Qualifying Sales Opportunities Organizations with sales teams fall into one of two camps when it comes to qualifying sales opportunities or customer deals.   Either you have a qualification process in place, or you don’t.   When we talk about qualifying sales ops, what we mean is that you have a company recognised method of deciding whether a sales opportunity is valid or not – so for example, that could mean, the customer has the budget, the timescales are defined and there is an actual need for your product. Unfortunately, qualifying sales ops is often seen by sales people as a was ..read more

Episode Notes Coronavirus has turned everything upside down – and so it’s not surprising that most sales teams across the world are in a state of flux. Customers aren’t buying, or maybe they are, but they’re not buying what they’d planned to buy 12 months ago – in fact, in a B2B sales survey on the impact of Coronavirus that we conducted, 73.9% of B2B salespeople said their sales opportunities have decreased over lockdown. Strategies are out of the window, annual reports and multi-year programs have been ditched in order to survive the here and now. Teams have shrunk, some are still ..read more

Being an Introvert in Sales We often think to be successful in sales, you need to be an extrovert. True, lots of salespeople are extroverts. Sometimes, maybe a little TOO extroverted. We all know that person. Sales can involve a lot of speaking to new people, engaging an audience, presenting to customers, cold calling, reaching out, interacting, and taking clients out for dinner, for example. But that doesn’t mean that being an introvert is a bad thing in sales. It can bring with it some great sales superpowers. So what does the science say about being an extrovert in sales? Research actually ..read more

How Do You Write a B2B Case Study? Link to a FREE guide on creating B2B case studies: https://contemsa.com/sales-hub/closing/case-study/ This week, we’re looking at case studies – why we need them and how to create an amazing case study for your brand. A case study is your product’s story – it’s the story of how your product is helping organizations to achieve success – how it delivers success, who helped them to achieve that success, what results that success delivered, and so on. It should take prospects on a journey from where the customer started in their business, through to where they en ..read more

Episode 9 - Racial diversity in sales In this episode, I wanted to talk about an important issue – racial diversity in sales teams. The more diverse your sales teams are, the more likely they are able to align with your customers – as customers themselves have increasingly diverse workforces, sales teams also need to reflect that same diversity to ensure we’re better understanding our customers’ challenges, their business aspirations, their needs and objectives, and how they operate. Sales is notoriously a male dominated environment – with not a huge amount of racial and ethnic diversity. I tr ..read more

Episode 8 - Smashing stereotypes in Sales: In this episode, I thought it would be interesting to look at some of the stereotypes we have about what makes a typical salesperson – and why we should be seeking to challenge some of these stereotypes. We often have a clear picture in our heads of what makes a successful salesperson – they probably look like the salespeople you see in films, in adverts, or on social media posts. This salesperson is usually wearing a dark suit, looking super smart, and the words that are associated with this salesperson are all about being strong, succeeding, being c ..read more

In this episode, we talk about what is Sales Enablement - and try to give a simple answer to a difficult question. We look at some of the challenges facing salespeople that Sales Enablement helps with - across customer knowledge, sales skills, tools, technology, processes and content. For more information, head on over to https://contemsa.com to find out more about sales enablement and access simple, but effective, sales enablement tools. This podcast is powered by Pinecast ..read more

We follow on from the last episode, where we talked about how to use a Sales Messaging Hierarchy to tailor sales messaging to different industries and buyer roles. In this episode, we talk you through a super simple framework for creating your own sales messaging, across: The types of organizations you are focusing on The buyer roles within those organizations Challenges your customers are facing End points that your customers are trying to reach How your product aligns Keywords and industry terminology Sector trends and news We also talk a little bit about The Sales Hub - a co ..read more

In this episode we’re going to be looking at how you can craft your sales messaging, and specifically how you can start to think about how you can apply different types of sales messaging – more impact, deliver greater results. Let’s get started today looking at the different levels. So firstly – we have your Company Level messaging. This is where you position your company as a whole, and the aim is to help your buyers understand where you fit in the market at a company. So what are you known for? What differentiates you? What value are you, as a company, bringing to customers? I also ..read more

Hi everyone, so the topic of today’s episode is Social Selling: Why Should Your B2B Sales Teams Care? Over the next few minutes, we’re going to be diving into social selling, specifically for B2B sales teams. So what is social selling? Well, it’s about using social media to connect and build relationships with customers and prospects. In research from CSO Insights, 33% of respondents said that social selling had enabled their teams to increase the number of leads they had, and 31% said it enabled them to build deeper relationships with clients. (Source: https://blog.hootsuite.com/what-is-socia ..read more