New research confirms what you might feel in your gut: eating together is one of the best ways to form relationships and get deals done. To hone in on that hunch, Babson College professor Lakshmi Balachandra ran a clever experiment: she had 132 MBA students negotiate a complex joint venture agreement between two companies, knowing [...]
Willy Loman is dead. Road warriors, Geoffrey James noted recently, are giving way to desk jockeys who sell via computer and phone. Bloomberg Businessweek concurs in a long article outlining the decline of traditional in-the-field selling. With technology transforming nearly every industry, this shift is no shocker, but the rise of selling via tech—inside sales—comes with a rapidly [...]
Most businesses attempt to sell additional products or services beyond initial purchases, also known as “cross-sales,” to all customers, believing that more transactions lead to higher profits. They’re right—most of the time. If you are an iPhone app developer, they are all but required. But sadly, 10 – 35% of a firm’s individual customers who [...]
We already know you’re a rock star salesperson. But are you a rainmaker? Did you have a killer week, month and quarter using some of our features? Whether it’s an innovative template, a new way to leverage tracking, or a fresh method to analyze a report, we want to hear about it. If your story [...]
From ThinkNear’s $22.5 million sale to the confusion behind Color’s next steps—it’s closing, it’s selling to Apple for $10 million, its engineers are being acquihired for anywhere between $2-$5 million—this has been an interesting deal week for startups. ThinkNear’s team exemplified why the TechStars model of investing a small amount, raising a modest series A, [...]