Things are going great with your sales contact, you’re making steady progress towards a deal. You’ve had several excellent calls with them. They seem to be fully engaged and enthusiastic about your product. They asked lots of questions during a recent demo and appear to be very excited about your customized proposal. You’re expecting a […]
Some advice just doesn’t work. New parents can relate – they constantly receive unsolicited advice, often based on old wives tales, on parenting from friends, family members, even random people in the grocery store. Smokers from the big tobacco era of yesteryear can relate too. “More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette” an ad […]
Ever since the introduction of sales automation software, the great debate has been ongoing: What activities, interactions, and conversations should be automated so prospect can interact on their own, and what should be done with the help of a human? The automation side of the debate has fueled its fair share of anxiety that humans […]
If you’ve spent any time in sales at all, you likely know that there is a right way and a wrong way to run a sales role-play exercise. Role-plays and are an incredibly powerful sales training tool and are an excellent way for reps to perfect pitches, run in to objections, and practice negotiation tactics […]
Sales is an ever-changing profession. Before the internet became mainstream, customers relied on companies and their sales reps to provide product information. Today, 74% of business buyers conduct more than half of their research online before engaging in a sales process offline. What these well-informed prospects want is a very different experience from those of […]
Do you have any New Year resolutions for sales performance improvement? With the hope of change and improvement at the start of a new calendar year, resolutions can be difficult to resist. That’s why so many people have at least one, even if they don’t write it down. Sadly, these goals are often abandoned by […]
Storytelling works in sales because humans experience life as one big story. Scholars like Walter Fischer, a USC professor and researcher, have been have been studying how we interpret our experiences and how that affects human communication for decades. The resulting theory, called the Narrative Paradigm, helps explain why humans are more often persuaded by […]
The start of a new year and a fresh set of goals means the pressure is on. How well your sales team performs against these goals is in your hands. Your confidence for the coming months hinges on last year’s results – if it was a down year, it is time for a change; chances […]
Many salespeople struggle to find the right words to say and the right way to say them – whether that is to prospects, to their bosses about their work, or in social content if they do that. But that isn’t really the problem. The truth is, sales reps who are struggling to find the right […]
The other day, Spotify offered me a list of my top 100 most listened to songs of 2018. My spouse and I share an account, and I have diverse taste, so the playlist was a total mess. Snoop Dogg with Beethoven? Why not! Despite that, a few gems popped out at me from the list […]
It’s that time of year. Everyone is scrambling to make sure their holiday shopping is done, and after scouring for gifts for family and friends, you likely have little energy left to even think about client gifts. Truth is, it is easy to skimp on customer gifts during the holidays. Too many people treat it […]
Yesterday, we wrote about why sales kickoff meetings are better now than they were just 10 years ago. Today, we are covering some practical, concrete suggestions you can take to make your sales kickoff fantastic in 2019. Sales kickoff meetings can be expensive. A typical event is a costly company investment averaging $1K – $2K […]