June, 2018

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Sales Cycles Explained in 500 Words or Less

Hubspot Sales

What Is a Sales Cycle? “Sales Cycle” refers to the specific actions salespeople follow to close a new customer. Sales cycles are often confused with sales methodologies. A sales methodology, such as the “ inbound methodology ,” refers to the framework for implementing the sales cycle. The sales cycle is more tactical, and often includes stages such as “prospect,” “connect,” “research,” “present,” and “close.”.

Logistics 145
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Account-Based Marketing (ABM): A Complete Guide

Drift

A long, long time ago, in a time known as “the 2000s,” marketers were obsessed with casting these super-wide nets in the hopes of pulling in as many leads as possible. Blogs became content farms, covering topics that were meant to attract anyone and everyone. As far as marketers were concerned, the more traffic they could send to their sites, the better.

Marketing 134
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Don’t Make Everyone Your Customer

Engage Selling

Some sellers (erroneously) believe that they should be attempting to sell to anyone and everyone. This is, counterintuitively to some, an excellent recipe to create a disaster. Here’s some important advice. Only sell to those who are ideal prospects.

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30 Songs to Pump Up Your Playlist and Help Boost Sales Productivity

The Center for Sales Strategy

I read a recent study that shared many interesting things about music and how much it does for humans. Some things noted in the study are that music: Enhances intelligence, learning and IQ. Improves memory performance. Improves concentration and attention. Helps work productivity. Helps fight fatigue. Improves mood. Whether you're motivating yourself or your sales team, I think anyone in sales would like a little bit of all of those.

Sales 94
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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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Admin Inefficiencies are Dragging Your Inside Sales Productivity Down

SBI Growth

Inside sellers should perform essentially the same role as field sellers, the only difference being the inside sales team does not visit customers or prospects face to face. Role Corruption Results in Poor Sales Performance. With the inside sales team in the.

Sales 94
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How to Discount Less Often When Price Pressure is High

RAIN Group

With more sales going through purchasing departments, you're bound to face price pressure on almost every opportunity. They'll expect you to discount. Nearly all organizations negotiate or discount their stated list price to some extent. In fact, in our Top-Performing Sales Organization study, we asked about the frequency in which companies discount.

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Account-Based Marketing (ABM): A Complete Guide

Drift

A long, long time ago, in a time known as “the 2000s,” marketers were obsessed with casting these super-wide nets in the hopes of pulling in as many leads as possible. Blogs became content farms, covering topics that were meant to attract anyone and everyone. As far as marketers were concerned, the more traffic they could send to their sites, the better.

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6 Questions To Ensure You Build Value For Your Customers

MTD Sales Training

You know well how customer don’t buy on price alone. The risk that is taken when they buy the cheapest option is sometimes too great and so other components are taken into account when decisions are made. We often say that we should sell the concept of value, as it appears in the eyes of the prospect. But how can you generate that value? How do you know what would be valuable to a client?

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The 8 Talents Every Salesperson Needs to Succeed

The Center for Sales Strategy

Have you ever heard about Katie Francis, who shattered the 30-year-old world record by selling 21,477 boxes of Girl Scout Cookies in 2014 ? On weekdays, Katie put in about seven hours every day selling cookies. So she rested on weekends, right? Nope. She put in 12 hours a day on the weekends! Since then, she's sold a record of 100,100 boxes of girl scout cookies in her seven years as a girl scout.

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Why Top Sales Reps Will Be Unemployed In 2 Years

SBI Growth

Sales 87
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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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6 Ways to Boost Sales in Your Organization

RAIN Group

There is no magic way to achieve sales success. However, there is one significant concept that helps the companies and sellers who embrace it—those who make it part of the fabric of who they are and who their sales organization is—experience wildly successful sales results. If you want to boost sales and join their ranks, you must become a Value-Driving Sales Organization.

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6 Rookie Sales Call Mistakes That Make Prospects Hang Up ASAP

Hubspot Sales

As a sales rep, you’re no stranger to rejection. You’ve made hundreds if not thousands of prospecting calls in your career, and regardless of how well you prepared or how perfect the prospect was for your offering, some of those dials resulted in hang-ups. Getting hung up on occasionally is an unfortunate consequence of being in sales. Nothing to obsess over.

Sales 145
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Introducing Drift Help: Deliver 24/7 Conversational Support On Your Website

Drift

Conversational marketing and sales is about meeting prospects where they are and providing a one-to-one experience that feels less like a sales pitch and more like a helpful dialogue between friends. When executed properly, a conversational approach leads to better educated prospects, more closed deals, and a stronger relationship between buyers and your brand.

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Dream Teams: Why Effective Collaboration Requires ‘Diverse Mental Tool Kits’

Nutshell

The following is excerpted from Dream Teams: Working Together Without Falling Apart by bestselling author and Contently cofounder Shane Snow. For more, follow Shane on Medium , Twitter , and LinkedIn. *. Pretend that you are having a housewarming party, and you’ve invited your eight best friends. You’ve baked a delicious round cake, and because you love your friends equally, you want to cut it into eight equal pieces for them.

CRM 81
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How to Stay Competitive in the Evolving State of Martech

Marketing technology is essential for B2B marketers to stay competitive in a rapidly changing digital landscape — and with 53% of marketers experiencing legacy technology issues and limitations, they’re researching innovations to expand and refine their technology stacks. To help practitioners keep up with the rapidly evolving martech landscape, this special report will discuss: How practitioners are integrating technologies and systems to encourage information-sharing between departments and pr

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Do You Have A Personal Board of Directors?

The Center for Sales Strategy

Whether you like it or not, we are faced with a multitude of decisions every day. Some are small, but some are monumental. And while we all like to think we make the best decisions, it's imperative that we seek wise and experience council. A personal board of directors is a group of people you regularly consult for advice or feedback on these major business and life decisions.

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How to Take Over a New Sales Territory

SBI Growth

Sales 86
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Closing Techniques In Sales are Dead. This Data Explains Why.

Openview

I have bad news. By the time you try that slick closing technique you read about online, it’ll be too late. Your deal’s fate will already have been sealed. The actions you take earlier in the sales process define your outcome. Not even the fanciest closing technique can change that. Imagine an asteroid on a collision course with earth. When the asteroid is far away, even a tiny shift in its trajectory will make it miss our little blue planet.

Sales 77
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The Ultimate List of Sales Discovery Call Questions

Hubspot Sales

Closing calls are sexy. They’re the calls where a deal gets moved across the line, contracts get signed, and you earn your commission checks. But closing calls are a bit of a fait accompli. Depending on who you sell to and what you sell, you could have already spent 10 to 20 hours with your prospect. You should have a good idea of whether the deal will close and for how much.

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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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How to Implement Conversational Support: The 8 Plays Every Pro Needs To Drive Customer Success

Drift

“We need to launch chat support.” Those words have always had the potential to strike fear into the heart of every customer support leader. Why? Because launching a new support channel is no joke. It requires planning, training — and, sometimes –onboarding new team members to help you execute on your strategy. But most businesses can understand the appeal of offering conversational.

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How Nutshell?s support engineer rotation keeps us focused on customers, not code

Nutshell

As a developer, it’s easy to get caught up in writing good code instead of writing good software. We all love new feature work and the process of creating things, but the reason we show up for work every day is to build a product for our customers. That’s why it’s so important that development and CX work side by side: Without constant communication with the people who are actually talking to your customers, the wrong things get done.

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What's a Marketing Qualified Lead? What's a Sales Qualified Lead?

The Center for Sales Strategy

When it comes to lead generation, when does the marketing department’s role end and the sales department’s role begin? Very specifically, when should a lead be passed from marketing to sales? This is a tricky question, and as with most marketing and sales best practices, it’s not always black and white. Every organization is different, and it’s important that your organization has it's own marketing and sales agreement plan that outlines in detail how you will qualify, distribute, track, and ult

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How to Enhance Your Senior Talent Review Experience

SBI Growth

It is essential for organizations to have the most talented people embedded in their businesses. Without their greatest assets, there is risk for major losses across the board. Key elements in preventing such loss are the: Approach Framework Timing of senior talent reviews. Consider.

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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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Do B2B Buyers Want to Cut Salespeople Out of the Buying Process?

Miller Heiman Group

The Miller Heiman Group 2018 Buyer Preferences Study found that more than 70 percent of buyers said they wait until after they have already defined their needs to engage sellers. In this post, we look at the questions of whether buyers want to cut salespeople out of the buying process and why so many reps find themselves struggling to stay involved.

B2B 69
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The 4 Email Templates That Earned Us $100,000 in 30 Days

Hubspot Sales

Like most small businesses, we used to get 90% of new clients from referrals. If we had more time, we’d generate leads through inbound marketing. If we had more money, we’d purchase $30,000+ in advertisements or sponsorships. But we had limited time AND money. So we had to come up with a different solution. As a result, we built a follow-up email system -- using the free Email Templates tool from HubSpot Sales -- that generated $100,000 in the past 30 days.

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Inside the Drift Playbook for Increasing Website Conversions: 6 Plays You Should Be Running Right Now

Drift

Here’s an eye-opening stat: Only 22% of B2B businesses are satisfied with their website conversion rates. Why? Because the path that most people follow on a company’s website tends to look something like this. Customer gets to your website, scrolls through your homepage, checks out your products, looks at your pricing page, and then before they even consider adding booking a demo, they leave.

B2B 72
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How sales automation software separates the amateurs from the pros

Nutshell

When you think about the activities that are essential to making a sale, you probably think about actions that require the human touch of the sales rep—listening to a prospect’s needs, developing a solution for them, and asking for the sale when it’s time to do so. And then there’s everything else. A sales rep’s day always involves tasks that require manual effort, but don’t get their prospects any closer to a “yes” (at least not directly).

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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 Sales Pipeline is More Important Than Sales Activity

The Center for Sales Strategy

It seems like every sales manager I have talked to lately wants to talk about activity and how to enforce minimum activity expectations. It took a few of these conversations before a simple truth became obvious to me: Pipeline is way more important than activity.

Sales 79
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What Role Does Your Marketing Team Play in The Revenue Desk?

SBI Growth

There is an emerging best practice in Key Account Management that successful B2B firms are quickly deploying. The best practice is a “Revenue Desk”. In this blog, I will outline the role of Marketing in this critical new Key Account.

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How to create a modern sales playbook

PandaDoc

Back in the day, simpler sales meant simpler playbooks. Sure, sales playbooks still resembled comprehensive, step-by-step guides and collections of best practices. But playbooks from several years ago were nowhere near as detailed, scalable, and flexible as today’s versions—as one-size-fits-all sales are no longer the norm. More modern playbooks read less as a linear script, bound via binders and split up tab-by-tab, and more like adaptable, collaborative resources.

Sales 68
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SPIN Selling: The Ultimate Guide

Hubspot Sales

If you’re a B2B salesperson, you’ve probably heard about SPIN Sales. It’s one of the most well-known -- not to mention oldest -- selling systems. SPIN gives reps a research-backed framework for working and closing complex deals with extended sales processes. You can use SPIN principles along with your current sales methodology. The strategy focuses on asking good questions in the right order, using active listening, and translating the prospect’s needs into your product’s features.

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How to Prove Marketing Value: Demonstrate Content ROI and Contribution to Sales

Every marketer knows how important it is to prove their efforts drive sales opportunities, but that’s easier said than done. When problems like sales and marketing misalignment, lack of data, and wasted efforts persist, marketers can’t measure, prove, or increase their impact on revenue at a time when demonstrating marketing value is critical. Using analyst and expert data, this guide to marketing impact and content attribution explains: How B2B buyers use content The most common types of conten