Posts Tagged ‘Sales Best Practices’
Inside 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 MoreGoogle+ for Sales Reps: Applying the Social Media Tool to Prospects and Customers
Google+, the neglected middle child of the social media world, is rising quickly in popularity with the professional world. Sales reps, especially, should take note that it can be their own secret weapon. Obviously, the powerhouse of social selling is LinkedIn. The B2B social media platform is full of professionals looking to network and other…
Read MoreInside Sales Tips: How to Reach Decision Makers and Avoid Gatekeepers
As a sales rep, there are few things worse than hearing, “I’m sorry, he isn’t available. Why don’t you leave your name and number and I’ll have so-and-so call you back” from a gatekeeper. This is especially true if that gatekeeper has absolutely no intention of delivering your message onto the decision maker – ever.…
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 Get Comments: Building an Online Community Through Social Media (Part 1)
How you interact socially online can help or harm you. In this two part blog series I’m going to focus on the method to ask for comment and leave comments in order to build following on your blog. Social media currency (the value we hold for something) is huge, and an important part to the…
Read MoreReal Lead Generation Means Speed and Persistence—But Mostly It Means Doing It
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything on this blog, mostly because I’ve been knee-deep in doing research, and working with a couple of clients. But I’ve decided to post today to talk specifically about one particular experience talking to a client about how much the XANT system had made a difference in their sales performance.
SEO business optimization experts OrangeSoda improved individual sales rep performance 300%, and started seeing three times the monthly number of account closes.
But just as much as the productivity gains (which I was naturally gratified to hear about), something else stuck out to me, which was that even before they started using the XANT system, they were doing a lot of things right. They had a good system in place to acquire leads and close sales. They had a great management team that had developed a scalable, repeatable process.
The problem was they simply hadn’t fully learned yet that most sales are won and lost at the top of the sales funnel, not the bottom. It’s not that their pipeline was non-existent or stagnant. They simply weren’t getting the results they could have been because they hadn’t put enough focus on the lead qualification process . . . .
Read MoreSales Tip: Confidence vs. Intellectual Laziness
A couple of years ago we hired what we thought was going to be a stellar sales rep. He appeared to be smart, well-spoken, and had the individual charisma that we thought was going to make him a star. So when the numbers came back after six months, I was surprised that he was nowhere…
Read MoreOptimal Metrics for Lead Generation
Driving performance requires accurate and focused measures of performance. This is especially the case for account development and lead generation teams. I have recently been interviewing both XANT customers and non-customers (predominantly from the B2B High Tech/Services/Telecom industries) to identify the optimal metric to use when measuring the success of account development reps. I found that…
Read MoreBad Performance Management “Inconvenient Truths”
As the founder of top-level consultancy High-Yield Methods in Minneapolis, Dick Lee has worked as a sales and customer process guru for over three decades, doing VP- and C-level consulting with companies like Boeing, 3M, and Microsoft.
In an outstanding article entitled “Sales Lead Programs—Another Inconvenient Truth,” Dick tears apart bad lead management practices with a metaphorical sledgehammer, but in the process brings up a just-as-critical side effect: “We now have and have had innumerable clients dying to hire good, experienced salespeople, but the well has about run dry.”
Sales people get paid a lot of money, and perform “hard, essential work,” but in Dick’s mind are often treated as “Joy Riders. Parasites. Necessary Evils.” Sales is the “corporate whipping boy,” he states, because “anyone having that much fun deserves to be punished, eh?” If the well is running dry, it’s because professional sales reps are “treated so badly that most up-and-coming business professionals won’t put up with those levels of disrespect . . . . “
Read MoreInside Sales Research – Departments Keep Growing Because It’s a Win-Win-Win
There’s been a lot of talk ever since our 2009 InfoUSA study revealed that the inside sales industry was projected to grow at 7.5% per year over the next five years, while outside sales industry jobs is stagnating at 0.5% growth.
bNet Business’s Geoffrey James even sounded off on the topic, questioning the reasons behind the slow obsolescence of outside sales when the sales process and buying cycle have become even more “touch” intensive and complex.
In my mind, however, the trend is significant, but hardly inexplicable. The Web has made one of sales’ primary functions—distributing information to prospects—a much different activity than before. Even for complex purchases, there’s a wealth of information about available products and services, and the average prospect has significantly less of a need to rely on a sales rep to provide actionable information . . . .
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