The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Consumers have long told marketers to be relevant and non-disruptive with respect to advertising. Some answers to those demands in the past have been through online creative and digital technology, such as viral video content like Jeff Gordon's Pepsi Max Used Car Salesperson scare, or behavioral targeting and retargeting.

Okay, so we’re all moving very quickly.  I get that.  You get busy, decide to cut a couple corners, and maybe skip a piece of paperwork here and there.

Those of us that work in or around the media industry know that radio, TV, and newspaper are far from becoming dead advertising vehicles. Instead, the best and most innovative media companies have learned that it’s about evolving and finding new ways to not only get the attention of readers, viewers, and listeners but to uncover new methods of attracting and retaining advertisers as well. 

The search for qualified, sales-ready leads is a challenge to almost all sales organizations and as technology continues to advance and all of our lives (and our prospects lives) become busier, the need to uncover and nurture qualified leads becomes increasingly more important.

I'll start by saying that many marketers are indeed doing digital, but even if you are or know of a business owner or marketer who is, ask yourself if they are doing the best they could be with their digital marketing efforts. Chances are you or they would say, "No." Even with the number of business and brands using digital, I still come across a number of stories where I hear about a marketer not willing to try digital, whether it be social, mobile, desktop display, or search.

Here at The Center for Sales Strategy we know how busy life can get. We know you can't read every single interesting b2b sales article you come across online, so we like to help our readers out every now and then by pulling together some of our most popular blog posts — just in case you missed them!

Are you curious about what has “never killed a salesperson?”  Are you curious, period?  I hope so.  It's one of the best traits a salesperson can carry into the field.  Perhaps curiosity killed the cat, but it’s as healthy as a 60-minute workout for those of us who sell.

Probably not! It’s only a slight exaggeration. After 21 years of consulting sales organizations of all sizes, both here in North America and overseas, I can tell you there is one thing that executives and sales managers keep getting wrong.

If you’re a client of The Center for Sales Strategy, this message could be akin to “singing to the choir.” But even the greatest practitioners of customer-focused selling can benefit from a reminder, from time to time.  

Anyone who’s ever participated in sports, coached sports, or watched sports knows the object of the game is to win! We keep score throughout the game, because when the game is over we want to know who played the best and who deserves to be crowned the winner!  Salespeople in B2B sales are pretty much the same. They keep score by evaluating their new business conversion rates, by regularly analyzing their budget vs. goal numbers, by measuring renewals, and by consistently making sure they’re meeting their customer’s goals and ROI. When all of these things are positive… they consider that a win.  

Some say that salespeople are a dime a dozen. Basically, they have very little value.  On the contrary! In b2b sales, great salespeople can literally be worth millions of dollars to their clients’ business.

During the American Revolution, July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was approved and signed by the Second Continental Congress setting the 13 colonies on the road to freedom with the resolution of independence from Great Britain. Two days prior, John Adams wrote these words to his wife Abigail:

1. Surprise Business! – This is new business that comes your way because of your company’s great reputation, your connections in the community, or simply “being in the right place at the right time.”
2. Enterprise Business! – This is new business that you developed from scratch, business that would not have existed anywhere but for your efforts. These are prospects you specifically selected and then worked hard to get in front of. Once in front of these prospects, you nailed an important assignment during your needs analysis meeting, which led to the development of a tailored solution.

We all work hard and deserve a few surprises over the year, but if we don't have some enterprise accomplishments too, are we really selling?

"Things were so much simpler before Apple," says my 11 year old daughter after a recent panic attack over the thought of losing her Instagram followers and pictures. Her iPod Touch was a lemon and luckily under warranty, but the time between her device crashing and her logging back into her Instagram app was pure torture… for both of us!

If you’re in sales, it is not unusual to run into people (prospects) who tend to focus on the negative. In fact, some of us still run into people who consider the economy to be on the shaky side… as if we are still in the grips of the Great Recession.