It’s been encouraging to see the phone making a comeback as a new business development tool. More and more sellers are getting serious about generating their own leads as they’ve realized that, in spite of the social selling “experts” dangerous preaching that everything has changed, prospecting is not dead at all. In fact, it may be more necessary than ever now that salespeople have awaken to the fact that sitting on their butts waiting for their social media efforts to create a legitimate sales opportunity probably isn’t the best method to fill their pipeline or earn a living.

At the end of last year, the good folks at Open View Labs put together a great post asking Top B2B Sales Influencers to name their favorite sales tools for 2015. There were more than few chuckles when, without hesitation, I boldly declared The Telephone my favorite tool!

Just this week a salesperson wrote me asking to point him to some of my favorite articles about using the phone to prospect. His request caused me to realize how l’ve gotten away from writing about the phone. There’s this classic old post from my early blogging days, and the piece I wrote for Tibor Shanto’s great blog called Winning with Voicemail. When asked for a book recommendation I immediate point people to Art Sobczak’s Smart Calling. It’s a favorite of mine and I have purchased more copies than I can count for client sales teams (you are welcome, Art!). And, of course, Chapter 9 in New Sales. Simplified. has some of my very best tips for using the phone to score that meeting with a target prospect.

I commit to mixing in more posts with prospecting tips over the next few months, and will kick it off today with this very simple admonition: Sell the discovery meeting, not your solution.

My theory is that for almost every prospecting call, we should have a single primary objective. Sure there are some secondary objectives that we may have to settle for, but both my personal experience and that of my clients convinces me that when we pick up that phone, we are most effective when laser-focused on one goal: Getting the meeting!

I know that many will disagree and offer various perspectives. Some will tell us that we must qualify prospects before trying to secure the meeting. I’ll tackle that specific issue again in the future, but here’s a link to a few posts where I caution against over-qualifying too soon in the sales process. Others will make the case that we want to learn as much about the prospect as we can so the phone call should be more about discovery than trying to secure a future meeting. And finally, there are those who think the goal of the prospecting call is to begin selling their actual solution/service/product.

Sell the discovery meeting. Your one objective for the prospecting call is get the prospect to agree to the next step in your sales process – which for most of us is a scheduled discovery meeting. If you’re in Inside Sales, that discovery meeting will most likely happen via the phone, too. If you’re an outside salesperson that meeting typically takes place at the prospect’s place of business.

You will face obstacles trying to set this meeting. Your call is an unexpected interruption. Prospects hide behind voicemail. If you do get someone live, their auto-reflex response is to resist you because other idiot salespeople have poisoned the waters by wasting their time – among other sales sins. Be prepared to ask three different times for the meeting. And each time you ask, my coaching is to remember your goal: Sell the meeting. Don’t start selling your solution. Sell the value they’ll receive from spending just a little bit of time with you. Let the prospect know that along with learning more about their situation, you’ll share how you are helping other people like him or organizations like his. Make it abundantly clear to the prospect that whether or not there is a next step or a fit, he will leave that discovery meeting challenged by what you share and with fresh perspective and ideas. I coach salespeople to approach the call believing that the prospect would be a fool not to want to visit with them.

Are you making the kind of calls that would compel the prospect to spend more time with you and open a dialogue? That’s the type of prospecting call that earns you the discovery meeting.

 

How to Make Referrals a Winning Part of Your Prospecting

Of all of the possible sources of leads, referrals are often the hottest and most desirable. Brokered by someone who knows you first-hand and trusts your work, there’s an implicit recommendation instilled, which carries considerable weight. The problem is that sales reps too often fail to pursue these opportunities.

Here’s a four-step process to bolster your long-term success by getting your sales reps to take a proactive approach to gaining referrals.

1) Timing

There are always busy business cycles to avoid when approaching your contacts for something that’s not essential to them. You should obviously avoid those occasions, but is there a right time to ask for referrals?

Use common sense — ask when your contacts are happy, not frustrated. Realize that each person is different and has varying attitudes and receptivity to being asked to provide a referral. Therefore, trust your instincts, and ask when you are comfortable with your relationship and the work that you may be doing for them. When you’ve just finished a successful project, reached a significant milestone, or have otherwise helped your contact, these are likely good times to broach the subject.

When circumstances are different, you should hold off. For example, if you have something big to deliver but haven’t yet done so, avoid appearing distracted and looking toward your next target. You’ll look selfish and unprofessional.

The other aspect of timing is frequency: How often do you ask? There’s no rule, but monthly is likely too often and annually too infrequent. You want it to feel natural and not like you’re being a mooch or pest.

2) Obstacles

What prevents sales reps from asking for referrals? As is often the case with prospecting, there’s discomfort in calling people we don’t know. Most obstacles are behavioral, not procedural. If you have something of value to share, then you shouldn’t have anything to hide or be shy about.

People get stuck and feel timid because asking for a referral is more personal than cold calling or blasting mass e-mails. The risk of your contact saying “no” or failing to make a personal connection is enough to stop people from trying.

Present yourself as a resource. This mirrors how aggressive you are (or aren’t). Offer to help, and set yourself up as someone who can be useful, even if your prospect isn’t interested in buying now. There’s no harm in asking — if you don’t ask, you don’t receive.

Other common obstacles include a clash of culture (“That’s not how we do things here — we’re not so forward!”) and a lack of process (“How do I know who my contacts know?”). Once detected, these can be corrected.

3) Sources

Learn to leverage LinkedIn, which provides a great network of your connections and theirs. The more robust your network, the more opportunities you can identify.

Consider traditional sources, such as current and former clients. Also tap into nontraditional sources, such as former colleagues, classmates, neighbors, and relatives.

The closer your connection is to the prospect, the better. It should be someone whom the prospect would consider credible and working in his or her best interest.

Hopefully, your common connection has already experienced “the value” that you bring and would be willing to broker the connection. You want your contact to feel positive about making the referral — it shouldn’t be hard for your contact to understand why you’re asking. If you’re pursuing a nontraditional source, then provide additional context or reasoning to help quell any concerns.

4) Making Contact

Ideally, your contact would make the introduction for you via e-mail or a meeting. Simply giving you a name and contact details to use on your own might fall flat. Draft an e-mail that your contact can send to the prospect, copying you and getting the ball rolling.

—————————————–

Complimentary New Research Report

 

 

To download this report, please click here.

The post How to Make Referrals a Winning Part of Your Prospecting appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

This is a guestpost by Shannon Byrne, Content & PR Manager for Mention where she crafts words, creates strategies, and recruits loyal brand advocates. She also really likes live music, craft beer, and laughing at her own jokes. She's based in New York. Say hi @ShannnonB.

Finding new leads is time consuming, and can even be daunting at times, but it’s the lifeblood of most sales people.

What if you could simplify and streamline the lead discovery process while generating inbound leads? Sounds like a dream, huh? Fortunately, there are many tools and tactics available to help you do just that, some of which have managed to fly under the mainstream’s radar.

Here are the Mention team’s eight favorite lead discovery tools that you may have not known about, or perhaps never thought about using for sales.

1 - Quora

Yes, the Q&A forum. Quora is the perfect place to discover people looking for a solution to a specific problem.

Do a search on a topic relevant to the problem your product or service solves and join the conversation! Don’t blatantly try to sell yourself. Rather, provide value to these conversations. The relationships, and consequential sales will naturally follow.

As a bonus, you’ll quickly gain a better understanding of your competitor landscape and what solutions your potential customers are currently using by reading previous comments.

2 - ProductHunt

Whether or not your product has been hunted on Product Hunt, it can be a valuable lead generation tool. Of course, these two strategies look very different.

If you plan to hunt your own product, or have someone else hunt it, try to be as strategic as possible about it. The same goes for creating or being included in a collection or special offer promoted by PH.

Pro tip: If you’re hunted before planned, just ride the crazy wave that is Product Hunt success.

When planning your Product Hunt strategy, consider the following tactics:

• Have a dedicated landing page with a special offer for Hunters.

• Ask friends and colleagues to help promote your placement. The goal is to be in the top five hunts of the day so that you make the daily digest email.

• Follow up a couple days after Hunters sign up; consider sending a brief survey asking what attracted them.

• Follow up and ask about Hunters’ experience after their trial period is up, if you offered one.

• Product Hunters are early adopters, trendsetters, and thought leaders. Reach out and build these relationships. If they’re satisfied, they may be potential future brand ambassadors.

Even if you don’t reach Product Hunt fame, it’s a valuable resource for leads. Keep an eye on the daily emails to see what’s hot and trending.

Do a search based on your product offering to see what people are saying about new competitors. Join in the conversation and connect with anyone actively looking to solve the problem you can help with.

3 - Mention

Mention, or your media monitoring tool of choice will help you with lead gen in two ways:

1. Identify the people talking about your brand, whether or not they’re talking to you. Our data has shown that this (brand mentions without the Twitter handle) actually represents 31% of brand mentions on Twitter.
   
   These are people looking for insights and reviews on your brand, who have an issue with it, or who are singing your praises. In any of these events, you should be present and a part of the conversation. Media monitoring tools allow you to discover and jump in these discussions.
   
   

2. Identify people talking about the pain points your brand solves. Much like the first way, a media tool allows you to track terms that represent the problem your product solves. You can then identify the people who are using these terms, where, and in what context. This provides you with your first touchpoint for building a relationship and qualifying a lead.

Check out how Close.io used social listening via Mention to close $585 in monthly recurring revenue!

4 - Meetup.com

In addition to finding networking events where you may meet potential leads, you can also use Meetup.com to identify people who will be inetrested in connecting online.

Check out relevant meetups and see who’s attending. Attendees are listed on the side of each event page with a brief bio, and are flagged if they’re a friend of a friend, so you know if you have a common connection. You can simply hover over each attendee or member for a quick snapshot of who they are and what their other interests are.

5 - OAuth

GrowthHackers.com uses Auth to make the signup process super easy by auto completing users’ first and last names for them.

More importantly, OAuth allows them to collect important data on their users, including company, title, industry, social media accounts, LinkedIn connections, and more, without having to lift a thumb. Learn more on how GrowthHackers uses oAuth here (slide 29).

6 - PadiAct or SumoMe

True confession: We haven’t actually used PadiAct, but it sounds great!PadiAct allows you to add an email signup to your website based on a behavioral targeting engine.

You can target people who are new users, have visited at least three pages on your website, have spent more than 30 seconds on your website, and many other scenarios. Test which pop-ups increase your email subscribers and scrap the ones that don’t.

We’re focused on collecting emails to share our content, which then acts as a lead generator by providing added value through education. We use SumoMe’s List Builder to build our email lists and love it. The tool is simple to use, let’s you choose length of visit before popup, desktop and/or mobile options, and which pages the pop-up appears on.

Each time we make a change to our strategy, we see a significant increase in signups, which is also pretty cool.

7 - Twitter Cards

The more social savvy of readers have probably already experimented with Twitter cards. For those unfamiliar, they are the images that accompany a tweet, like this one in Buffer’s update:

Use these cards to create a call to action driving some sort of sign up, whether it’s directly to sign up for your service or to receive your content, such as a newsletter, ebook, academy, class, etc.

The beauty of Twitter cards are that they are very quick and easy to setup, and emails are collected and downloaded from your Twitter account. Go to Twitter Ads → Creatives → Cards → Create Lead Gen Card and follow instructions.

From there, you can create your first tweet promoting your card. We suggest pinning it to the top of your profile for maximum visibility. And of course, if you  really want an extra boost, promote said tweet to a relevant, targeted audience based on interests, demographics, or community.

If you want to learn more about what you can do with Twitter Cards, Buffer has a really great guide.

8 - Turnstile

If you’re implementing video marketing, you should give Wistia’s Turnstile a try. Turnstile makes it easy to add calls to action and collect emails at the beginning, middle, or end of your videos. Calls to action might be to sign up for your product, unlock additional content, or even just watch more videos. The tool also integrates with several email marketing platforms including Hubspot, Mailchimp, Marketo, and more.

Conclusion

We at Mention are obviously big fans of tools to help make our lives easier and our workflows more efficient. However, at the end of the day, sales and business development is really about people and personal relationships. Don’t forget that all of these tools are intended to aide you in building a rapport and getting to know your prospects better.

Do you have any quirky lead generation tools that haven’t reached mainstream yet to add?

About the Author

Shannon Byrne is the Content & PR Manager for Mention where she crafts words, creates strategies, and recruits loyal brand advocates. She also really likes live music, craft beer, and laughing at her own jokes. She's based in New York. Say hi @ShannnonB.

 

Recently, we’ve written a lot about how technology companies are transforming the way we sell. It’s pretty clear that big changes in sales have already been set in motion, and that’s exciting. The big question is Why Now?

What makes now the perfect time for sales teams to embrace and adopt new technologies, developers to build them, and VCs to invest in them? Why are orgs investing in sales more than ever before? Why is now the time to build for salespeople?

There are many different opinions on why now is the right time. I personally believe it starts with data. Data has never been this inexpensive and more easily uncovered then in previous years. To the modern Sales Hacker, this data is a salesperson’s best friend.

I found this topic so interesting that I asked our LinkedIn Sales Hacker Community about it and here are some of our favorite points. Feel free to Join the Community and Add Your Opinion.

Gary Swart, VC & Partner at Polaris Partners believes it’s a shift in how buyers buy:

“It could be a combination of the economy and the change of how customers buy, combined with the talent war for good sales resources.

I believe that prospects are harder to reach these days and traditional sales techniques are not working like they used to. Customers are inundated with “solutions” and it is also harder to find sales talent with the skills for prospecting and developing needs.

Good products are bought not sold and companies cannot afford to have a sales force that is not selling. With this in mind, companies are looking for leverage from technology to identify both interested and qualified prospects much earlier in the process and to increase the capability of their sales teams.”

Kyle Porter, CEO of SalesLoft considers this the perfect storm:

“- Products are getting cheaper to sell and don’t require such extensive sales cycles (yielding higher efficiency opportunities).

- The buyer is more heavily online meaning sales tools can be used more effectively to motivate them. They are in their inbox and on social.

- Sales pro millennials are more talented with tech allowing them to push the industry forward.

- Sales leadership is starting to realize there is a better way than air travel, golf trips, and wining and dining.

- The browser itself has become more valuable and social media has opened up a sea of information on our prospect communities.

This is all happening at the same time. It’s created the powerful inside sales industry and now the specialized sales development industry.

But that’s not enough to serve this market successfully.

Vendors must have the right level of empathy for the sellers they serve. When they blend this with world-class engineering, and strong core values, they can experience huge upside helping this emerging sales world do more faster with the best technologies in the world.”

Manny Medina, CEO of Outreach.io brings to light two different seismic shifts:

“Sales productivity is starting to decrease. A study by Accenture and CSO insights called ‘Powering Profitable Sales Growth—Five Imperatives’ found that ‘just six in 10 (59%) sales representatives are expected to achieve his/her quota, down from 67% in 2013.’ Concluding that whatever gains were had from moving to an on-line CRM are now hitting a ceiling and a void in productivity has been created that Sales Automation tools will need to fill in. The study goes as far as recommending sales teams to go out there and try a bunch of new tools! As these findings become internalized and more commonplace, the expectation is that sales teams will become more receptive to adopting sales automation tools.

- New technologies + cheap processing power = sales acceleration magic. New technologies that were conceived less than 10 years ago are now just hitting the market in commercial form (Nosql, hadoop, mahout, etc.) and developers are starting to marry these techs with increasingly cheaper processing power to create sales acceleration magic. Tricks like RelatIQ or Outreach interpreting email to figure out next steps for a prospect or Connectifier’s identity assignment to figure out a person’s correct email or twitter account were a lot harder to do a few years ago. They are quickly becoming table stakes (PersistIQ is doing, etc) and will become part of the day-to-day sales process in 5 years.

As the business void created by the former conflates with the solutions created by the latter a new wave in sales efficiencies will hit the market and in the process make everyone’s life better.”

John Barrows compares it to the recent shift in the Marketing industry:

“To add a piece to this puzzle I think we need to take a look at what happened with Marketing over the past 5 years. Marketing used to be more artistically focused and has now become completely science oriented which has been able to drive consistent, measurable results and taken the entire industry to a completely new level. There was an article that came out recently titled ‘IDC Predicts CMOs Will Drive $32.3B In Marketing Technology Spending By 2018.’ Companies and tools that focused on the science of Marketing were rewarded heavily over the past few years with huge evaluations, IPOs and big acquisitions.

Sales historically has been seen or thought of as an art form (you either have it or you don’t), which is why there are very few colleges where you can get your degree in Sales. Now with all the technology and tools out there, coupled with the obvious benefit the scientific approach provided to Marketing, Sales has become the focus since it is actually a much larger market at the end of the day. Not only are there more people in Sales than Marketing but Sales focuses on all aspects of the sales process (open to close) where Marketing tends to mainly focus on the front end. This is why there is so much more opportunity for sales tools to make an impact.

The interesting thing to watch in my opinion is how may of these tools are aiming to help Sales reps sell more effectively versus automating the process and taking the Sales rep out of the equation entirely. With the amount of Sales and Marketing tools out there I think the average sales professional is going to die a painful death in the next few years. The only ones who are going to survive are the ones who learn how to use the tools to put themselves in a better position to add value. The ones who continue to send out template e-mails and make generic calls will either be replaced or become salaried with no commissions.”

Ryan Buckley, COO of Scripted blames the sinking costs on software development and easy access to accurate data:

“My opinion is the access to and proliferation of consumer data is the key to the “why now?” question. Sales and technology met a long time ago, but it’s only been in the last few years that data was added to the equation. As software development costs have fallen, so too, but much more quietly, has the cost of high quality data.

“Sales hacking” is where the two meet in a sales context. In other words, sales tech + consumer data => sales hacking. Just a few years ago it wasn’t possible to match things like titles, interests, and age to an email address without expensive contracts with major data providers. Today anyone with a credit card can sign up for a service that provides this info for less than $100/mo.

This access opens the floodgates both for companies to develop internal or external products that solve real sales funnel problems. As John and Kyle said, the net effect is more efficient sales and competition among reps to the most sales in the least amount of time. It’s an exciting time to be in it.”

Eric Bohren, VP of Business Development at Conversica sees artificial intelligence playing a big role:

“What I see, particularly in high tech B2B sales, is the emergence of a Sales technology stack that did not exist a few years ago (referring to Max’s post from last week). After having Marketing dominate the selection and use of technology for sales, I am seeing Sales take ownership of its own stack.

For conversion of leads into opportunities, one major shift has been the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to engage in natural 2-way email conversations with prospects to identify those that are ready to speak to a sales rep. This has been enabled by the speed and accuracy of natural language processing to understand responses from the prospects. I am also seeing AI in mobile marketing, customer support, underscoring how this breakthrough is replacing human-driven activities in multiple use cases.”

I think there are many different answers here, and I’m excited to see what people can come up with. The good news is, our time is here and our time is now. What’s still uncertain is why, and how long will it last for?

Check Out the Other Answers in the Group and Feel Free to Join the Conversation

We’ll be turning the best discussions into articles to share on SalesHacker.com. It’s the best way to make your voice heard and build a personal brand in the space. So please Join Us!

*This discussion was inspired by a conversation I recently had with Jay Weintraub of Grow.co. Thanks Jay!

The post Embracing Technology in Sales – Why Now? appeared first on Sales Hacker.

To kick off the new year, I’m sharing 15 ideas on improving your lead management. I have so much to share that I’ve split this post into three parts (you can read Part 1, with tips 1-5, here and Part 2, with tips 6-10, here), and today will be the final Part 3, with tips 11-15.

As you’ll see, this series isn’t just about getting more leads but about generating better and higher quality leads. These 15 tips (across all three blog posts) will help make your lead management more effective.

Without further ado, here is the final Part 3 of this three-part series, featuring tips 11-15:

 

11. Use a single voice when communicating with leads

People pay attention to who is sending them emails. Anonymous email servers may save money and be scalable, but they don’t build connections. The re-engagement process has to start with a human being.

You need to have a person behind the email and the phone call. Also, it should be the same person. Our goal is to build the relationship through one person to the point to where the lead is sales-ready, then hand that relationship off to the next person.

 

12. Nurture organizations, not just people

It’s important to have a closed-loop feedback system so that you can track all activities with all leads inside an organization.

Especially with B2B, selling happens at a corporate level and a business unit level in addition to an individual level. You need to be able to track interactions to be able to determine the program of selling the entire organization.

 

13. Market to the role, not the title

It seems like everyone is a vice president these days. You need an intelligent process to identify the person’s function and role in the company, rather than going by title.

With a recent MECLABS partner, we developed a process for determining a contact’s function in the company based on a series of conversations. Unless you do that, you don’t have a way to segment your lead accurately and send them the right content for where they are in the buying cycle.

 

14. Have a clear hand-off process between Marketing and Sales

The point at which Marketing hands a lead off to Sales is like a relay race — it’s important to keep moving fast without dropping the baton.

For one partner, we got Sales to commit to contacting all leads within 48 hours if they had the following three things:

• The lead conforms to the universal lead definition
• Confirmation that the lead wants to speak to a sales representative
• Qualification information for each lead

It’s important to document the process so that both sales and marketing can track all steps and evaluate the process objectively. This documentation is shown in the following figure:

 

15. Create a process for joint marketing and sales “huddles” to gauge progress

A football team would never think of skipping the huddle between plays. Sales and Marketing should view their work together in the same way. They need to talk frequently about what’s happening with their leads if they want to see ROI.

It’s important to close the loop on every lead and to talk about ways to improve the process. In my experience, Sales and Marketing should huddle on leads at least once a month.

Here are some questions to ask:

• How many of the leads we’ve given you in the past two weeks are active?
• Have you talked to them?
• Are you moving forward?

It’s also important to celebrate wins together as part of these huddles. You need to feel that you are all part of the same team. When that happens, you start seeing improvements at all levels.

For example, one partner had an administrative person at the meetings enter information about leads into the CRM system as people were talking. Soon, sales began to see why they needed to capture accurate information about leads in the system. If they do it, they can see that nurturing will happen on their behalf.

 

Key takeaways from this three-part blog series

• Marketing must create a marketing funnel to develop sales-ready leads and nurture those that aren’t ready to buy.
• Sales and Marketing need to agree on a universal definition of a lead.
• The hand-off process between Sales and Marketing must be clearly defined so that leads do not languish or become lost.
• Sales and Marketing must have regular meetings to gauge progress.

 

Bonus material: 

Embed the passion in your organization

Building clarity around the lead process helps build passion for making a difference in your organization. It creates closer ties between Marketing and Sales and helps Sales do its job better than ever before. You will begin qualifying leads in a disciplined and rigorous way.

No more dropping the baton in the hand-off between Marketing and Sales. That will bring a significant improvement in revenue generated from marketing.

 

You might also like

Where’s the Passion in B2B Marketing? [More from the blogs]

Lead Generation: How to empower your program like Siemens Healthcare [MarketingSherpa webinar archive]

Marketing Research Chart: SEO most effective tactic for lead gen, but also among the most difficult [MarketingSherpa chart]

Lead Generation: 3 questions every marketer should ask themselves about incentive [More from the blogs]

When should salespeople sell with facts and figures, and when should we try to speak to the buyer’s emotional subconscious, instead? When do you talk to Mr. Intuitive, and when to Mr. Rational?

I’d argue that too often, selling to Mr. Rational leads to analysis paralysis, especially for complex products or services. And yet many of us continue to market almost exclusively to Mr. Rational. The result is that we spend too much time chasing sales opportunities that eventually stall out. We need to improve our ability to sell to Mr. Intuitive.

We default to selling to Mr. Rational because when we think of ourselves, we identify with our conscious rational mind. We can’t imagine that serious executives would make decisions based on emotion, because we view our emotional decisions as irrational and irresponsible.

But what if Mr. Intuitive has a logic of his own? In recent years, psychologists and behavioral economists have shown that our emotional decisions are neither irrational nor irresponsible. In fact, we now understand that our unconscious decisions follow a logic of their own. They are based on a deeply empirical mental processing system that is capable of effortlessly processing millions of bits of data without getting overwhelmed. Our conscious mind, on the other hand, has a strict bottleneck, because it can only process three or four new pieces of information at a time due to the limitations of our working memory.

The Iowa Gambling Task study, for example, highlights how effective the emotional brain is at effortlessly figuring out the probability of success for maximum gain. Subjects were given an imaginary budget and four stacks of cards. The objective of the game was to win as much money as possible, and to do so, subjects were instructed to draw cards from any of the four decks.

The subjects were not aware that the decks were carefully prepared. Drawing from two of the decks led to consistent wins, while the other two had high payouts but carried oversized punishments. The logical choice was to avoid the dangerous decks, and after about 50 cards, people did stop drawing from the risky decks. It wasn’t until the 80th card, however, that people could explain why. Logic is slow.

But the researchers tracked the subjects’ anxiety and found that people started to become nervous when reaching for the risky deck after only drawing 10 cards. Intuition is fast.

Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman says that 95% of our purchase decisions take place unconsciously – but why, then, are we not able to look back through our decision history, and find countless examples of emotional decisions? Because our conscious mind will always make up reasons to justify our unconscious decisions.

In a study of people who had had the left and right hemisphere of their brains severed in order to prevent future epileptic seizures, scientists were able to deliver a message to the right side of the brain to “Go to the water fountain down the hall and get a drink.” After seeing the message, the subject would get up and start to leave the room, and that’s when the scientist would deliver a message to the opposite, left side of the brain asking “Where are you going?” Now remember, the left side of the brain never saw the message about the fountain. But did the left brain admit it didn’t know the answer? No. Instead it shamelessly fabricated a rational reason, something like, “It’s cold in here. I’m going to get my jacket.”

So if you can’t reliably use your own decision-making history as a guide, when do you know you should be selling based on logic, or on emotion?

Here’s the short rule of thumb: sell to Mr. Rational for simple sales, and Mr. Intuitive for complex sales.

This conclusion is backed by a 2011 study based on subjects selecting the best used car from a selection of four cars. Each car was rated in four different categories (such as gas mileage). But one car clearly had the best attributes. In this “easy” situation with only four variables, the conscious deciders were 15% better at choosing the best car than the unconscious deciders. When the researchers made the decision more complex – ratcheting the number of variables up to 12 — unconscious deciders were 42% better than conscious deciders at selecting the best car. Many other studies have shown how our conscious minds become overloaded by too much information.

If you want to influence how a customer feels about your product, provide an experience that creates the desired emotion. One of the best ways for a customer to experience your complex product is by sharing a vivid customer story. Research has shown that stories can activate the region of the brain that processes sights, sounds, tastes, and movement. Contrast this approach to a salesperson delivering a data dump in the form of an 85-slide power point presentation.

Rather than thinking of the emotional mind as irrational, think of it this way: an emotion is simply the way the unconscious communicates its decision to the conscious mind.

“If only I had a qualified lead!”

“I get too many leads!”

“I don’t get enough leads!”

“Salespeople never close out the leads!”

“No one likes the CRM system, so no one uses it!”

From my perspective, having interviewed hundreds of managers on SLMA Radio, and managed 20+ sales and marketing teams (interim management) through the years, it’s the excuses that drag down organizations. Excuses from both employees and managers can fill a book, and most are bogus.

Today's blog was submitted by James Obermayer, Executive Director and CEO of the Sales Lead Management Association and President of Sales Leakage Consulting. James is a regular guest blogger with ViewPoint.

Qualification is a critical sales activity that ensures reps aren’t wasting their time on leads that will never buy. It's a useful (or even essential) exercise to conduct at the start of your sales process — but there are certain limits to it.

Qualifying too much, too early can be counterintuitive. If you over-qualify up front, you might wind up narrowing your perspective to the point of missing viable opportunities and working on bad leads. In my opinion, it's always better to under-qualify leads initially and then over-qualify prospects during the first conversation — but reps often struggle with that.

So to help you qualify as effectively as possible and avoid some key missteps that will trip you up early on in your sales process, I've put together a list of four key prospect qualification mistakes to remain mindful of.

4 Key Prospect Qualification Mistakes

1. Fixating on Titles

Salespeople tend to make assumptions about a contact's type of work and decision-making authority based on their title — but titles can be deceiving. For instance, if a rep sells supply chain management software, they might assume that the head of operations is the relevant decision-maker.

In turn, they infer that people in other roles — like the facilities manager or a finance specialist — are unqualified prospects. They lock in on one title and let everyone else at the company fall by the wayside.

Something similar happens with inbound leads — reps are often slow to reach out to them (if they reach out at all) because they don't have the exact job title they're looking for.

But there’s just one problem — not everyone with the same title has the same responsibilities. The head of operations might control supply chain software choices at one company, but the facilities manager might have that kind of authority at another.They might even work in tandem or as part of a larger team.

All this to say, There's no one-size-fits-all model for what role makes decisions at every business — so you can't count on titles to be the be all, end all indicator of where to focus your energy.

2. Misunderstanding Needs

Let's say you sell software that keeps websites from crashing. Think about the companies you would target — your gut might tell you that you should focus on businesses whose websites crash regularly. Obviously, they have a pressing need that your product is essentially designed to solve. Seems like a no brainer, right?

Not quite. If you lock in on those companies exclusively, you're missing out on an entirely different type of prospect. Sure, businesses with unreliable websites have a more straightforward need for your product — but organizations with websites that perform well could use it too.

Those businesses have a preventative need for your software. They need something to get ahead of potential crashes — an extremely urgent pain point that you can tailor productive sales conversations around.

Leadership at one of those companies might have some big ideas for growing the website, but they're held back by inadequate crash protection. They would be receptive to a call from you, but their phones just aren't ringing because you are thinking too linearly.

When identifying needs, don’t use tunnel vision. Think about every likely scenario that would compel a prospect to buy your product. Don’t be too quick to disqualify a prospect for having the "wrong" problem — you could still provide the right solution.

3. Obsessing Over Budget

I would argue that B2B budget qualification is almost irrelevant. Unless the company you’re selling to is going out of business, it has money. The funds might not be earmarked for a specific project, but it’s there.

What’s far more important than knowing if they have the perfect budget is knowing if they have the ability to buy. For example, if you’re selling consulting services to an organization that has never hired a consultant in its history, you have to sell on two fronts.

First, you have to convince them that using a consultant at all is a good idea. Then once the baseline value is established, you have to convince the prospect that your consultancy is the best on the market. Getting through both of these stages is tough.

Selling consulting to a company that has bought these types of services before is much easier. This prospect is much more able to buy than the other opportunity, even if they both have the exact same funds.

Knowing a prospect’s buying history is far more informative for qualification than knowing their budget. Seek this information instead of a specific dollar amount.

4. Too Many Criteria

Lead scoring is a double-edged sword. What it offers in terms of accuracy often comes at the expense of time, and in my opinion, speed always trumps criteria. The time spent scrubbing a lead and evaluating it on several different points lengthens the span between when a salesperson receives a lead and when they make initial contact — stretching it from hours to days.

The longer you wait to contact the prospect, the less likely you'll be the first seller on the scene — that means losing out on some crucial benefits. Plus, the time you allot to over-qualification cuts into the time you have available to close.

Specificity is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can't be your only priority while qualifying. You can't get too caught up in ensuring that every lead is vetted as rigorously as a presidential candidate.

The bottom line is that more salespeople and leaders should get comfortable with under-qualifying early and over-qualifying later on. Casting a wider net won’t necessarily result in more chaff — it could also help you reel in more customers.

Sales Question: "What’s the Best Way to Get Referrals from Your Existing Clients? Our sales team is calling and asking the “WHO DO YOU KNOW?” question but we aren’t having much success."

SalesBuzz Answer: 

I’m not a fan of the “Who do you know?” question for two reasons:

1. It puts your client on the spot when they weren’t prepared for it;
2. Even when you get a few names, in most cases, they are just about an inch above the quality of opening a phone book and randomly picking out a name.

Your clients may be a great fit, but that doesn't mean they know what your ideal target looks like. In many cases, you end up with a few random names that come to their mind in the heat of the moment, yet they aren’t qualified. 

Now, of course, you’ll always have a time or two where it pans out in your favor, but if that was happening often enough, I doubt you’d be asking me this question to begin with.

Something else to think about… even if it does work on occasion, at what price? How many clients are you willing to have “fear” your incoming call because they know you’re looking to squeeze a referral out of them? Just something to think about.

Of course, when prospects start to refer you to their connections all on their own, those leads are worth their weight in gold. But that’s a different “referral” altogether.

A Better “Referral” System

What I’ve found to be the best system for generating warm referral leads is to do the following:

1) Create a 20-minute webinar that SOLVES A PROBLEM for your core audience. This webinar is NOT a company commercial nor a 20-minute DEMO of what it is that you offer. In fact, when the webinar starts, SKIP the 5-minute who you are, what your company does BS and get right to the problem at hand and then show your audience HOW TO SOLVE IT. 

For an example on what a SOLVE THE PROBLEM WEBINAR looks like in action, see our webinar on: Voicemail Strategies – How to Get More Prospects to Call You back, TODAY!

2) Let Email Do the Work. Once your 20-minute HOW TO SOLVE A PROBLEM webinar is created, send out an email to your client list letting them know that you would like to invite them to attend the session and if they would simply forward the email to some of their business or Linkedin connections they feel would also benefit from it.

You could even suggest they “tweet” about it. If your subject line (the title of your webinar) is strong and on point with your targeted audience, you could generate anywhere from 50 to 500 fresh new leads, with one well crafted and managed email blast. 

Now, which would you rather call on… 2 or 3 names that were coughed up in a pressure situation, or have 50 to 500 fresh new leads to call on that attended your webinar and now see you as an industry subject matter expert on helping them solve their problems?

 

Guest Author:
Susan Lee, Global Pricing Strategy Specialist


Oil prices have dropped more than 50% since last year and global commodity prices are at their lowest in the last few years. While many are predicting oil prices to rebound from the below $50/barrel level, “rising costs” can no longer be the only excuse for price increases.

To drive profit growth… yes, you can cut costs, sell to more people and get them to buy more, but capturing value through price will always be one of the most powerful profit drivers. For an established brand, price increases are inevitable.

Companies around the world want to raise prices, but most have not succeeded. On average, only about one-third of all planned price increases actually get implemented. Companies raise prices by only 1.9 percent for every 5 percent they attempt. In fact, we are seeing “pricing power” – the ability to achieve higher prices – plunging to its lowest level in 5 years. These are the results of Simon-Kucher’s Global Pricing Study 2014.

This struggle is especially acute for FMCG brands in mature markets like the U.S. where retailers are powerful and competitive pressure comes from both deep-pocket national brands and low-cost private labels.


While failure to raise prices can hurt short-term profit, it also has a big impact on long-term growth. Time and time again, stagnant profits leave companies without sufficient resources to finance future innovations.

The good news is you can increase your chances of success if you…

1.    Incorporate external indicators
Start with assessing consumer perception of each key product group’s relative value-price relationship. We recommend assessing four categories of indicators: consumer-, competition-, market- and margin-oriented. Companies that struggle, focus only on internal financial metrics and ignore the external dynamics.

Chances are you have multiple brands, sub-brands and pack-sizes in your portfolio. A uniform price increase is almost never the optimal strategy. By understanding the consumer’s volume migration pattern, you can vary the level of price increase so that part of your portfolio is relatively more attractive to catch the volume leakage before it goes to your competition.


Honestly, folks in the FMCG world already know this is the right thing to do (Unilever and Procter & Gamble are stated as examples by a recent WSJ article ), but not everyone does it. Why? Doing this requires planning the price increase as a proactive move and many price increases are reactive to a cost change. A wise industry veteran once told me, “If you use cost increases to argue for a price increase, be prepared to bring the price down when commodity prices go back down.”

X-factor: Keep calm and carry on: In addition to incorporating the 3 success factors above, a well-planned price increase roadmap prepares for a short-term volume dip. Among consumers who notice the price change (most won’t), they may take a few shopping trips to get adjusted to the new normal. Leaders who can stomach the dips will enjoy a much greater chance of getting the price increase to stick.

To read more on the insights from our 2014 Global Pricing Study, click here to get your free copy of our eBook, “Profitable Innovation.” Don’t worry, it’s written for busy business people who want to learn something new during a 3-hr flight.

*Editors Note: Guest Post by Aseem Badshah, CEO and Founder at Socedo.

Traditionally, sales reps have focused on building relationships with their leads using phone calls, emails and in-person meetings. Now think about how you communicate with your friends and family. I’ll bet a large portion of those relationships are driven through new digital communication channels like social media and text message. As traditional communication methods become crowded and stale, innovative reps are using a multi-channel approach to connect more effectively with potential customers.

What is a “Multichannel” Approach?

Before, the relationship between sales reps and leads was manly driven through phone and email interactions, which would hopefully lead to face-to-face meetings and finally culminate in a closed sale. As with many other things, digital media and technology came along and changed up the game. Today, this relationship has expanded to include communication through: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, text message, and a host of other digital platforms. This is gives reps a more developed view of prospects and more opportunity to connect.

What are the Advantages?

This change in dynamic provides some major new benefits to social sellers.

Less Noise to Compete With

Because social selling is a relatively new practice, people still get flooded with sales calls and emails much more so than Tweets and messages on social media. This can often mean that leads will respond much faster and much more often through these lesser-used channels because there are fewer offers coming at them.

It’s almost instinctual for many people to screen sales calls or immediately file away marketing emails without reading. Coming to them through social media channels provides a more personal touch and avoids the knee-jerk reaction people have to traditional sales methods. We’ve even gathered data to suggest that the click-through rates of Twitter DMs are around 10 times higher than those of email marketing messages. At Socedo, we have seen that users who have sent out at least 10 automated DMs containing links had an average click-through rate of 29%. The rate increased 31% for users who sent over 50 links via DMs. Nothing to scoff at when you take into account that average email marketing click-through rates fall around 3%. To learn more about this trend, check out the article on the Heinz Marketing blog. All of this further supports the idea that people are paying more attention to interactions on social media and sales reps don’t have to fight as hard to be noticed in this space.

More Lead Info to Work With

Social media platforms offer reps more complete lead info about their job, interests, and valuable “real time” personal details (hobbies, sports, music). This can be the key to building trust and bringing them into the sales funnel faster.

Take LinkedIn and Twitter for example. A user profile on LinkedIn has tons of easily accessible, structured data such as job title, industry, location, and experience. Twitter can provide a lead’s interests and passions based on what they’re Tweeting about, the #hashtags they use, or the events they post from. You can see if someone is having a good day, a bad day, what makes them happy, and even what subjects to stay far away from. Armed with all of this new information, a sales rep can go into sales conversation much more prepared.

It’s a two-way Street

The transparency on social media goes both ways. Leads are able to get a better view of sales reps, which can definitely work in the reps’ favor. Platforms can show a salesperson’s skills, specialties, and industry experience. Reps can post interesting articles and providing their own insights on topics that are helpful to their leads. They can interact with and uplift the people in their networks in a proactive way that traditional methods don’t allow. Discussing posts and retweeting articles are easy ways to enrich their communities. And all of this helps leads to see these reps as thought leaders and connections that can provide value to them and their business.

How can you make this work for you?

So we can see that the relationship has obviously changed, but how can sales reps make the most of this new dynamic? There are several actionable steps reps can take to optimize this social media outreach.

• Use social media to find relevant leads. A huge perk of having access to so much information on social media is reps can use it to find the users who best fit their consumer persona. Follow industry hashtags, monitor relevant groups and discussions, and take note of who is following other players in your space in order to discover new pools of warm leads.
• Don’t just be active, be proactive. Actively post and Tweet regularly, but take it a step further by actually engaging with your leads. Become one of their followers, favorite their tweets, add them to your “Lists”, and send them DMs to initiate conversations. People are much more receptive to those who go above and beyond to interact with others.
• Present leads with a clear call to action when you connect. Don’t be afraid to use these social media interactions to drive people directly to your product or service. The attention span of users can be remarkably short, so come in strong and clear with what you’re offering and why they would be interested. Something easy and actionable, like “I noticed your interest in digital marketing and I think you’d find our new software very interesting! Here’s the link to our site to learn more…”
• Upload social media leads into your CRM system. Social media can be a huge source of warm leads for reps and it’s important, as with any traditional lead, to track them as you maintain contact. That’s why it’s a good idea to populate your CRM system with the leads reps connect with via Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. These systems will help reps to easily transition from social media interaction to traditional sales methods and hopefully a closing call.

I’m not saying that email and phone are irrelevant in the modern sales process, merely that digital media has expanded the scope of these connections. This new relationship requires a more holistic approach to understanding leads. Every prospect now has their preferred communication channel and it’s up the sales reps to learn the most effective way to reach them.

The post The New Relationship Between Sales Reps and Leads appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Blog posts about marketing usually focus on issues that are readily visible. Blog posts will concentrate on what your marketing strategy is, how to measure your social media marketing, or how to avoid the latest PR gaffe. It is easy to get absorbed into these big picture issues. There is plenty to dig into, after all, and there is room for debate. The more mundane details of running a business in the 21st century often are ignored. This makes sense for the most part. Who wants to talk about issues that we all just have to deal with every day like paying the bills or keeping the lights on? That stuff is just “fact of life” kind of miscellany, right?

The problem with this kind of approach is that sometimes it’s the everyday mundane details that can really throw businesses for a loop. A good example is the change in pricing that UPS announced for 2015. We were recently alerted by a client that UPS rates not only had increased by 4.9% across the board, but all packages now were going to be shipped based on dimensional rate rather than on actual weight. Depending on the types of products being shipped, this single change in UPS guidelines can increase shipping expenses by 50%. This not only impacts the company but of course it also impacts the company’s customers, who will have to pay more for their products.

As marketers, there is not much we can do about changes like this. When the United States Postal Service decides to increase postage or cancel Saturday delivery, that has impacts on our clients, but there is not anything we can do directly to solve that problem. There are ways marketing can help, however. It is not difficult to predict how customers will react to increases in prices. Strategic marketing can help companies soften the blow for customers in any number of ways. Customers can be alerted via a direct mail and/or email campaign that their pricing will be increasing, for example. Loyalty plans can be created to help nurture relationships with customers who stay on despite the higher costs. Transparency in marketing communications regarding issues beyond the company’s control can help customers feel like they are in the know. These alerts may even help customers sympathize with the company if they are dealing with similar obstacles.

Many agencies and marketing consultants avoid dealing with this level of granularity. Business operations are a far cry from increasing sales or honing the HR department. However, there is a world of opportunities in helping companies make sure that these daily grind issues aren’t the ones that will break the customers’ loyalty. Whether the problem is shipping changes, difficulties due to weather, high gas prices, or chaos on the other side of the world, marketing has the capacity to make sure that customers are being kept up-to-date on why their service or their prices are fluctuating. At the end of the day, this kind of information can spell the difference between keeping or losing a customer. To us, that is what marketing is really all about – helping to make sure that new customers are brought to the table and that existing customers are kept happy. Maybe it’s time marketing began to overlap a little more with those everyday mundane aspects of running a business.

What say you?

Image Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/83633410@N07/7658225516/via Creative Commons

Figuring out the value proposition for your new product or service is the first step in any marketing plan. It communicates to your customers why your offering is worth purchasing.

If you can’t clearly articulate the value of your offering, you won’t be able to sell it to customers.

Your value proposition is the promise of value to be delivered – so writing it clearly, in a way that is both understandable and relatable, is absolutely critical.

What is a positioning statement, anyway?

A positioning statement is the “pitch” of your value proposition. It’s the written statement that encapsulates the main value of your product or service.

Your positioning statement will be your guidepost for your marketing efforts, and it will help you and your team maintain focus and perpetuate your brand.

A Winning Formula

By far, my favorite positioning statement formula or template is from Geoff Moore’s book Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers. This is the one I see most agencies using with their clients, and the one I typically use with my clients. It not only has a powerful impact on marketing efforts, it actually streamlines your whole business.

Formula:

For ____________ (target customer) who ____________ (statement of the need or opportunity), our (product/service name) is ____________ (product category) that (statement of benefit) ____________ .

Positioning Statement Examples:

Amazon –

For World Wide Web users who enjoy books, Amazon.com is a retail bookseller that provides instant access to over 1.1 million books.

Volvo –

For upscale American families, Volvo is the family automobile that offers maximum safety.

A positioning statement written with this formula gets your team on the same page and gives them guidelines for decision-making. When a new opportunity or idea pops up, check it against your positioning statement. Does it align? Then you may want to move forward. Does it conflict? Then you may want to stop putting time and effort into that opportunity or idea.

Something More Creative

Though the formula above is the most popular and, I believe, the most reliable in getting results, there are many other ways you can craft your positioning statement. Here are several more templates to experiment with if this Moore’s formula isn’t working for you.

The Swiss National Bank's decision to abandon its cap on the Swiss franc's value against the euro last week threw the financial markets into chaos.

There are lots of theories as to why the central bank chose to act, but there is one that was clearly underappreciated — the role of Swiss local government in lobbying for dividend payments.

The SNB is unlike other central banks because it is not in fact owned by the Swiss government but is a listed company with shareholders that include Swiss administrative regions, know as cantons, as well other public bodies and private individuals. As Cullen Roche points us to:

At the end of 2013, 52.5% of these shares were held by cantons, cantonal banks and other public authorities and institutions. The remaining shares were in the possession of private individuals and legal entities in Switzerland and abroad.

Who owns the central bank is not terribly important. What is important is that the SNB has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders — that is, a responsibility to act in their best interest. And here we may start to understand the pressures that the bank was under.

Firstly, the SNB pays a dividend to its shareholders capped at a maximum of 6% of net profit as well as a flat fee to local governments. As such, shares in the bank tend to act very much in line with a Swiss government bond with a 6% coupon.

This arrangement provides a cool 1 billion francs ($1.15 billion) annually split between Switzerland’s 26 cantons in proportion to their populations and, most importantly, was considered a safe and reliable stream of income. In fact, according to the Swiss central bank, the dividend had been paid every year for over 100 years. Until 2013. The reason? A collapse in the price of gold hurt the bank's gold asset holdings.

The 30% drop gold prices over 2014 caused a loss of 9 billion francs, meaning that the central bank was unable to pay out under Article 31 of the Swiss National Bank Act.

The failure to pay a dividend proved a shock to local government finances — a fact that the central bank was clearly aware of. In its explanation for cancelling the 2013 dividend Jean Studer, President of the Bank Council, noted that the consistency of dividend payments reflected "special factors in the last two decades meant that payments were very handsome". However, he reminded the cantons that "the SNB has regularly emphasised that there is no guarantee for the distributions".

And yet after the cancellation the cantons started to complain to the central bank. Bloomberg reports that "cantonal budget chiefs earlier this month urged the SNB to give them more money for 2014 to offset shortfalls in revenue from other sources". As majority shareholders in the business the bank had a duty to listen to but not necessarily to act on their concerns.

At the start of this month, the SNB said it expects to book a net profit of 38 billion francs for 2014 allowing it to restart its dividend payments. In its statement it made clear that as a result "ordinary profit distributions of CHF 1 billion to the Confederation and the cantons can be resumed".

Yet less than a week later the central bank abandoned its currency peg, sending the franc soaring and providing the much publicised mark-to-market currency losses estimated to have been around 13% of GDP (CHF75 billion) on Thursday. Letting the franc appreciate against the euro means the value of euro assets that the central bank built up on its balance sheets (the euros that it bought to defend the cap) fall in CHF terms.

So why did they act in a way that almost guaranteed losses for the central bank's balance sheet?

One simple (though incomplete) answer, is the timing. Having just dealt with the dividend payment for 2014 and with the rest of 2015 to try to reverse the losses it has just suffered, the central bank appears to have attempted to seize the moment to abandon a peg that it had clearly long been uncomfortable with. It has a whole year to find the money for the 2015 dividend, after all, even if it's hurting right now as its foreign currency holdings sink in price.

Given that SNB President Thomas Jordan believes that the franc remains "greatly overvalued" at its current level he will no doubt be expecting it to weaken somewhat from here — lessening the market losses on the euro assets held by the central bank.

Of course, such logic is effectively a gamble on the eurozone crisis. The European Central Bank (ECB) is widely expected to undertake quantitative easing on Thursday, the major impact of which may well be to weaken the euro further from its current level (and therefore potentially drive the franc up in the short-term). If it has a positive effect on the region's prospects, then it is possible that eurozone growth will pick up, and with it the currency.

If it fails, however, the Swiss could find themselves taking in more capital flows from Europe seeking a "safe haven" place to park capital. You can see the SNB's decision to drop its interest rate on deposits again to a staggering minus 0.75% — the bank takes a slice of your money rather than paying interesting — as an effort to limit this effect, though negative rates have so far proven ineffective at achieving this. Investors still see the franc as a safe harbour from losses, even at a price of 0.75%.

Join the conversation about this story »

With every new year comes a landslide of predictions and trends to guide us into the new year. While the year advances, rarely do such transformative trends or changes take place in alignment with a calendar. Not even Y2K could do so

Now with that said, I was asked to present my thoughts on what lies ahead in Vegas during CES at Brand Innovators “Mega Trends” event. By the first week of January, there were already some tremendous thoughts already shared by some of the best. So, I thought about and thought about some more. What I assembled was a list of the most notable trends that brands and consumers need to know this year and next.

Consider this list v 1.0. It represents technologies and trends that I’m paying attention to and also high level thoughts around them. It’s not complete as there’s more to add on each topic or new topics to introduce of course. But this list is definitely worth exploring. I also invite you to share your ideas and the technologies you’re watching.

The trends are visualized and explained in the embedded Slideshare. I also touch upon each below…

By Tibor Shanto - tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

When you initially approach an unsuspecting prospect, how you present what you sell will go a long way in determining the outcome.

Yet when you ask sales people to tell you what they sell, a large majority and their managers get it wrong. They will usually tell me things like:

• I sell hardware – software – any kindaware
• Systems, or “high end” systems
• Blah blah blah services
• MFP Printers
• Print solutions

These are all good, but in the end these are things that you deliver, literally, in most cases they are a means to an entirely different end. These are also how the user or implementer would define things, after all they are part of the process, not the ultimate beneficiary. If you are an IT person working on implementing a new finance package, the above type of response will suffice, because they are more likely to be part of the selection process, not the buying process, those who have the requirement that drives the selection and implementation.

One interesting follow on to the above is when we drill down on “solutions”, that crowd favourite, juicy, round, yet vague enough to fit most conversations. (Usually only a few words either side of the other great undefined – value) By implication, when you say you have a solution, you should be able to articulate what you can solve for the prospect, in terms they can relate to, not vis-à-vis your quota. Basing your answer to that on the list above will cost you sales. The problem the user or implementer are trying to solve are very different than those that got the project funded and backed. Without that you will always be in the selection pageant, not in the decision tent.

When we push this point a bit, we get a second round of answers, better but not quite there yet. We get:

• Improved productivity
• Improved work-flow
• Efficiencies
• Peace of mind

No doubt a step forward, but on their as they are above, and in most initial prospecting conversations, they mean nothing, they lack teeth. How can we improve their work-flow or productivity? What specific efficiencies can you introduce that are specific to them, not your offering Remember your offering and that of your two closest competitor, usually known as Column A and Column C, are most likely 85% the same, so if you can’t answer that, the discussion drops to line P, for price.

The answer is really “why do people buy?” People at all levels of the decision. The challenge in selling the first list is it only speaks to the selection folks, not the buying folks; the second list needs to have a lot more specifics aligned with the buyers’ objectives than just identifying their categories. You need to speak to those objectives and outcomes you have delivered. Understanding how they view productivity, and speaking to that in specific terms is a start. They need to be able to visualize and relate to the specifics of the ‘what’ and the ‘how’. Same for the financial aspect, time shifts, risk and more. Then you need to be able to present things in a way that aligns with their filters, and each role in the decision will be biased by their role.

The reality is that much has changed in sales, but the fact that first impressions are crucial has not, and how you answer that initial question of “What do you sell?” can make all the difference to your success.

Tibor Shanto

Product brochures are both frequently consumed and highly valued by B2B technology buyers, according to a recent report from Eccolo Media. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

While the country's high tech industry is a major growth engine and investment magnet, increasingly startups acquired by foreign buyers are then either shut down or turned into R&D centers.

With the Golden Globe awards once again recently concluded, it might surprise some people that the winner for Best Animated Film was Dreamwork’s How to Train Your Dragon 2. That’s not to say it was a bad movie but simply because sequels aren’t know for a perfect record for success.

Likewise, sales leads are remarkably similar when it comes to how marketers treat them. Despite their long-term benefits, the conventional wisdom dictates the best leads are fresh acquisitions instead of making a sequel out of currently existing clients.

It doesn’t sound too bad at first. You’d have to be pretty crazy to think you don’t need new customers. The problem is when that becomes the defining standard for what is considered the best sales lead.

Much like how movies are sometimes held to a standard of just one extreme (e.g. being a non-sequel), the standards for a good sales lead still leans heavily towards new customer acquisition.

Granted, this isn’t just about trying to generate sales leads out of existing customers. It’s about how you need to be rather flexible with your standards for qualified prospects. Contrary to popular belief, you are being more unrealistic if you think all your sales leads should lead to new contracts and new clients.

You want to know the actual reality?

• Every B2B customer is unique – Old or new, every customer has a unique set of needs and pain points. Do you really think you’re going to maximize your market share if you just stick to catering a really narrow niche? What about demand? Sustainability? While buyer personas are important, you shouldn’t try to pigeon-hole your customers.

• Your products have to be diverse – Specialization won’t get you far if demand is weak and you insist on catering purely to those who are a 100 percent fit for your assigned personas. You might have one or the other but you can’t have both. Because either way, your products need to diversify. Whether it’s increasing the functions of one particular service (e.g. janitorial) or the kinds of products (e.g. insurance packages).

• Old customers are more familiar – And of course, the most commonly cited defense is that of the familiar face. Some might call it milking the cash cow but you can also call it loyalty or relationship building. Don’t be afraid to call upon an old customer to pitch them something new because asides from no longer needing to familiarize, they more or less have more trust in you compared to new acquisitions.

New customers have their place. They could indicate newer markets, fresh faces, and bigger challenges. However, they are not something to consider if you want to keep marketing sustainable. There are such things as bad sequels but that doesn’t mean good ones don’t exist either!

Guess which social media network has been the buzziest of them all in the last one year? Yes, it’s Pinterest.

That social media network that was all about housewives and pretty pictures and slightly lame quotes (with pictures, again!) is now comfortably taking on the big boys of social media. If you did not consider Pinterest a contender for your social media efforts, rethink right now.

Adobe’s research shows that 15% of all social media referrals come from Pinterest – a figure that is more than the twice the share of Twitter and second only to social media behemoth, Facebook.

According to the above-referenced data from ComScore, Pinterest users spend double the amount that the average shopper spends online. In comparison to Facebook users, Pinners are more generous with their online spending by leaps and bounds.

Not only is Pinterest a star social media referrer in terms of traffic, it also delivers in terms of revenue per visitor and average order value. According to a Shopify study across its websites, Pinterest delivers the highest average order value at $80 per order – double that of Facebook which stood at $40.

1. Cover The bases

Hopefully those stats were convincing enough to get you to consider Pinterest as a real option for your social media marketing.

Once you’ve decided to go ahead on a pinning spree, there are a few basics that you must take care of:

• Don’t look at Pinterest as a backup social media platform. It is much too important to be viewed as one. Give it, its due importance and you’ll start seeing results soon enough.
• Pinterest users are voracious consumers of content – there are currently 30 billion pins and counting on Pinterest. If you’ve signed up your business for it, put aside a fixed amount of time every single day building up your boards and pins on your Pinterest account. You don’t want to serve up the same old boring content on your page for days together.

Source: You do NOT want a page like this! Surprisingly, it has 48 followers!

• Build an inviting and complete profile page for your business. A great image (duh, it’s Pinterest!) to represent your brand as your profile picture, a well written brand description that tells users what to expect from your brand in your brand’s signature style, links to your website and your other social networks to allow users to learn more about your brand and so on.
• Ensure you include your most important keywords and industry terms in your profile description – it’ll go a long way towards attracting the right users to your pages.

2. Choose Variety

The most popular brands on Pinterest let their imagination run wild and offer reams and reams of content on their pages. With dedicated boards for every possible interest that their ideal users might have, successful brands ensure that they don’t lose any opportunities at all in connecting with the right audience and becoming more relevant in their lives.

It’s quite easy to see the connection between variety and engagement. The brands with the largest number of boards on the most varied topics see the highest engagement rates on Pinterest.

Get inspiration about what boards to create by analyzing the keywords your audience uses to find new content. You’ll be surprised to find some interests in there that you might never have considered promoting, but mean a lot to your target audience.

Source: Ann Taylor mixes it up with boards covering a wide range of topics from pets to inspirational quotes and more – not just fashion content.

Another way to discover fresh content ideas or board topics is to check out the competition. See what it working for them and use those as inspiration to build your own popular boards.

3. Promote Your Pinterest Page via Your Blog and Email Marketing

Why just let Pinterest users see the awesome content that you pin on your boards? Put all that hard work you spent in creating or curating your fabulous content to good use by promoting it across all your owned platforms.

Here’s a handy guide to embed pins from Pinterest directly on your blog to expand your Pinterest reach and make your blog a tad buzzier.

Going the other way around, let users pin your blog posts to their Pinterest profiles by including a simple ‘Pin It’ button on all your posts. If you’re unsure how to do that, learn here. If embedding your pins to your blog gives you a kick about Pinterest, you can take it a notch higher by using some lovely Pinterest themed plugins on your blog.

Give your blog a makeover with a Pinterest-themed plugin

Another great way to spread the word about your pins on Pinterest is by promoting them via your email marketing. You would be in good company too, as according to Experian Marketing Services, 64% of brands that are active on Pinterest promote their Pinterest accounts via email.

4. Become Findable, Be a Generous Re-Pinner

Pinterest, like most other social media platforms, helps boost your SEO rankings. As I said earlier, with the right use of keywords in the descriptions of your pins, you can attract the right audience. Pinterest’s own search function, which was revamped earlier this year, helps well fleshed out pins and business pages to be discovered more easily by pinners, whether they follow your page or not.

Another simple yet extremely effective addition to your descriptions are hashtags. Use hashtags on Pinterest the way you would on Twitter or Instagram and be discovered more easily.

Source: Pinterest’s dedicated ‘Gifts’ section is a perfect brew of social and commerce

Use prices in your product descriptions to be automatically featured in the Pinterest Gifts section. This is a page that features gifting ideas arranged by budget and category (handmade gifts, Christmas gifts, etc.) with click through links to the pinners’ websites.

Pinterest is still largely driven by organic content as compared to its competitors and any overt self-promotion can come back to bite you. Use Pinterest search to look up relevant, “re-pinnable” content from other pinners and share it on your own boards. It spreads the love, gives your users more diversity in content, and makes your brand look like an enabler rather than a self-promoter.

5. Have Conversations with Your Followers

Pinterest has plugged the gap in its ‘being social’ repertoire and now allows users to have conversations with each other through direct messages. The caveat here is that both users must follow each other to avoid spam.

This means as a business owner, you can now reach out to a follower one on one, instead of having just boards of content passively communicating your brand idea to your fans. Imagine how cool it would be as a fan to have your favorite brand talking back to you! Yeah, offer that experience to your own users. Group conversations have a limit of supporting up to 9 users at a time.

There’s so much that can be done with this messaging feature. For example, you could:

• Reach out to fans who have liked a product offering them assistance in purchasing the item.
• Offer thanks to followers through a personalized message for re-pinning one of your pins.
• Send out personalized coupons or gift cards to star re-pinners and get them to transact on your site.
• Set up group conversations with like-minded followers. Help them connect with each other and your brand on topics of mutual interest.

6. Milk Pinterest Analytics

Pinterest also has remarkable analytics for its business accounts! With Pinterest Analytics you can know who your users are – their gender, age, location, etc. You’ll get insights into the interests of your followers, what type of content from your site they pin the most, how many leads your site receives from Pinterest, and so on.

You can actually do so much with each bit of these free insights that Pinterest reveals to you. Take users’ interests for example.

Source

Pick those interests that are common among a majority of your followers and create pins around them. Even better, start a board for a topic that interest the majority of your users. Increase engagement with them by inviting them to pin on these boards by making them collaborative.

Use an all-encompassing dashboard like Cyfe that lets you see all analytics data from your social media accounts, your website, your CRM tools, and elsewhere in one place. Cross-reference your social data with visitors’ interactions on your website or their activities on Pinterest to create unique blog content or email newsletters that they will enjoy.

Closing Thoughts

Pinterest marketing firm managed to put a price on each pin posted by users on their Pinterest pages. Turns out, every new pin is worth 78 cents of incremental sales to the brand that is featured in the pin. With over 30 billion pins racked up already, that’s a goldmine waiting to be tapped.

So put your best foot forward and say hello to the ‘ladies & gents who pin’ (and shop like mad) on Pinterest.

SaaS companies are product-driven companies, and they often pay very little attention to marketing in the very early stages of their company’s growth. This is the right approach because customers are buying your product, not your marketing. However, ignoring marketing as part of your growth strategy is a deadly mistake, especially if you’re a B2B company and can’t solely rely on public buzz to acquire customers. SaaS companies need marketing. Shoot, every company needs marketing.

The fun part of working for a SaaS startup is you get to pretty much hack your way to growth without spending tons of money. Here at Decisive, our marketing has evolved rapidly since our public launch last April. Take a look at some of the techniques we use, how we can improve, and what we have planned.

Early Growth Through Word Of Mouth

A large part of our early success came from the buzz surrounding our company. People tend to disagree on whether word of mouth is a form of marketing. I will tell you right now that it is. It’s marketing because of the proactive steps you have to take to keep the word of mouth flame burning. In other words, it’s influenced by the company. There are two parts to this strategy:

1. Creating a useful, buzz-worthy product.
2. Fostering and nurturing customer relationships and managing your brand/reputation.

Creating A Useful, Buzz-Worthy Product

What drives word of mouth is your product. Your marketing efforts will fall short if your product isn’t good enough. We have positioned our product as a simpler, more effective product than the alternatives in the industry. Our early customers have experienced this first-hand (not without a few bugs, though). We all know when a product or service satisfies us, we’re more than willing to pass it on to others. Creating a great product that helps your customers achieve their goals will generate instant buzz. The downside is that customers won’t hesitate to air you out if your product isn’t satisfactory, which leads to the second part of the strategy.

Relationship & Brand/Reputation Management

What do you do when your customers are pissed off and your company’s name has a bad taste to it?

This part requires you to be forward-thinking, responsive, and have a deep understanding of your customer’s pain points. We don’t internally refer to this as a technique of marketing since we sincerely care about the customers we interact with (it’s built into our values), but fostering relationships before the purchase and brand management both fall under the umbrella of marketing.

Our team members do a great job of building and nurturing relationships with our customers and addressing the issues they have with our platform. We do this by checking in on conversations in online communities, sending update emails, having Skype conversations, and even having casual conversations about non-business topics. Any pressing issue that threatens to hurt our company is addressed immediately and worked on until a resolution is found.

Word of mouth marketing is the most organic form of marketing and works pretty well for a young startup.

Content Marketing

Here at Decisive, we know we have a lot to say. The ad tech industry lacks educational resources, which is ironic because this is a very complicated industry. We use our content to provide valuable insights to potential customers and the whole industry. Our content marketing strategy has helped us increase our overall site traffic by 248% in 9 months and increased our weekly signups from our marketing channels by about 15%. Here are some of the KPIs we track every week in a comprehensive marketing scoreboard:

Consumption & Sharing Metrics

• Average Bounce Rate
• Average Time Spent
• Marketing Channel Signups
• Newsletter Subscriptions
• Top Page (SEO, seen in Google Webmasters Tools)
• Top Source
• Twitter Engagements
• Unique Blog Views

Cost & Spend Metrics

• Activated Users (on our platform)
• Advertising Spend (on our platform)
• Average CPC/CPE
• Conversions
• CPA
• CTR
• Deposit Amount (on our platform)
• Impressions
• Marketing ROI
• Marketing Spend
• Total Spend (on our platform)

The key to any content marketing strategy is having a core group of people who create content consistently. Creating content can’t just be a hobby. It deserves as much attention as sales. To create even better content, your non-marketing employees should also contribute.

For example, the idea for this viral Slideshare we created, which was featured on Slideshare, came from our Software Engineer and Business Development person. That’s real teamwork!

Content marketing shouldn’t be called content marketing. It’s just another way to market your product or service, and everyone should do it.

Social Media Management

We focus on channels where are potential customers are. Two channels that have been working for us are Twitter and LinkedIn. These are the most popular channels for B2B companies.

Twitter – Twitter is our best-performing channel for our content. Most companies and thought leaders in the ad tech industry have Twitter accounts. This gives us an opportunity to put our content in front of the eyes that matter. Twitter also has a pretty cool advertising platform (coming from another advertising platform).

LinkedIn – Every company that matters should have a LinkedIn presence. The content we promote on LinkedIn gives us instant traffic to our blog. LinkedIn also seems to bring more engaged users.

Setting It And Forgetting It With Buffer

Remember the days when everyone had to manually post on social media? Me neither. It’s been so long since those days.

With all the social media scheduling tools available today, no business should be posting tweets and other posts manually (unless you’re posting about breaking news). It’s just too time-consuming, and there are better alternatives. One platform that’s essential to our social media management is Buffer.

The great thing about Buffer is it’s simple and to the point. They don’t try to overdo themselves by cramming their platform with unneeded features. The simplicity makes it a joy to use.

Our Twitter schedule in Buffer. The 8:35 AM EST time slot has worked best for us.

Areas For Improvement

Doesn’t hurt to call yourself out, right? As much as I would like it to be, our marketing efforts aren’t perfect. In fact, we’re just getting started. There are a lot of things that need to be in place for us to have a well-oiled marketing machine:

1. Better attribution methods
2. An improved website for SEO
3. A better lead nurturing strategy
4. More diversity of content (blog posts and Slideshares are our strong points)
5. A bigger team of marketing all stars

Looking Ahead

Most of 2014 was spent behind the scenes creating a foundation for our SEO, content, social media, and branding. All of our customers were acquired without salespeople. We plan to continue this trend for as long as possible. In 2015, we plan to amplify our brand through more outreach, events, better content, and more advertising tools.

We have a long way to go, and we’re excited for the ride. We’ll be updating this as we discover new methods!

How many leads do we need? A basic sales calculator will help you work out how may proposals and leads you need to meet your sales target. And it will be wrong. Adding just a small degree of sophistication to your sales calculator will deliver you a very different conclusion, resulting in a very different plan. In this week's show, we'll build a basic back-of-the-envelope sales calculator, and share a great free tool that will give you a result that will astound you. You need a lot less market than you think.

read more

For the new year, I’m sharing 15 ideas on how to make your lead management more effective. There is so much to share, I’m splitting this post into three parts (you can read Part 1 with tips 1-5 here), and today is Part 2, featuring tips 6-10.

This post isn’t just about generating more leads; it’s about generating better and higher quality of leads. These 15 tips (across all three blog posts) will help make your lead management more effective.

So, without further ado, here is Part 2 of the three part series, featuring tips 6-10:

 

6. Define lead nurturing — and which leads you should nurture

Lead nurturing is a relevant and consistent dialog with viable potential customers, regardless of their timing to buy. The people to be nurtured are generally those with whom you’ve had a direct meaningful interaction via phone or email and who are in companies that fit your preferred profile. The point is to build a relationship with them over time without trying to qualify them during each interaction.

 

7. Filter content by role and by the stage of the buying process

Executives get too much undifferentiated content. However, if you can demonstrate that you’ve done some filtering on their behalf, you can get through to them.

We found that readership went up significantly by sending one targeted piece to leads rather than a generic newsletter targeted to everyone.

Begin by asking your sales team:

• What questions do your customers ask most often?
• What do they care about?
• What issues are they facing?
• What content have you shared that has helped the most with conversion?

In addition, ask your sales team about the prospects involved in the buying process and what challenges they all have in common. Try to get Sales to articulate the problem they are trying to solve. Then, you can deliver the content and help Sales find what its looking for at each stage of the lead nurturing process.

Find content — such as articles, blogs and white papers — that addresses these issues. Pass this content by your sales team, and ask them whether their customers would value it. As much as you can, repurpose content. For instance, white papers can be transformed into articles, and articles can be transformed into blog posts.

A job title can give you clues about a prospect’s role in the buying process, but it’s best to determine their role through a phone conversation and a series of questions. Once you’ve determined who they are, you need to support a continuing conversation.

For example, if you have a webinar, send them a follow-up email with more information. Afterwards, call to ask, “Did you find that webinar helpful? Did it bring up other questions?”

 

8. Touch leads frequently

To remain relevant during the nurturing process, you have to be consistent. My threshold for consistency is to reach out to leads at least once a month. Different marketers have different thresholds, but I would say that quarterly isn’t enough to be remembered — there is just too much noise over that timeframe.

 

9. Don’t sell; educate and help

Most case studies and whitepapers have a sales edge to them. That won’t work for lead nurturing. The content must be educational and helpful. One MECLABS research partner worked with an outside publisher to develop educational webinars and brought in some editorial support to help them develop some thought leadership pieces that didn’t focus on products or sales.

 

10. Use third parties to add credibility

Most marketers try to generate all the content they send to leads themselves. However, third parties can do that work for you and, more importantly, validate what you are doing in the marketplace. For example, one partner started partnering with analysts covering their industry. They paid a fee to repurpose the research and shared it with their target audience.

Meanwhile, linking to third-party media articles costs you nothing. You don’t need to get permission to send hyperlinks to articles that you think are relevant. It helps to personalize the emails. For example, you could write something along the lines of, “I saw this article in IndustryWeek that I thought you might find relevant based on our last conversation.” Having clear profiles of the different leads means that you can somewhat automate that process.

 

Image Attribution: Keith Hoffart

 

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Lead Generation: How one company increased leads 96% by changing the presentation of incentive content [More from the blogs]

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Lead Generation: How to empower your program like Siemens Healthcare [MarketingSherpa webinar archive]

How the Halo Effect Drives Lead Generation [More from the blogs]

Sales and marketing alignment: For some this topic causes panic and angst, for others it stirs up no emotion at all … and for a select minority it presents a vast ocean of opportunities. I’m in the latter bucket.

Marketers don’t/can’t/won’t understand the complexity and sheer uphill battle that sales faces, while my sales friends ridicule marketing as being divorced from REVENUE reality. Make no mistake about it, this is one chasm both sides will have to cross in order to work together and produce the best possible results.

After training thousands of sales and marketing professionals. I’ve seen first-hand what aligned sales and marketing teams can achieve. There is no convoluted strategy, no hype, nothing uber-fancy needed in order to get to accord. It’s taking ideas and concepts that we all know about in the off-line world and porting them to digital.

Moreover, it’s all about execution. An insane amount of it, if I may add. Get it right and your inner Indiana Jones will have found the Holy Grail. And this heavy lifting is the fundamental reason why most companies prefer the status quo.

One good place to begin the process of sales and marketing alignment is in social selling. It’s an emerging field with great promise, and most of us don’t have entrenched habits to overcome. It’s a practice that can be constructed with alignment at its core, which by osmosis can affect existing barriers.

Social Media Marketing Fulfills the Promise of Reach

Marketing’s all about reach and messaging. Have you considered what the effect might be if your sales team actively helped distribute your messaging and content? What’s your social reach now? You may work for a company with 10 sales reps or 10,000. While an individual sales rep’s social footprint might not seem like much, each one has exponential possibilities, and the aggregated reach would be massive.

Add to this the ability to add more prospective buyers to your social networks. While your audience grows, so does the number of qualified buyer persona consuming your content. Your prospective buyers could, literally, be educating themselves on a buying journey!

Marketers, as you tie this in with your marketing automation platform, the end product will make you dance for joy. Sales leaders and reps, you could be generating customized leads from your content writing and sharing efforts. This level of visibility is needed if you’re serious about getting sales more involved in the social sharing process.

The On-Ground Reality

Now, let’s dive in further. Let’s specifically focus on content creation and distribution. How much time do you think it takes to produce a marketing asset? Let’s look at some of these stats.

(I hope my friends in sales are reading this to get a sense of the workload.)

1. The average whitepaper takes up to 50 hours to complete. I’m willing to bet the time it takes to research, fact-check, etc. is not included. (Editor’s note: you are right, my friend.)
2. The average blog takes up to 5-7 hours to write with research, writing, editing, etc. (Editor’s note: Not counting posting, finding images, and creating metadata. It’s a labor of love, though.)
3. And how about the average infographic? Try 25-50 hours!

Why Content Sharing Matters

There have been a plethora of articles and posts about the importance and value of content sharing. Engagement is often cited as a barometer of success. Sometimes branding and awareness are cited.

However, allow me to express a selfish point of view. You see, we sales folks only care about using social media IF there is a tangible benefit associated with it. Benefits like MORE conversations, MORE pipeline and MORE revenue.

I don’t want to think about how difficult it must be to produce all of this incredible content and then have it sit in an ivory tower without sales reps even looking at it (let alone sharing it). How painful!

So here’s a cure for the common cold shoulder: here are four tips to help marketing and sales align around sharing content via social … which will lead to social sales. It’s win-win for both sides (not to mention the company).

4 Tips to Increase Social Content Sharing By Sales

Tip #1: Get Sales More Involved In the Creative Process

If your company doesn’t have a joint sales and marketing meeting on a regular basis, you’re doomed for failure. I’ve seen companies whose marketing departments scratch their heads on why sales doesn’t share content; meanwhile their blogs don’t even have social share buttons!

Take the time to ask sales what they need and what they’re hearing from clients and prospects on the street. Being that close to buyers makes sales reps invaluable sources and subject matter experts as you conceive, create and deploy your content. Don’t just ask for input, put sales in the driver’s seat. Let them contribute ideas about what buyers are asking for today. Some might sound funny and outrageous, but others will nail something important. And over time your two teams will gel far better together.

Tip #2: Have Sales Produce Their Own Content

Although this is probably not on many people’s radar (just yet), let me point you to what forward-thinking sales reps are already doing. They’re writing their own content and using tools like LinkedIn Publish or even their own personal branded blogs to disseminate content.

Ben Laflamme does this well, check out his blog here. Jack Kosakowski from Act-On is also building a very strong personal brand using LinkedIn Publish.

If you’re scared that your sales reps don’t want to write their own content (or scared that they will, and it won’t be very good), consider asking them questions over the phone, transcribing this and turning it into a powerful asset. This is a traditional journalistic technique to get a story, and a prime example of an off-line tactic that translates to digital very well. Smart organizations are using this very strategy today to help sales reps become thought leaders.

What marketing should know is that buyers will be much more likely to buy into the words of an experienced sales rep than a standard, generic piece of marketing.

Tip #3: Really Understand the Buying Journey

It’s amazing to see how many sales and marketing leaders don’t know their customer’s buying journey. No, I’m not taking about your sales cycle process, I’m referring to the path prospects take before they enter your funnel all the way through to becoming clients. It’s about them and their viewpoint, not you and your plan for them.

The more time the sales and marketing teams work together to understand the path the buyer takes, the more targeted content you can create. As you integrate sales into this process, the faster they’ll share content, and the better, more on-the-nose that content will be.

Tip #4: Use Tools and Automation

Many marketing departments are deploying tools that share content to their sales reps’ social media accounts. It’s quick, painless and allows broad content distribution rather quickly. I personally love this solution – but I wouldn’t risk not changing the mindset of my sales and marketing teams first.

To clarify: Although it may tempting to ramp everyone up on social sharing tools, if you don’t focus on changing their mindset first, you’ll lose your internal audience. Those people you hope will share must be given a very good reason for adopting a new technology or process. Remember, this isn’t a fad diet. This is a change in culture. It will be hard for some of them. Will it take long? I’ve seen companies successfully transform their social sharing programs from zero to hero in about six to nine months.

At the risk of boring you, let me underscore this one more time: Layer on all the acceleration tools you want to after but do not sacrifice the core principle of shifting mindset first.

The Bottom Line

We’ve seen why social sharing is so important, examined why most reps don’t do it, and reviewed ways you can bring sales and marketing together.

What’s next?

Social sharing is a component, the first phase, of social selling. One of the best things you can do for your sales teams today is to get them formally trained on social selling. As a marketer, you can play a central role in helping your sales team find, educate and engage more buyers online. The benefits are astounding: greater pipeline growth, increased customer engagement, more sales conversations, and of course (most importantly) more revenue.

Feel free to leave a comment below or contact me @AmarSheth to share your ideas on increasing social sharing.

P.S.: Want to learn more about lead generation with social media? Check out Likes are Good. Leads Are Better

In a time where 50 hour work weeks, working from home, and working with multiple screens have become commonplace, needless to say, many job positions and careers are transforming. With societal trends and changes in the economy, expectations and responsibilities in the workplace change as well, and the fields of marketing and public relations are shifting too.

Due to advances in the fields of technology and communication, it’s not surprising that roles in areas that rely heavily on B2B and B2C communication have shifted and grown as a result. Marketing and public relations are two overlapping areas that have responded to these changes.

Dual roles

So, what’s the difference between marketing and public relations? Though the two are separate departments, job roles in these areas both usually deal with customers, client studies, and customer satisfaction. Due to the close relationships PR and marketing foster with clients, the two areas could be thought of as one unit centering on the same customer information, each covering their different specialties.

Not only is it possible to share tasks and goals between marketing and PR departments, it may be becoming increasingly necessary. Because many of the functions of each are similar or at least highly interrelated, some data may become lost or be unaccounted for without communication between departments. Joint meetings and task lists may be other ways for PR and marketing to work together.

It’s important that marketing and PR not only account for gaps in communication inside the company but it’s also recommended that these two departments present a united front to customers. Because their end goals are so related, both departments need to be on the same page in order to optimize the business’s relationship to current clients as well as initiatives intended for the overall client base.

Many Hats

Many marketing and public relations professionals are finding themselves taking on amorphous roles with diverse daily tasks. Marketers take on customer service and public relations. Public relations specialists are finding themselves becoming marketing mavens and strategizing on ways to increase sales.

It’s true that for these areas, the lines of responsibility have become blurred, and in some places, they have disappeared altogether. Due to the nature of each, marketing and public relations are often the same department in some companies, wherein marketers compile and send out news, press releases, product updates and so on. Public relations professionals may find themselves conducting customer service calls or collecting testimonials in a manner that primes future clients for retention or advocacy.

Office Synergy

Marketing and PR can certainly work together to better reach an intended audience. Marketers analyze data corresponding to weekly events. Public relations specialists speak directly to customers. The former has information on client reactions, while the latter initiates contact or interactions.

In a sense, marketing and PR form two halves of a whole when it comes to customer information. Marketers have access to information like analytics, weekly web leads, click-through-rate and the like, while public relations employees craft communications via email blasts. Both groups are assigned to monitoring and using social media platforms.

Because marketers and PR professionals already work in many of the same areas, it makes sense that their work could be done cooperatively. In the age of information where technology and opinion are often intertwined, marketing and PR need to share data and coordinate on team vision to speak to clients and potential customers.

Conclusion

Marketing and PR each have a separate, valuable use and function as well as working in tandem. In some cases, they must function separately and in other cases, the outcome in a particular situation will be much more successful if those two areas work together.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a complimentary assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

Over the course of my career, I’ve learned firsthand that practicing good sales behaviors is essential for success … and that bad sales behaviors can sink an entire sales org.

Developing good sales behaviors yourself and helping your team improve is the hallmark of an effective sales professional. But it’s hard to know how to get better when you don’t know what you’re doing wrong.

That’s why I wrote this article. In this post, I’ll start by walking through five of the most common bad sales behaviors that hold promising salespeople back. Then, I’ll discuss some of my top good sales behaviors to nurture, as well as strategies to monitor and improve sales behaviors on your team.

Table of Contents

• Bad Sales Behavior to Kill
• Good Sales Behaviors to Practice and Nurture
• How to Monitor and Improve Sales Behaviors in Your Team

Bad Sales Behavior to Kill

1. Getting Stuck in “Reacting” Mode

The number one bad sales behavior that I’ve seen hinder otherwise promising salespeople is getting stuck in “reacting” mode. Too often, sellers wait passively for leads to find them. Rather than proactively reaching out and building relationships with prospects, these reactive salespeople just wait around for a perfectly teed-up opportunity to come their way.

This approach is understandable. After all, it’s a lot less work than actively connecting with potential buyers. However, experts agree that reactive salespeople are likely to be constantly playing catch-up to their proactive competitors.

In his comprehensive book Sales Management. Simplified., Sales Coach Mike Weinberg argues that “probably the most common and damaging driver of salespeople being perceived and treated simply as vendors is being late to a sales opportunity.” Weinberg notes that to be seen as a valuable consultant rather than just someone trying to make a quick buck, it’s essential for salespeople to be proactive, taking the initiative to share insights and earn their seat at the table before the customer is ready to buy.

Source

2. Focusing on the Product

Another common failure mode is an excessive focus on the product. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen well-meaning salespeople put their product front and center in an initial pitch, going on and on about its many features and benefits without even stopping once to check if it’s what the customer really needs.

Again, I can understand how salespeople fall into this trap. If you’re excited about the product you sell and you truly believe in its potential to add value, it’s only natural to get a little carried away when telling a prospect about it.

However, to move from that initial conversation to a closed deal, it’s essential to balance a healthy focus on the product with a focus on the people. As Sales Coach Nick Kane explains, “Unless your product is revolutionary, like the first smartphone, it’s only marginally different from the competition. On its own, there’s not much to distinguish it from the others.”

Kane continues, “That’s why a product-focused strategy is limited. Instead, even the best products need a sales strategy centered around the people who sell.”

If you focus too much on the product, you’re liable to send the message that all you care about is selling. Instead, it’s critical to demonstrate that you’re truly invested in understanding and delivering what the customer actually needs.

3. Forgetting the Basics of Sales Calls

As a sales professional, I believe strongly in the importance of ongoing learning and development. It’s essential to stay up to date with the latest trends, from the impact of AI tools to industry shifts that may be affecting your customers. That being said, it’s also vital to remember the basics.

Specifically, one of the most common bad sales behaviors I’ve witnessed from otherwise high-achieving salespeople is to completely forget the basics of how to conduct an effective sales call. For example, I’ve seen sales reps fail to establish an agenda, jump right to a demo without getting buy-in first from the prospect, and go through an entire call without asking a single question.

Basic errors like these can make it seem like the salesperson is just there to pitch a product, rather than to learn about the customer’s needs and establish a relationship with them, ultimately making them come across as self-interested and untrustworthy.

As Weinberg puts it, “You don’t earn a seat as the expert or consultant at the customer’s table when you’re viewed as a pitchman better suited to doing infomercials than to helping your customer address business challenges.” Forgetting the basics of sales calls is a great way to sink a potential client relationship before it even begins.

4. Ignoring Objections

Many of us like to focus on the positive — but when it comes to sales, ignoring the negative is not a recipe for success. On the contrary, it’s impossible to address prospects’ objections to your offering if you don’t know what they are.

While it may feel a little uncomfortable, asking probing questions to better understand why a customer is hesitant to move forward is a key part of a good sales rep’s job. Indeed, sales coach Jeet Vadher points out that “addressing objections effectively helps build trust, as it shows that you’re listening to their concerns and offering thoughtful, informed solutions.”

Vadher further notes that “when you handle objections with insight and clarity, you reinforce your role as a problem solver, not just a seller.” At the end of the day, Vadher argues that “objection handling is not just about closing the deal. It’s about creating an ongoing relationship with your customer.”

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While it may be tempting to bury your head in the sand and refocus the conversation on the positive, being willing to discuss customers’ objections is a necessary step to overcoming them.

If you’re still not sure, just ask yourself: Do you want to know what it will take to get your customer to buy? Or would you rather they just walk away without any explanation? If you ignore the prospect’s objections, you’ll have no way to figure out what it will take to turn their no into a yes.

5. Never Saying No

You may have heard that the customer is always right — but that doesn’t mean the salesperson can never say “no.”

On the contrary, one of the worst sales behaviors I’ve seen is an unwillingness to push back on a customer. While it’s always important to be respectful, it’s also essential for salespeople to know how to refuse an unreasonable request or how to suggest an alternative to an uninformed customer.

In some cases, this may mean turning down a prospect entirely. For example, Entrepreneur and Sales Expert Michelle Weinstein speaks eloquently to the importance of saying no when a customer isn’t a good fit, sharing, “I know that the temptation to accept every client that comes your way is high, especially when you find yourself in a financial pickle. You’ve got bills to pay. Rent is due. And you don’t have another deal in sight. It’s scarcity mentality at its worst, and it can shake you to the core. But believe it or not, if you accept a client out of sheer desperation, you might be setting yourself up for an even bigger disaster than not making rent this month.”

In other cases, a prospect may be a good lead, but it’s still important to set healthy boundaries and learn to say “no” when they ask for a last-minute demo, demand yet another discount, or make other unreasonable requests. As entrepreneur Theresa Delgado explains, “Whether it's declining unrealistic demands, setting boundaries, or redirecting your priorities, knowing how to say no tactfully and professionally is crucial for long-term success.”

Good Sales Behaviors to Practice and Nurture

So far, we’ve covered what not to do. But what are the good sales behaviors that set top-performing salespeople apart? Below, I’ll go through some of my favorite expert-approved good sales behaviors to practice and nurture.

1. Qualifying Leads

In my experience, one of the most critical behaviors of a successful salesperson is qualifying leads. Rather than simply assuming that anyone who gets on the phone with you is a potential customer, it’s essential to take the time to qualify each prospect you connect with.

Indeed, as Jack Bowerman, senior marketing manager for the prospecting platform Surfe, argues, “Qualifying leads effectively makes sure you’re investing your time in the right prospects — which improves the overall success rate of the deals you close.” In other words, if you don’t qualify your leads effectively, you’re likely to waste a lot of time talking to the wrong people.

2. Building Relationships

Of course, sales isn’t just about determining who is qualified to be a potential customer. Once you’ve qualified a lead, it’s essential to start cultivating a relationship with them.

Building relationships starts with building rapport. That means demonstrating curiosity about the person you’re talking to, asking questions, and making the effort to learn more about them and their challenges. Aja Frost, HubSpot’s director of global growth, notes that “to build rapport, sales reps typically practice active listening to successfully uncover prospects’ needs and form a relationship.”

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In addition to active listening, sales reps can build strong relationships by following best practices such as fostering trust by mirroring the prospect’s body language and speech patterns, demonstrating empathy by sharing common experiences, and emphasizing their dedication and expertise by researching the lead and their industry in advance.

3. Demonstrating Value

In his comprehensive overview of the concept of value selling, Founder and CEO of the Harris Consulting Group Richard Harris takes the controversial stance that “sales hasn’t changed since the days of merchants trading their wares in Mesopotamia.”

How can that be? Harris clarifies, “Sure, we may have more (powerful) sales tools and new methodologies. We’re even starting to harness AI to predict buyer behavior and respond to it more quickly. But, strip away all the nuanced strategy and tech, and sales remains simple: Identify a need and show how your product or solution meets that need while delivering positive economic impact.”

At its core, selling is all about demonstrating value. Whether you’re selling a product or a service, a B2B offering or mass market B2C merchandise, I’ve learned that making a sale always boils down to demonstrating the value you can add to your customer.

To do so, Harris recommends doing your research before every call to ensure you’re prepared to ask probing questions. Then, during the conversation, he suggests prioritizing active listening and empathy, to help you understand the problems the prospect is facing. And finally, Harris reminds us to “avoid the hard sell:” Rather than desperately trying to close the deal at all costs, great salespeople work together with their prospects to identify the best way to add value.

4. Serving Customers

Hand in hand with demonstrating value is serving the customer. In my experience, great salespeople know that selling isn’t just about closing deals — it’s about truly prioritizing the needs of the customer throughout their customer journey.

As Sales Expert Amy Bradley explains, “Sales success hinges on more than just transactions. It’s about creating lasting connections with your customers.”

To create those lasting connections, Bradley recommends several strategies, including establishing your expertise and credibility, following up consistently, and customizing your communications for each prospect. By serving the customer in these ways, salespeople can build relationships that are genuine, sustainable, and truly mutually beneficial.

5. Leveraging AI

Finally, in recent years, I’ve seen AI transform from just another hype cycle to an incredibly impactful sales tool. That’s why no list of good sales behaviors would be complete without including leveraging AI and automation.

This can take many forms. From a tool that helps automate prospecting to AI-generated call scripts and emails, there are countless ways in which today’s top salespeople have begun to use AI to save themselves time and boost productivity.

In fact, according to HubSpot’s latest State of AI report, nearly half of sales professionals currently use some form of AI at work, and more than three out of four believe that by 2030, most people will use AI or automation to assist them in their jobs.

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As such, it’s hardly surprising that University of Alabama at Birmingham professor Colleen McClure believes that “AI technologies are helping to augment every phase of the sales process, especially as it relates to complex B2B sales.”

AI is making a major impact on the world of sales — so it’s imperative for today’s salespeople to learn to leverage these new tools and technologies.

How to Monitor and Improve Sales Behaviors in Your Team

Knowing what to do (and what not to do) on an individual level is important. But what does it take to monitor and improve sales behaviors on a team? There are no shortcuts or one-size-fits-all solutions, but I’ve found that the strategies below can help managers support their teams, ultimately boosting both engagement and productivity.

1. Set clear expectations.

Your team can’t read your mind. If you want your sales reps to follow certain processes, hit certain targets, or engage in certain behaviors, it’s vital to tell them.

That means setting clear expectations and quantifying those expectations whenever possible. For example, don’t just tell people to follow up with prospects “in a timely manner.” Instead, specify exactly how quickly you expect them to follow up, perhaps even with tactical guidelines around what should go into those communications.

Michelle Richardson, Vice President of Sales Performance Research at the Brooks Group, argues that “​​in order for the members of your sales team to be successful, they must know exactly what defines ‘success’ in your organization.”

As a result, she continues, “it’s critical for sales leaders to establish and communicate expectations with their sales reps early on, and enforce them on a continual basis.” To begin to improve sales behaviors on your team, it’s essential first to define the behaviors that you expect people to engage in.

2. Target specific behaviors for improvement.

Next, once you’ve defined key expectations for your team, you can begin to target specific behaviors for improvement. After all, as President and CEO of ValueSelling Associates Julie Thomas wrote in a recent Forbes article, “To propel your sales team toward accelerated results, you must initiate behavior change.”

Importantly, I’ve learned that it’s really vital to isolate specific behaviors to focus on. While it may be tempting to try to optimize everything all at once, real progress usually happens one step at a time. So, rather than trying to push your sales team to totally overhaul their approach, choose just one or two specific behaviors to target for improvement.

For example, if you’re interested in improving customer acquisition rates, you may opt to focus on behaviors such as prospecting, setting up introductory calls, or adding new leads to the pipeline.

Then, for each of these behaviors, identify exactly how you’d like your team to improve. And remember: This may be different for different sales reps. Perhaps you’d like one person on your team to prioritize increasing the number of new leads they add to the pipeline, while another might benefit more from focusing on scheduling more intro calls.

“Ultimately,” Thomas concludes, “by prioritizing behavior change and investing in the necessary support structures, companies can unleash the full potential of their teams and drive sales success.” Being strategic — and specific — about the behaviors you want to improve will help increase the chances that you achieve your goals.

3. Track key performance metrics.

Of course, you can’t just say you want to improve a certain behavior and expect it to happen. To drive lasting progress, sales leaders must identify quantifiable metrics associated with those behaviors, and then track those performance metrics consistently.

Thomas speaks to the importance of metrics in another recent article, sharing, “Measuring both sales behaviors (leading indicators) and sales results (lagging indicators) is important. Many organizations only set goals that focus on lagging indicators, and this narrow focus hinders enablement’s ability to demonstrate its accomplishments.”

In other words, effective sales leaders recognize the importance of tracking key performance metrics on an ongoing basis, making sure to focus on both sales results and the sales behaviors that drive those results.

4. Share feedback regularly.

Finally, I’ve learned that when it comes to helping sales teams improve their performance, feedback is everything. That means celebrating achievements, but it also means being clear when people fall short of targets.

While some managers are hesitant to share constructive criticism, research from the Center for Sales Strategy found that 91% of salespeople report that they want more learning and development opportunities. In other words, sales reps are hungry for feedback — it’s up to their leaders to provide it.

As sales and marketing expert Dan Lever explains, “No matter how effective your sales training is, it’s unrealistic to expect your sales reps to achieve their best without some form of ongoing sales coaching. Achieving sales excellence requires continuous development and feedback.” Great sales leaders know that the most valuable thing they can offer their team is regular, open feedback.

Don’t Let Bad Sales Behaviors Hold You Back

As I wrote this article, I was consistently impressed with just how powerful good sales behaviors can be — and just how much harm bad sales behaviors can cause. From getting stuck in reaction mode to never saying no, bad sales behaviors can seriously hinder salespeople’s ability to succeed.

Luckily, my research also illustrated the many good sales behaviors that can help professionals thrive. In particular, I was struck by the importance of classic behaviors, such as demonstrating value and serving customers, as well as newer trends, like leveraging AI throughout the sales process.

At the end of the day, I believe that it’s the responsibility of sales managers to monitor and improve sales behaviors on their teams. By setting clear expectations, targeting specific behaviors, tracking performance metrics, and sharing feedback regularly, sales leaders can help their teams reduce harmful sales behaviors and cultivate the good sales behaviors that will help them (and their organizations) succeed.

Inside sales – already an important component for many company’s sales efforts – is expanding as more companies develop or add to this valuable sales channel.  Here are six things to consider to insure your new sales team is effective and profitable.

#1 Define the role of your inside sales team.  When considering building or adding onto your inside sales team, defining their role will guide every decision you make, including who to hire, how to compensate, and how much training and supervision will be needed.  Ask yourself: Is your inside sales team going to take just inbound calls or will they make outbound, prospecting calls as well?  Will the majority of their calls to be existing customers, as in either growing accounts or upselling, or will they also be responsible for bringing in new business?  And what part of the sales cycle will they contribute to – appointment setting, qualifying leads or closing sales?  All these considerations will help define not only the role of your inside sales team, but will make other decisions more straightforward as well.

#2 Define your sales process.  CSOinsights.com reports that you can improve the performance of your inside sales team by as much as 33% if you first define your sales process.  Surprisingly, many companies overlook this crucial step.  Developing a defined sales process, or “DSP,” simply means that you’ve identified each step a successful sale goes through, and you’ve identified the best practices of each step.  Knowing exactly what needs to happen at each step in the sales process allows you to not only teach best practice sales approaches, but it allows you to measure adherence to this best practice approach as well. 

#3 Develop effective phone scripts.  Effective phone scripts – that are rehearsed, internalized and delivered in a natural way – often mean the difference between a team who regularly hits their sales targets and those that don’t.  Because sales is a set of skills that can be taught, learned and repeated, it’s important to give your team the tools they’ll need right from the start.  Since 80% of the selling situations they run into are the same day after day, teaching your team the most effective responses to these stalls and objections, enables them to stay positive, win sales and stay empowered.

 

#4 Record your calls.  This one tip is the essence of all successful inside sales teams.  Every major company uses recordings to train, measure improvement, and help coach their teams to better performance.  Sales reps find recordings especially helpful because it gives them the awareness they don’t have while they’re on the phone and in the heat of the sale.  By stepping back and listening to opportunities missed, and to areas that can be improved, they’ll be able to make adjustments and get better. 

#5 Learn how to onboard your new reps effectively.  Many companies spend more time training on their products and services, and on their procedures, than they do preparing their new reps how to succeed on the phone.  Several things you can do include intensive role-playing sessions to help prepare new reps for the selling situations they’re about to face.  Also, playing recordings of other sales reps successfully handing common objections also teaches them not only to expect these objections, but it provides them with specific examples of how to overcome them.  This builds confidence and helps them experience success quicker – all of which increases their chances of turning into a productive, long term hire.

#6 Give your manager the training they need.  Most managers have risen through the ranks of a company, and it’s not uncommon for a top producing sales rep to find themselves promoted to sales manager.  The owner’s thinking is that if they could sell well, then they should be able to teach others to do what they could do.  Unfortunately, successful sales management involves many other skills besides just a knowledge of how to close a sale.  People skills, leadership skills, management skills, etc. are all important components in helping a sales manager be successful at hiring, training, and growing a successful inside sales team.  To prepare them for that task, you’ll need to provide your sales manager with the specific type of sales management training they’ll need.

Understanding the importance of phone scripts

We all dread it: Your phone rings at night, and you’re greeted by a person reading a script who asks you how you are doing.  “Fine,” you think, “as soon as I get rid of you!”  Telemarketers like this have given phone scripts a bad name, but don’t let them discourage you from the proper use of this highly effective – and crucial – tool for inside sales. 

Look at this this way: for those inside sales reps who say they would never be caught dead using a script, isn’t it true that if you were to record them for a week, transcribe what they say day in and day out, and then handed it back to them, you’d find that they are using a script already?  The truth is, they are saying the same thing over and over again, and that is their “script.”

The real problem with this is that what they are repeating on each call is often a bad combination of poor sales techniques.  Most sales reps have never been taught how to handle objections and stalls correctly, and as such, when they get into these situations, they usually fail.  Think about it: how does your team respond to someone when, after a presentation, the prospect says they need to talk to their partner or spouse or another party? 

Most sales reps respond to this smokescreen stall by asking them when a good time to call back would be.  Or worse, they ask to speak to the other party, completely buying in to the smokescreen and not getting to the real objection.  By using proven scripts, however, sales reps can be taught to isolate this smokescreen and thereby advance the sale. 

Here’s how they should handle the “I want to talk to someone else” objection:

“That’s perfectly O.K. (prospect).  Just out of curiosity, if they say to do whatever you think is best, and based on what we’ve gone over just now, what would you tend to do?”

This prepared, scripted, response is geared to cut through this smokescreen objection and get the prospect to reveal how they really feel about the product or service.  Any answer other than “I’d move forward” means that talking to another person is just a smokescreen.  Unless it’s explored and handled here, getting back to someone usually results in a missed sale.

This brings up two important points about all sales.  The first is that the great benefit about being in sales is that 80% or more of the selling situations, objections or stalls a sales rep faces are going to be the same, day after day, month after month.  The benefit here is that because they know what’s coming, all it takes is a little preparation to craft and deliver an effective response to them. 

But that’s a step most sales reps and management teams tend to overlook.  In fact, if you record most sales reps, you’ll find that they are, for the most part, ad-libbing on the phone.  Most reps are making it up as they go along, and this means their responses are seldom consistent or effective. 

Scripting proven, prepared responses and training on these scripts solves this problem, enabling your inside sales team to have the proven tools they need to overcome the situations they run into most often.

The other important point in sales ties into the above.  You’ve probably heard that “practice makes perfect,” right?  It’s actually not true.  Practice only makes permanent, and the problem with most inside sales teams is that they are practicing, day in and day out, ineffective responses to the same selling situations they get over and over again.  This is why such a large percentage of sales reps fail to make their revenue numbers each month.

The answer to improved and consistent sales, and to a confident sales team that does not experience call reluctance, is to equip them with, and train them on, effective, proven scripts which they can practice, internalize and then deliver naturally.  Once an inside sales rep learns how to respond effectively to the selling situations they face most often, they will be freed from thinking about what they are going to say next.  And this will allow them to begin practicing the most important sales skill of all: listening to the needs and wants of their customers.