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Blog Sales and Marketing Sales Enablement Sales Management Sales Process

Service Level Agreement (SLA): Critical For Streamlined Sales And Marketing Alignment

If you’ve been following this blog, you already know that I believe alignment between an organization’s sales and marketing departments is critical. However, did you know that the Service Level Agreement (SLA) is an important way to achieve that alignment? The SLA is THE document that builds trust and accountability between sales and marketing departments. It’s going through the act of building the SLA and readdressing the SLA every month in a meeting that builds the foundation for sales and marketing alignment.

Unfortunately, only 43% of marketing and sales operations leaders have lead response SLAs in place, and most are not being governed. And only 11 percent of survey respondents reported having jointly managed SLAs according to SiriusDecisions.

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Blog Sales Enablement

What Best-In-Class Sales Teams Do To Sustain Massive Revenue Growth

You might as well call sales enablement “business survival training” at this point. Aberdeen just came out with a report that looked at how best-in-class sales teams achieve market dominance and massive revenue growth on a consistent basis. The report concludes that sales enablement is the answer. The most successful businesses invest in a combination of the right sales education, top talent and advanced technology to overcome the challenges imposed by tech disruption. Essentially to align the right people, process and technology. A commitment to the effectiveness of sales training is turning laggards into leaders.

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Blog sales training Social Selling Training

How Social Selling Integrates With Your Existing Sales Training

No matter what sales methodology has been adopted by your organization, Social Selling can be easily integrated. Thanks to Xerox in 1967, and David Sandler in 1968, millions of sales professionals over the last 50 years have learned a structured sales process.

There have been multiple variations on how to approach a buyer, but in the last five years the buyer has evolved so dramatically, that it has left sales organizations scrambling! According to Forrester Research, 74% of today’s B2B buyers conduct more than half of their research online before making a purchase. The answer to this is Social Selling.

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Blog Sales 2.0 Sales Advice Sales Process

5 Cold Calling Fails And How To Fix Them With Social Selling

Have you heard that cold calling is back from the dead? It turns out that cold calling is a bit like Mark Twain: Reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.

Cold calling in sales is all about reaching out with confidence to someone you don’t know. Contact has to be established somehow, and many B2B sales teams still utilize cold calling within their existing sales strategy. However, 97% of cold calls are ineffective according to IBM Buyer Preference Study. So how do you even start a conversation? The elemental truth is that Social Selling and cold calling are not polar opposites, but merely complementary pathways for establishing the kind of relationships that lead to sales.

Successful sales leaders take advantage of all the tools in their triage kits to get the job done. For some sales professionals, cold calling can be a challenging way to reach buyers. However, you need to be able to support your team under any circumstances.

Here are five good ways to resuscitate the effectiveness of the common cold call by applying Social Selling techniques.