2021

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Defeating the "No-Decision" Trap: The Power of Divergent Thinking

Holden Advisors

Imagine if you could banish “no-decision” from your sales funnel. More deals that travel all the way to the win/loss finish line, less wasted sales time, more essential customer needs resolved, and a higher share of wallet. What’s standing in your way? Is it the wrong solution, an inadequate business case, inability to get budget, or something else?

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Strategic account managers (and their bosses) deserve better decision-making tools

Strategic Account Management Association

By William Trail, Co-Founder, Opportunity State. If you have experienced the pain, humiliation and fear of having to tell your manager that you are not going to hit your “blood number,” your commit for the quarter, then I have news for you: It’s not your fault. You don’t have the technology to predict 90 days in advance which deals will be finalized in time.

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10 New Capture Strategy Tips to Keep Clients & Avoid Competitive Bids

Account Manager Tips

How a capture strategy helps avoid competitive bidding Is your client due for renewal? Avoid a bidding war and follow these 10 capture strategy tips to keep your client long before they think of going to RFP. Tweet. 0. Share. 0. Pin. 0. Share. 0. Capture Strategy Tips A capture strategy identifies how to position organizations as the supplier of choice and convince clients to renew without considering alternatives.

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The Important Role of Pricing Departments in the Price, Cost, Revenue Equation

Holden Advisors

Not every company has a pricing department. Here we explain why they are incredibly important players in the price, cost, revenue equation. Recently, I was on a call with a prospective client who asked the following question: “What are the primary responsibilities of a pricing division? Is it setting the price or is it controlling discounts?”. Because pricing departments play an important role and many companies are without one—or only have a discount division—I thought it would be a good idea t

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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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SUSTAINABLE SAM: ARE YOU READY FOR THE NEW REALITY?

Strategic Account Management Association

By Edmund Bradford, Managing Director, Market2Win Ltd. We have passed the tipping point of interest in sustainability. Sustainability and other good behavior metrics now need to be reported, meaning your strategic accounts will no longer be satisfied with bland statements of intent from your company. Sustainable SAM will be a key differentiator in the near future.

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What is Key Account Management? (It’s Not What You Think)

Account Manager Tips

Definition of key account management. Tweet. 0. Share. 0. Pin. 0. Share. 0. If you're not sure what key account management is, don't worry, you're not alone. It's a difficult concept to nail down and often misunderstood. So let's answer what it is, what it isn't, and how to do it well. Here's the dull, academic definition of key account management: [Key account management is] the process of allocating and organizing resources to achieve optimal business with a balanced portfolio of identified ac

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8 Key Account Management Skills in Demand Right Now

Account Manager Tips

What skills do key account managers need? Key account management is a profession in demand. What are the top skills companies are looking for and how do you get good at them? Tweet. 0. Share. 0. Pin. 0. Share. 0. All this talk about the digital economy. jobs being gobbled up by new technology and millennials set to make up 75% of the workforce might have you worried.

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The Future of SAM – Revisited

Strategic Account Management Association

This blog post is based on a keynote presentation from the 2021 SAMA Annual Conference. The session was moderated by Jim Ford, Chief Commercial Officer, Solecta and SAMA Chairman of the Board. Panelists’ remarks have been paraphrased for this blog post. . The future is now. After 14 months of chaos, now is the time for SAMs to learn from the past and prepare for the future.

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9 Unexpected Reasons Why Key Account Management is Important

Account Manager Tips

Share. 0. Tweet. 0. Share. 0. Pin. 0. Why is key account management important? Some reasons are obvious, like growing client revenue and retention, but others will surprise you. Why should you care? Well, i f you don't have key account management in place, you could leave money on the table, be helpless to competitor threats and put your most valuable clients at risk of defection.

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How Atlanta’s Calendly turned a scheduling nightmare into a $3B startup

Openview

The post How Atlanta’s Calendly turned a scheduling nightmare into a $3B startup appeared first on OpenView.

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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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Work together on Altify account and opportunity plans with Slack

Upland

Work together on Altify account and opportunity plans with Slack. In leading organizations, Slack is often the go-to tool for collaboration, and Salesforce is the book of record for everything customer relationship-related. By integrating Slack with Altify, an account planning software built natively in Salesforce, sellers can easily work together to refine account plans and win opportunities—with all critical insight captured in Salesforce for future reference.

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Action Items

Software Sales Guru

Action Items “When you leave a sales meeting, it shouldn’t only be you who has an action item. The customer needs to have an action item too.” This statement came from a salesperson in one of my training sessions. Though early in her sales career, she had already realized that you need the prospective customer to buy-in to the process and work with you to.

Software 173
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How Managing Is Done Now

Engage Selling

Too many leaders today are still stuck in a “behind the desk” mindset. They fixate on managing data rather than on managing their relationships with people. That must change because now—more than ever—the quality of your outcomes in sales are … Read More » The post How Managing Is Done Now first appeared on The Sales Leader.

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Applying Soft Skills to Hard Problems: Internal and External Alignment

Vantage Partners

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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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Email deliverability: A practical guide for sellers and marketers

Nutshell

“Oh, your email ended up in my spam folder” is what email marketers and salespeople hear in their nightmares. Emails only suffer from deliverability issues for a few reasons and all of them are bad. If your emails are ending up in your recipients’ spam folders it means that your sales and marketing are having no impact. And if no one sees your emails, it’s just a (short) matter of time before your pipeline starts to feel it.

Marketing 149
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5 Ways Sales Leaders Create a Winning Culture

SBI Growth

In years past, if you wanted to build out or strengthen your sales organization, you could simply offer higher compensation than your competitors. The higher sales cost would be greatly outweighed by the revenue that high-performing sales professionals would drive.

Sales 149
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Are You Ready for a Usage-Based Pricing Model?

Holden Advisors

Usage-based pricing, or quantity-based pricing, is the next iteration of the subscription economy, especially for B2B software companies. If you’re considering how your company would fare with usage-based pricing, there’s no time like the present, but here are a few things to think about before you jump in. The shift to subscription pricing many years ago led to what we now call the subscription economy, a term coined by Zuora.

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Future of Machine Learning: Ways ML and AI Will Drive Innovation & Change

Customer Think

Did you know?? By 2022, the global ML market is expected to be worth $8.81 billion. It’s not a surprise that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are two of the top buzzwords in today’s technological world. But, how will the two technologies create innovation and change in the near future? Do you have […].

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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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Want to Accelerate Your SAM Journey? Create a Center of Excellence

Strategic Account Management Association

By Dominique Côté, Founder & CEO, Cosawi & Principal, The Summit Group. Disruption Leads to Innovation. Disruption, although most times unwelcome, gives way to innovation. This last year has certainly proven this saying. Could the mother of creativity and innovation, in fact, be disruption? We have seen seismic shifts in industries like events and hospitality that have been devastated by the pandemic.

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15 Reasons Why You Might be a Bad Account Manager

Account Manager Tips

15 Reasons Why You Might be a Bad Account Manager Bad key account managers fail to build business relationships and achieve results. But you can quickly improve with a little work and reflection. Discover fifteen things you should stop doing and what to start doing instead. Tweet. 0. Share. 0. Pin. 0. Share. 0. Here are fifteen signs you might be a bad key account manager and how to turn yourself into a good one. 1.

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Axonius nabs $100M at a $1.2B valuation for its asset management cybersecurity platform

Openview

Remote work has become the norm for many businesses in the last year, and today a startup that has built a cybersecurity platform to help manage all the devices connecting to organizations’ wide-ranging networks — while also providing a way for those organizations to take advantage of all the best that the quite fragmented security market has to offer — is announcing a major round of funding and a big boost to its valuation after seeing its annual recurring revenues grow ten-fo

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Strengthen Altify account and opportunity plans with Google Docs

Upland

The most successful account executives rely on close collaboration with their wider revenue teams to expand existing customer relationships and win the opportunities that matter. But sellers often move fast and get pulled in several different directions at once. Multitasking, jumping from meeting to meeting, and racing the clock, are all too familiar for salespeople.

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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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Giving Concessions is Not Negotiating

Software Sales Guru

Giving Concessions is Not Negotiating Master negotiators make sure their counterpart walks away from the table feeling like a winner. And they do so with a minimum of concessions. Yet, the paradox is that sellers who give away huge concessions easily, will end up with an unhappy prospect who harbors some vague, inexplicable sense that he’s been cheated.

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Understanding Your Customer

Engage Selling

Is your sales team taking the time to truly understand your customer? Sales, in one form or another, is as old as humanity itself. People have been exchanging goods or purchasing services since the dawn of civilization. And while sales … Read More » The post Understanding Your Customer first appeared on The Sales Leader.

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20 Strategic Planning Models to Consider

ClearPoint Strategy

Strategic planning tools, or models, are designed to help organizations’ develop their action plan to achieve their goals. There are a lot of strategic planning models out there. We know. Which is why we pulled together a list of 20 of the most popular ones and describe the scenario that they are most useful.

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5 Reasons Why Real Estate Agents Need a CRM

Nimble Business Success

CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management” We like to emphasize the word Relationship as the abbreviation seems to make people run for their life. Think of CRM as a tool that stores information about your leads, clients, and other valuable real estate contacts. CRM can also be used to help you keep track of all […]. The post 5 Reasons Why Real Estate Agents Need a CRM appeared first on Nimble Blog.

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The 2023 Supply Chain Crystal Ball: Challenges and Solutions

Speaker: Olivia Montgomery, Associate Principal Supply Chain Analyst

Curious to know how your peers are navigating ongoing disruption? The supply chain management techniques that dominated the last 30 years are no longer supporting consumer behavior or logistics and manufacturing capabilities. So what’s working now? What should your plans for 2023 include? By researching the supply chain challenges and solutions that businesses – especially small and midsize businesses – are currently experiencing, we’ve learned what’s working and what’s not.

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Building the Foundations for a Strong 2022: How to Align Role Profiles to Growth Plans

SBI Growth

While we all know the last 18 months have presented innumerable challenges, they have also highlighted how some individuals can thrive in digital or remote environments, flipping the script on the competencies many sales leaders thought were tried-and-true in their.

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Passing the Price Gauntlet with Strategic Accounts

Holden Advisors

As a strategic account manager, you take the long view in working with your customers to ensure that each of them gets the right solution. You invest time in evaluating your customer's business and sourcing the best team internally to configure a valuable solution. It takes teamwork, planning, and execution. When it’s time to close the deal, procurement is introduced into the process and now runs the relationship and the deal – and they only focus on the price.

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5 Best Uses for Artificial Intelligence in B2B Sales in 2022

Customer Think

Seventy-five percent of salespeople believe that they could not do their jobs as effectively without current technologies, according to our latest research. Technology is essential in a world that relies on it to evolve and enhance the way sales teams connect and follow up with leads. Now artificial intelligence (AI) has become a key piece […].

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Character Matters: Learn How to Become a Better SAM

Strategic Account Management Association

By Rowena Abrahams, Contributing Editor, SAMA. “Who you are matters as much as what you do.”. Dr. Fred Kiel, co-founder of KRW International , a global leadership consulting firm and Kelly Garramone, CEO of KRW and Executive Director of the KRW Research Institute, prove that character “isn’t kumbaya.” Kiel is often referred to as a sage in the field of character science.

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The Truth About Sales Agility: Separating Fact From Fiction

Speaker: Michelle Vazzana

Every sales organization wants their sales force to be agile. Why? Because the world is rapidly changing, becoming more complex, and making the salesperson’s job harder. Organizational leaders are unsure of the best way to equip sellers to succeed in this new reality. Should they change their sales methodology? Should they adopt better technology tools?