Category: Sales Process

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Top 5 Must-Read Blog Posts About Lead Generation and Prospecting

One of the questions we receive most often – in tweets, InMails, emails, phone, conversation – is, “How do I generate leads with Social Selling? How to I go from random social interactions, that are unproductive, to prospecting real Social Selling opportunities? Where do I begin? How does this fit within a larger Social Selling routine?”

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Blog Content Marketing Sales 2.0 Sales Advice Sales Enablement Sales Process Social Selling

“Stop Thinking” And 4 Other Actionable Tips To Marry Sales With Marketing

Sales With Marketing

There’s no question that closing the gap between sales and marketing translates into real numbers on the bottom line. Aberdeen Research concluded that the companies that are best-in-class in merging sales and marketing have been able to post a 20 percent growth in revenue, while those that have fallen behind have seen a 4 percent decline.

Sales reps have traditionally been taught that their only priority is reaching their set quota. However they can get it, for the penalty of failure is high. Marketing, for decades, has been taught to stick to strategy, branding tactics and overseeing the creative direction of the company. The two of them have rarely worked together.

If your organization is struggling to bring these traditionally separate players into alignment, here are five relatively easy adjustments that can be put into practice today to begin making a measurable improvement.

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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 Sales Sales Process

The New and Ancient Art of Data Visualization

Data Visualization

Applying data visualization to the sales process can yield actionable insights that make sales teams become more productive.

This is a guest post from Nikolaus Kimla, the founder of Pipeliner CRM.

Something that fascinates us here at Pipeliner CRM is the power of a language we want to speak well: Visual. This concept, the learning and absorbing information through a visual process, is getting more attention. This is good, because our product is differentiated on the visual features whereby Pipeliner customers can “see” the data and immediately get what they need to do their job more effectively.

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Blog Sales Metrics Sales Process

Predictive Sales Analytics Are BLOWING MY MIND!

Predictive Sales Analytics

Predictive analytics are taking sales measurement to a whole new level.

We were running our Salesforce.com CRM just like everyone else. We used “Stage” and “Probability” to guesstimate our sales pipeline. Sure, we were pretty solid at keeping important statistics like Opportunity Source and Dates for each change in the buying process, but we hadn’t taken it seriously until Kevin Thomas Tully on our team suggested we move to a Predictive Sales Analytics model.

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Blog Sales Process

Social Selling Equals Sales & Marketing Alignment

Business People Teamwork

Getting the sales and marketing departments of any business to work together seamlessly is almost always a tug of war.

Marketing creates tons of high-value content but can’t get their sales teams to share it. Sales teams feel that they don’t have the support of marketing and are not handed enough quality leads.

It’s an age-old struggle that I’ve seen hundreds of times. In an ideal environment, sales and marketing would work together as one cohesive unit to pass information and leads back and forth openly. In reality though, it rarely works out this way.

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Blog Sales Process Social Selling

Best of Sales for Life: Our 5 Most Inspiring Blog Posts

Motivation

Sometimes, the first step to achieving success is believing in yourself.

The majority of the content on this Sales for Life blog is about the sales industry and practical tips on social selling. However, sometimes the biggest barriers to success in sales and social selling isn’t learning to use social media tools, nor company red tape.

Sometimes, we stand in the way of ourselves because we have limiting beliefs about success/money or fears about change. To help knock down these invisible barriers so we can grow, here is a collection of our inspiring and motivational blog posts. These blog posts may mention sales or social selling, but the lessons go much deeper than that.

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Blog Demand Generation Sales Advice Sales Process Social Selling

Don’t Worry, Be Happy as a Social Seller

Social Selling Quotes

Social selling is your new secret weapon for reaching your sales targets.

If you currently hold a quota-carrying sales position or had one in the past, then you’ve likely worried about reaching your targets at one point in time or another. This stress simply comes with the territory. Everyone in sales has months or quarters where, regardless of their effort, the monetary value of their closed deals did not reach their level of expectations.

Not reaching your goal could happen for a number of external reasons, such as summer vacations, long sales cycles, economic conditions and so on. It could also be a result of internal factors like poor forecasting, improper qualifying or a small sales pipeline of prospects.

Fortunately for all of you sales professionals out there, the technology age has brought about an entirely new set of tools that can alleviate the stress of reaching quota by helping you exceed your targets and transforming you into a social seller.

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Blog Sales Sales Advice Sales Process Social Selling

How LinkedIn Helps Combat CEB’s Truth About Increased Sales Cycle Timelines

Increased Sales Cycle Timelines

Sales cycle timelines have increased. Here’s how you can use LinkedIn and social selling to stay in touch during the buying process.

I’m sitting in the Pittsburgh airport, reading the CEB article on increased sales cycle lengths on my Feed.ly App. I’m literally participating in the reasons CEB wrote the article, and is DEAD RIGHT.

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Blog Sales Advice Sales Process

SHUT UP and Listen to Your Prospects

Listen to Prospects

As sales professionals, one of the hardest skills for us to learn is LISTENING.

Our managers and mentors teach us hundreds of things: how to cold call, how to elevator pitch, how to prospect, how to qualify, how to close and so on. Rarely, though, are we ever taught how to actually listen to prospects.

Shutting up and listening to my prospects was the single most important lesson I’ve learned in sales, and I thank sales trainer, Jeff Hoffman, for imparting this wisdom on me. Jeff taught me to not take on other peoples’ insecurities and to revel in uncomfortable silences.

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