September, 2019

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I’ve Built Multiple Growth Teams. Here’s Why I Won’t Do It Again.

ConversionXL

I love running growth teams. It’s everything I could want from a job. It directly impacts the company, is fairly autonomous, works great with a few high-caliber folks, and involves a ton of A/B tests. I’ve spent years running these teams—but I don’t know if I’ll ever build one again. I doubt that I’ll even have a growth team at any company I’m managing in the future.

Growth 133
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The Two Truths and a Lie of Prospecting

Anthony Cole Training

Prospecting for salespeople is often a struggle due to varying factors including their ability to stay committed to the process and overcome rejection.

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Trending Sources

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Social Media for Sales vs. Social Selling: What’s the Difference? [Infographic]

SalesforLife

For years, the above has been a recurring question that I’ve received from sales executives, business owners, and sales leaders. They often misunderstand the word ‘social’ in ‘social selling’ by connecting social media with what their children do on Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram, instead of correlating ‘social’ as a mechanism to do two important things: 1.

Sell 123
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Sales Effectiveness: Nature or Nurture?

Membrain

There are no perfect salespeople born into this world. At least I haven’t met any.

Sales 119
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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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FUD Meets FOMO

Partners in Excellence

We and our customers live in worlds of paradox, uncertainty, confusion, complexity, overwhelm, overload, and constant change. Organizationally and individually, we are afraid of missing something—FOMO. We constantly move from one thing to another and then to the next. We see the latest technique, strategy du jour, technology, competitor and want to do the same thing.

Meeting 118
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What The Downturn Will Probably Look Like in SaaS

SaaStr

So, despite SaaS multiple and the public markets being at near record highs, we’ve seen things start to … wobble a bit overall in tech: The WeWork IPO simply failed , and the Peloton and Direct Smile IPOs were broken. No one really expected this. Having a high profile IPO like this fail is a bit scary. The Fed’s Repo market had to essentially be bailed out by the government.

Contract 111

More Trending

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Practice Schedules: A Perfect Sales Productivity Tool

Anthony Cole Training

I started this series of articles by relating my experience coaching football to selling. It is my goal now each week to focus in on one of the 9 football related tools that can be applied to selling.

Product 124
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9 Shrewd Negotiation Tips Proven to Close More Deals

Sales Hacker

Negotiating is one of the most important skills salespeople can develop, yet it’s often overlooked. Which is a real problem… Because after you’ve put effort and resources into researching and creating a solid pitch and proposal, it only makes sense to come to the table prepared to negotiate with the prospect. The key is to create a negotiation strategy in advance, which helps you talk about price and other important elements of the deal.

Negotiate 111
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You need to know how Salesforce is stealing your budget

Membrain

For almost 20 years, one CRM platform has been in use by more sales organizations than any other. You know the one.

CRM 116
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On Innovation

Partners in Excellence

Innovation is important. We all know there is a limit to doing the same old things, over and over. Even though we may do them in greater volume or greater velocity, over time they become…… well old… and not very effective. So we struggle to innovate. We think of the great new revolutionary or disruptive idea. We reflect on people like Thomas Edison and his inventions (like the light bulb), or the invention of the internal combustion engine, or Al Gore inventing the internet (so

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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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How Do You Build Rapport with Customers?

RAIN Group

Everybody's brain has two different processing centers: emotional and rational. The emotional brain is old. It developed millions of years ago, first with raw instincts—like fight or flight—that all animals have, and then into more complex emotions for us humans like anger, aggression, desire, fear, hatred, passion, love, disgust, sympathy, and so on.

Customers 108
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Audience Segmentation: Where Do You Start?

ConversionXL

As Peter Drucker famously wrote, “The aim of marketing is to know the customer so well the product or service fits them, and sells itself.” In conversion optimization , we talk about the importance of knowing our customers a lot. But we rarely talk about the process of strategically segmenting our audience so that our products and services can sell themselves. ??????

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Football & 9 Sales Productivity Tools That Will Change Your Results

Anthony Cole Training

We often find there is a direct connection between sales and competitive sports. Due to his time on the football field as both a player and coach, Tony Cole has identified 9 Sales Productivity Tools that will help your producers build better plays, hit harder in the field, and come home with more wins.

Product 122
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9 Things Terribly Wrong With Sales Today: The Sales Tools

A Sales Guy

Sales is suffering from 9 brutal ills: Number 5 in this 9 part series. The Bro Culture , . Lack of Coaching. Too Product-Centric and Not Problem Centric. Not enough salespeople understand the game/rules of sales. Too much reliance on selling tools. Upcoming: Not enough training in the industry/space. Too much activity management. Little respect for prospects and buyers time.

Cold Call 108
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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 pollute your sales ocean, one technology at a time

Membrain

Have you ever had a slip of the tongue that reveals an insight? On a call with one of my team members recently, we were talking about the sales world’s overly complex landscape of technologies, and I wanted to talk about point solutions, but what I said was, “point pollutions.”.

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Client Experience Creates Competitive Advantage

Sandler Training

One of the most important ways to retain clients is to view an honest understanding of their interactions with your company. What are the different touch points and how well does your company act and react at all those points along the way? Read Time: 6 Minutes.

Clients 107
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You’re Buying People’s Knowledge, Not Just a Training System

SalesforLife

I was recently on a call with a prospective customer working on a global project scope, and they asked me a question that made me stop and think. They asked me what makes us at Sales For Life bold and different? It was a unique question that quite frankly, I wasn’t used to answering. Here at Sales For Life, we rarely encounter alternatives to modern, digital selling because our competition has always been the status quo, or alternative training programs.

Trust 106
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The 4 Types of Value Propositions Every Business Needs

ConversionXL

Humans are value-rating machines. Every day, all day long, we size up different decisions by appraising the value proposition of that action. Should I buy this product? Sure, that’s the obvious one. But also: Should I go to lunch with this person? Should I open this email? Should I even spend the time to ponder this decision? When most marketers think about a value proposition, they’re thinking of the 10,000-foot-view—an overall company value proposition.

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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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The Solution vs. Budget Dilemma

Anthony Cole Training

There is an age-old debate about which came first, the chicken or the egg?

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The #1 Killer of All Sales Deals and What to Do About It

Sales Hacker

Sales 106
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How to stop chasing Will-o-the-wisps

Membrain

In ancient English lore, a Will-o-the-wisp is a mischievous spirit of swampy and dark places that uses a lantern-like light to lure unwary travelers off the path. Travelers may mistake the Will-o-the-wisp for a fellow traveler leading the way or for a kindlier spirit, such as a Leprechaun, who might lead them to treasure.

Process 111
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We’re Setting Aside 1,250 Equality, Diversity + Inclusion Tickets for 2020 SaaStr Annual. APPLY NOW!

SaaStr

We’re proud to have > 60% women and multicultural speakers at the 2019 and 2018 SaaStr Annuals, and we are on track to meet or exceed that again in 2020. But our bigger goal is to drive our attendees to similar levels of inclusion and diversity. Our 2019 and 2018 attendee Diversity and Inclusion programs were fully subscribed and worked well, so we want to go even bigger this year on a number of levels.

Meeting 20
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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.

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I Have A Problem With “Storytelling”

Partners in Excellence

Storytelling seems to have come into fashion over the past few years. Too often, we have tried to overwhelm our customers with logic, data, and facts; expecting everyone to respond as Dr. Spock did in the old Star Trek series. While we have known we need to make an emotional connection, too often, we still focus on, “just the facts.” Ever since I’ve been in sales, which has been a few years, I’ve known the maxim,”People decide with their hearts, they rationalize the

Pitch 103
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JavaScript vs. Python: Which Should Marketers Learn?

ConversionXL

Like many marketers, you may fantasize about the amazing things you could do if you learned to code. But before you get there, you need to decide which language to learn. Several languages come up : Python, SQL, Bash, JavaScript. But only two are full-fledged programming languages—JavaScript and Python. If you’re interested in programming, these are the two languages that you should compare.

SQL 117
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The 11 Best Abandoned Cart Emails To Win Back Customers

Hubspot

It was a Saturday night, around 11 PM, and I was innocently scrolling on Amazon to look for a gift for my best friend’s birthday. But then, it happened. I had an impulse to purchase everything. The female empowerment mug? The wine tumbler? The pillow that said "Nap Queen"? I wanted it all. I added everything I liked to my cart. $200. Let’s be honest, $200 was going to be hard to pull off.

Customers 101
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Does Swag Work as a Sales Tool? (Here’s What the Data Says)

Sales Hacker

It’s a healthy question and one that has strong opinions on both sides… . Does swag work? Promotional products (AKA swag, tchotchkes, freebies, branded merchandise, you name it) have been around for some time. In fact, they date all the way back to George Washington’s campaign in 1789. . More recently, companies have started to integrate swag into their sales sequences, driving healthy growth for the entire industry.

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Brick & Mortar Retail Relevance: How to Stay Ahead of the Curve

Speaker: Jay Black, Senior Account Executive

Let's set the record straight: in-store retail isn't dead - it's evolving! Faced with the digital age and the demands of omnichannel shopping, some retailers are thriving while others are struggling to adapt. Join Jay Black in this exclusive session as he explores the strategies that set successful stores apart, including: Crafting unique and unforgettable in-store experiences 🛍️ Mastering the art of retail demands 🛒 Navigating inventory challenges in today's climate 📦 an

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For Sales Leaders Only: Top Tips for a World-Class Pipeline Review

Gong.io

It’s Monday morning, and that can only mean one thing – it’s time for your pipeline review. Your team shuffles in reluctantly, yawning, coffee in hand. . Within minutes, most of them are on their laptops or phones, zoned out and waiting to update you on their deals. Everyone rattles off the same thing: a list of their deals, next steps, and forecasts for the month. .

Pipeline 101
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Customers and Rational Behaviors

Membrain

Too often, I’m in reviews with sales people whining, “The customer is irrational!”.

Customers 101
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The Fastest Way To Fix Sales Performance

Partners in Excellence

Hundreds of pundits, thousands of articles, hundreds of books, hundreds/thousands of sales/marketing automation suppliers purport to have their miracle cures to fixing sales performance. Somehow the miracle cures seem to be: “Just train your people to do these 3 things… ” “Do this one thing… ” “Implement this new technology… ” “You just need to prospect… ” … and on and on and on… Don’t get me wrong, many of

Sales 102
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How to Build Robust User Personas in Under a Month

ConversionXL

Customer personas are often talked about in marketing and product design, but they’re almost never done well. [This post contains video, click to play]. There are certainly companies doing them well, but not a lot of detail goes into instruction, and the blog posts out there on how to build personas are generally pretty bad. I recently created robust user personas for CXL Institute (on inspiration from a course in our CRO certification program taught by Stefania Mereu and Eric Taylor ), an

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How to Prove Marketing Value: Demonstrate Content ROI and Contribution to Sales

Every marketer knows how important it is to prove their efforts drive sales opportunities, but that’s easier said than done. When problems like sales and marketing misalignment, lack of data, and wasted efforts persist, marketers can’t measure, prove, or increase their impact on revenue at a time when demonstrating marketing value is critical. Using analyst and expert data, this guide to marketing impact and content attribution explains: How B2B buyers use content The most common types of conten