Sat.Jun 20, 2020 - Fri.Jun 26, 2020

article thumbnail

Why Are My Salespeople Not Perfoming as Expected?

Anthony Cole Training

Why do so many of my salespeople fail to perform as expected? It's a loaded question. Or, is it? In our corporate sales training experience, we've seen that evaluating underperforming salespeople in the pre-hire sales assessment is crucial for success in your business.

article thumbnail

How to survive the pandemic as a sales trainer

Membrain

Almost nobody expected 2020 to turn out like it did. At the end of 2019, we were all dutifully making our annual plans for the coming year, projecting revenues, segmenting markets, doing all the things that good sales departments do.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Prospecting Is Not An Event!

Partners in Excellence

We get so much about prospecting wrong. We reach out to people who are far outside our ICP, people we should never be talking to, wasting our/their time. We contact other prospects, only to pitch our products and services, ending with, “Are you interested, can I invite you to a demo.” We don’t do our homework, we don’t understand the customer, their challenges or where they might be interested in helping.

article thumbnail

When You Fall Out of Product-Market Fit

SaaStr

I’ve been investing just long enough now to see start-ups fall out of product-market fit. When I started blogging on SaaStr.com back in 2012 (!), I didn’t really think this happened. I thought folks got out-sold, lost to the competition, and even failed to evolve. But I didn’t get that apps with happy customers, and some real traction, could fall out of product-market fit.

article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

Blogger Outreach: 5 Ways to Help People See Your Content

G2

Blogger outreach is an effective way to tap a relevant audience and introduce your brand to a whole new set of readers.

article thumbnail

Making The Most of The Time You Have

Engage Selling

There’s still time for you to make the most of the time you have.

More Trending

article thumbnail

Even With Just “Pretty Good Growth”, You Can Build a Unicorn After $10m ARR

SaaStr

One of the very firm SaaStr-isms what that while $0-$1m ARR is Impossible, and getting from $1m-$10m ARR is Unlikely … that getting from $10m to $100m ARR is Inevitable. Let’s take a look at a version of that basic math. Today, the very best SaaS companies are scaling faster than ever. Often 200% or even 300% at $10m ARR. Look at Zoom, Slack, Datadog, UiPath etc.

article thumbnail

Small Business SEO: The 28-Step Checklist to Help You Win

G2

Want to know an overlooked truth about small business SEO?

article thumbnail

Forecasting B2B Marketing Activities to Meet Sales Goals

Heinz Marketing

By Stephanie Carrillo , Senior Marketing Consultant at Heinz Marketing. It is typical for companies to be given a marketing budget before setting sales goals for the year. According to the article B2B Budget Benchmarks: how much should you be spending on average 9-10% of the company’s annual revenue is allocated towards marketing efforts. But often, when I work with clients, I see a big disconnect between the sales goal and the ability to drive enough lead volume to meet the sales goal wi

article thumbnail

Are You Managing The Process Or Is It Managing You?

Partners in Excellence

Deal review after deal review, I see the same thing. Sales people don’t seem to be managing the process, they are responding to what the customer is doing (or not doing). This is particularly frightening, when one recognizes customers don’t know how do buy, they wander through the buying process, going back and forth, starting and stopping, changing direction, getting lost.

article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

10 Great Questions to Ask a VP Sales During an Interview

SaaStr

One of the classic original SaaStr posts was on the Top 10 Questions to Ask a VP of Sales Candidate. All the questions still hold today, interestingly. We did an update of that classic post below together with this brand new video on the topic: Use this script for hiring that first VP of Sales. It works. Ready to hire your first VP Sales? But haven’t done it before?

article thumbnail

Sleep and Productivity: The Best Way to Boost Sales Performance

Sales Hacker

Even before the uncertainties of COVID-19, Americans were underslept. And there’s a lot of research that shows we’ve been quite unproductive as a result. The current crisis has introduced even more threats to our sleep and productivity. Anxieties keep us up at night , and distractions from working from home , burnout from a lack of boundaries between our professional and personal lives, and the cognitive overload of Zoom are all killing our focus.

article thumbnail

Surprise and Delight: Best Practice for Great Customer Experience

Heinz Marketing

By Win Salyards , Marketing Coordinator for Heinz Marketing. Generosity is one of our key values at Heinz Marketing. We work to live that throughout our customer experience and engagements. We believe our clients are our partners and should be treated as such, and part of that is celebrating significant life events with them. I was recently asked to review our client gift process so we could better respond and scale.

article thumbnail

5 things every SaaS sales rep needs to know

Salesmate

Capturing and sustaining buyers’ attention can be a real challenge in the SaaS world. With the rapid evolution of SaaS products, buyers’ expectations are also increasing. Besides, new players are entering the market and doing all that it takes to prove their mettle. And how can we forget the old players who are innovating and improving the user experience to maintain their position in the industry?

article thumbnail

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

article thumbnail

6 Reasons To Not Stick With Just Self-Service

SaaStr

Q: Can B2B sales ever be 100% automated? Of course it can. It is called self-service. And it works great, up to a point. The question is, do you want to do better than that? Do you want to sell deals much more than $299 / month? Prospects really want to a live human before putting much more than that, at least to start, on a credit card. Do you want to close more of the potential seats / revenue up front?

article thumbnail

Why CFOs Kill Your Deals (& What to Do About It)

Sales Hacker

Does this question sound familiar… “Actually, can you make this out to our CFO?”. You’re closing a deal and after sending the order form to your so-called champion, you learn that they aren’t the one signing. The fate of your deal now depends on someone you’ve never met. To make matters worse, today is the close date of this forecasted opportunity and your manager asks you when it’s coming in.

article thumbnail

Customer experience management – sustaining symbiotic value

Membrain

Client loyalty can eventually span a lifetime, but to make it more attainable, we should take it one step at a time. Whatever situation we’re in, good or bad, we must ask ourselves what we refer to as the Loyalty Question: “What am I doing right now that will make the customer come back the next time they need what we sell?” It’s not about a lifetime.

article thumbnail

Top reasons why SaaS business owners must invest in a sales CRM

Salesmate

Every business is revenue-driven. SaaS businesses that have just started out in the market have to make their resources last for a longer time for maximizing the profit margin. This is a simple cycle of extending their stay in the market and compete. As a business, you have to start out with little expandable resources and you have to follow a strict plan of action for the customer base, the finance, the market research, and logistics!

CRM
article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

How Common Is It For Founders To Get Some Liquidity in A Venture Round?

SaaStr

These days, if you raise money at a >=$80m-100m valuation, and are oversubscribed, most bigger Silicon Valley VC firms will offer to provide some founder liquidity. And these days, the valuations where it is offered is creeping down a bit as bigger funds do earlier stage deals. It’s not out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s so they can buy more and/or win the deal.

article thumbnail

The Power of We: Getting Sales and Marketing on the Same Page

Sales Hacker

We were caught in a perpetual struggle between Sales and Marketing. Sales blamed Marketing for not attracting enough high-quality leads , and Marketing claimed Sales wasn’t nurturing leads enough. There was a stark disconnect between one end of our pipeline and the other. Marketing never knew what happened to their inbound leads, and Sales would work with leads they knew nothing about.

article thumbnail

Is Click Fraud Devouring Your Ad Budget?

ConversionXL

Click fraud occurs when a pay-per-click advertisement is clicked on by a user with malicious or disingenuous intent. Click fraud first came to light in 2005, when several major cases were taken to court. However, it continues to poison marketing campaigns—and find its way into more and more courtrooms. Juniper Research estimates that click fraud cost advertisers $42 billion in 2019.

article thumbnail

Accelerating your entire calling game: Introducing Salesmate Power Dialer

Salesmate

In our previous product update article , we gave you a glimpse of what’s coming in this month. This post specifically revolves around a very crucial feature that we all are very excited about. We are proud to announce that Power Dialer is officially accessible to our users in the freshly-introduced Boost Plan. Power Dialer is one of the most demanded features by businesses to ace their calling game.

article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

In SaaS an MVP Isn’t Enough. You Need an “MSP”.

SaaStr

Q: What are the lessons you learned from building an MVP for a startup? I worry about the term “MVP” in SaaS. The only thing I think that matters in an “MSP” — a Minimum Sellable Product. A product that gets at least 10 paying customers. Here’s what often happens with MVPs that aren’t yet MSPs in SaaS: They break and don’t scale. A hack often doesn’t work even under moderate load.

article thumbnail

The 3-Step Mantra to Modernize Your LinkedIn Lead Generation

Sales Hacker

There is a simple three-step mantra to generating more leads on LinkedIn (or any social media for that matter). ADD. POST. ENGAGE. Building an intentional digital presence is about meeting your buyers where they are and delivering value. Most B2B buyers happen to be on LinkedIn, so that’s where we’ll focus today. However, these strategies will work on any social platform.

article thumbnail

New Data Reveals Interesting Differences in Salespeople's Ability to Work From Home

Understanding the Sales Force

You wake up, the sky is blue, the sun is shining, you open the door and it's freezing cold outside. Or there is the opposite of that, when there are thick clouds, it's drizzling, you open the door and it's hot and humid as hell! Things aren't always what they appear to be. In early April, during the earlier stages of the virus-required lockdown, I wrote this article about some of the remote selling challenges that companies were experiencing.

article thumbnail

Strategies for Powerful, Virtual Sales Conversations: Be Smart About Your Start – Episode 3

SalesProInsider

The virtual world is here…and it’s not going away any time soon. That’s why this series of short videos is so important. I’m sharing practical and actionable strategies for making your virtual sales conversations productive for you…and your buyer. These are actions you have control over, not your technology or your company policies. Conversations Not Sales Meetings.

article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

I Think My Boss is Going to Hire a VP Above Me. What Should I Do?

SaaStr

Q: I’m Head of Product and I think our CEO is actively recruiting a VP of Product. What should I do? Go talk to your CEO. It’s totally fine to do that. You just … don’t know. A few additional thoughts and learnings: If you are potentially being “topped”, be a bit Zen about it. Don’t see it as a threat. It may mean you need to find another role, or another start-up at some point.

article thumbnail

Does LinkedIn InMail (Really) Work for Lead Generation?

Sales Hacker

Does LinkedIn InMail actually work for lead generation? The short answer is, it depends. LinkedIn has a reputation for high engagement for sales and high cost for marketing. And plenty of B2B brands already use the paid features of LinkedIn to great effect. That’s why the more important question isn’t whether InMail works, but whether it will work at scale, within your budget.

article thumbnail

5 Signs Your Pipeline Reviews Are Failing

InsightSquared

Ugh, not another pipeline review! We all have those meetings we dread but are forced to sit through every week because it’s part of the process. Some of them are actually useless and can be removed from the calendar, while others carry immense value, but lack the structure and accountability to realize it. . As a team leader, you hold weekly or biweekly pipeline reviews with every rep to gauge the health of their active deals.

article thumbnail

How to Succeed When the Sale Goes Sideways [PODCAST]

Sandler Training

Mike Montague interviews Hamish Knox on How to Succeed When the Sale Goes Sideways. In this episode: Throw your current proposal out the window Don’t let the “sunk cost fallacy” get in your way Be emotionally unattached from the outcome You can’t lose anything you don’t have Empathize with your prospect Go back and reset You… The post How to Succeed When the Sale Goes Sideways [PODCAST] appeared first on Sandler Training.

article thumbnail

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.