By Jamie Crosbie Like many things in life, it’s not necessarily simple to hire the best salespeople. Good hiring practices don’t just happen. Locating, recruiting, and hiring the best sales talent requires planning, ingenuity, and focused action. To thrive in competitive markets, you need to create a value proposition that attracts highly qualified sales candidates. Bear in mind, though: Your company is not the only one out there looking. Write a Good Job Description for Salespeople before You Hire In the same way that every building needs a strong foundation, you first need to ask some key q ..read more

By Parth Thaker I read a terrifying stat that up to 63 percent of a sales rep’s time is spent on non-selling activities, like updating records in their CRMs. Couple that with needing 7-13 touchpoints before a prospect becomes a sales qualified lead, and there simply isn’t enough time in the day for reps to do everything needed to hit their quota with human touch alone. Enter sales automation, which helps reps scale their efforts by sending out hundreds of scheduled messages while all that activity is being logged into the CRM automatically. This has been a godsend for today’s tools-inund ..read more

By Elay Cohen The early Salesforce days were some of the best in my career. As Salesforce’s senior vice president, sales productivity, I saw us come together as a company under strong leadership and with a vision of creating and dominating the market. Salesforce founder Marc Benioff and the leadership team decided to invest heavily in enablement as a go-to-market priority. As a result, we doubled down on enabling our sales, customer success, and partner teams with training, onboarding, coaching, certifications, and content. We also did everything possible to get our teams productive faster an ..read more

By Ben Schemper It’s no secret top salespeople are driven by the need to perform at high levels. They have a target number to hit, and their job is to achieve it. Working to overcome challenges keeps them excited and motivated to learn new skills, strategies, and tactics. Sales leaders also understand high achievers are celebrated when they hit their goals. They win trips and trophies, get recognition from peers, and are paid handsomely. Then they set off to achieve a new goal. Wash, rinse, repeat. Over and over…until they wake up one day and feel like something is missing. Finding Meaning be ..read more

By Scott Collins Do you want to capture more market share than your competitors? Then you need to stay on top of the ongoing, evolving, and emerging trends in not only sales, but also in customer buying. Here are four critical trends that have the potential to bring you more opportunities in 2019. Trend #1: The ongoing increase in customer buying complexity shifts the role of sellers Customers have reached a tipping point – B2B buying has become nearly unnavigable for stakeholders today. Not only do customers report that the number of people involved in buying continues to increase, but so do ..read more

By Gabrielle Hughes The purpose of sales coaching is to get the absolute best performance from your salespeople – but coaching is a demanding job, and can overwhelm many sales managers. To help you stay focused, here are the key areas you should focus your coaching efforts. Area #1: Onboarding As we make clear in our Sales Onboarding and Ramp Guide, great sales coaches do seven key things during the onboarding process. Let reps view a full sales cycle Show them what good looks like Let reps learn on demand Crowdsource training content Continually measure Let reps demo sooner Use a consistent ..read more

By Gideon Thomas As the sales tech industry continues to evolve, so does the CPQ marketplace. Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) software is no longer considered a “nice-to-have,” but is now a “need-to-have” for businesses seeking every opportunity to increase revenue through more effective and efficient sales processes. As the sales tech industry continues to evolve, so does the CPQ marketplace. Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) software is no longer considered a “nice-to-have,” but is now a “need-to-have” for businesses seeking every opportunity to increase revenue through more effective and efficient s ..read more

By Robert Kear Other than the costs associated with hiring top sales talent, a sales leader’s most significant investment will be training his or her team. According to data from the 2016 State of Sales Training report, published by ATD Research, (which reflects responses from 227 talent development professionals responsible for sales enablement), the average annual total expenditure on sales training is $954,070. Unfortunately, many sales training investments aren’t providing the top-line impact sales leaders and management are looking for. But there is a solution to this. My organization, S ..read more

By Nikolaus Kimla Sales and marketing professionals are so bombarded with data and information today we need technology to help us sort it all out. One powerful aid to that mission is visualization – simply because the mind processes visual data many times faster than written or verbal data. This makes sense. Going all the way back in humankind’s evolution, before written words, we communicated with pictures and symbols. All the recorded history we have of our earliest civilizations  – Egypt is a prime example – is in pictures and symbols. (When one thinks of ancient Egyptian symbols, on ..read more

Most B2B sales professionals cringe at the thought of the stereotypical image of the sleazy salesperson who will do or say anything to close the sale. But there are salespeople out there who attempt to badger, coerce, or lie their way to a sale.   In his keynote presentation, “How to Succeed with Sales 3.0 – Lessons from History for Winning in 2019,” at the Sales 3.0 Conference in Las Vegas, Gerhard Gschwandtner, founder of Selling Power magazine, discussed integrity in selling. He said behaviors like cheating and lying in sales are actually manifestations of a negative mindset. Here are ..read more