Posts Tagged ‘Sales Management’
How to Succeed in Inside Sales: Lessons from a 1984 Olympic Medalist
There’s a reason sales people are usually former athletes or those with a strong competitive nature – our work demands it. As sales people we know competitive pressure, starting with the second we pick up the phone. As the Olympic Games kick off in London today, we wanted to take this time to reflect back…
Read MoreHow to Improve Inside Sales Success Through Sales Role Playing
From their desks every morning, our reps responsible for making outbound calls, we call them Business Developement Reps (BDRs) pick up their phones and dial. Just a few seconds later you can hear a phone ring, and a voice you recognize from the other side of the room kicks off the role playing. Since we…
Read MoreInside Sales Rep Management Techniques: How to Protect Star Performers
Within every company there are always a few standouts that would be classified as ‘stars.’ Because of their consistent high performance, they are highly visible and everyone knows them. It’s these types of employees that we spend all our time recruiting. In my upcoming research paper, “Catching Falling Stars: A Human Resource Response to Social…
Read MoreHow to Use Score Cards to Improve Inside Sales Performance
Prominently displaying each sales reps’ numbers in your sales room can create a motivating atmosphere and positively influence the performance of your sales team. This works because sales people are generally a competitive bunch. Additionally, such a tool enables management to hold their sales team accountable for whatever results they generate. Here at XANT, our…
Read MoreSilence on the line. When is it a good thing?
It’s been described as awkward, painful, uneasy and empty. But it’s also something else, and for a sales rep, the word to describe silence is powerful. When it comes to questions we, as salespeople, are an impatient breed that want an instant response. We want to move things along in the process and get the…
Read MoreThe Sales and Marketing Disconnect Continues
Just when you think the business world is changing for the better, that marketing and sales professionals are starting to “get it,” that a new age of enlightened prospecting is on its way, based on serving the customer and truly providing strategic value to them, rather than just pushing product . . . you have a meeting like the one I sat in on last week.
Well, to be honest, calling it a “meeting” is a bit disingenuous; a live-action comedy of marketing errors is a bit nearer the mark.
I can’t reveal names or the organization involved, because it would be a blow-up embarrassment for them. But let’s just take you through
the last bit of our collective conversation . . .
The Coming of the InsideSales Revolution
Real revolutions–the ones that definitively change the way we work and live–rarely start in executive board rooms. They almost never start from profit-analysis reports, pipeline review meetings, training agendas, or marketing demographic outlines.
A revolution isn’t about creating a “brand,” or “engagement,” or “measurable metrics” (though in many cases those come later).
It’s not about who has the best “spin,” the best PR, or the best prime-time network ad slot.
It’s about an idea.
An idea, and people that believe in them so strongly that the idea becomes reality.
Revolutions don’t happen by accident. They come because the time, the place, and the circumstance demand it, and the people in the center of it can’t bear the thought that things might remain the same . . .
Read More“Enchantment” and How to Build Business Performance
Bumped into an interesting video interview, posted on The Brand Builder Blog about a new book buy Guy Kawasaki called Enchantment. Anyone who’s spent any time in Social Media has probably at least heard of Guy through his voluminous Twitter account(s), as “one of Apple’s old marketing gurus,” or in his role as a venture…
Read MoreThe Meaning of “Result Y”
We forget sometimes just what exactly it is all this technology in business is supposed to be doing for us. The point of it all is that ultimately we want to replace the aspect of human intuition….or do we? On the surface you’d think that was it, right? If anything, we want sales to be…
Read MoreLead Generation Tip: Add a Tiny Bit of “Oomph” to Your Elevator Pitch
Something short and sweet today for teams doing lead generation:
We’ve all heard the concept of the “elevator pitch”–A concise, high-impact statement designed to convey the identity and value of your company/product/brand in the space of 30 seconds or less (some say as little as 10).
For example, “At XANT, we empower sales reps to take control of their prospecting and fill their pipelines faster, and give managers better insight into the process while it happens.”
The value of such a statement, obviously, isn’t that it’s actually going to be used to pitch a VC board member on an elevator (although if you’ve actually done this and gotten funding, that would be a great story and I’d love to hear it). The value is that an “elevator pitch” lets you boil down a core message into something easy to digest, but still demonstrates key touch points that communicate how you serve a prospect’s potential needs . . .
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