Salespeople have a unique career benefit: they have a virtually limitless number of people with whom they can have a conversation. Of course, some prospects are less receptive than others, and even less prospects are a good fit for a particular product or service. But every salesperson has more people in his or her addressable [...]
Add Dan Pink’s thinking on the power of intrinsic motivation and autonomy to exploding connectivity and you get the perfect recipe for rapidly rising interest in telecommuting. Inside sales is burgeoning, but the organization of the future is dispersed. More sales pros will be working from behind a desk but those desks could be anywhere. [...]
The truth in sales, as in life, can often be deceptively simple: Sometimes to look ahead, you have to look back. As in five decades back. While it’s tempting to think that apps and gadgets alone can catapult your sales career into the stratosphere, you might also want to consider as another effective tool a [...]
John Bracken is a founder and CEO of Speek, which offers a new kind of conference call. The days of using words like “hard” and “cold” when discussing sales tactics are over. You can sell your product with confidence and turn a profit while still feeling like a human. Many sales-based teams will admit that [...]
Most of us at some point in our sales career were told that activity equals results and were forced to make 50-100 dials a day until our ears fell off. Many of us were even forced to use scripts and read them verbatim when trying to manage a call or leave a voicemail. Brutal. This [...]
If you’ve ever experienced call reluctance–as I did during my cold-calling days–then you know that feeling. You’ve felt that dull throb in the pit of your stomach, that inability to pick up the phone or make the day’s first appointment, that awful dread in which you obsess upon rejection, rejection, rejection.Call reluctance hits sales rookies [...]
According to the American Society for Training and Development, American companies spend $20 billion a year on sales training, with a dubious return on investment. An ES Research Group study reported that 90% of all corporate sales training programs yielded only a 90-to-120-day increase in sales productivity before it returned to pre-training levels; similar studies showed as [...]
If you’ve been a salesperson for more than a week, you’ve no doubt experienced death by PowerPoint. Turns out it’s even worse over the phone; poor screen sharing is more lethal than boring in-person presenting.Eliminating snooze-inducing online presentations isn’t just a matter of mercy for listeners. For salespeople, who increasingly pitch prospects from behind their computer [...]
One company has taken the unusual step of putting every employee in the company on commission. Sales suddenly had a lot more friends and collaborators. Traditional commission-heavy compensation for salespeople does a great job of stoking the competitive flames and egging on sales pros to meet or exceed their targets (too good a job, according [...]
As the editor of this blog for salespeople, I talk to salespeople every workday. While listening to them, I’ve learned something that many of them are surprised to hear when I pass it back to them. What have I learned? That the best salespeople are the ones who tell the truth. That’s a notion at [...]