The best flash sales build urgency that aligns with long-term goals, brand positioning, and channel constraints.
sales-salesmgmt
My wayward months as the best telemarketer in America.
New technology and old tactics have made buying a car a death march of deception. Jase Patrick, who spent 15 years in the business, reveals the dealer secrets.
Joe Sullivan sheds light on balancing educational outreach with sales tactics and how to position your brand as a thought leader.
The sales management landscape is very dynamic, so staying ahead of the curve requires leveraging the best tools. In 2024,
This time, we're talking with Graham Collins, Head of Partnerships at QuotaPath, about the nuanced world of startup sales compensation.
While unleashing the “animal spirits” of your sales team, beware of the unintended consequences that powerful incentives can create.
A customer relationship management tool can help a business grow and scale at an affordable price. Here is a list of simple CRMs for businesses of all sizes.
Explore the top 5 sale coaching models used by high-performing sales leaders to maximize your return on investment and help reps retain sales training knowledge.
What is consultative sales and how can it help you win more business? These 7 consultative selling strategies will help you stand out from the competition.
In many board rooms, the most important go-to-market number this quarter is pipeline health. For some companies, the pipeline may be less clear than a quarter or two ago. Summer seasonality may play a role. Macroeconomics might also be lurking within the numbers. Pipeline fluctuations are normal. But any meaningful & unexpected surprise warrants introspection. Pipeline analysis often has four parts: Craft the sales sandwich to predict your GTM conversion rates & determine if close rates have changed in parallel.
In Deliberately Underselling as Sales Strategy, I wrote about the importance of sizing contracts below customer needs to ensure customer success. “A key part of the formula: crafting the right account executive compensation structure to reward this strategy.” I received a pile of questions asking for more detail. Since then, I’ve spoken to many sales leaders & Lee Kirkpatrick who originally surfaced the concept during Office Hours on how to do this well.
I was recently talking with Mark Roberge, CRO at Hubspot, for a podcast we’re launching soon. I asked him, “What is a common question that…
“I’m into distribution, I’m like Atlantic I got them mutherfuckers flying’ cross the Atlantic” –Rick Ross, “Hustlin’“ When I ask new entrepreneurs what their distribution model will be, I often get answers like: “I don’t want to hire any of those Rolex-wearing, BMW-driving, overly aggressive enterprise sales slimeballs, so we are going to distribute our product like Dropbox did.” In...
Asking, “Can I have coffee with you to pick your brain?” is probably the worst possible way to get a meeting with someone with a busy schedule. Here’s a better approach. —— Jason, an e…
So perhaps you’re burned out in the consumer software game, or are just considering a pivot into the enterprise (“B2B”) market. You’ve heard that there’s a lot of opportunity in “selling to enterpr…
Hacks that will help you to bring the whole sales process on the next level. Check out our tips that proved their good value.
If I had to choose a single factor that is crucial to an online store’s success, it would be social proof. The term is often misunderstood. It doesn’t
Upshift Partners Founder Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski lists the 7 deadly sins of sales that can tank your company before you even have traction.
Seldom do you see sales advice that's so specific, down to the actual language you should use to get customers to say yes. Here, sales expert Peter Kazanjy shares exactly what's worked for him.
Sales is a unique function to hire for, requiring different criteria and strategy. TalentBin Co-founder Peter Kazanjy has the process nailed. Here it is.
Objection handling is an important skill for sales people. But if that skill is augmented with great product knowledge (provided by product managers) sales take off.
I’ve written a lot about recruiting and hiring at startups including my controversial post on whom not to hire and my rapid response to the flame war. I’ve also written extensively on sales and on…
Would you like to know how to get more customers who can’t wait to buy your products and services?
If you’re a startup company founder with a technical background (or a design or product management background), building a sales team for…
Think of a sales contract as a system of interconnected components and levers that work together to achieve an acceptable level of risk and reward for both you and your customer.
If you're in sales, you'll fail sometimes. Failing is great if you learn from why you lost deals. Win/Loss Analysis can help you fail better.
Pricing is a good place to make a few critical resolutions for businesses. Learn the 5 resolutions as you shape your pricing strategy for 2019.
B2B marketers often deliver unqualified leads, which wastes their resources and those of the sales team. How can you generate qualified leads without breaking the bank? A combination of content marketing and triggered emails enabled one B2B team to generate and auto-qualify leads. The result is a campaign that automatically delivers the company’s best sales prospects. Find out how the team drives SEO traffic and earned a 50% conversion rate on the landing page.
I’ve had the privilege of conducting “Win/Loss/No Decision Sales Cycle Analysis Studies” for leading companies including IBM, EMC, ATT, Acxiom, and PayPal. To accomplish these studies I have interviewed hundreds of C-level executives and countless mid-level managers and lower-level personnel....
Editor's note: Roman Stanek is CEO and founder of GoodData. Lately, in Silicon Valley and its counterparts around the world, disappointment has ruled the halls of companies that had a huge impact with consumers, but then fizzled as investments when they went public—Facebook’s and Zynga’s IPOs being the most notorious examples. Attention quickly moved from the consumer to the enterprise market, where Splunk, Palo Alto Networks, Workday, and LinkedIn are all humming along just fine. Entrepreneurs seeking to sell to enterprise customers should recognize that the business-to-business (B2B) market, especially with respect to IT, plays by a different set of rules than the business-to-consumer (B2C) space.
Are buying groups just another buzz word? Understand what buying groups are, how to measure them and how they can help drive more sales for your business.
Darryl Praill joins the Predictable Revenue Podcast to share best practices and common mistakes companies make when implementing outbound sales sequences.
When I came to HubSpot five years ago, I had never run a sales team, so I didn’t know the conventional techniques that sales managers use. Instead, I relied on my background as an MIT-trained engineer to create a system of hiring and development that relies on metrics and quantitative analysis. Five years later, my […]
The most consistent sales leader I’ve worked with hit plan 27 consecutive quarters. How can a sales leader develop similar repeatability? Much goes into it here are the reports he used to manage his team at the board level. The PQR (pipeline-to-quota) funnel is first. Pipeline is the total value of the accounts within a stage or later. Quota is the aggregate quota on the street for the quarter. Divide P by Q to get PQR.
There are many books on sales. But if you wanted to read the few most popular ones, "The pychology...
Profit desert customers — small, low-profit customers often numbering in the tens of thousands — are an important business segment in most companies. They often amount to about 50–80% of customers and consume about 40–60% of the company’s costs. In some companies, they’re assigned to territory reps as low-revenue “C” accounts, which distracts the reps from selling more lucrative business. In all companies, they create costly complexity in functions ranging from order-taking to fulfilment to after-sales service and returns because these customers are numerous and often inexperienced. The best way to manage your profit desert customers is to cluster them under a unified management structure — a profit desert customer team — rather than having them scattered in sales reps’ portfolios throughout the company. This team should be composed of specialized sales and marketing managers who are solely focused on this customer segment. The author presents three steps these managers should take to bring latent profits to the bottom line.
Explore all you need know to make better decisions for your revenue operations team. Learn KPI's and key term that will drive success.
Paul Ross is a Master of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. He’s taught people the power of language to sell, heal, and turn pain into passion.
For all of its other moving parts, ‘White Men Can’t Jump’ relies on teasing out the part of a hustle that I am most fascinated by in real life.
Generating and retaining business customers makes you deal with longer (and more complicated) sales cycles, more demanding customers, and huge amounts of data.
How to structure quotas, compensation, and territories for a new sales team.
Unleash the power of Product Qualified Leads to skyrocket your SaaS business growth. Learn to identify, nurture, and convert PQLs now with our guide.
Even unintentionally, you’ve probably seen one of these infomercials on TV. The presenter goes through all the supposedly amazing features of an obscure product with an excited voice, an urgent tone, as if he or she was sharing an important secret few will be lucky enough to know about. When you think the advert is ... Read More
As your sales team grows, your tech stack almost always does too. But figuring out which sales tools you should buy can be a daunting task.
As a former CEO and software engineer (Citrix, XenSource, VERITAS, etc.), board member of GitHub (recently acquired by Microsoft), and lecturer in management at the Stanford Graduate School of Busines, a16z general partner Peter Levine is constantly asked “Why sales?” by entrepreneurs and technical founders. He himself used to hold the “engineer-centric” view that if...
Increase your sales with the tips from the Step-by-Step Copywriting Secrets.
Research shows that 48% of B2B salespeople are afraid of making cold calls. There are typically two central fears: 1) fear of sounding like a sales person; and 2) fear of failure. Overcoming the fear of sounding like a salesperson is a simple matter of accepting that you actually are a sales professional and that that sales is an honorable profession. When you dial someone’s phone number or walk into their office, remember this: You are there to help them improve their lives and businesses. Until you understand this simple concept, you’re going to be anxious and fearful about cold calling. Sometimes the fear of cold-calling comes from a limiting belief that we simply won’t be successful at it, which creates anxiety and leads to a destructive self-fulfilling prophecy. The key to getting better at cold-calling is to simply get more accustomed to it, so your body does not perceive fear. And the best way to do that? Role playing. You don’t need to have an Oscar-worthy performance – you just need to remind your brain that there’s nothing to be afraid of. The more accustomed you get to cold-calling, the more confident you’ll be, which creates a more productive, positive, self-fulfilling prophecy.
The experience was surreal and taught me a lot about the world, in the way that only personal experience in a difficult task can.
Sales gets a bad rap, but it's essential to your business.
