May, 2023

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Fearing Your Client: The Importance of Candor and Courage in Sales

Iannarino

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
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Acquisitions — If You Do Sell, Try to Make Sure It’s At a Local Maximum

SaaStr

Have a strong M&A offer? Not sure what to do? Look at this pic or a similar one Do you want it? If so, say No If not? Probably just say Yes pic.twitter.com/K483lKnyzd — Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin  (@jasonlk) April 21, 2021 So I wrote a version of this post years ago, about when to think about selling your startup, if you do get an attractive offer.

Sell 144
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Trending Sources

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Discovering And Qualifying Is Not Just For Sellers

Partners in Excellence

Discovery and qualifying are critical to sellers. We use discovery to understand the customer’s needs, problems, requirements. We use discovery to understand the capabilities they seek in looking at solutions. We use discovery to understand their budgets, the alternatives they are considering, their knowledge of and interest in us, how they will make the decision, and when.

Customers 133
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The 4 categories of AI that impact marketing: Generative AI

Martech

It’s almost impossible to ignore the impact of artificial intelligence on businesses today. The marketing industry is no exception. From ChatGPT ’s rise as the fastest-growing platform of all time to near-constant headlines on the latest AI-related product releases, we are inundated. But with all the hype, how can marketing leaders and their teams best determine how to utilize AI to benefit their work and customers?

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Empowering Retail Associates to Enhance the Customer Experience

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.

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Google no longer recommends canonical tags for syndicated content

Search Engine Land

Google now says the canonical link element is not recommended for syndicated content; instead, block the syndicated content from being accessed to avoid duplication. Google posted this new piece of information in this help document over here. What’s new. Google posted this paragraph under the section “syndicated content:” “The canonical link element is not recommended for those who wish to avoid duplication by syndication partners, because the pages are often very differe

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Nimble CRM is Designed to Build Relationships, Not Spreadsheets

Adaptive Business Services

Full disclosure. I’ve never been much of a big data guy. Nor have I ever required extensive reporting from my salespeople. I never spent my time building, crunching, and analyzing spreadsheets. The only numbers that I was ever interested in were … How much is in my/our pipeline? What are my/our sales for the month? What was my/our closing ratio? How much money do I have in my bank accounts?

CRM 122

More Trending

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Dear SaaStr: When Searching for a Co-founder, How Do You Know You Found The Right One?

SaaStr

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).

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Simplifying Value Creation

Partners in Excellence

As sellers and leaders, we know we are supposed to create value–for our customers, our people, and each other. Too many of us, me included, tend to be very glib about the term, assuming everyone automatically understands what is meant by value creation. I’ve come to realize, despite how much we talk about it, we really don’t understand what it means, often overcomplicating it.

Teamwork 131
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5 tips for balancing ‘push’ and ‘pull’ in content marketing

Martech

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
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Google no longer requires video descriptions as part of structured data

Search Engine Land

Google has removed the requirement to have the description property as part of your video structured data. Google says it is still recommended to provide a description to your videos in the structured data but it is not a requirement. With that, Google Search Console will not report errors for missing description property items. Structured data change.

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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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Why Deals Get Stuck in the Sales Pipeline and What to Do About it

Understanding the Sales Force

My wife chose some beautiful new shrubs and flowers and I was digging the holes to plant them in the garden. The largest shrub required the largest hole and it was to be placed in an area of the garden that I knew was quite rocky. Sure enough, after just three shovel fulls of dirt, I hit rock and it was bigger than both my shovel and the hole. I was stuck.

Pipeline 105
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Cold Outreach As It Is Practiced Today Is Dead

Iannarino

Social selling promised sales organizations they would no longer need to make cold calls to create new opportunities. When this turned out to be false, many sales organizations turned to inbound marketing to fill their B2B sales pipeline.

Cold Call 228
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Fundraising By VC Firms Themselves Is At a 10 Year Low. What That Means.

SaaStr

So when I was a founder, I didn’t pay much attention to how VC funds themselves worked. I just pitched them. But fast forward to today, and there is an incredible amount of information about how the industry actually works, and we put a bunch of the best stuff on SaaStr itself. Most important today is for founders to know (1) how active the venture markets are, at each stage and (2) how healthy venture is overall.

Pitch 143
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Activities, Outputs, Outcomes—What’s The Difference?

Partners in Excellence

The “new” sales mantra seems to be all about activity. Our managers measure us on activities, and it seems our performance is based on how many activities we complete. As a result, we measure all sorts of things to demonstrate our “busyness,” dials, emails, meetings, InMails, contacts, proposals, and on and on. The more activities we do, the better.

Sales 133
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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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73% of marketers now using generative AI tools

Martech

Generative AI has taken marketing by storm: 73% of B2B and B2C marketing executives say their companies are using it to help create text, images, videos or other content, according to a new survey. Not holding out for long. Thirty-one percent of those not using it expect to do so within a year and 46% within two years, according to the report from Botco.AI.

B2C 128
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How to steal your competitors’ featured snippets with ChatGPT (prompts included)

Search Engine Land

Are you struggling to rank for featured snippets and missing out on valuable traffic? I used to spend countless hours trying to optimize my content, making educated guesses on how to win those elusive featured snippets. The process was time-consuming and very hit-or-miss. Now, I can harness ChatGPT – including its understanding of SEO and exceptional writing skills – to generate near-perfect optimized snippets, saving me time and boosting my traffic.

Start-ups 127
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The Biggest Lever in Sales

Membrain

What is the biggest lever in sales? The one thing you can upgrade to have the greatest impact on your win rates, deal size, sales cycles, and overall performance?

Sales 105
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The Future of B2B Sales Is Professional Expertise

Iannarino

In today’s fast-paced business environment, change is constant. While some buyers claim they would prefer a “salesperson-free buying experience,” many also suffer from buyer’s remorse. The reason is that business buyers treat complex purchase scenarios like they are buying a big-screen television from a retail store like Best Buy.

B2B 249
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The B2B Sales Leader's Guide for Any Economic Environment

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.

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SaaS Capital: Across 1,500 SaaS Startups, Yearly Contracts Don’t Actually Increase NRR

SaaStr

So SaaS Capital put out its latest report on SaaS retention and NRR after having surveyed over 1,500 SaaS companies and professionals. You can download it here. There are a lot of great learnings and metrics in the report, and a few stood out to me: #1. Annual Contracts Didn’t Boost NRR, And Even Multi-Year Contracts Only Had a Modest Impact on NRR.

Contract 134
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Why I Love Selling

Partners in Excellence

Having anything to do with sales was the furthest thing from my mind when I was thinking about a job following college. I’d had a few selling experiences as a kid. In Boy Scouts, there was always an event of some sort that we had to sell tickets for. My Mom usually bought the allocation I was assigned to sell. Sometimes a neighbor would buy them (but I think my Mom had called saying she would pay for them).

Sell 132
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Where to find marketing ideas to boost your performance

Martech

Are you looking for inspiration to improve your organization’s marketing performance? Well, there’s plenty of inspiration if you keep your eyes and ears open. This may seem obvious, but sometimes I have to remind myself of this fact and of all the opportunities out there. As marketing-oriented professionals, we’re all responsible for contributing ideas, regardless of where we sit on the organizational chart.

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10 SEO challenges faced by fast-growing SaaS companies

Search Engine Land

“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.

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Contact vs. Company Intent Signal Data

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.

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The Art and Science of Complex Sales Podcast

Membrain

In the latest episode of the Art and Science of Complex Sales podcast, Paul Fuller sits down with Scott Leese , CEO of Scott Leese Consulting to discuss how openness and connection is important in Sales Leadership.

Sales 110
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Mastering Credibility, The Key to Winning Sales Trust

Iannarino

One reason salespeople fail to win clients is because they have a difficult time building sales trust. Business acumen is a larger variable than most salespeople suspect, and when a contact senses it is lacking, they look elsewhere for help. Most sales organizations believe they are consultative, but few of their salespeople have the business acumen and experience to have the types of conversations this approach requires.

Trust 252
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My #1 Best Hack for VC Fundraising

SaaStr

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
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Where Were The Leaders When People Were Struggling?

Partners in Excellence

As we see more organizations announce reductions and layoffs, we are seeing more CEOs use poor seller performance as an excuse for the layoffs. One CEO said, “We’ve identified more than 100 people on our sales team who have consistently missed expectations. Simply put, a significant percentage of our sales force has been repeatedly underperforming based on measurable performance targets and critical KPIs.

Sales 126
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The Next Level of Sales Enablement: Sales Content Management

Speaker: Deniz Olcay, Senior Director of Product Marketing, and Jake Miller, Senior Product Marketing Manager

Modern Sales Content Management (SCM) platforms have become table stakes in the world of sales enablement. Sellers need one-stop access where all of their sales content is stored, organized, deployed, and measured. Today’s modern SCM platforms achieve just that. However, these various platforms also have key differences. In this value-packed webinar, Deniz Olcay and Jake Miller will unravel and debunk the top three SCM myths and explain how to get the most from your SCM solution.

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Digital ad spend growth drops to 7.8% this year

Martech

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
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6 ways to use ChatGPT for Amazon marketing

Search Engine Land

ChatGPT – and its numerous use cases – has been widely covered in the last few months. It can be used for writing (everything from essays and poems to blog articles and even music), coding and debugging, translating text, finding data sets, answering complex questions, solving math equations, and more. As with all new technologies, the AI chatbot has pros and cons.

Promote 126
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How to Incorporate Video into your Social Media Strategy

Heinz Marketing

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,

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A Guide to Mastering Sales Conversation Acumen

Iannarino

If you listen to salespeople in conversation with their prospective clients, you may notice that some salespeople are better than others. Some sales professionals engage their buyers and decision-makers by creating a better sales conversation. Other sales reps have a difficult time providing their contacts with the B2B sales experience necessary to win their business.

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Retail Reimagined: What It Means To Be An Innovative Retailer

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.