Trending Articles

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Dealing with Rejection in Sales: SW3

Anthony Cole Training

Salespeople have to prospect. That's the truth. Salespeople can find their prospects in lots of different ways: introductions, social media, networking, lists, internal referrals from business partners, cold calling, pre-approach email, association memberships, and business networking groups. What is also true is that no matter how a salesperson gets a name, the next step is to contact them.

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The 2025 Selling Year – Half Gone or Half Remaining?

Sales Pop!

As we wind down 2025’s second selling quarter, we can check our performance versus our YTD quota to see exactly where we stand. That’s the beauty of selling and the pay-for-performance lifestyle, isn’t it? There’s no mystery about where you stand. Your YTD number is there in bright lights and it’s reflected not only in your compensation but in how you feel about yourself.

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3 Mistakes Revenue Leaders are Currently Making with AI

Force Management

The AI revolution is coming fast – it’s reshaping industries, redefining workflows, and promising unprecedented growth to sales organizations. Yet, many leaders are hesitant to make a big bet on AI. The wrong move could cost you time, revenue, and credibility. With the right foundational strategy and the right tool, AI should be a sales force multiplier enabling your teams to sell faster and more proficiently, bringing more value to customers and more impact to revenue.

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How strong brands build stronger B2B pipelines

Martech

B2B marketers are under pressure to deliver pipeline, but the old playbook of MQL chasing, generic content and paid ads isn’t cutting it anymore. To drive growth in an AI-saturated, attention-poor market, we need to refocus on what really moves the needle: building a brand that stands out, connects with buyers and earns trust. The limits of MQLs in an AI-first world Traditional, MQL-focused lead generation isn’t doing well.

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Welcome to the Future of Hospitality: Smart Rooms Start Here

Speaker: Jady West, VP of Hospitality & Chris Bennett, Head of Sales & Engineering

The modern hotel room is no longer just a place to stay—it’s an experience to remember. Today’s guests expect seamless 5G connectivity, personalized comfort, and high-tech convenience. From AI-powered smart room controls to in-room entertainment and app-based services, technology is redefining hospitality from the inside out. In this new session featuring industry pros Jady West and Chris Bennett, we’ll explore how high-speed, high-bandwidth connectivity powers the innovations that are enabling

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Dear SaaStr: How Does a Founder Mindset Change As You Go From Startup to Scaleup?

SaaStr

Dear SaaStr: How Does a Founder Mindset Change As You Go From Startup to Scaleup? The big changes I see: Moving (Over Time) From Hustler to Strategist. Though Stay a Hustler, Too 😉 In the early days, you’re in the trenches—selling, building, and doing whatever it takes to survive. But as you scale, you have to step back and focus on strategy. You move from being the doer to the leader, managing teams and making high-level decisions.

Growth 107
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Our Models Limit Us, Dangerously

Partners in Excellence

We build all sorts of models to help us understand our customers, markets, competition. We look at changes, disruptions, building them into our models. They help us simplify and focus our efforts and initiatives. They provide a framework each of us understands, enabling our teams to maximize performance. Eventually, they provide the operating framework guiding our strategies and execution.

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What Is a Target Market? How To Identify Your Ideal Customers

Salesforce

Imagine trying to sell hiking boots to someone who never steps off the pavement? Or pitching pet food to someone without a pet. Sounds like a waste of time, right? No matter how great your product is, if you’re talking to the wrong people, it’s a lost cause. Yet, many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) fall into this trap. They try to sell to everyone, hoping something sticks.

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Salesforce unveils agentic Marketing Cloud Next

Martech

Salesforce today introduced Marketing Cloud Next, a significant update to its marketing platform that embeds autonomous AI agents across the entire customer funnel. The company says the product represents a shift from traditional campaign-based marketing to its much-touted “agentic marketing,” where AI agents act independently to execute campaigns, personalize customer interactions and optimize performance.

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The VP of AI Trap: Why Hiring One Exec Won’t Transform Your Company. In Fact, It May Make It Worse.

SaaStr

I see it happening everywhere. Board meetings where someone inevitably asks, “Don’t we need a VP of AI?” I saw a term sheet the other day where a leading VC firm reserved $1m of the round … for hiring a “VP of AI” Leadership teams scrambling to post job descriptions for “Head of Artificial Intelligence.” Recruiters cold-calling anyone with “machine learning” on their LinkedIn.

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Top Sales Pros Know When to Exit Bad Deals (Money Monday)

Sales Gravy

Have you ever been working on a deal where you had this feeling, this intuition, this Spidey sense—something in the back of your mind telling you that this wasn't going to close? That you were going to waste your time? Maybe you had one of the stakeholders who was against you—an enemy. There was a naysayer who kept calling you out. Perhaps the stakeholders weren't engaged, or the incumbent vendor was so integrated into the organization that it would be very difficult to displace them.

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Breaking The Commerce Bottleneck: Your SAP Exit Plan Starts Now

Speaker: Jason Cottrell and Gireesh Sahukar

Retailers know the clock is ticking–legacy SAP Commerce support ends in 2026. Legacy platforms are becoming a liability burdened by complexity, rigidity, and mounting operational costs. But modernization isn’t just about swapping out systems, it’s about preparing for a future shaped by real-time interactions, AI powered buying assistants, and flexible commerce architecture.

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Podcast - The Chemistry of Coaching with Wesleyne Whittaker

Membrain

In this episode of The Art and Science of Complex Sales , Paul Fuller is joined by Wesleyne Whittaker , founder of Transformed Sales , a former chemist turned international sales leader. The conversation unpacks what it means to transform sales teams from within, with a sharp focus on leadership accountability, mindset and skill-building, especially in the often-overlooked world of manufacturing and distribution sales.

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Prompts Won’t Save You! The Thinking Underlying The Prompt Will….

Partners in Excellence

AI is embedded into virtually everything I do, every day. Two windows are always open on my computer. One for Claude, one for ChatGPT (I’m experimenting with others). As I mull over issues, questions, ideas, these tools are critical thought partners. When I want a different point of view, I often turn to the LLMs to help me. Over time, I’ve developed a rich library of prompts I use to help me look at new things.

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Why high-consideration industries need AI optimization

Martech

Every jump forward in technology changes the consumer journey — sometimes in subtle ways, other times more dramatically. Online searches and interactions are changing fast, and ignoring this shift could hurt your brand. Whether it’s Google’s AI Overviews or AI Mode, Perplexity, models like ChatGPT o3 and o4-mini or one of a dozen other options, AI’s popularity significantly impacts how consumers seek solutions.

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Dear SaaStr: We Have More Than 20% Churn Our First Month. What Should We Do?

SaaStr

Dear SaaStr: We Have More Than 20% Churn Our First Month. What Should We Do? This is pretty common in the prosumer space and especially in mobile subscription apps. And even where you don’t see 20% churn the first month with SMBs, it often lurks, because most B2B apps in SaaS don’t even get 80% of their SMBs activation the first month. This is a classic onboarding and activation problem.

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Automation, Evolved: Your New Playbook for Smarter Knowledge Work

Speaker: Frank Taliano

Documents are the backbone of enterprise operations, but they are also a common source of inefficiency. From buried insights to manual handoffs, document-based workflows can quietly stall decision-making and drain resources. For large, complex organizations, legacy systems and siloed processes create friction that AI is uniquely positioned to resolve.

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5 Keys to Account Management Success; 10 Keys to a Strong Customer Partnership

Understanding the Sales Force

This article sounds like a beast, but it’s one of the shortest I’ve ever written. My backup title was Adventures in Account Management , but I didn’t want to get too cute. Here we go! I was at the optometrist’s office, waiting for my broken glasses to be fixed, when SHE walked in. She approached the receptionist and said, “I’m the new rep for a frame company, and I stopped by to introduce myself.

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Is Getting Better Good Enough?

Adaptive Business Services

We have probably all heard the phrase “Good, Better, and Best”. This is typically used in product comparisons. The same might hold true when related to performance. Let’s take sales as an example. While we all want to be the “best”, what if your current status is only “good”? Is being the best too far away or is just getting “better” the appropriate first step?

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Middle Managers: The Overlooked Backbone of Organizations

RAIN Group

75% of managers are overwhelmed, according to Gartner, and the pressure is only intensifying. Hybrid teams, relentless change, talent churn, rising expectations, and AI are fundamentally changing the structure of work itself. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 20% of organizations will use AI to flatten their structures, eliminating more than half of today’s middle management roles.

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Where are marketing teams under-utilizing AI?

Martech

In MarTech’s “MarTechBot explains it all” feature, we pose a question about marketing to our very own MarTechBot , which is trained on the MarTech website archives and has access to the broader internet. Q: Where are marketing teams under-utilizing AI? While many marketing teams are increasingly adopting AI technologies, several applications remain under-utilized.

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Get Higher-Quality B2B Leads That Convert!

B2B marketers face a number of challenges, including: continuously generating great leads converting leads to active sales prospects finding vendors that deliver real results Aggregage has proven content syndication, webinar, online advertising and intent signal marketing programs that deliver higher-quality leads. More than 700 companies have already benefited from our programs.

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Dear SaaStr: When Should I Hire My First AE?

SaaStr

Dear SaaStr: When Should I Hire My First AE? We’re said this many times over the years at SaaStr, and it’s as true today as then: You should hire your first AE (Account Executive) once you’ve closed at least 10-20 customers yourself as the founder. Not before. And even then, you have to stay in founder-led sales mode until you have 1-2 sales execs that are scaled and really hitting quota.

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The Value IS The FRICTION!

Partners in Excellence

We are obsessed with eliminating the friction! We want to create frictionless experiences. We fetishize efficiency. We leverage technology to do the work. We strive for easy. But what if we were to shift our point of view? What if we recognized that friction isn’t our enemy, but it’s our source of value? Permit me, for a moment, to revert back to my training as a physicist.

GTM 62
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How to Prep Like a Pro and “Close” Like a Human

SalesProInsider

Great sales conversations don’t just happen. They’re crafted. Ask any top-performing financial advisor their secret to closing more clients and you’ll hear a consistent theme: preparation. But here’s the kicker: most advisors do prepare. They prep to share data. They prep their questions. They might even rehearse their pitch. What they often don’t prep for?

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Sell More by Understanding this God, Garden, and Baseball Analogy

Understanding the Sales Force

I know what you’re thinking from my title: Baseball Gods meet in the Garden of Eden. Thankfully, no. Instead, some thoughts from the weekend… While sitting in Church I realized that belief in God is a lot like belief in the sales process. It’s about Faith. Everyone who attends believes in God. Some believe in God but do not attend. Some are there every week.

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State of AI in Sales & Marketing 2025

AI adoption is reshaping sales and marketing. But is it delivering real results? We surveyed 1,000+ GTM professionals to find out. The data is clear: AI users report 47% higher productivity and an average of 12 hours saved per week. But leaders say mainstream AI tools still fall short on accuracy and business impact. Download the full report today to see how AI is being used — and where go-to-market professionals think there are gaps and opportunities.

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Why SaaS vendors must shift from transactions to embedded partnerships

Martech

The martech landscape is evolving rapidly — and creative operations is increasingly at the center of that transformation. As marketing teams scale their ambitions, expand channels and accelerate production, the operational layer supporting creative work has become vastly more complex. What was once a simple SaaS transaction — buy a license, get trained, start using — no longer fits.

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Is AI Penetration … Slowing Down? Ramp Says Possibly

SaaStr

New spending data from Ramp reveals a possible trend: end user AI adoption may be hitting its first growth slow down. The AI adoption party might be slowing down—at least temporarily. Fresh data from Ramp’s AI Index suggests that the meteoric rise in business AI spending might be showing signs of deceleration, raising questions about whether we’re witnessing market maturation or beginning to hit a potential adoption ceiling: The numbers tell a nuanced story.

Growth 112
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Embracing The “Messiness” Of Buying And Selling

Membrain

As human beings and business professionals we crave structure and order in everything we do. We build carefully architected sales processes. Our customers draft detailed project plans, guiding them on their journey.

Sell 69
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Data-Driven Forecasting and Budget Justification – A CMO’s Guide to Speaking CFO Language (Part 1)

Heinz Marketing

By Maria Geokezas Chief Operating Officer at Heinz Marketing One of the fastest ways to a CFO’s heart is through data-driven forecasting. For CMOs championing new GTM initiatives, being able to forecast pipeline and revenue with accuracy – and tie marketing spend directly to those future outcomes – is paramount. CFOs, as stewards of financial stability, value a sure thing.

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The Intersection of AI and Sales: Personalization Without Compromise

Speaker: Jesse Hunter and Brynn Chadwick

Today’s buyers expect more than generic outreach–they want relevant, personalized interactions that address their specific needs. For sales teams managing hundreds or thousands of prospects, however, delivering this level of personalization without automation is nearly impossible. The key is integrating AI in a way that enhances customer engagement rather than making it feel robotic.

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My Top Tips – Getting Your Call Returned

Engage Selling

By popular demand – my three top tips of the last year… This week – Getting Your Call Returned! Tired of your voicemails being ignored, then this video is for … The post My Top Tips – Getting Your Call Returned first appeared on Colleen Francis - The Sales Leader.

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Bridging the gap between mental availability and momentum in B2B

Martech

In B2B, complex buying decisions are rarely made on impulse. Yet, many marketing programs still focus almost exclusively on capturing short-term demand — a costly mistake. To build lasting momentum and drive future growth, you need a strategy that connects mental availability to buying triggers. A continuum approach does just that. Marketing beyond the 5%: Reaching buyers across the entire journey Buying cycles for complex solutions are lengthy, ranging from nine months to several years.

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5 Interesting Learnings from Circle at $2.3 Billion in “ARR”

SaaStr

So Circle is the latest tech IPO and it’s not really B2B or SaaS per se — it’s a fintech that issues and manages “stablecoins” Cypto that converts 1:1 to U.S. dollars. But there are still lessons to learn, and it’s great to see the IPO markets truly re-opened: $2.3 Billion Revenue Run Rate Growing a stunning 60% $16 Billion valuation, so about 8x revenue We're back to IPOs seeming normal again That's quietly a big deal And a good thing [link] —

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The AI-powered buying experience: How DSRs accelerate deals

Highspot

What happens when your buyers move faster than your sales process? That’s the question at the heart of Highspot’s recent webinar, The AI-Powered Buying Experience: How Digital Sales Rooms Accelerate Deals. The way people buy has changed. Today’s buyers are informed, decisive, and selective about how they spend their time. If your sales process can’t keep up, your buyers won’t wait.

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From Rigid To Resilient: Why Enterprises Need Modular Commerce Now

Speaker: Benjamin Woll, Tiffany Spizzo, and Jaime Santos Alcón

Enterprise commerce is at an inflection point. Rigid, monolithic platforms slow brands down, but a full replatforming is disruptive and costly. Modular architecture offers a flexible, scalable alternative - allowing enterprise brands to modernize without ripping and replacing their entire stack. Learn how a composable approach helps modernize commerce stacks while maintaining control over critical systems.