November, 2020

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4 Rules to Help Salespeople Maximize Initial Prospect Meetings

Anthony Cole Training

How important is it that you or your sales team close more business, more quickly at higher margins?

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How to Set Sales Targets in Uncertain Times

Engage Selling

Salespeople, business leaders, and shareholders thrive on having reliable and realistic sales targets. Without them, you can’t possibly gauge performance. Setting those sales targets, more importantly, hinges on being able to consistently anticipate the future.

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A brief history of sales opportunity qualification

Membrain

The quality and accuracy of opportunity qualification is widely acknowledged to be a key predictor of future sales success - and a critical differentiator between the best salespeople and the rest.

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Project Management And Sales Methodology

Partners in Excellence

Recently, I wrote, The Next-Gen Sales Methodology. In it, I posited that project management and problem solving methods are core to a much more modern sales methodology. Be sure to read that, to understand the thinking and rationale. Let’s first understand the basics of project management. Project management is basically a work plan/process that enables us to accomplish our objectives in a disciplined, effective, and efficient manner.

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Smart Tools & Strong Teams: A People-First Approach to AI in Sales

Speaker: Matt Sunshine, CEO at The Center for Sales Strategy

AI isn’t replacing salespeople—it’s empowering them. The most forward-thinking sales organizations are using AI to enhance human performance rather than eliminate it. From coaching and messaging to prospecting and pipeline accountability, artificial intelligence is giving managers and SDRs the new tools they need to work smarter, sell better, and close more.

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Remote Selling is Here to Stay: 3 Ways to Drive Numbers Up

Force Management

Remote selling, buying, prospecting and training is here to stay. Even as lockdowns and restrictions loosen, B2B buyers continue to embrace, but also seem to prefer, remote interactions over face-to face meetings. That’s according to new research just published by McKinsey. At Force, we’ve found similar trends. Elite sales leaders are analyzing how well they’re supporting their salespeople in the remote environment, and making strategic changes to drive continued success or improve numbers.

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Selling Over Video - The Six Things You Must Do Next to Improve Your Look

Understanding the Sales Force

At this point, most salespeople have accepted that the majority of their sales "calls" will take place over Zoom or similar video platform. However, accepting the reality of video selling, and maximizing that video selling for effectiveness, are two completely different things. In today's article, we'll discuss the next set of steps you should take so that selling over video can be as effective as possible.

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Customers Don’t Want to Deal With You | Sales Strategies

Engage Selling

Recently, Gartner shared intriguing research to a group of us sales experts.

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Forecasts are about the deals, not the number!

Membrain

This is one of those topics I wish I could just put to bed and ignore–yet it keeps rearing it’s ugly head. We continue to get forecasting wrong, at least for complex B2B sales.

B2B
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Action Plans, The Well Structured “To-Do”

Partners in Excellence

My life seems to be spent in one meeting after another. Reviews of all types, planning sessions, problem solving sessions, training—you name it, I go from meeting to meeting. In most of those meetings, we are trying to address some issue–how to win a deal, how to address performance issues, how to address organizational/structural issues, how to address new opportunities or problems.

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How New B2B Sales Methodology Trends Might Impact Your Initiatives

Force Management

The way you launch and implement a new sales methodology is critical to its success. In fact, it may be even more important than the methodology you choose to adopt in the first place. That’s the findings from the latest study from MetaCX. Researchers surveyed 400 revenue leaders within B2B SaaS companies on sales methodology trends. Not surprisingly, the research shows that application powers success.

B2B
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How to Coach Reps on Overcoming Sales Objections with Confidence

Speaker: Brendan Sweeney, VP of Global Sales and David Phelan, Account Manager

In a world where buyers are more informed and objections are more nuanced, confidence isn't optional—it’s a competitive advantage. In high-stakes conversations, knowing how to handle pushback can make or break the deal. Join industry experts Brendan Sweeney and David Phelan for a behind-the-scenes look at how teams are transforming sales coaching with real-time feedback, objection-handling role plays, and pre-call preparation that actually sticks.

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What Order Should You Hire Your Management Team In?

SaaStr

IME, rough order to make hires in: VPM: $0.2m ARR VPS: $1-$1.5m ARR VPCS: $2m ARR VPP: $3m-$4m ARR VPE: $5m-$6m ARR CFO: $10m ARR COO: $20m ARR. More here: [link]. — Jason BeKind Lemkin (@jasonlk) July 21, 2019. The other day I was meeting with a great CEO who had raised a modest seed round. Enough to invest, but not enough to go crazy with. He’d found several good First VP candidates, in particular, a strong first head of marketing and a strong first head of product.

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It's Goal Setting Time, Start Here

Anthony Cole Training

H. Personal Goal Setting from Anthony Cole Training on Vimeo.

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The 5 x Key Areas Of Sales Professionalism

The 5% Institute

Sales can be won or lost based on how you present and carry yourself – which is why sales professionalism is key to your success. But what exactly is sales professionalism? And what ingredients are needed to carry and present yourself as a true sales professional? In this article, we’ll explore what sales professionalism is, as well as the five key factors you need to position yourself as the easy choice for your potential clients.

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How to get a free trial of Membrain

Membrain

When we launched Membrain, offering a free trial was not the right move for us. We felt that we needed to educate customers during the sales cycle because our offering was too different from traditional CRM platforms.

CRM
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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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Templates, Scripts, Context, and Variability

Partners in Excellence

I read a fascinating discussion led by Jeff Molander on the Copy Culture. Much of the discussion revolved around how we look at best practice, finding things to copy or emulate to improve the ability for others to achieve higher levels of performance. We develop scripts and templates, that help us leverage those practices and experiences that have worked, minimizing those that don’t work.

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5 Sales Attributes We’re Thankful For

Force Management

The team at Force Management loves sales. We love salespeople. We know good salespeople when we see them. We are thankful for the ones who get it. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, we are sharing a little gratitude on The Command Center blog.

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5 Reasons to Actually Have Board Meetings

SaaStr

I held off for 6+ years and 3000+ Quora answers on writing a post on Board Meetings. Why? Because every investor in the world writes lengthy posts on How to Have a Great Board Meeting. How to Have a Great Pre-Board Meeting. How to Have a Great Board Meeting Week. Etc. etc. etc. etc. VCs, once they have been doing it a while, basically become professional Board Members, and they write a lot about that.

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Sales Advice As We Approach The End of The Year

Engage Selling

I don’t know many people whose 2020 went “according to plan.” As we approach the end of the year, here’s some sales advice to be considering right now. 1.

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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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How To Use The Intent Statement For Sales Success

The 5% Institute

Something we teach Sales Professionals and Business Owners that make their sales conversations a lot more successful, is an intent statement – also known as a pre-frame. An intent statement is a game changer. It positions you as a trusted advisor , builds trust, gets you the information you need to close the sale, and even eliminates some objections.

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A next gen sales methodology

Membrain

Recently, I wrote Which Sales Methodology , suggesting the 21 plus sales methodologies may not be sufficient as we look to the future. I’m not sure I’ll present a methodology for the future, but I will suggest design principles for a Next Gen Sales Methodology.

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Is your data telling a story?

Heinz Marketing

By Payal Parikh , Director of Client Engagement at Heinz Marketing. With technological advances we’ve seen over the last two decades on data visualization and integrating data from various sources, there are still gaps in how we process that data, how we present it, and how we tell the story behind it. In my early career days I had been guilty of presenting all the data I could find into ‘pretty’ charts and would scroll through my slides in a room full of executives.

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Create a “Content Playground” that’s Fun for Buyers (and Lucrative for You)

ConversionXL

I recently faced a familiar scenario: My team wanted to buy a new SaaS tool, so my boss asked me how much budget to request. I had no idea about pricing, so I Googled around and asked for pricing tiers from several vendors in the space. Unfortunately, I received a handful of all too common, unhelpful responses. “Let’s jump on a call for a demo and maybe we can talk about pricing at the end.

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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 Interesting Learnings From Shopify. At $3+ Billion in ARR.

SaaStr

Shopify has grown so quickly, it’s tough to even comprehend. From A $1.6B run rate a year ago to $3.2B today. Wow. Zoom is the most obvious “Covid Beneficiary”, but Shopify in many ways isn’t far behind: Ok the issues marching to $4b in ARR are a bit removed from what most founders experience. But, there are still many interesting things we can learn from Shopify, especially since it sells to so many SMBs, has been late to go upmarket, and combines a payments/fintech e

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5 Ways to Influence Virtual Relationships with Buyers

RAIN Group

The in-person buying and selling experience usually goes something like this: You show up to your buyer's office, where they greet you and offer you coffee. You accept, and walk together to the kitchen, discussing your trip in and how the day's going. You chat around the coffee pot for a few minutes about the local restaurant you visited last night.

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What Is Warm Calling & How To Do It Right

The 5% Institute

Warm calling is an effective prospecting activity when done correctly; so, what is warm calling, and how can you do it effectively? In this article, you’ll learn what is warm calling, as well as how to make your cold calls into warm calls. What Is Warm Calling? So, what is warm calling exactly? Put simply; warm calling is a call to a prospective client when they already know you exist, and you’ve already made contact with them in some way.

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What if outstanding service is stunting your growth?

Membrain

Everybody knows that great customer service is key to retaining and growing accounts, right? As an industry, we believe this so strongly that we invest countless hours and boundless resources into developing customer success teams whose sole job is to ensure that clients are so happy that they continue to buy and increase spending.

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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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Is Your Product Marketing Problem a Product Problem?

Heinz Marketing

Guest post by Caroline Tien-Spalding CMO at Aptology. As of this writing, there are over 211,000 jobs on Indeed in the category of “product marketing.” On the flip side, there are only 19,000 jobs under the “demand generation” category. How can it be that the need for marketing a product can be so much higher than pipeline creation and lead gen? . The answer is surprisingly (and sadly) simple: Companies are building products and trying to fit them into a marketplace that never asked for that sol

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What Does This Metric Mean To Me?

Partners in Excellence

We measure a lot of stuff in sales. We have all sorts of pipeline metrics, activity metrics, prospecting metrics, account, territory, retention, renewal, mix, margin, and endless other metrics. We have an entire alphabet soup of metrics, including MQL, SQL, ARR, ACV, TCV, NPS, MRR, LTV, CAC, Churn, and XYZ (OK, I made that up—I think). We couldn’t manager our personal or organizational performance, without metrics, though, I’ve observed we tend to have too many metrics, and tho

SQL
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The Top 10 Mistakes First Time SaaS Founders Make

SaaStr

Second-timers know the playbook and can execute against it faster. But often times, they also have a bit of healthy skepticism, a bit of baggage, from the last time. First-timers often know very little, but are baggage free. That can be very powerful. I’ve had a chance to watch a whole cohort of SaaS first-time founders go from $1m to $10m ARR in 5 quarters or less (more on that here ) and just been awestruck by how much better than me they are as founders, and how much better they̵

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Client Gift Giving Ideas

Engage Selling

We’re approaching that time of year. And while this year will likely look much different than any year in recent memory, here are some client gift giving ideas to keep in touch with your customer base.

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New Research-Backed Strategies to Empower Managers as Culture & Engagement Leaders

Speaker: Beth Sunshine, SVP, Up Your Culture

When culture isn’t consistently lived out across the organization, engagement suffers—and it often starts with a disconnect at the top. In this session, Beth Sunshine, SVP of Up Your Culture at The Center for Sales Strategy, will reveal how HR and executive leaders can close the gap between vision and execution by equipping frontline and mid-level managers to become culture carriers.