Managers know they need growth to survive—but innovation isn’t easy. In this Harvard Management Update article, HBS professor Clayton Christensen and co-authors detail the six keys to creating new-growth businesses.
If your brand’s message is important to your company (which it should be) then the sales development should be directly aligned with marketing.
Bad pitches ruin good products. That much has been true since the dawn of sales and isn’t changing anytime soon. What has changed, though, is that the average salesperson can’t rely on their conversational skills alone to close a deal. They have to translate those compelling pitches into writing.
Everything you need to know to create a sales funnel that converts like crazy.
It used to be the day and life of a sales person was defined by how many sales calls they made. Productivity was king. If a great sales person could get a prospect on the phone, it was highly likely that a deal would get done. Having been a sales rep, who ‘dialed for dollars’, a manager who pushed my teams to constantly be working leads to someone who is constantly on the lookout for sales best practices – I was pleasantly surprised to find some compelling new research tackling the topic of what makes a winning sales discovery call.
Pretend that you’re an experienced buyer who has met with hundreds of business-to-business salespeople. What percentage of them would you say are excellent, good, average, or poor?
According to a new study of more than 230 buyers, 12% of salespeople are excellent, 23% good, 38% average, and 27% poor.
The bad news is that the underperforming salespeople lack the self-awareness to know that buyers don’t value them, nor do they understand why. They don’t take the time to figure out why they lost a deal or longtime client. They either don’t know why they weren’t selected or they reflexively blame it on factors out of their control.
Interviews with buyers illustrate seven important lessons about the mistakes salespeople make and why they lose business.
A strategic plan demands strategic execution across the whole of your business. Plans are just paper until leaders getting people to implement them. Here’s how.
Sales and marketing must embrace these principles to stay relevant with customers and close more deals as our inboxes get even more crowded.
Sales professionals are a rare breed. Most are self-starters, personable, inquisitive, intuitive and passionate about their craft. They enjoy selling and revel when they are in contact with prospects or customers. They thrive on challenges and relish the benefits of being the CEO of their territory. When faced with a constant change, they welcome the freedom to design a roadmap to make their monthly, quarterly and yearly sales number. For most of them their customers become their friends and they enjoy seeing the value their products or services bring to their customer’s business.
If there is one consistent complaint we hear from frontline sale managers, it is that they are always short on time. This isn’t surprising given the numerous responsibilities sales managers have, including recruiting and hiring new sales professionals, day-to-day management tasks, sales coaching, and administrative duties. Additionally, they face the challenge of managing sales professionals who are typically independent, strong willed, and often have little day-to-day contact with their managers. And in many organizations, sales managers are required to both sell and manage.
