Month: April 2014

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Blog Sales

The 4 Sales Fundamentals That Matter Most

What do the successful sales initiatives of multi-billion dollar enterprises, early-stage start-ups, tech and healthcare companies all have in common?

Every time, the success of the sales effort often comes down to consistent execution of the fundamentals.

This shouldn’t be surprising. In baseball, especially the playoffs, experts often note how key games come down to things as simple as catching and throwing the ball. Or running the bases. Fundamentals that are easy to overlook, yet can make or break your success.

It’s no different in sales. There are no shortcuts, and the fundamentals that will drive success can just as easily be forgotten, or ignored, or brushed aside when things get particularly busy.

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Blog Sales Metrics Social Selling

Social Selling Reduces the Cost Per Lead

Our data shows that it costs 75% less to generate leads on social media than on other channels. At the bare minimum, social selling is something that you should be exploring.

In the world of B2B sales and marketing, we’ve always been fascinated with a few key KPIs that help us manage our business. One of them is cost per lead.

Your sales team is hard at work every day generating leads and chances are that your marketing department is out there generating marketing qualified leads so your sales people can transform them into viable opportunities.

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Blog Sales Advice Social Selling

3 Sales Nuisances to Make You GASP!

Sales NuisancesThe sales industry has made little progress on updating sales best practices despite how technology has changed the way people interact with each other.

If you took accounting classes in your college years, you’ll know what GAAP is. The Generally Accepted Accounting Principles are guidelines by which the finances are kept in order. Without these principles, we wouldn’t have clear insights into how money flows in and out of a corporation. Accountants have taken years to agree upon these rules and they are still revised from time to time.

While our friends in finance and accounting have made a lot of progress on guidelines and best practices, sometimes it seems that our sales community lacks willingness to push forward with any type of meaningful progress.

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Blog sales training Social Selling

Death to 3rd Party LinkedIn Workshops. Hail eLearning and Crowdsourcing

Death to LinkedIn Workshops Traditional LinkedIn training workshops don’t cut it anymore. For social selling, you need to adopt an eLearning and crowdsourced system.

I want you to think about your upcoming LinkedIn workshops or training sessions. Is this event going to be ‘Death by PowerPoint?” Are you going to bring your sales reps together into 1 room, and take them off production for 4 hours or 8 hours?

If so, I guarantee, the event will end up like this photo! Here are the problems with traditional LinkedIn workshops.

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Blog Social Selling

What’s The Best Way to Learn Social Selling?

QuotesSales training models work well for traditional forms of learning. However, social selling requires a different type of teaching.

For those of you that know me, you know I’m a huge fan of quotes. Nothing like a quote to fire up the spirit! Here’s one that my colleague Jamie Shanks sent me.

It makes me think about the best way to learn. When we apply this to our world of social selling, or even sales training in general, interesting observations can be made.

The Classic Sales Training Models FAIL with Social Selling

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Blog Social Selling

Social Selling in 60 Seconds: The Harry Houdini Effect

Find Tweets Using the “Tweets Near Here” function in Hootsuite, here’s how to find tweets near a client or competitor’s office location.

Do you want to be a modern-day Harry Houdini? Would you like to be in one place but have your eyes and ears in another? Rejoice friends, this ability is not just for the rich & famous and the government anymore!

This tip is for those that are already using social selling a little here and there. As you know, one of the hardest things to keep a track of are prospects, existing buyers and even competitors. It’s hard to know who’s doing what and when. Especially as buyers become more social in their research and know-how, how can sales professionals keep a track of all of this data?

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Blog Sales

The Rise of the Millennials! Challenges and Opportunities for the Sales Industry

Rise of the MillennialsBy 2025, 75% of the workforce will be comprised of Millennials. This poses a lot of challenges and opportunities for us in the sales industry.

We’re at a really interesting time in human history right now. There is an entire generation of people who can’t remember life without the internet. This means that the act of staying connected and consuming information from a fire hose is baked into their DNA. These folks are entering the work force en masse with very different ideas on how to do things and they’re not afraid to let you know, the way we’ve been doing things isn’t working for them.

If you haven’t read Shama Kabani’s article in Forbes What You Need to Know About Millennials, you should check it out. The Millennials is the generation that is full of hope, courage and excitement. Although they get a bad rap for being the generation of entitlement, they are the future. It’s up to all of us to nurture their creativity.

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Blog LinkedIn Success Stories

Getting on the Front Page of Google in 30 days With LinkedIn

Front Page of GoogleGetting on the front page of Google search results was surprisingly straight forward using LinkedIn. Here’s what this sales rep did.

If you don’t think the basics of social selling are important, these results will wake you up!

Keith Gill is a sales professional previously with Copper-State Communications, now with Avisolve in Tuscon, Arizona. He started our Social Selling training program with Module #1 – Building a Buyer-Centric LinkedIn Profile. Less than 30 days ago, he adjusted his LinkedIn profile and optimized it for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in LinkedIn.

LOOK AT THESE RESULTS! 30 Days later, he’s a #1 search on Google on specific terms:

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Blog Social Selling

Top 4 Sales and Cold Calling Complaints from Sales Reps

Sales & Cold Calling Complaints When a rock star sales rep starts complaining, you know there’s an issue with traditional cold calling.

Yesterday I had a chance to connect with one of my closest friends who I haven’t connected with in about 9 months. Yes, life is that crazy.

Michelle is a sales rock star! She’s one of the best sales professionals I know. And that’s why it was tough to hear her (of all people) complain about how brutally tough her job is. At first I thought she was just whining. But then I realized that wasn’t the case at all. She told me in detail how she had tried different ways to get in front of her prospects and nothing was working.

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Blog Sales Social Selling

‘No Social Media at Work’ Policies Are Paranoid, Not Practical

Social Media at WorkIt’s 2014 and social media has become a bona fide and legitimate communications medium in society.

Everything from sharing updates about family to organizing massive country-wide revolutions is happening on social media platforms. Some governments around the world have banned social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter (the latest news comes from Turkey where country leaders have banned Twitter outright).

But we’re not in a foreign country – we’re in the hotbed of open markets and free economies. Right?

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