Category: Sales

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Blog Sales Sales Advice Sales Enablement Social Selling

6 Signs (And the Cure) to Unmask a Social Selling Charlatan

Halloween is the holiday traditionally reserved for costumes, illusion, and scary things. But October 31 isn’t the only date for spotting Social Selling pretenders.

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Blog Sales Sales 2.0 Sales Advice Social Selling

4 Popular Objections And How To Overcome Them Using Social Selling

Nobody likes to say no. People come up with lots of creative ways to stall or put off making a decision, even when it is in their best interest to solve the problem. When you are training your sales team to become experts on social selling, one way to get them on board is to show them how new technology solves some very old sales challenges.

At the Sales Acceleration Summit earlier this year, Jim Keenan revealed that 78.6 percent of sales professionals who used social media outperformed their competition. How did they do it? Here are four of the most common sales objections along with the ways that social selling blows them away.

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Blog Content Marketing Sales Sales 2.0 Social Selling

Blogging for Sales: How To Write (And Monetize Your Content)

Blogging for Sales

Want to know the worst-kept secret in academia? University professors must either “publish or perish.”

It’s called brand building. In academic circles, it’s essential to advance your career and keep your job.

For sales professionals, while not a job requirement, individual brand building is a crucial component of career success.

Much like college professors seeking placements in professional publications, perhaps the easiest route for sales pros to establish themselves as industry thought leaders is through blogging.

The writing process instills feelings of fear and dread in many sales professionals, especially those emotionally scarred by traumatic sentence diagram experiences when younger. (OK, maybe that’s just me.)

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Blog LinkedIn Sales Sales 2.0 Sales Advice

Ensuring Account Engagement With LinkedIn’s ‘Relationship Flows’

Social Selling

In Version 2.0, Module #7 (Create Action in your Account) of our Social Selling training curriculum, we had been training sales professionals with named accounts to “Social Surround the account”. The reason is simple, you don’t want to get caught being “Single Threaded”, as you see from this slide:

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Blog Sales Sales 2.0 Sales Advice Sales Enablement

5 Ways To Make Sales Training More Effective

Resources For Online Learning

Out of all the components of sales training, where should you focus your attention to achieve greater effectiveness? There are five areas that have the greatest impact on sales enablement. After studying the comments from chief sales officers (CSOs) at more than 1200 companies, Accenture has identified some of the most powerful ways to prepare your team for more effective sales.

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Blog Sales Sales Process

10 Things That Sales Teams Will Need In 2015

Sales Toolkit

As 2014 winds down, salespeople and managers should look at the current environment to figure out what elements will be most important and useful in the months to come. Here’s a short list on what many experts are calling for to prepare modern sales forces for the next wave of advancement in a data-centric world.

1) Social Selling Platforms

Social selling has proven to be a key tactic for companies, and having the right tools to get onboard and seek out customers is going to mean everything to a sales strategy. This article from Mashable, which looks positively at LinkedIn’s new Sales Navigator tool, cites studies that show that sales people with social selling strategies are 51 percent more likely to beat a quota, partially by eliminating the need for cold calls and other traditional tactics.

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Blog Content Marketing Infographics Sales Sales Metrics

The ROI of Social Selling [Infographic]

Project Analysis

Social Media has become a key digital strategy for a vast majority of sales and marketing teams (70%+). But how are companies measuring the impact of Social Selling? Do they even see value in tracking those channels? For those who do gather Social Selling data, what results are they reporting so far? Is Social Selling driving actual revenue?

The following infographic reveals that although social tactics are indeed having a positive effect on the bottom line of North American businesses, most of them still struggle to measure the ROI of those efforts.

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Blog Content Marketing Sales Sales 2.0 Sales Advice

Attention CMOs – 4 Ways To Organize Your Content Library For Sales [Video]

Organize Your Content

There’s no denying that content marketing has become a key tactic for marketing teams. With so many assets being created on a consistent basis, CMOs need to make sure that their content is easy to access and leverage by sales teams! Below is an ESSENTIAL list for the success of any Social Selling program. Here are 4 simple categories of tools to consider when creating a content library for sales:

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Blog Sales Sales 2.0 Sales Advice Sales Inspiration

8 Shockingly Inspirational Quotes for Sales & Marketing Professionals

Everyone in the sales & marketing industry hits motivational lows from time to time. It unfortunately comes with the territory. Perhaps no one has been returning your calls today or engaging with your content. Maybe you just lost a big deal or have hit writers block trying to meet a deadline for a new blog post.

It happens to ALL of us so fear not if this is currently your situation because you are assuredly not alone. This low you experience may last a day, a month or even a year at times. And there is no mistaking it, the feeling just down right sucks.

Luckily though inspiration is all around us in this brilliant age of information that we live in. On the other side of one simple mouse click could be a quote, video, picture or message that picks you back up again and puts a smile on your face. As some of you may have noticed (if we’re connected on LinkedIn) I love sharing inspirational quotes with me network. This is partly because it is a nice break from the constant Social Selling content that I post out and also partly because I hope that maybe, just maybe, someone out there who is experiencing one of these low points happens upon my post and it brightens their day a little bit.

So by popular demand, here is a list of my favorite quotes that individuals within my network have liked, reshared and commented on because they have also found a little inspiration hidden within… I hope you do too 🙂

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Blog LinkedIn Sales Sales 2.0 Sales Advice sales training Social Selling

The Big Spenders Are On Social Media (And They’re Looking To Buy) [SlideShare]

Social Media

A whitepaper released by IDC Research and LinkedIn focuses on the value of social networks for increasing trust between buyers and salespeople.

According to new research published by IDC and sponsored by LinkedIn, buyers making purchase decisions gravitate to their professional social networks to increase their confidence on a determined product or service. This process is called social buying.

Check out the whitepaper titled Social Buying Meets Social Selling: How Trusted Networks Improve the Purchase Experience, which includes great original data and tips on how to gain trust from buyers and provide them with confidence during the decision making process.

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