Sat.May 19, 2018 - Fri.May 25, 2018

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21 Sales Qualification Questions to Identify Prospects Worth Pursuing

Hubspot Sales

Qualifying Questions. What's the business problem you're seeking to fix with this offering? What's prompting you to do something about it now? What has prevented you from trying to solve the problem until now? Have you tried to solve this problem in the past? If so, why didn't that solution work? What happens if you do nothing about the problem? Do you have a budget allocated for this project?

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Is Your Buyer Part of the Solution?

Engage Selling

You need to know what’s going on in the minds of your buyers when it comes to the solution you’re offering. Confused about what this means, exactly? Let me explain.

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Trending Sources

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The Art of Conversation: How Sales Teams Can Build World-Class Buying Experiences With Chat

Drift

People are tired of being sold to. They’re immune to emails, turned off by the hard sell, and can spot a sales pitch a thousand miles away. These days, buyers have more information and power than ever before, and they’re not just using that power to buy products — they’re using it to buy experiences. Twenty years ago, you might order something over the phone and wait weeks for it to arrive.

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5 Tips for Mastering the Art of Sales Knowledge Management

Openview

The world of sales is full of dangerous villains – time-consuming administrative tasks , inefficient internal processes, lack of proper tools and resources, etc. – that are weighing your company down. And to top it all off, there is an even greater foe – the leaking of your valuable sales knowledge. Sales Knowledge Management to the rescue! Knowledge Management vs.

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2024, The Year of the Customer

2023's struggles fueled a shift: companies are ditching wasteful strategies in favor of data and AI-powered growth. Enter 2024, the year GTC takes center stage. Discover 5 ways a customer-centric approach unlocks new revenue and delivers lasting success.

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The 14 Best Bluetooth Headsets of 2018

Hubspot Sales

Best Bluetooth Headsets. Jabra Steel. Jabra Motion. Plantronics Voyager 5200. Plantronics Voyager Focus UC. VXi BlueParrott B450-XT. Plantronics M55. Motorola Boom2+ Headset. Plantronics Voyager Edge. Plantronics Voyager Legend. LG Tone Free Headset. Samsung Level U Pro. Sennheiser Presence UC. Jabra Wave. Jabra Stealth. A salesperson’s right arm? It might be their Bluetooth headset.

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Sales Skills: The Best and The Worst

RAIN Group

To succeed in sales, you need to have the right skills. You must be able to lead masterful sales conversations, manage opportunities, uncover needs, negotiate the best deals, fill the pipeline, develop relationships, manage sellers, and the list goes on. With the laundry list of skills needed, what skills are sellers most likely to have? In our The Top-Performing Sales Organization study, the RAIN Group Center for Sales Research asked, across a number of areas, if sellers have the skills they ne

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Tracking Executive Changes at Your Most Important Accounts

Openview

Here’s a fact that should get your attention: The number of CEOs who left their jobs at U.S.-based companies hit 132 in January 2018 alone, the highest monthly total since February 2010, according to global outplacement consultancy and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. In 2017, they noted, there were 1,160 CEO exits. “But I don’t sell to CEOs,” you might say.

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23 Follow-Up Sales Email Templates to Send Instead of "Just Checking In"

Hubspot Sales

Salespeople shouldn’t send “just checking in emails for one very simple reason: They don’t work. Buyers feel like the rep is virtually poking them, making them reluctant to answer. Not only do “checking in messages rarely garner responses, they can even turn prospects against their senders. But reps still need a way to get in touch with buyers who’ve gone dark.

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Who Creates Content for Sales Enablement? Hint: It’s Not Just Marketing

Miller Heiman Group

When you think about who creates the content your salespeople and other customer-facing professionals use to engage prospects and customers, you probably think about your marketing team. For many leaders, marketing is synonymous with content. Whether it’s branding, demand generation or website creation, marketing is all about content. But you might be surprised to discover that marketing only creates about 39 percent of the content salespeople need.

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The Top 5 Phrases That Will Close The Deal With Your Prospect

MTD Sales Training

We had an enquiry last month from a sales manager who asked us to work with his sales team for half-a-day on closing techniques. He said his team was good at relationship-building but when it came to the close, they needed help. They simply didn’t know what to say to get the order without it appearing to put pressure on the prospect. One of my training consultants said to him that the problem couldn’t be solved in just half-a-day with some closing tricks, tips and techniques.

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How to Stay Competitive in the Evolving State of Martech

Marketing technology is essential for B2B marketers to stay competitive in a rapidly changing digital landscape — and with 53% of marketers experiencing legacy technology issues and limitations, they’re researching innovations to expand and refine their technology stacks. To help practitioners keep up with the rapidly evolving martech landscape, this special report will discuss: How practitioners are integrating technologies and systems to encourage information-sharing between departments and pr

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The Best Sales Pitch Isn’t a Pitch at All

The Center for Sales Strategy

This post was originally published on Hubspot. Despite its increasing irrelevance, the tired, old sales pitch still enjoys a large following. Unfortunately, that washed-up elevator pitch generally focuses solely on the seller -- the company, its capabilities, and its accomplishments -- and rarely highlights the prospect’s needs.

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5 Amateurish Behaviors That Kill Salespeople’s Credibility

Hubspot Sales

Define Amateurish. Amateurish behavior is when you display no skill or tact in a particular area. It means you're clumsy and inept. As a salesperson, you never want to be considered amateurish by your colleagues or prospects. It lowers your credibility and authority and kills your chances of closing a deal. Sales leaders and businesses are paying a hefty price for not developing the selling skills of their people.

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Why Workshops are Bad for Salespeople

Engage Selling

Workshops and learning events can be the least effective—and for some, even the worst—places for your salespeople to get the training they need. You heard that right. Now, let me explain.

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How To Approach A New Referral

MTD Sales Training

So you’ve achieved that great goal of getting a referral from a customer. This is the holy grail in sales; getting a warm lead without having to do the marketing to achieve it. How should you approach this referral? Here are some ideas: Basically, you need to know what links the two companies or people. What is the business relationship between your customer and the person they are referring you to?

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1st, 2nd, and 3rd Party Intent Data: Which Is Right for You?

How do 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party intent data compare? 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party data each have specific advantages and disadvantages. It comes down to four factors: accuracy, cost, control and quantity. This infographic explains the pros and cons of each and helps you understand which one is best for meeting your business objectives. Intent data can be a great way to fill your pipeline and close more deals.

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Get that First Appointment — Master Your Approach

The Center for Sales Strategy

Have you ever felt like taking a “Wild Wild West” approach to securing your first appointment? Think about it… if only it were appropriate to ‘lasso’ your prospect, ‘tie him down’ and force him to stay engaged so that you may cordially introduce yourself, establish credibility and politely present your value proposition. Honestly, if you could just get his undivided attention for 5-minutes… you know he’ll like you, and you know he’ll be intrigued and perhaps even excited or anxious to learn more

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Sales Follow-Up Emails the Pros Use [Free Email Templates]

Hubspot Sales

Much thought leadership is dedicated to the art of selling: pitching, presenting, closing, building trust, developing a relationship, and a myriad of other skills. But showing off these talents depends on getting on prospects’ calendars in the first place. That’s when active selling skills get put on ice and reps have to flex their follow-up email or phone call muscles instead.

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Productize Your Service and Make Your Number

SBI Growth

Many organizations offer great services to their customers. Yet many of these organizations struggle with making their number. Longer sales cycles, and the customization required for most service offerings present challenges. Sales leaders try to overcome these by increasing leads.

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The Art of Conversation: How Sales Teams Can Build World-Class Buying Experiences With Chat

Drift

People are tired of being sold to. They’re immune to emails, turned off by the hard sell, and can spot a sales pitch a thousand miles away. These days, buyers have more information and power than ever before, and they’re not just using that power to buy products — they’re using it to buy experiences. Twenty years ago, you might order something over the phone and wait weeks for it to arrive.

Sales 54
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How to Leverage Intent Data for Better Outcomes

Speaker: Susan Spencer, Principal of Spencer Communications

Intent signal data can go a long way toward shortening sales cycles and closing more deals. The challenge is deciding which is the best type of intent data to help your company meet its sales and marketing goals. In this webinar, Susan Spencer, fractional CMO and principal of Spencer Communications, will unpack the differences between contact-level and company-level intent signals.

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The Only 6 Reasons A Sales Manager Should Be Attending Sales Calls with Their Team

The Center for Sales Strategy

Sales managers, let’s be honest… it’s hard to watch a salesperson that seems to be flailing in shallow water when they are on a prospect or client call. However, if you take a step back, you realize they are probably going to find their feet and be able to stand up and be fine. Recently, I attended one of The Center for Sales Strategy's Talent Focused Management workshops led by Matt Sunshine (Managing Partner), and I walked away with a few reminders.

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10 Cringeworthy Body Language Mistakes Salespeople Make During Meetings

Hubspot Sales

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. “Mabel, Mabel, sweet and able, get your elbows off the table!”. Whether the lesson stuck with you or not, the rhyme’s message is clear: Etiquette and body language are important. And this is especially true in sales. Any time you’re in a face-to-face meeting with a prospect, your body language is crucial. What you say is just as important as how you say it -- and how you look when you say it.

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Fast Frame of the Week – The Top 5 Keys to Managing Customer Relationships

SBI Growth

Welcome to the Revenue Growth Fast Frame of the Week. In this week’s video, Greg Clark, the CMO for Caliber Collision Centers, answers the question: “If you borrow a B2C best practice and apply it to B2B companies, what is.

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Live Chat is Great — But It Doesn’t Scale: Here’s How to Use Conversational Marketing to Effortlessly Book More Meetings

Drift

The other day, I was trying to change a hotel reservation over chat. I typed out my whole story, detailing the dates, reason for wanting to cancel, and even acknowledged their current policy and why I thought this was an extenuating circumstance. 150 words. Boom. I hit send. And then I got this: “Thanks for your message — support will reply as soon as a specialist becomes available.

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Negotiate Larger Deals More Quickly

What if there was a better method of changing the conversation with your customer from delivering pricing to delivering value solutions? A method that would help keep you in control, manage the uncertainty, and close larger deals more quickly for you and your company? There is.

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10 Reasons Salespeople LOVE the HubSpot CRM and Sales Enablement Tools

The Center for Sales Strategy

As a proud partner of HubSpot , we at The Center for Sales Strategy, as well as our sister company, that focuses on lead generation and sales enablement, LeadG2 , naturally have experience with the HubSpot CRM , and it might be easy to think that we’re biased about this tool because of our relationship with them. However, it’s important to know a bit more of the context to better understand why we’re not biased and how that shows up in what we do and recommend.

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The 5 Deadly Mistakes of Sales Prospecting Emails

Hubspot Sales

Contrary to what most people believe, prospecting is not a numbers game. You don’t have to send 100 emails just to hear from one or two of them. You know the numbers are true if you’ve been conducting cold or warm outreach for a while. In fact, some people boast a response rate of 20%. While I can’t give you a specific number for my cold email response rates, I can tell you I’m sending cold emails -- a lot.

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A Communications Lesson from the NBA Playoffs

Oratium

Imagine two people witness the exact same event. They are the same age, same gender and same education. You would expect that when asked, they would give you roughly the same narrative description of the events they witnessed, right? Actually… wrong. That is totally incorrect. Their interpretation of the events will be massively influenced by their personal predispositions.

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Live Chat is Great — But It Doesn’t Scale: Here’s How to Use Conversational Marketing to Effortlessly Book More Meetings

Drift

The other day, I was trying to change a hotel reservation over chat. I typed out my whole story, detailing the dates, reason for wanting to cancel, and even acknowledged their current policy and why I thought this was an extenuating circumstance. 150 words. Boom. I hit send. And then I got this: “Thanks for your message — support will reply as soon as a specialist becomes available.

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ABM Evolution: How Top Marketers Are Using Account-Based Strategies

In times of economic uncertainty, account-based strategies are essential. According to several business analysts and practitioners, ABM is a necessity for creating more predictable revenue. Research shows that nearly three-quarters of marketers (74%) already have the resources needed to build successful ABM programs.

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Dovetailing Interests: The Key to Unlocking Hidden Value in M&A Deals

CM Partners

Written by CMPartners Principal, Rob Rosen. dovetail / ?d ?v ?te ?l/ verb: to fit together conveniently. In my roughly 20 years as a private equity dealmaker, I had my share of successful negotiations and also conducted many that ended disappointingly. Upon reflection, I realize that I could have achieved far better outcomes had I focused my efforts differently; instead of only searching for common ground, I could have looked for areas of difference between my counterpart and me.

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13 Entrepreneur Blogs to Jumpstart Your Dreams

Hubspot Sales

Entrepreneur Blog. Seth Godin's Blog. Both Sides of the Table. Wise Bread. All Business. A VC. Copyblogger. The Entrepreneurial Mind. Gary Vaynerchuk's Blog. Kabbage Small Business Blog. Entrepreneur's Journey. The 4-Hour Workweek. Women on Business. The Suitcase Entrepreneur. Whether you’re ready to stop dreaming and start doing, or still in the planning stage of turning your ideas into a full-time job, these blogs for entrepreneurs are the right place to start.

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Top 3 Customer Retention Metrics

SBI Growth

“Our customer retention is excellent. We only lose 5% of customers per year, so our retention is 95%.”. Does this sound familiar? If so, you have probably also been caught off guard when your board double clicks on this number.

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Weekly Roundup: GDPR Compliance + More

The Center for Sales Strategy

We hope you've had a great week! It's Friday, and today we're sharing what we've been reading online this week! Here are our "best" from around the web.

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Contact vs. Company Intent Signal Data

Contact and company intent data both have their advantages. Contact-level intent leads can be acted on immediately to reach active buyers, while company-level leads improve outcomes for account-based marketing and other programs. This infographic unpacks the advantages of both contact and company data and gives details about how B2B marketers can benefit from both.