Today’s business buyers are accustomed to personalized buying experiences. We all experience the convenience and speed of consumer transactions in our personal lives, and have come to expect it in the workplace as well. Salesforce found that 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. The […]

The following is a guest post from RingLead’s VP of Enterprise and Channel Sales John Kosturos. Strong data is just as essential to salespeople for peak sales performance as the right gasoline is to an Indy car. Real time, clean, constantly-changing data will get you ahead of the curve so you can focus on success, […]

In my last post, I discussed how traditional behavioral data analysis differs from contextual data, which I defined as information that is delivered to the right person at the right time within an actionable context. Today I’ll discuss the three broad types of data that matter most to sales agents. Prioritization Data In enterprise companies, […]

If I had a dollar for every time a company has fired an amazing salesperson because he or she wasn’t good at prospecting for new leads, I’d be sipping margaritas in my mansion in Cabo right now. According to the TAS Group, more than two thirds of account executives (AEs) fail to hit quota. Now does this mean […]

We’ve entered a new era of sales and marketing alignment. According to The Bridge Group’s Sales Development Metrics and Compensation Report nearly one half of inbound-focused inside sales reps now report directly to Marketing. While this may seem counter-intuitive to some, it actually makes a lot of sense. Marketing already owns much of the technology that can […]

Sellers are learning to love metrics. You just have to be careful not to love them blindly. Let me give you an example. In any sales conversation with a buyer, such as a phone call. video call or in-person meeting, it is considered bad form if the salesperson monopolizes the conversation. Based on metrics about […]

Recently, we’ve been deluged with sales teams looking for a Lightning ready voice communications platform for Salesforce. It’s easy to understand why, since Lightning has a sexy interface and is slowly but steadily closing functionality gaps that exist with Salesforce Classic. Surprisingly, there’s a lot of misinformation out there about what’s possible in regards to telephony integration with Lightning. […]

Outsourcing appointment setting to a service, instead of using your SDR team, has its challenges. Sales development is very different from appointment setting. With claims that the service will set up so many appointments that your sales team will beg them to stop, it may sound like your sales will go through the roof. It […]

When you’re reaching out to new prospects via telephone, there is little room for error. You only have, at most, a minute to convince a prospect to stay on the phone. So how can you get prospects to not only stay on the phone, but engage them enough to convert them into buyers? The answer is that […]

According to Marketo, 10.99% of sales referrals convert. The same research found that only 0.9% of regular sales prospects turn into customers. That’s a huge difference. One reason for this variance is likely due to the fact that only 3% of people consider salespeople to be trustworthy. Additionally, most buyers now research and select vendors […]

Imagine that you’re an inside sales rep at a B2B company. You’ve exchanged a couple of emails with a key decision maker, and she invited you to give her a call. You’re pumped up with adrenaline, ready to convince her that buying your company’s software solution will be the best investment she’ll ever make. After […]

I had the good fortune to work in Seattle during the release of one of the earliest tablet computers, the Tablet PC (you thought Microsoft Surface was their first effort, didn’t you?). If you lived in Seattle in 2002, you would have been forgiven for thinking that the Tablet PC was a runaway hit. The city seemed […]