROI.”. I had just wrapped up a demo with a key account and could feel the momentum. I quickly sent the calendar invite for Tuesday. But while I juggled 30 other deals in my pipeline, I completely forget to send the ROI study.
ZoomInfo customers aren’t just selling — they’re winning. Revenue teams using our Go-To-Market Intelligence platform grew pipeline by 32%, increased deal sizes by 40%, and booked 55% more meetings. Download this report to see what 11,000+ customers say about our Go-To-Market Intelligence platform and how it impacts their bottom line. The data speaks for itself!
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