The following guest post is by Dan O’Brien, marketing manager at Prialto. If increasing your sales revenue depends on referrals, then you need to focus on building trust. When people trust you, they will refer opportunities to you. While trust is a broad and expansive concept, potential referrers only need to think about it in […]

To build a world-class sales organization, you need to be able to predict the future. And by tracking the right metrics, sales leaders can gain the fuel they need to make smarter decisions and help their sales teams drive more revenue than ever. So if your sales team is not already leveraging predictive analytics, you may be […]

In their buyer preferences study, CSO Insights found that salespeople ranked ninth out of the top ten ways buyers prefer to solve their business problems. “Vendor salespeople” placed below websites, peers, social networking groups, and web searches. In fact, only 23 percent of buyers named salespeople as one of their top three resources. This makes […]

I’ll admit right off the bat that the title of this article is a trick question. Because the majority of reps are not going to update their CRMs consistently. Why? Because reps view updating Salesforce as burdensome. As Andreesen Horowitz’s Scott Weiss rightly pointed out in a recent article, “The words ‘I need you to update Salesforce’ […]

By now, we all know that consistent coaching produces higher rep productivity. When coaching an inside sales team, call recordings are especially important for providing feedback during 1-on-1 coaching sessions and building a library of sharable best practice examples. Since coaching is essentially an ongoing conversation between coach and rep, how you communicate is key to […]

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s when I hear sales reps calling under the guise of “just calling to check in,” or “just calling to say hi.” Sales reps take note: if you don’t give your prospects a clear, justifiable reason for calling, the conversation is over before it started. In order to […]

Email is one of the best tools a salesperson can have. It is highly efficient, can easily contact mass amounts of leads and prospects within minutes, and can be highly targeted to a sales reps’ most relevant audiences. Sales emails can also be used in conjunction with sales calls, as they increase the effectiveness of […]

Since releasing our Complete Guide to Inside Sales Analytics, I’ve had some time to reflect on what the most important sales metric is. While there are dozens of metrics that I believe sales leaders must track in order to succeed, one metric keeps sticking out in my mind, and it’s a fairly simple one: sales conversations […]

House of Cards is back for its forth season. This is just one of those shows that keeps getting better and better and I can hardly wait to see how the latest season ends (I envision some binge-watching in my future). If you’re new to House of Cards, it’s the story of Frank Underwood (played by Kevin Spacey), […]

Context for Sales Conversations For sales managers with Salesforce, lead status can only tell you so much about about the state of the prospect interaction. When you need real insights into a relationship with a contact, the progress of a discussion, or where things left off, you have to read the call notes. The call […]

In my experience, one of the biggest differences between successful and unsuccessful sales reps has been the amount of sales conversations that they have each day. A lot of work goes into having a single successful sales conversation. The most successful reps follow up relentlessly, leverage tools to connect with more prospects and can keep qualified prospects on […]

It’s not uncommon for star sales reps to be promoted or otherwise move into sales management. Unfortunately, top salespeople aren’t necessarily the best sales managers. The sales manager is a critical role, and you must select the right person for it. If the wrong individual is chosen, there may be significant costs to your organization. […]