There’s an ongoing debate about whether or not cold calling is dead. Regardless of what you’ve read or heard elsewhere, the truth is cold calling is alive and well. A recent study revealed that 71% of buyers want to hear from sellers when looking for new ideas to improve their business. In the same study, […]

According to a study by CSO Insights, sales organizations are using an average of 10 sales tech tools, with a plan to add another four in the next 12 months. Affectionately named the “sales stack,” these tools are all supposed to help a salesperson become more productive and yield metrics that managers can use to […]

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 […]

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 […]

I recently read some psychology research that transformed what I thought I knew about multitasking. The article, published by Wharton researchers in the December 2018 issue of the journal Psychological Science is titled “The Illusion of Multitasking and Its Positive Effect on Performance.” Although it is about general human psychology, it has big implications for […]

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 […]

Want to hear your sales team groan? Tell them that it’s time to do sales role-plays. It’s the activity that sales professionals love to hate because they always seem to feel awkward and uncomfortable. Role playing is dreaded and awkward because it is a cross between public speaking and acting, the soft skills that people […]

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 […]