It’s the time of year when sales teams wrap up celebrating last year’s wins and start setting goals to exceed last year’s performance. Likewise, marketing teams are heads-down in planning their own strategies for the year. Too often, though, those teams are so focused on their own planning that they forget they’re stronger together.
What do personalization tech, social networks and content portals all have in common? User-directed action. All three represent the large-scale culture shift away from undifferentiated, mass-market broadcasting and toward greater individual control over the speed, form and scope of content they interact with on a daily basis.
Sales reps ask for more content, yet the content already created by product teams, marketing and sales enablement groups seems to sit there taking up server space and offering zero action. Some research indicates that up to 65 percent of the content created for sales teams is going to waste. Why?
We all have leadership expectations to meet, goals to reach, and milestones to achieve. Think you or your buyers and customers are not biased? Think again. It’s baked into us from a young age—check out this post from HubSpot on 26 forms of bias.
Nobody wants to hear, “I’ll check with my boss.” It usually means that sales loses control of the presentation and will be shut out of the Q&A session, if there ever is one. That’s one of the reasons why every salesperson should strive to get through to the C-suite from the start. Then sales just has to sit back as the gravitational force of management pressure can work its magic on the procurement team.
If you are only posting stories for people to read, you’re only using half of the Internet. Great content should encourage B2B buyers to engage in conversations with your sales teams. Consider your ideal buyers for a moment and try to assess what would motivate them to engage, explore further or even buy.
Sometimes, giving 100 percent is just not enough. Overperformers are sometimes defined as sales professionals who bring back at least 125 percent of their quota. That was the starting point for a survey by the Harvard Business Review that looked at the motivations and personal attributes of overperformers in the sales arena.
Sales reps are calling for more and better content so they can ramp up revenues, yet up to 70 percent of the content already produced by marketing is going unused. Why?
For many B2B organizations, the problem of disappearing content now stands in the way of sales and marketing alignment. One of the primary reasons for this breakdown is that sales and marketing too often use contradicting definitions of a shared word: content.
In Part A of this series, we talked about the unfortunate miscommunication that most sales organizations have with their front-line sales leaders in clearly outlining the core business outcomes. Assuming that step has been tackled, can your front-line sales leaders tell you how specifically they’re measuring important milestones that will achieve your business outcomes?
Sales for Life was founded with one goal – to become the most trusted sales resource for its customers. During our journey, we’ve had the privilege of serving thousands of sales professionals and leaders around the world, from start-ups to Fortune 50 corporations.
