Salesforce

MAY 15, 2023

We thought selling would be easier after the pandemic. Instead, we’ve been hearing “no” more often. Customers are fearing for their jobs, tightening their belts, and “ starting to freak out.” It’s no surprise that almost 70% of reps agree that selling has gotten harder. After talking with other sellers, and using Dale Carnegie’s principle to “get them saying yes, immediately,” I’ve come up with four key sales tips that can help you land

Sales 98

Sales Up-sell Trust Sell 98

Iannarino

MAY 13, 2023

One of the most important things about the One-Up approach you find in Elite Sales Strategies: A Guide to Being One-Up, Creating Value, and Becoming Truly Consultative , is that it positions you as an expert and authority on the results you help your clients improve. Leaders and decision-makers don’t want to buy from a salesperson; they want to buy from a business advisor who has experience.

Clients 259

Clients Sales Consult Trust 259

Sales Hacker

MAY 15, 2023

Running a startup is easier said than done, especially when you have a tight budget and limited resources. It’s hard to know when you’re ready to hire a sales team — and the consequences can make or break your startup. Perhaps not surprisingly, about 40% of new companies go out of business because they run out of cash or fail to raise capital, reports CB Insights.

Sales 77

Sales Pitch B2B Minimum Viable Product 77

Force Management

MAY 18, 2023

The Chief Financial Officer is an influential voice in any sales conversation. If you’re looking to drive growth for your organization, your reps must be able to influence the CFO to close higher-value deals. Recently, due to economic pressure and budget constraints, many sales teams are seeing CFOs get involved in every deal, regardless of size. The ability to sell to the CFO is now a crucial skill every seller needs in order to hit revenue targets in today’s market.

Sell 118

Sell Conversion Sales Growth 118

Speaker: Andrew Regan, Managing Partner at BlueSeed Retail Ltd.

Did you know that 70% of new retail technology fails to deliver expected benefits and can often decrease customer value, service, and experience? With that in mind, how can we empower our store associates to leverage new technology to optimize the customer experience and boost productivity? This exclusive webinar with Andrew Regan will dive into strategies to empower retail associates for success with new technology.

Retail

Hubspot

MAY 17, 2023

The average buyer in this day and age is shrewd — naturally skeptical of salespeople and having certain standards reps have to measure up to. That makes establishing credibility central to the success of any sales effort. But maintaining that kind of trustworthiness and legitimacy over multiple sales conversations can be easier said than done — a lot of reps run into hitches, hiccups, and human errors that undermine their credibility with prospects.

Prospecting 83

Prospecting Sales Conversion Follow-up 83

Iannarino

MAY 14, 2023

Those of us who have had the experience of selling in a highly commoditized industry adapt to the lack of differentiation. Even if your company does something different than your competitors, your prospective clients aren’t likely to find this compelling. As a result, some of us in the red ocean remove any conversation about our companies and our offerings.

Sell 253

Sell Prospecting Clients Conversion 253

SaaStr

MAY 17, 2023

Dear SaaStr: When Searching for a Co-founder, How Do You Know You Found The Right One? I think it boils down to 2 key factors: Someone that is both very good at, and better than you, in several key functional areas. If you are good at coding, she is good at sales and customers. Or whatever. That together, the two of you have all the key functional areas covered decently, at least initially (Engineering, Product, Sales & Customers, Marketing).

Engineering 140

Engineering Sales Customers Product 140

Search Engine Land

MAY 19, 2023

Content that doesn’t get read is useless. So, how do you create content your audience will read (and not just skim)? Make it more readable. This sounds so simple it’s silly, but it’s true. Readability is a giant factor that will determine everything from who engages with your content, how much value they get from it, and whether they’ll return to read more.

Objectives and Key Results 119

Objectives and Key Results Niche Technique Engineering 119

Iannarino

MAY 15, 2023

Many salespeople believe they are selling value when they are really selling their products and their services. This is the result of a legacy approach to selling that teaches salespeople that their company and their offerings create value. Because they believe that their solution is the value, their selling strategy is poor. You should avoid this approach to sales.

Sell 232

Sell B2B Sales Service 232

Martech

MAY 18, 2023

The health of your business is highly dependent on your marketing strategy. In turn, your marketing strategy’s success depends on your content’s quality and substance. Customers overwhelmingly rely on a company’s content for purchasing decisions. One survey found that most people prefer content over social media, reviews or contact with a sales rep.

Sales 123

Sales Promote Clients Campaign 123

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.

Price

SaaStr

MAY 15, 2023

So raising VC capital has gotten a lot harder than it was at the peak of 2021 — when it was still hard for all but the best and more privileged. But boy, it’s harder today. Everything has slowed down, the bar has gone up, and even VC funds themselves are struggling to do their own fundraising: Fundraising By VC Firms Themselves Is At a 10 Year Low.

Price 128

Price Meeting 128

Search Engine Land

MAY 19, 2023

Keyword difficulty isn’t one of SEO’s hottest topics or latest trends. But it is a powerful metric when you understand its potential. It can help you to make educated decisions about your prospects of ranking for specific terms, allowing you to make tactical choices that underpin your SEO strategy. Here’s what keyword difficulty means for SEO, how the score is measured and tips for using it to get better results.

Niche 116

Niche Follow-up Strategize CTR 116

Iannarino

MAY 17, 2023

Many sales organizations use a terrible approach to negotiation, one that harms salespeople and their companies. Concessions are at the heart of this approach because many salespeople mistake concessions for negotiation.

Negotiate 222

Negotiate Sales 222

Partners in Excellence

MAY 13, 2023

BHAGs are “Big Hairy Audacious Goals.” The term was, apparently, developed by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras. I first became familiar with it from TJ Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor. What I find fascinating about BHAGs is to achieve them, you are forced to rethink everything you do. Doing more of what you currently do, or even doing better at what you currently do is, usually, insufficient.

Quota 119

Quota Pipeline Up-sell Start-ups 119

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.

Contact

Martech

MAY 18, 2023

U.S. digital ad spend is only expected to increase 7.8% in 2023, dropping below 10% for the first time in 14 years, according to a new forecast from eMarketer. It is projected to rebound to 11.2% growth in 2024, the forecast said. Yearly increases in digital ad spending are predicted to hover around 10% through 2027. Digital ad spend saw a dramatic rebound in 2021 following the initial wave of the COVID pandemic — when it saw growth of 37.6%.

Growth 113

Growth Retail Follow-up Networking 113

Search Engine Land

MAY 15, 2023

“We’re at around 100,000 monthly organic traffic, but we cannot sustain the SERP positions and conversions…” “We are at 530,000 monthly organic traffic, but our growth has become stagnant and we’re unable to scale up…” I hear plenty of similar SEO concerns from SaaS companies. After working on numerous audits, I found that most of them struggle with SEO issues that impact their customer acquisition costs and diminish revenues. 1.

Engineering 123

Engineering Growth Clients Customers 123

Iannarino

MAY 19, 2023

My first job, which I started at age 12, was delivering newspapers. Making money meant knocking on every door in three apartment complexes and asking the person that answered to subscribe to the paper. Knocking on doors is a real cold call.

Cold Call 212

Cold Call Prospecting 212

Partners in Excellence

MAY 15, 2023

Most of our marketing and selling efforts focus on becoming the “product/solution authority.” “We have the leading CRM solution on the market…… Our manufacturing technologies are the best solutions available… We are the leading provider of financial services solutions… ” Our content and our selling efforts focus on demonstrating the superiority of our solutions. “We have the best references, we have more features/functions, we are cheaperR

Prospecting 112

Prospecting Sell Trust CRM 112

Advertiser: ZoomInfo

When economic headwinds pick up, sales leaders are the first to sound the alarm — and chart a new course. Longer sales cycles, larger buying committees, increased price pressure, and smaller teams can quickly combine to reduce your margin for error and increase the urgency to find a solution. To thrive in a challenging environment, sales teams need a rock-solid grasp of the fundamentals and the biggest force-multipliers they can get their hands on.

B2B

SaaStr

MAY 19, 2023

So 2023 is a unique time in venture fundraising. We’re coming off a stretch in 2021 where VC capital hit crazy, record highs… and now is coming into multi-year lows. It’s a time when SaaS and Cloud spend are also at record highs , and many Cloud leaders are still growing at strong rates … yet many startups have stopped growing at all. And really worst of all is multiples.

Growth 108

Growth Gaming Trust Customers 108

Search Engine Land

MAY 19, 2023

Non-skippable ads are coming to YouTube Select on connected TV. This means that viewers will see one 30-second ad instead of two consecutive 15-second ads. Why we care. YouTube was the most popular U.S. video streaming platform in April and watch time increased, according to Nielsen. It remains to be seen whether a non-skippable 30-second format provides a good advertising ROI.

Engineering 109

Engineering 109

Iannarino

MAY 18, 2023

Sales leaders often require their sales force to fill their pipeline with several multiples of their quota. Ensuring you achieve your sales goal is a necessary goal, but this approach is a sign that the sales team isn’t working effectively. When a sales leader asks their team to create an outrageous overage of opportunities, there are big problems in the sales organization.

Pipeline 206

Pipeline Sales Quota 206

Martech

MAY 15, 2023

I’ll get straight to the point: “Submit” and “Click here” are ineffective calls to action (CTAs) for your email campaigns. (I’ll explain why a few paragraphs down.) If you need help with CTA samples you can test, language models like ChatGPT or Google’s Bard can be your best new copywriting tools. But you still need to prime the pump with a well-written prompt that recognizes the values of a good CTA.

B2B 114

B2B Campaign Pitch Promote 114

Speaker: DeAnna McIntosh, Retail Growth Strategist

The past three years have forever changed the retail landscape. Companies of all sizes were forced to welcome change with open arms and surrender to total flexibility in order to be agile in the ever-evolving economic environment. In 2023, we are navigating inflation and its impact on consumer spending, various lasting side effects from the pandemic, and a looming recession in the back half of the year.

Retail

SaaStr

MAY 19, 2023

Dear SaaStr: How Can a SaaS CEO Tell Which Customers are 10+ Year Customers? I think it’s fairly easy. Look for: Are they running an entire division or group (or more) on your product? Is the use case mission critical — even if niche? I.e., would the business be at risk if you went down or away? Is deploying your app a key initiative for your top stakeholder?

Customers 107

Customers Niche Contract Legal 107

Search Engine Land

MAY 17, 2023

An entity is a uniquely identifiable object or thing characterized by its name(s), type(s), attributes, and relationships to other entities. An entity is only considered to exist when it exists in an entity catalog. I used this definition in my entity SEO article. The first part of this entity SEO series should be used when you need to justify a tactic associated with optimizing for an entity.

Sports 111

Sports Objectives and Key Results Up-sell Engineering 111

Iannarino

MAY 16, 2023

One mistake weak salespeople make is pursuing clients that are easy to win but difficult to service after the deal is closed. These easy-to-win clients desperately need a salesperson to agree to take their business because better salespeople refuse it. Once an unsuspecting salesperson wins these undesirable clients, the client’s constraints become the salesperson’s company’s problems.

Clients 208

Clients Sales Closing Service 208

Heinz Marketing

MAY 19, 2023

By Sarah Threet , Marketing Consultant at Heinz Marketing You’ve spent months developing a content strategy and weeks laboring over a piece of content that you have deemed “high value”. Conventional inbound marketing tells you that you need to create a landing page for this content and gate that content behind a form that leads will need to fill to view and download your content.

Strategize 105

Strategize Referrals Contact Pipeline 105

Advertisement

Contact and company intent data both have their advantages. Contact-level intent leads can be acted on immediately to reach active buyers, while company-level leads improve outcomes for account-based marketing and other programs. This infographic unpacks the advantages of both contact and company data and gives details about how B2B marketers can benefit from both.

Contact

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2023

So a recent SaaS survey confirmed what I’ve experienced over the year: outsourced SDRs are tough to make work. It would be so great if we could all outsource sales, sales development, sales operations, and more. It really would be great. It’s just hard in practice to outsource something you don’t already know well yourself. Personally, I’ve seen it sort of work a few times — and that’s why I added “sort” as an option, and 26% of you also said it

Sales 110

Sales Appointment B2B Product 110

Search Engine Land

MAY 19, 2023

Instacart made $740 million in ad revenue in 2022, a 30% increase over 2021. Surging ad business. The Information reported: “The grocery-delivery firm’s ad revenue totaled about $740 million last year, up 30% from 2021, according to a person familiar with the matter. That’s a striking increase, given that the digital ad market was largely stagnant last year.

Advertising/ Marketing 107

Advertising/ Marketing Retail Up-sell Market share 107

Membrain

MAY 17, 2023

Although my company explicitly serves the “complex B2B sales” market, I’ve never really liked the word “complex.” In its correct definition, “complex B2B sales” is an accurate description of a particular type of selling.

B2B 102

B2B Sales Sell 102

Heinz Marketing

MAY 16, 2023

By Mina Guirguis , Marketing Consultant at Heinz Marketing Incorporating video into your social media marketing strategy is a great way to engage more followers, increase brand awareness, and drive conversions. However, with so many different platforms and formats to choose from, it can be hard to know where to start. Luckily, we’ll explore the best practices for incorporating video into your social media marketing strategy, including choosing the right platform, creating high-quality content,

Conversion 110

Conversion Entertainment Consult Gaming 110

Speaker: Joe Apfelbaum, CEO of Ajax Union

In this webinar, Joe Apfelbaum, CEO of Ajax Union and business strategist, will take you through the ABCs of intent data. You'll learn how to effectively use it to drive business results, with practical tips on how to leverage both company and contact intent data to maximize your marketing efforts. Whether you're a seasoned marketer or just getting started, this webinar is a must-attend for anyone looking to stay ahead in the ever-evolving world of digital marketing.

Contact