Sat.May 19, 2018 - Fri.May 25, 2018

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Productize Your Service and Make Your Number

SBI Growth

Many organizations offer great services to their customers. Yet many of these organizations struggle with making their number. Longer sales cycles, and the customization required for most service offerings present challenges. Sales leaders try to overcome these by increasing leads.

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The 14 Best Bluetooth Headsets of 2018

Hubspot Sales

Best Bluetooth Headsets. Jabra Steel. Jabra Motion. Plantronics Voyager 5200. Plantronics Voyager Focus UC. VXi BlueParrott B450-XT. Plantronics M55. Motorola Boom2+ Headset. Plantronics Voyager Edge. Plantronics Voyager Legend. LG Tone Free Headset. Samsung Level U Pro. Sennheiser Presence UC. Jabra Wave. Jabra Stealth. A salesperson’s right arm? It might be their Bluetooth headset.

Sales 145
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Who Creates Content for Sales Enablement? Hint: It’s Not Just Marketing

Miller Heiman Group

When you think about who creates the content your salespeople and other customer-facing professionals use to engage prospects and customers, you probably think about your marketing team. For many leaders, marketing is synonymous with content. Whether it’s branding, demand generation or website creation, marketing is all about content. But you might be surprised to discover that marketing only creates about 39 percent of the content salespeople need.

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The Top 5 Phrases That Will Close The Deal With Your Prospect

MTD Sales Training

We had an enquiry last month from a sales manager who asked us to work with his sales team for half-a-day on closing techniques. He said his team was good at relationship-building but when it came to the close, they needed help. They simply didn’t know what to say to get the order without it appearing to put pressure on the prospect. One of my training consultants said to him that the problem couldn’t be solved in just half-a-day with some closing tricks, tips and techniques.

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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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Top 3 Customer Retention Metrics

SBI Growth

“Our customer retention is excellent. We only lose 5% of customers per year, so our retention is 95%.”. Does this sound familiar? If so, you have probably also been caught off guard when your board double clicks on this number.

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5 Amateurish Behaviors That Kill Salespeople’s Credibility

Hubspot Sales

Define Amateurish. Amateurish behavior is when you display no skill or tact in a particular area. It means you're clumsy and inept. As a salesperson, you never want to be considered amateurish by your colleagues or prospects. It lowers your credibility and authority and kills your chances of closing a deal. Sales leaders and businesses are paying a hefty price for not developing the selling skills of their people.

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Tracking Executive Changes at Your Most Important Accounts

Openview

Here’s a fact that should get your attention: The number of CEOs who left their jobs at U.S.-based companies hit 132 in January 2018 alone, the highest monthly total since February 2010, according to global outplacement consultancy and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. In 2017, they noted, there were 1,160 CEO exits. “But I don’t sell to CEOs,” you might say.

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How To Approach A New Referral

MTD Sales Training

So you’ve achieved that great goal of getting a referral from a customer. This is the holy grail in sales; getting a warm lead without having to do the marketing to achieve it. How should you approach this referral? Here are some ideas: Basically, you need to know what links the two companies or people. What is the business relationship between your customer and the person they are referring you to?

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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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Fast Frame of the Week – The Top 5 Keys to Managing Customer Relationships

SBI Growth

Welcome to the Revenue Growth Fast Frame of the Week. In this week’s video, Greg Clark, the CMO for Caliber Collision Centers, answers the question: “If you borrow a B2C best practice and apply it to B2B companies, what is.

B2C 70
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13 Entrepreneur Blogs to Jumpstart Your Dreams

Hubspot Sales

Entrepreneur Blog. Seth Godin's Blog. Both Sides of the Table. Wise Bread. All Business. A VC. Copyblogger. The Entrepreneurial Mind. Gary Vaynerchuk's Blog. Kabbage Small Business Blog. Entrepreneur's Journey. The 4-Hour Workweek. Women on Business. The Suitcase Entrepreneur. Whether you’re ready to stop dreaming and start doing, or still in the planning stage of turning your ideas into a full-time job, these blogs for entrepreneurs are the right place to start.

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The Best Sales Pitch Isn’t a Pitch at All

The Center for Sales Strategy

This post was originally published on Hubspot. Despite its increasing irrelevance, the tired, old sales pitch still enjoys a large following. Unfortunately, that washed-up elevator pitch generally focuses solely on the seller -- the company, its capabilities, and its accomplishments -- and rarely highlights the prospect’s needs.

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Why Workshops are Bad for Salespeople

Engage Selling

Workshops and learning events can be the least effective—and for some, even the worst—places for your salespeople to get the training they need. You heard that right. Now, let me explain.

Sales 59
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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 Know if You Have the Right Talent to Accelerate Growth

SBI Growth

EXcuse me, is this seat taken? The largest asset any organization must manage is its people. Employee Experience (EX) should be the cornerstone and fundamental value that drives your organization to success. In consideration of determining if you have the.

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Sales Follow-Up Emails the Pros Use [Free Email Templates]

Hubspot Sales

Much thought leadership is dedicated to the art of selling: pitching, presenting, closing, building trust, developing a relationship, and a myriad of other skills. But showing off these talents depends on getting on prospects’ calendars in the first place. That’s when active selling skills get put on ice and reps have to flex their follow-up email or phone call muscles instead.

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Get that First Appointment — Master Your Approach

The Center for Sales Strategy

Have you ever felt like taking a “Wild Wild West” approach to securing your first appointment? Think about it… if only it were appropriate to ‘lasso’ your prospect, ‘tie him down’ and force him to stay engaged so that you may cordially introduce yourself, establish credibility and politely present your value proposition. Honestly, if you could just get his undivided attention for 5-minutes… you know he’ll like you, and you know he’ll be intrigued and perhaps even excited or anxious to learn more

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How to Focus on your Bread and Butter: Achieving Work-Life Balance with Technology

SBI

The Daily Conundrum. If you’re like most sales professionals working in today’s hyper-connected, always-on environment, you struggle on a daily basis to meet your goals. The concept of work-life balance is a dated one as we continue to raise the bar on performance and financial expectations. This struggle is real, because essentially your salespeople are tasked with 4 jobs, each of which could be a full-time job including; Outbound prospecting to ensure they have enough pipeline to meet coverage

CRM 55
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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

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The Sales-Driven CEO, an Emerging Breed

SBI Growth

Our guest today is Ryan Tognazzini, Chief Executive Officer for iGrafx. Ryan represents one of the new breed of Sales-driven Chief Executive Officers who have come through the ranks of sales. Ryan is here to share his incredible journey from.

Sales 63
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10 Cringeworthy Body Language Mistakes Salespeople Make During Meetings

Hubspot Sales

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. “Mabel, Mabel, sweet and able, get your elbows off the table!”. Whether the lesson stuck with you or not, the rhyme’s message is clear: Etiquette and body language are important. And this is especially true in sales. Any time you’re in a face-to-face meeting with a prospect, your body language is crucial. What you say is just as important as how you say it -- and how you look when you say it.

Meetings 112
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10 Reasons Salespeople LOVE the HubSpot CRM and Sales Enablement Tools

The Center for Sales Strategy

As a proud partner of HubSpot , we at The Center for Sales Strategy, as well as our sister company, that focuses on lead generation and sales enablement, LeadG2 , naturally have experience with the HubSpot CRM , and it might be easy to think that we’re biased about this tool because of our relationship with them. However, it’s important to know a bit more of the context to better understand why we’re not biased and how that shows up in what we do and recommend.

CRM 59
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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 54
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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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Building Your Channel Program Through the Lens of the Partner

SBI Growth

Market coverage, growth, speed, revenue, retention, and customer success are factors for all companies. With the rate of venture funding being poured into companies increasing yearly, companies are popping up everywhere and competition is more prevalent than ever. So, a.

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23 Follow-Up Sales Email Templates to Send Instead of "Just Checking In"

Hubspot Sales

Salespeople shouldn’t send “just checking in emails for one very simple reason: They don’t work. Buyers feel like the rep is virtually poking them, making them reluctant to answer. Not only do “checking in messages rarely garner responses, they can even turn prospects against their senders. But reps still need a way to get in touch with buyers who’ve gone dark.

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The Only 6 Reasons A Sales Manager Should Be Attending Sales Calls with Their Team

The Center for Sales Strategy

Sales managers, let’s be honest… it’s hard to watch a salesperson that seems to be flailing in shallow water when they are on a prospect or client call. However, if you take a step back, you realize they are probably going to find their feet and be able to stand up and be fine. Recently, I attended one of The Center for Sales Strategy's Talent Focused Management workshops led by Matt Sunshine (Managing Partner), and I walked away with a few reminders.

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Live Chat is Great — But It Doesn’t Scale: Here’s How to Use Conversational Marketing to Effortlessly Book More Meetings

Drift

The other day, I was trying to change a hotel reservation over chat. I typed out my whole story, detailing the dates, reason for wanting to cancel, and even acknowledged their current policy and why I thought this was an extenuating circumstance. 150 words. Boom. I hit send. And then I got this: “Thanks for your message — support will reply as soon as a specialist becomes available.

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ABM Evolution: How Top Marketers Are Using Account-Based Strategies

In times of economic uncertainty, account-based strategies are essential. According to several business analysts and practitioners, ABM is a necessity for creating more predictable revenue. Research shows that nearly three-quarters of marketers (74%) already have the resources needed to build successful ABM programs.