May, 2018

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Show Me the Money! A Guide to Creating a Scalable Sales Compensation Plan

Openview

We’ve all heard Tom Cruise’s famous line from Jerry Maguire, but showing your sales team members the money is often a complicated equation. In this guide, you’ll find tips for designing sales compensation packages that yield results and actually scale. As most CEOs have discovered at some point, sales compensation is very often a delicate balancing act.

Sales 147
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The Follow-Up Thank You Email That Got Me Hired In One Week

Hubspot Sales

Just like in the world of sales, the follow up advice out there can be a little conflicting. You don't want to annoy the interviewer, but you also don't want to be forgotten, right? So whether you're applying for a job or following up with a prospect, it can be a little confusing on whether or not you should follow up. Regardless of what advice you read, it's proven that a follow up is important.

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Burn Your Ships: A History Lesson About How to Be a Great Leader

The Center for Sales Strategy

If you are a history buff, you may know the story of Cort é s and the burning of his ships. In the year 1519, Hern á n Cort é s arrived in the New World with six hundred men and, upon arrival, made history by destroying his ships. This sent a clear message to his men: There is no turning back. Two years later, he succeeded in his conquest of the Aztec empire.

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Is Your Buyer Part of the Solution?

Engage Selling

You need to know what’s going on in the minds of your buyers when it comes to the solution you’re offering. Confused about what this means, exactly? Let me explain.

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State of AI in Sales & Marketing 2025

AI adoption is reshaping sales and marketing. But is it delivering real results? We surveyed 1,000+ GTM professionals to find out. The data is clear: AI users report 47% higher productivity and an average of 12 hours saved per week. But leaders say mainstream AI tools still fall short on accuracy and business impact. Download the full report today to see how AI is being used — and where go-to-market professionals think there are gaps and opportunities.

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An ABM Program Can Make Capturing Marketing’s Revenue Contribution Even Easier

SBI Growth

Our guest today is Sangram Vajre, Chief Evangelist and Co-Founder of Terminus. Sangram is one of the 21 B2B influencers to watch by the B2B News Network. And many in the audience know Sangram as the founder of the #flipmyfunnel.

B2B 109
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B2B Companies Have A $4.6 Billion Lead Engagement Problem — But LeadBot 2.0 Is Here to Fix It

Drift

Let’s take a trip back in time to 2016 — the year Drift launched its very first chatbot. Just two years ago, the idea of a bot making life easier for sales reps and marketers was far-fetched at best. At the time, B2B sales and marketing was powered by automation and lead forms. And chat was traditionally used by support teams. So why did sales and marketing need a real-time engagement tool?

B2B 98

More Trending

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How to Start a Business: A Complete Guide for Startup Entrepreneurs

Hubspot Sales

Everyone wants more visitors, more qualified leads, and more revenue. But starting a business isn’t one of those "if you build it, they will come" situations. In order to build a successful company, you’ll need to create and fine-tune a business plan, assess your finances, complete all the legal paperwork, pick your partners, choose the best tools and systems to help you get your marketing and sales off the ground … and a whole lot more.

Finance 145
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10 Social Media Best Practices for Salespeople

The Center for Sales Strategy

In an ever-changing sales landscape, maintaining a healthy personal brand on social media has become a necessary tool for sales professionals to build and maintain relationships with prospects. According to a Forrester Consulting study, Social Selling: A New B2B Imperative , “49 percent of B2B enterprises have developed a formal social selling program, and 28 percent are in the process of doing so.

Media 122
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Always be Retaining!

Engage Selling

I don’t know a single sales leader who finds hiring great new talent to be particularly easy. Especially in this virtually “full employment”current market. So, what’s the solution? Do everything possible to keep your team from leaving.

Marketing 110
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How the Fastest Growing Startups Build Their Sales Teams

Openview

To achieve explosive growth, technology startups need to have world-class sales teams. From smart cities and driverless cars to artificial intelligence, big data and SaaS, 2018 is ripe for companies to achieve record revenue and profits. That is, if they have the right sales team in place. A company’s success depends on the ability of its sales teams to deliver sustainable, predictable revenue at scale.

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AI Strategies for Sales Managers: How to Cut Down on Tedious Admin Work

What if you could help your sellers stop wasting 72% of their day on non-selling activities and focus on bringing in revenue? Incorporating AI in your enablement workflows can help you cut down on busy work, get projects done faster, and let your team (and you!) focus on making a bigger impact. We put together this guide to show you how to use AI to cut time and costs for projects, including collateral creation, development of training videos, and automating tedious processes.

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5 Red Flags That Signal Your Exec Team Isn’t Aligned to Your Growth Strategy

SBI Growth

Crafting a truly effective growth strategy is a critical mission and a herculean task for any CEO. After spending the effort to build it, be certain your executive team is aligned to it. If not, the results can be as.

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What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done to make a sale?

Nutshell

Nothing inspires a salesperson’s creativity like a game-changing deal that’s hanging just out of reach. We asked eight sales professionals and business leaders for their best stories of going wayyyy above and beyond to close the deal. Enjoy, and tweet your own crazy sales stories to @nutshell. (The best story that can fit in a single tweet wins a prize!).

Sales 93
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21 Sales Qualification Questions to Identify Prospects Worth Pursuing

Hubspot Sales

Qualifying Questions. What's the business problem you're seeking to fix with this offering? What's prompting you to do something about it now? What has prevented you from trying to solve the problem until now? Have you tried to solve this problem in the past? If so, why didn't that solution work? What happens if you do nothing about the problem? Do you have a budget allocated for this project?

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What is a Target Persona and Why Do I Need One?

The Center for Sales Strategy

There’s a great line from the hit show Friends that seems appropriate to any discussion of target personas. If you’re a fan, you may remember when the whole gang goes to Barbados in one of the later seasons, and Joey meets someone who doesn’t own a TV. Dumbfounded, he says: “You don’t own a TV? What’s all your furniture pointed at?”. Similarly, with inbound marketing (the process of attracting prospects to you), when someone doesn’t have a clearly defined persona we think, “You don’t know your t

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2024, The Year of the Customer

2023's struggles fueled a shift: companies are ditching wasteful strategies in favor of data and AI-powered growth. Enter 2024, the year GTC takes center stage. Discover 5 ways a customer-centric approach unlocks new revenue and delivers lasting success.

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How to Generate Over $1 Million In B2B Sales Leads With Chat

Drift

Conversational marketing is about having real-time, one-to-one conversations with people on your website in order to capture, qualify, and connect with your best leads. It has the power to reduce your bounce rate, shorten your sales cycle, and even grow your revenue by $1 million or more. Sound intriguing? It should. As more B2B buyers use chat to evaluate products in real-time, it’s crucial that.

B2B 69
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Sales Skills: The Best and The Worst

RAIN Group

To succeed in sales, you need to have the right skills. You must be able to lead masterful sales conversations, manage opportunities, uncover needs, negotiate the best deals, fill the pipeline, develop relationships, manage sellers, and the list goes on. With the laundry list of skills needed, what skills are sellers most likely to have? In our The Top-Performing Sales Organization study, the RAIN Group Center for Sales Research asked, across a number of areas, if sellers have the skills they ne

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World Class Pipeline and Forecast Management

SBI Growth

Many CEO’s today lack confidence in their sales leaders to produce an accurate forecast. They have learned to apply algorithms to de-risk the number. This is a roller coaster ride that happens quarter after quarter of inconsistent forecasts. This problem.

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How to Implement a Sales Process: The Complete Guide

Nutshell

Building a sales process gives your future sales efforts a much greater chance of success, but your work isn’t done until it’s part of your organization’s DNA. According to Sales Benchmark Index , a well implemented sales process can improve your team’s win rate by 24%, reduce your sales cycle length by 20%, and increase your average sale price by 15%.

CRM 82
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1st, 2nd, and 3rd Party Intent Data: Which Is Right for You?

How do 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party intent data compare? 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party data each have specific advantages and disadvantages. It comes down to four factors: accuracy, cost, control and quantity. This infographic explains the pros and cons of each and helps you understand which one is best for meeting your business objectives. Intent data can be a great way to fill your pipeline and close more deals.

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8 Steps to Setting Smarter Sales Goals

Hubspot Sales

Sales Goals. Monthly sales goals. Waterfall goals. Sequence goals. Activity goals. Incentivized goals. Goal progression. Stretch goals. Mentor goals. If your reps only have one goal -- meeting their quota -- they’re selling themselves short (literally). Hold your reps accountable to smaller weekly or monthly goals, and you’ll increase the likelihood they’ll meet their bigger number.

Sales 145
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Do you Need Sales Enablement Tools and a CRM?

The Center for Sales Strategy

Is your sales team running the same plays as it did ten years ago? Even five years ago? Well if it is, then there is a good chance you need to update your sales playbook. The fact is that the way businesses buy and sell has forever changed—and to stay competitive, you need to change too. Yes, certain things are still essential—finding needs, presenting solutions, and getting results—but how you interact with prospects and clients is different.

CRM 89
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The Art of Conversation: How Sales Teams Can Build World-Class Buying Experiences With Chat

Drift

People are tired of being sold to. They’re immune to emails, turned off by the hard sell, and can spot a sales pitch a thousand miles away. These days, buyers have more information and power than ever before, and they’re not just using that power to buy products — they’re using it to buy experiences. Twenty years ago, you might order something over the phone and wait weeks for it to arrive.

Sales 83
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The Best Way to Fire a Client

Engage Selling

As much as we all wish that each client we work with turns out to be a dream, we often need to come back down to reality and face the facts.

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How to Leverage Intent Data for Better Outcomes

Speaker: Susan Spencer, Principal of Spencer Communications

Intent signal data can go a long way toward shortening sales cycles and closing more deals. The challenge is deciding which is the best type of intent data to help your company meet its sales and marketing goals. In this webinar, Susan Spencer, fractional CMO and principal of Spencer Communications, will unpack the differences between contact-level and company-level intent signals.

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5 Keys to Execute a Successful Sales Re-Org

SBI Growth

Weeks and months of planning go into defining the optimal sales org design for your organization. Countless meetings and analysis comparing the benefits of hunter/famer, stratification, product specialization or other org designs. Time is spent defining the role SDR’s, Sales.

Sales 85
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A Weekly Sales Meeting is a Place to Create New Sales

Jeffrey Gitomer

Sales staff meetings are a vital link between what your company expects the sales team to do, and what actually gets sold in the trenches. It is a place where marketing is converted to sales. But how often is the opportunity these meetings provide lost, rather than gained?

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9 Alternatives to "Looking Forward to Hearing from You"

Hubspot Sales

"Looking Forward to Hearing from You" Alternatives. “Could you return all proposal feedback by Friday?”. “Could you help me find the answer here?”. “I saw X and thought of you. What are your thoughts?”. “It would really help me out if you could reply by Wednesday.”. “If you’re too busy to handle this request, is there someone else I can reach out to?”.

Meetings 145
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Stop Spending Time with Lousy Prospects: 3 Criteria to Help Qualify Your Prospects

The Center for Sales Strategy

Many sellers struggle to develop new customers. Often this has less to do with the seller’s ability to sell, and more to do with the seller’s ability to select quality prospects.

Sales 84
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The 2023 Supply Chain Crystal Ball: Challenges and Solutions

Speaker: Olivia Montgomery, Associate Principal Supply Chain Analyst

Curious to know how your peers are navigating ongoing disruption? The supply chain management techniques that dominated the last 30 years are no longer supporting consumer behavior or logistics and manufacturing capabilities. So what’s working now? What should your plans for 2023 include? By researching the supply chain challenges and solutions that businesses – especially small and midsize businesses – are currently experiencing, we’ve learned what’s working and what’s not.

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The Secret Lives of Product Marketers And Why The Good Ones Have the Power to Transform Your Brand

Drift

Product marketing is one of those areas of the marketing profession that’s shrouded in mystery. Is it sales enablement? Marketing? Part of product? No one knows. But they should. That’s because — when done right — product marketing is one of the most powerful weapons in your marketing arsenal. It has the power to help you stand out in a sea of lookalikes, and elevate your brand to a.

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Getting Pricing Wrong

Engage Selling

Recently I was at a large gathering of CEOs: all sharp thinkers who want to see their companies grow.

Sales 75
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How to Pinpoint Your Market’s Sweet Spot

SBI Growth

Should you cover the entire market or double down on your sweet spot? You’re a CEO who just missed the quarterly number for the 3rd time in a row. You know what happens next. You are on the hook to.

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BMW Launches Public Innovation Challenge

Planview

Cars are no longer just forms of transportation. From the ability to have hands-free conversations through interior speakers to diagnostic displays that enable you to see the health of your vehicle to autonomous driving, they’re quickly becoming a technology platform where remarkable innovations are happening. While the exterior of a car usually gets all the attention, interiors are getting more sophisticated as they become tightly integrated with our everyday lives.

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The GTM Intelligence Era: ZoomInfo 2025 Customer Impact Report

ZoomInfo customers aren’t just selling — they’re winning. Revenue teams using our Go-To-Market Intelligence platform grew pipeline by 32%, increased deal sizes by 40%, and booked 55% more meetings. Download this report to see what 11,000+ customers say about our Go-To-Market Intelligence platform and how it impacts their bottom line. The data speaks for itself!