The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

We’ve all heard, “You’ll never get a second chance to make a great first impression.” This applies to so many facets of life, and when it comes to sales, that first 7-10 seconds can make or break you.

Our brains make a thousand computations during the first seven seconds we see someone. That means within seven seconds, the person across from you is assessing whether you’re likable, trustworthy, and competent.

Is the impression you create a blend of your personality, body language, and communication skills? If not, it should be!

When it comes to the sales pipeline, a good rule of thumb is — having nothing in the top of your sales funnel today, means nothing to close in the future.

This means it is important to add prospects to a sales funnel, as well as ongoing engagement to move them through the funnel. Simply put,  just because a prospect enters the top of the sales funnel, it’s not guaranteed they’ll move to the middle of the funnel.

When it comes to lead generation, when does the marketing department’s role end and the sales department’s role begin? Very specifically, when should a lead be passed from marketing to sales?

As with most marketing and sales best practices, it’s not always a black and white answer.

Every organization is different, and it’s important that your organization have it's own marketing and sales agreement plan that outlines in detail how you will qualify, distribute, track, and ultimately close your marketing leads.

Recently, I shared a blog post called 10 Social Media Best Practices for Salespeople, and I wanted to expand on a few of them specifically related to how you can put these best practices into play on LinkedIn. I’ve gathered some specific examples from our team of experts, so check out the previous post here, then read on for actionable steps you can take in one hour or less of your time, to enhance your LinkedIn social selling efforts.

Twenty seconds may not sound like much time at all, but consider this: a hummingbird beats its wings at an average of 53 times per seconds. This means that a 20-second period is just enough time for a hummingbird to beat its wings an incredible 1,060 times.

It’s also enough time for a new lead to decide whether they’re going to listen to you or not. First impressions in business can be ruthless. This is understandable, as no decision-maker has the time to waste on an unwanted sales call, read a spam email, or even organize a meeting with someone they don’t trust.

We call this the critical window of opportunity. The first 20 seconds of meeting a new lead is your one chance to make a lasting, positive impression, so what do you do?

In just a couple of weeks, the LeadG2 team will be heading to Boston for INBOUND 2016—the yearly marketing conference hosted by HubSpot. As a Platinum Partner of Hubspot, we appreciate how HubSpot continues to lead the industry in research studies, thought leadership, and educating marketers. We learn so much each year at the conference.

Over four days, five keynotes, and hundreds of workshop sessions, we’ll be increasing our knowledge so we can better help our clients, and we’re looking forward to that! 

There are certain movies and shows that you have to watch if you want to be able to contribute to the water cooler talk on Monday morning or discuss the latest happenings on the show with a client. If you are in advertising, Mad Men was a must-watch for several years. For computer programmers, it might be Halt and Catch Fire. If you are in the business of sales or lead generation, Glengarry Glen Ross is that movie. If you are a sales manager or salesperson and haven’t seen it, you need to spend some time next weekend and catch up on this classic movie.

When I recently re-watched Glengarry Glen Ross, it made me think about how frequently the salespeople in the movie complained about the quality of the leads and made such a differentiation between the “good leads” and the “bad leads." If you are in sales or sales management, at some point in your career you have probably made a similar statement about the quality of leads being provided to you or your sales team. Soon after making a judgment on the quality of the leads, most sales managers start to focus on how to improve the quality of leads for their sales team.

Recently I wrote a blog post about the importance of sales performance metrics and how keeping score makes sales teams more successful. After discussing this with colleagues and those in the sales performance industry, one thing became clear: you have to be using a CRM system (Customer Relationship Management) in order to effectively track sales performance. Without it, you are just making guesses as to how your sales team is performing. If that’s you, you owe it to yourself and your organization to use one of the dozens of good CRMs you can choose from that works best for your organization.

Why a CRM Is Necessary to Measure Sales Performance

Measuring sales performance, by its very nature, entails gathering data about leads from multiple sources and being able to put that information into measurable, quantifiable and actionable information. In 2015, the year some have called, “The Year of Big Data”, there was an increasing interest in the ability to gather massive amounts of information about prospects and leads and use that information to make sales and marketing decisions. Regardless of how much data is collected on your leads or the financials related to your pipeline, without having a way to organize, track, and calculate your sales metrics, all is for naught.  

Having a CRM allows you to do many things that you could never do without—including tracking your leads' activities across your organization, calculating complex metrics, and the ability to add information to custom dashboards and management reports. Measuring sales performance isn’t an easy thing to do with the growing complexity of organizations. You'll need to track the performance of multiple salespeople, report different information to varying parts of the organization, and measure the overall performance of your sales team. Without a functioning CRM, all of this information is left to spreadsheets or disparate systems that don’t communicate with each other or have been abandoned by the sales team long ago.

Our sister publication, the LeadG2 blog, posts regularly about how to align sales and marketing for maximum results. Today, we're featuring the most popular sales strategy posts from LeadG2.

1. The Gap That Prevents Most Salespeople From Selling More

Most salespeople are pretty good at selling their products and services. They are usually proficient on sales calls—engaging prospects, discovering underlying needs they can address, and suggesting ideas and solutions that could improve a customer’s business. Companies invest significant dollars in training and systems to help their salespeople move the sales process ahead in a professional manner (and the should). But, there is one part of the sales sequence that often prevents salespeople from delivering their quotas, and that is the ability to get an appointment with a key decision maker in the first place. You’ve heard it said about many aspects of life thatbeing there is the most important thing. That certainly applies to selling.