Women Sales Pros

APRIL 26, 2019

There are, of course, right ways and wrong ways to respond to buyer objections. This blog post doesn’t go into that. Instead, this post focuses on a fundamental first step that most sellers forget when responding to an objection. Unless you take this critical step, no response to the objection will really be adequate. You’ll lost valuable time and blow “hot air” no matter how eloquent and technically correct your response may be.

Price 134

Price Contract Technique Negotiate 134

ConversionXL

APRIL 22, 2019

Color is an essential part of how we experience the world. But do colors really matter for conversion optimization ? Can a button color guarantee better performance for a call to action (CTA)? No single color is better than another. Ultimately, what matters is how much a button color contrasts with the area around it. This post explains what really matters for website CTAs and button colors.

A/B testing 131

A/B testing Sports Conversion Clients 131

A Sales Guy

APRIL 24, 2019

. Sales is suffering from 9 brutal ills: The Bro Culture , . Lack of Coaching. . Too Product-Centric. Not enough salespeople 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. I tackled the Bro-Culture in the first of this series because I feel culture is critical to change.

Angle 124

Angle Quota Gaming Sales 124

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 22, 2019

How do we create sustained results as sales professionals? After all, our jobs are: Create differentiated value with our customers. Execute our company business strategies with our customers. Achieve/exceed our goals and objectives. There are thousands of “experts” providing advice to sales people on how to best do our jobs. Thousands of posts and books, give the latest insights, techniques, principles to “help” sales people.

Technique 119

Technique Objection handling Sales Quota 119

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Sales

Membrain

APRIL 24, 2019

GLC Minerals is a 5th-generation family-owned company selling a product literally as old as the earth: Pure calcium carbonate. Operating in business as old-school as mined and processed minerals, and with a 75-year track record of profitability, it would have been easy for the company’s leadership to rest on its laurels and continue business as usual.

Sell 118

Sell Process Product 118

ConversionXL

APRIL 25, 2019

User flow is the path a user follows through your website interface to complete a task —make a reservation, purchase a product, subscribe to something. It’s also called a user journey. And it has a massive impact on conversions. To maximize your conversions, you have to get the user flow right on your site. Do it by building a user flow that matches user’s needs.

Objectives and Key Results 128

Objectives and Key Results Clients Presentation Start-ups 128

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 24, 2019

In any given year, I may be involved in doing 100’s of deal or opportunity reviews. Inevitably, I end up asking many of the same questions: What are the most important things the customer needs to do next in moving through their buying process? How will you help them? What are the next most critical things you need to be doing on this opportunity?

Process 115

Process Start-ups Customers Closing 115

Membrain

APRIL 21, 2019

One of the most common reasons why apparently promising B2B sales opportunities get derailed - often at a late stage in our sales cycle - is that we have failed to identify all the key stakeholders or to understand how to get them all to support our approach.

B2B 117

B2B Sales Pipeline 117

ConversionXL

APRIL 24, 2019

The concept of “economic moats” came from a 1999 Fortune article by Warren Buffett: The key to investing is [.] determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage. The products or services that have wide, sustainable moats around them are the ones that deliver rewards to investors. Economic moats remain tethered to investing: A bigger moat makes a stock a better bet.

Hospitality 122

Hospitality Non-Profits Networking Electricity 122

Gong.io

APRIL 23, 2019

Sales AI will replace some salespeople. No doubt about it. Want proof? I bet you’d HATE talking to a salesperson to buy a book on Amazon. You’d rather buy with “one-click” and be done! An Amazon book rep would introduce friction to an otherwise seamless buying process. It’s a simple buying decision and people want to get through it. Without another person.

Sales 108

Sales Up-sell Conversion Strategize 108

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.

Product

The Sales Hunter

APRIL 23, 2019

Not many people dream of having a career in sales. Let’s be real here: sales was probably not your first choice. For many of you, although afraid to admit, sales wasn’t even your second, third or fourth choice. Some of you reading this are thinking to yourself, “Mark you’re smoking something funny.” Calm down. Although I used to live in Oregon, I haven’t smoked anything.

Sports 107

Sports Sales Drivers/motivators Trust 107

InsightSquared

APRIL 23, 2019

Yet Another Marketing Buzzword? Every few years there is a new buzzword in B2B marketing. A few years ago it was “Inbound Marketing.” The inbound philosophy advocates publishing content through digital channels to entice qualified individuals to consume the content and enter the sales cycle. Then, there was “Account-Based Marketing.” The ABM approach advocates for targeting a predefined and limited set of companies and running campaigns to engage all individuals at these companies.

Process 106

Process Sales B2B Campaign 106

ConversionXL

APRIL 23, 2019

Your ecommerce checkout flow is where the money is at. Think about it. Random visitors leave the site before ever entering the checkout funnel. Motivated buyers come here to finish their order. Any small design improvement in your checkout UX usually has a direct impact on how much money your site makes. An ecommerce site that I analyzed recently had a payment page in which 84.7% of the traffic proceeded to buy.

E-commerce 115

E-commerce X-functional UX Drivers/motivators 115

Sales Hacker

APRIL 24, 2019

No one loves practice. No medals are won on the practice field. But all around the world, the brightest and best make time for it. They push themselves to be better every day and strain against their perceived limits –– all to make their performance as close to excellence as possible. Many of these people make their living playing sports… but sales isn’t so different.

Objectives and Key Results 103

Objectives and Key Results Sales Gaming Follow-up 103

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!

Sales

Hubspot

APRIL 26, 2019

In early 2019, HubSpot Research partnered with SurveyMonkey to conduct new research on social media preferences and buying preferences. We used SurveyMonkey Audience to ask over 2,700 consumers in Colombia, France, Germany, Mexico, Spain, the UK and the U.S. questions on how they buy. This report highlights the fascinating differences we've discovered in buying preferences worldwide.

Territory 101

Territory Trust Represent Service 101

Understanding the Sales Force

APRIL 22, 2019

Do shortcuts work in sales?

Sell 100

Sell Sales 100

ConversionXL

APRIL 23, 2019

The number of people browsing and shopping on mobile devices continues to grow. During the past 10 years , smartphone and tablet browsing has increased to more than 50% of all web traffic. As for ecommerce, projections forecast mobile sales to reach 54% by the year 2021. And, for their part, Google has switched to mobile-first indexing, pulling ranking signals from the mobile version of websites.

UX 114

UX Drivers/motivators User Experience Campaign 114

Miller Heiman Group

APRIL 23, 2019

Closing the deal can be challenging—but it doesn’t have to be. In most cases, sellers lose deals because they don’t make the right connection with the buyer, leading to buyer apathy, indecision and stalled progress. Often, this happens because sellers have simply taken the wrong approach: one that doesn’t speak to their particular buyer. Admittedly, it can be difficult to hone in what the right approach should be.

Closing 97

Closing Follow-up Up-sell Sales 97

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!

Customers

Hubspot

APRIL 25, 2019

In today’s e-commerce universe, Amazon is a behemoth.We all know it, and we all use it … whether we want to admit it or not. But today’s consumers don’t just use Amazon to buy stuff. They also use it to check prices ( 90% of consumers use Amazon to price check a product), discover new products ( 72% of consumers visit Amazon for product ideas), and start product searches ( 56% of consumers visit Amazon before any other site).

E-commerce 101

E-commerce Price Real Estate Engineering 101

Jill Konrath

APRIL 22, 2019

Recently I interviewed Luke Goetting, Director of Puffingston Presentations for an Engaging Presentations video series I did with Prezi. His expertise is in "transforming stale business presentations into visually engaging stories." That's why I asked him to share his thinking with you.

Conversion 93

Conversion Presentation Sales Prospecting 93

ConversionXL

APRIL 23, 2019

What kind of content should you have on your site? How should you structure the menu? What should be the first-level menu items? One or two menus? What should the menu links be called? This post gives you answers. Website information architecture is no joke, yet the overwhelming majority of businesses structure their site using the IMO method (“In my opinion…”).

UX 114

UX Objectives and Key Results User Experience Represent 114

Understanding the Sales Force

APRIL 25, 2019

Apparently, Duracell 9 volt batteries are the picture of consistency. Last night, all 7 of our upstairs smoke detecters starting squawking within about 30 minutes of each other to indicate that their batteries needed to be replaced. Given that the Duracells were installed in those units on the same day 4 years ago, one would hope that there are more things that we could rely upon to be as consistent and predictable.

Process 92

Process Sales 92

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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

Sales

Hubspot

APRIL 25, 2019

Social media is an instrumental component of any business's marketing strategy. But for users, scrolling through the mass amount of branded content across every social media platform can be exhausting. However, there's one social media site where users actually embrace branded content -- Pinterest. Pinterest can be an incredibly useful tool for attracting consumers to your products.

Campaign 101

Campaign Launch Networking Promote 101

CloserIQ

APRIL 25, 2019

A sales pitch , no matter how perfect, can quickly be ruined by poor objection handling afterward. Everyone has questions, no matter the industry, no matter the product. It’s a rare day when you pitch someone and they simply submit and ask where to sign. Indeed, a recent HubSpot survey shows 36% of respondents cited closing as the most difficult part of the sales process.

SQL 92

SQL Objection handling Angle Pitch 92

SaaStr

APRIL 25, 2019

It’s never remotely easy until you have a steady stream of leads and a decent 1.0 revenue team. But here are some things that can help in the early days: Always hire at least 2 reps to start. If you just hire 1, you won’t really know what is working, and not working, and why. Don’t expect a sales magician. You ideally need to close the first 10–20 customers yourself, and then hire sales folks to help.

Gaming 90

Gaming Start-ups Price Closing 90

SalesLoft

APRIL 25, 2019

Henry David Thoreau once penned: “goodness is the only investment that never fails.”. I’m thrilled to announce one such investment today. It’s my pleasure to share SalesLoft has finalized our Series D financing. This $70 million investment will benefit revenue generation for decades to come. This is bigger than us. This capital will empower companies to deliver the ultimate prospect and customer experience and generate the most revenue for their business.

Growth 90

Growth Commission Networking Up-sell 90

Speaker: Evelyn Chou

Choosing the right business intelligence (BI) platform can feel like navigating a maze of features, promises, and technical jargon. With so many options available, how can you ensure you’re making the right decision for your organization’s unique needs? 🤔 This webinar brings together expert insights to break down the complexities of BI solution vetting.

User Experience

Hubspot

APRIL 25, 2019

Growing up as a first-generation Asian American, I lived between two cultures. One was the East-Asian culture my parents brought from Taiwan, which prioritizes the needs and desires of the family and emphasizes academic excellence. The other was the Western culture that surrounded me outside the house, which prioritizes the needs and desires of the individual and emphasizes extracurricular activities.

Represent 101

Represent Campaign Drivers/motivators Networking 101

Openview

APRIL 24, 2019

As a recruiter, I hear from many founders and sales leaders regularly about how many salespeople they need and how quickly they need them. I know the pressure is on – many are handed very aggressive targets (I would actually say some are unrealistic ). But they often miss a critical component in the middle of their urgency. Growth is so much more than just getting more bodies in the door as fast as you can.

Growth 89

Growth Healthcare Sales Pipeline 89

Engage Selling

APRIL 20, 2019

No one in sales has an unobstructed 360-degree view of their relationship with their customers. Nobody. Not even top-performers.

Sales 89

Sales Objection handling Customers Presentation 89

CloserIQ

APRIL 23, 2019

Technology is essential in sales today. You need it to track performance, provide support and make accurate forecasts. Although technology hacks are improving every day, your top salespeople are still wasting time. They’re spending about a third of their day on tech support, approvals, pre-qualification, paperwork, and data entry. Sellers are a company’s most valuable asset.

Sales Support 88

Sales Support Negotiate A/B testing Technology 88

Speaker: Brendan Sweeney, VP of Sales at Allego

Maximizing sales rep performance is no easy task. 📈 Traditional sales training methods focus heavily on the first few weeks in the sales role. Companies dedicate time, resources, and budget to onboarding new hires, only for them to forget what was learned in those first few weeks, lose motivation, and struggle to come to grips with their role.

Sales