September, 2016

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Top 14 Truths About Managing Salespeople & Increasing Sales

Anthony Cole Training

If you’ve followed my blog for any period of time, you know that there are several phrases that I use when discussing sales outcomes, sales management, recruitment and talent development:

Sales 150
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13 Must Read Sales Books to Become a Badass Sales Person [Updated]

A Sales Guy

A few years ago I created a list of the best books sales people should read to become a badass. You can see the list here. The list included some amazing books. What made that list so special was the surprising number of books that WEREN’T sales books. The original list of must read sales books for sales badasses included some books that address traits and skills that are critical to sales, but aren’t solely sales related.

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PXL: A Better Way to Prioritize Your A/B Tests

ConversionXL

If you’re doing it right, you probably have a large list of A/B testing ideas in your pipeline. Some good ones (data-backed or result of a careful analysis), some mediocre ideas, some that you don’t know how to evaluate. We can’t test everything at once, and we all have a limited amount of traffic. You should have a way to prioritize all these ideas in a way that gets you to test the highest potential ideas first.

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The Buyer Journey - Myth, Reality, Hybrid, or an Avoidable Part of Selling?

Understanding the Sales Force

The Buyer Journey is front and center again. Dan McDade posted the second in his 3-part series on Lies and Myths and part 2 is about the Buyer Journey. 8 Sales Experts weighed in with their thoughts about the Buyer Journey and you can read those here. Don't miss Mike Weinberg's comment - I love it! It's pretty clear where the sales experts stand, so where is all of the Buyer Journey data coming from if not the sales experts?

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How to Improve Email Deliverability and Optimize Each Send

Learn how to optimize email deliverability and drive greater email ROI. What lands your email in the customer’s inbox? Understanding those factors, otherwise known as email deliverability, is critical to getting the most return on your campaign investments. But the “rules” around which factors land you in the spam folder aren’t always easy to keep up with.

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How Do I Find The Best Salespeople?

Partners in Excellence

I was just talking to an outstanding Vice President of Sales. The solutions his company develops address very complex issues in “manufacturing.” (I’m using that as a surrogate for what he is really doing.) It’s a complex sale. It’s an early stage company, they are starting to have great success and are closing some very large, intriguing deals.

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10 Ways to Prospect with Integrity

The Sales Hunter

When you prospect with integrity, you will get customers who have integrity. Think about what the previous sentence means. Integrity is an asset that is undervalued and underappreciated in today’s business world, yet it means more than ever. Today there are too many people using stupid tactics to prospect that lack integrity. I certainly realize integrity […].

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How To Close In The 21st Century

A Sales Guy

For years we’ve looked at “closing” as a thing you do to someone. We’ve looked at it like an event that happens at the end of the sales cycle. Here’s the problem with that. It doesn’t work. If you’re trying to “close” someone at the end of the sales process, if you’re treating the close like an event your not selling and you’re not in a good sales place.

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Were This Year’s Most Controversial Logo Changes Effective? [Original Research]

ConversionXL

What’s the value in a logo? It’s a question that’s been asked a lot lately, especially with companies like Instagram, Uber, and Google drawing both ire and admiration from their new logo changes. We all have an opinion (some have strong opinions) on these changes, but no one really measures their effectiveness – which is what matters really. How do we answer the question: is your logo actually working?

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How This Awful Cold, Voicemail Message Could Have Actually Worked

Understanding the Sales Force

The timing on these two events could not have been more perfect! Both occurred last week and I wanted to share them with you today. First came Dan McDade's article - the first of three parts - on whether cold calling is dead. He asked a number of sales experts to weight in and articulate whether it is truth or a lie. It was very well done and you'll want to read it.

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Account Based Everything Re-Imagined

Partners in Excellence

I love the emerging focus on Account Based Everything. The principles of account based sales and marketing are fantastic–actually taking me back to my foundations in selling, where everything we did was account based. Since the terminology around Account Based Everything changes with every person who talks about it, let me outline what I think it is.

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Brick & Mortar Retail Relevance: How to Stay Ahead of the Curve

Speaker: Jay Black, Senior Account Executive

Let's set the record straight: in-store retail isn't dead - it's evolving! Faced with the digital age and the demands of omnichannel shopping, some retailers are thriving while others are struggling to adapt. Join Jay Black in this exclusive session as he explores the strategies that set successful stores apart, including: Crafting unique and unforgettable in-store experiences 🛍️ Mastering the art of retail demands 🛒 Navigating inventory challenges in today's climate 📦 an

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How to Be More Interesting

Engage Selling

Have you ever wondered what makes you and your business more interesting to your prospects and clients? It isn’t hourly updates on social media or a picture with a celebrity.

Clients 98
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Variability of Performance – A Side Story

Anthony Cole Training

I’ve been writing about solutions to variability of performance and, as often happens, I see/find something connected to the theme of sales or sales management.

Sales 150
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#heykeenan 27 How Do You Motivate the Unmotivated?

A Sales Guy

I spent Labor Day on Cape Cod, this year. I spent it on Great Island. It’s one of my favorite places to relax and enjoy myself (and not shave ). It’s absolutely gorgeous, peaceful and serene. We were supposed to shoot #heykeenan 27 before I left for vacation, but we just didn’t get it done, so I figured, what the heck. I’ll do it myself from the beach.

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A Primer on Wireframing for Conversion Optimization

ConversionXL

If you’re part of a conversion optimization team, a big part of that job is communicating treatments to other specialists on your team (analysts, designers). Depending on the scope of the changes, you could use a few different tools and methods. Almost always, though, this includes wireframing – and it helps to be able to do wireframing decently well.

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How to Stay Competitive in the Evolving State of Martech

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

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Three Ways to Build Your Brand as a Leader

Score More Sales

Next week I’m hosting a conference in Boston called Rev it Up – Sales Leader Summit. Our opening keynote will be best-selling author Dorie Clark speaking about building your brand as a sales leader. Dorie’s most recent book is called Stand Out – How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It.

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Getting The Most Out Of Dreamforce

Partners in Excellence

In a few weeks the annual migration to Dreamforce will occur. I’ve only been to a couple of events bigger than Dreamforce, but it’s an “interesting experience.” Somehow, I’m certain the city of San Francisco sits a little lower in the water with the 150-180K people that converge on Moscone Center during the few days. I was asked my tips for getting the most out of Dreamforce.

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A Salesperson's Terrible Reaction to Good Sales Training

Understanding the Sales Force

You won't have to read much in today's post because I included most of it in a short video. This is a story about a salesperson who reacted extremely badly to some great training tips and disrupted the training. His thinking is so representative of salespeople that struggle, and is the kind of thinking which, if shared with others, could derail an entire sales force!

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What We Get a Chance to Do

Anthony Cole Training

My wife and I just came back from Minong, Wisconsin where we visited with our friends, Barb and Gerald O’Dell. Gerald, Barb and I go back a long way, over 30 years. We all met and worked together at Iowa State University. We parted ways for awhile until Gerald became the athletic director at the University of Cincinnati. Later, Gerald, a man of great integrity, decided it was time to leave UC and leave athletics for good.

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

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

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Give vs Take — #Spazz Out 8

A Sales Guy

The intra-webs have brought us closer and made connecting with people easier than ever. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, you name it, you can get a message out to anyone, I mean anyone in seconds. It doesn’t mean LeBron James, President Obama or Kim Kardashian will read it, or respond, there is however, a chance they will at least see it.

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Empathic Design: Mapping Your Brain, Brand, and Data

ConversionXL

What’s the best way to increase conversions? Apart from basic usability fixes, aligning your messaging and design with your users’ motivations is a good bet. Problem is, discovering user motivations is one of those things that is much easier said than done. There are, however, research techniques that purport to do just that. Empathic design is one such technique, an underutilized facet of qualitative research.

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SaaS Sales Reps Are Bad At Explaining

Score More Sales

When you are in professional, B2B sales and go to a lot of business conferences you see a lot of trade show booths and marketing tables. These tables and booths typically have large monitors or big screen displays with whatever SaaS sales tool that booth is promoting.

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The Lost Opportunity Of Focusing On Customers With “Needs”

Partners in Excellence

It’s always terrible to start a blog post with a disclaimer. It’s great to have customers with “needs.” Implicit in this, is they have recognized they have a problem or opportunity and are somewhere on the path to addressing that—including searching for solutions. These customers with “needs” are great. Our ability to engage them is much easier, since they are more likely to be interested in learning about how we can address those needs.

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The Battle of the Authoring Tools: A 10-Point Comparison for Picking the Right One

Speaker: Chris Paxton McMillin, President of D3 Training Solutions

There are plenty of great authoring tools for developing eLearning, but the one you select could directly impact your course's outcomes. Depending upon your learners’ needs and your organization’s performance goals, you could be overlooking considerations that impact the both effectiveness of your courses and how long it takes to finish them. From general capabilities to specific workflow structures, some aspects are critical when it comes to learning objectives and deadlines.

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Sales 102 - The Pitch Deck, the Price Reduction and the Data

Understanding the Sales Force

Recently I met with a CEO whose salespeople were not closing enough business. We had just evaluated their sales force and I had the answers as to why their sales were so underwhelming. Before we could explain what was causing their problem, the CEO said something along the lines of, "We are going to create a new pitch deck and reduce our prices. That will solve the problem!".

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What to Trust When Evaluating Sales Performance and Talent

Anthony Cole Training

When evaluating sales performance - past, present and future - it’s difficult to figure out what information or data to trust when making decisions. Just like investments where past performance is not a guarantee of future results, past sales performance does not guarantee anything for the future. It gives you some, not all, insight into sales results, but it doesn’t tell you how the result was created.

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Why Your Prospects Don’t Respond to Your Cold Emails and How to Fix It!

A Sales Guy

There is a science to getting emails read. There is a science to how our brain works and how we engage with email and if you want to understand that science, you’re gonna like this post. Getting emails read is one of the greatest challenges in sales today. As more and more people abandon the phone, email has become our go-to communication tool, yet most sales people suck at emails and so do their marketing department.

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When a Pricing Objection Isn’t | Sales Tips

Engage Selling

I have been spending a lot of time in workshops so far this year and the number one thing sales reps ask me is how you move beyond the pricing objection and here is what I’m discovering.

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How to Leverage Intent Data for Better Outcomes

Speaker: Susan Spencer, Principal of Spencer Communications

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

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Are You “Opportunity Starved?”

The Sales Hunter

Too many salespeople find themselves without enough opportunities to keep their pipeline filled. One of the most brilliant salespeople I know and good friend Anthony Iannarino and I recently discussed the problem people have with prospecting. If we’re not willing to hold ourselves accountable to prospect, then why should we expect our prospecting to be […].

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The Perfect Close

Partners in Excellence

I don’t write a lot of book reviews for sales or marketing books. This Fall, however, there are a number that are really noteworthy, so I’ll be sharing brief reviews of them. I tend not be a great reviewer, because to do a review, I actually dive deep into the book. Inevitably, I find things that I question, things the author may have handled better, things I think are dead wrong.

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Salesperson's Terrible Reaction Part 2

Understanding the Sales Force

Yesterday I posted a very short article/video where I discussed one salesperson's reaction to a great sales role play. I received a number of emails telling me how helpful the video, story and lessons were. I was also asked a number of questions and was even contacted by that salesperson's VP of Sales. The Sales VP learned a lot from that interchange and replay as well, and suggested that EQ, or emotional intelligence could have been a factor in what happened.

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The Solutions to Variability of Performance in Sales Teams, pt.1

Anthony Cole Training

I have a question for you: Why does variability exist?

Sales 169
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5 Inspiring B2B Marketing Campaigns to Take Yours to the Next Level

Your next big B2B marketing idea starts here. Get inspired with these five successful B2B marketing campaigns. Ready to generate more leads, interest, and revenue with your B2B marketing? In this comprehensive eBook, you’ll get: In-depth studies of five successful B2B marketing campaigns spanning a wide range of industries Key takeaways and lessons from each story to implement in your own strategy Resources to help your own B2B marketing thrive By submitting this form, you agree to have your con