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Category Archives: Best Practices
A Common Mistake from a VP of Sales
I have been selling for many years. As the VP of Sales at InsideSales.com, I do not usually give demos of our PowerDialer for SalesForce software. Today, however, I took the opportunity to present to Brian Geery, Interim VP of Sales at Sustainable Minds and a managing partner at Sales Productivity Architects. Brian was a referral from a friend and sales expert, Trish Bertuzzi of the BridgeGroup. I have been evaluating what InsideSales.com can do to improve our game and increase our sales growth in 2012. I figured that doing the demo would not only clear my mind, but also get me close to our product and a prospect.
My demonstration was not as polished as one of my best salespeople, but it lasted the standard 45 minutes, and it covered in content and form, what a standard demo would include. It was also received favorably with the prospect requesting a formal proposal. It is good to know that an old dog still can do a few tricks!
At its conclusion, Brian offered a personal critique. Simply stated, “The demo was good, however, I think you could sell more, faster, if your demonstration was less about what your software does and more about how it solves my problems.” Brian was exactly right!
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View Comments (4) Dreamforce ’11 ResponseAudit shows the Lead Response Bar is Low as Ever!
You would think after four years of doing a “Secret Shopper” on the attendees of Dreamforce the response times to fictitious leads submitted to their websites would get faster, wouldn’t you? Not so. In fact we dropped from 41 hours
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Climb the Trust Ladder to Increase Results in Prospecting
Here is a strategy to find the highest level of rapport or trust you can use to increase your results on a prospecting call. Using the Trust Ladder allows you to use your first few seconds so people are open
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B2B Technology Sales Tip – What’s Your 2nd (or 3rd) “Pitch?”
You and your company have done everything right up to this point. The marketing team created a compelling, targeted set of material that caught the attention of a potential buyer. They found your Web site and grabbed some information—a couple
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Looking Backwards and Forwards From 2011: Predictive Sales Intelligence Will Redefine CRM and the Sales Process
One of the problems we all have with technology is that we soon forget that what is now commonplace was once rare or non-existent. New technologies penetrate the market so rapidly that total market transformations can occur in the space
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Lead Management Tip: Brand Awareness Doesn’t = Buying
Saw a link to a Harvard Business Review article this morning on Twitter (thanks @abneedles) that had something interesting to say about the “sales funnel.” “A global consumer electronics company embarked on a CDJ [Consumer Decision Journey] analysis after research
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Demand Generation, Tactics and Strategy, and Business Intelligence
Tuesday evening at Dreamforce, I got into an interesting Twitter conversation with Left Brain Marketing’s Adam Needles (@abneedles on Twitter) discussing marketing’s relationship with sales. In Adam’s mind, he felt that the presenters of the Sales/Marketing alignment session were pushing
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B2B, Demand Generation, and “Getting Real” With Social Media
Working for a strictly B2B sales company (caveat: many of our clients sell direct to consumers, but we ourselves really only target businesses), I’m constantly evaluating the differences between B2B and B2C selling — as well as the similarities as
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Market Positioning and “18 Fishing Poles”
I recently bumped into a post by Escape Velocity’s Liz Strauss called “When Too Many Options Are None At All.” Having “18 fishing poles in the water,” she suggests, leads to a lot of “unfocused work for little return .
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Sales Tips – Progressing “Pain Avoidance” Prospects
In business, we’re all familiar with the concept of the “Idiot Tax.” If I don’t want to take the time and energy to change my oil, I pay a price premium to have a service center do it for me.
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