Posts Tagged ‘Sales 2.0’
Be Our Guest at the Sales & Marketing 2.0 Conference in San Francisco
XANT will be attending Sales 2.0’s Sales & Marketing 2.0 Conference in San Francisco and would like to give you a FREE conference pass worth $1,195. Why? Because we think this 2-day conference is so valuable it’s worth covering the registration fee for our readers. Who should attend: CEOs, VPs of Sales, VPs of Marketing,…
Read MoreThe Top 5 Voicemail Mistakes for Inside Sales Reps to Avoid
Voicemail can be a tricky thing – it’s very hit and miss. While at one time it was the tool that everyone loved to use, today there are other, must easier options, like email. What most sales reps don’t realize is that voicemail results in 3 to 22 percent in contact ratios with email being…
Read MoreInside Sales Reps: Using YouTube as Another Tool
Using video is one of the strongest tools when it comes to helping prospects or clients understand how your product works. Video allows for short, powerful demos highlighting the strengths of what your company does and how your products are a ‘must have.’ Not only can video educate, it can also lead to educated leads.…
Read MoreHow to Hire Inside Sales People – Get the Right and Avoid the Wrong Candidates
So you’re looking for a new sales rep? That’s great! But you better be doing it right or you’ll find yourself with a bad hire. What are some ways to prevent making a bad choice with a new recruit? Easy, if you understand some basic does and don’ts of hiring. Don’t do……. A key…
Read MoreHow to Lower Your Cost-of-Sale: Leverage New Sales Automation Technologies and the Inside Sales Model
With the advent of remote communications technologies, the inside sales model is slowly pushing the outside sales model off to the side of the stage. Inside sales is the practice of using modern computer tools and technologies to accomplish the same end goal as was accomplished by face-to-face meetings, but without all the associated T&E…
Read MoreThe Social Selling Catch-22
Like sports, travel, and Justin Bieber, Anchorman provides a nearly unmatched wealth of metaphors applicable to the sales industry (and I’m only half-kidding about Bieber. Hate the music, but give the kid some props—he definitely understands his target audience and their needs).
With salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff making it the entire focus of Dreamforce 2011, “social selling” is, in the immortal words of Ron Burgundy, “kind of a big deal” these days. In a world where attention spans are short, having an edge in connecting with prospects makes every step of the sales process easier and faster. Professional sales reps–particularly inside sales reps who sell remotely–seemingly can’t afford NOT to be connected to the various social platforms.
Inside sales expert Ken Krogue notes that a LinkedIn invitation with the exact same content as a marketing-generated email is 8x more effective at getting responses than the email by itself. Hubspot reports that companies that blog get 55% more Web traffic, 70% more leads, and 57% of organizations have acquired a customer through an interaction on their blog. In addition, companies with an active Twitter account get 2x as many sales leads, and organizations with 1000+ followers get 6x more traffic.
Read MoreLooking 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 of under three years (and some might say even less). It’s barely been a decade…
Read MoreSales 2.0 and a Dead Canadian
“Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools and yesterday’s concepts.” -Marshall McLuhan
New Year’s Eve, 2010, will mark 30-year anniversary of the passing away of someone you’ve probably never heard of, a scholar by the name of Marshall McLuhan.
Many academics consider McLuhan, a Canadian who taught the majority of his life at the University of Toronto, to be one of the foremost pioneers in the study of media and communications, and the effects of media technologies on the social and cultural makeup of society.
The concept of “the global village”—an always-on, totally connected society, linked by electricity and wires to move information—was first posited by Marshall McLuhan in 1961, 30+ years before the public Internet and World Wide Web would make his vision a reality . . . .
Read MoreThe Prospect’s Process is in Charge – A Sales Pop Quiz
If you’re not on a call with a prospect or client RIGHT NOW, put down the phone, and stop what you’re doing. And get off Facebook and quit fiddling with your iPhone too. Pop Quiz, hotshot. Here’s the rules: Without looking at your CRM system, think of your highest-probability deal in the pipeline right now,…
Read MoreSales Motivation – The Metaphor of “Jerry Maguire”
Every semester for two years while teaching college composition, I used an excerpt from the movie script for Jerry Maguire to emphasize the key point of writer ethos.
Classically defined, ethos is the persona, or appearance, of a writer or orator to their audience—the words they chose, the emotional voice and tone, the sense of authority the speaker projects.
Parts of the film haven’t aged well since the mid-’90s, but there’s an essential essence that still resonates, a part of the human experience that it manages to capture. The movie at its heart wasn’t a story about sports, or even love; it was a story about a human being coming to realize the power of humility, self-actualization, and integrity.
The metaphor for the entire film becomes Jerry’s journey to Kinkos at 3:00 AM to make a hundred copies of a mission statement he had just written because he knew, KNEW that it was that damn important, and that he’d never be able to look himself in the mirror again if he didn’t do something about it.
The story rings true because we recognize something about the character in ourselves; the person who sees that the real path to success lies in everything that they aren’t.
And for some reason, even in the midst of the Digital Age Sales 2.0 world, we still haven’t gotten the message . . . .
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