The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

It's Friday, and it's time for us to share what we've been reading online this week! Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. Focus on Keeping Up with Your Customers, Not Your Competitors — HBR

It's tempting to focus on what your strongest competitors are doing. After all, you're competing with them! But too often, companies focus on the competition when they should be focusing on their customers. How can you keep up with your customers? You have to start thinking like them. This article shows you how.

We’ve been talking about the Millennial generation for years now. Discussing their behaviors, styles, and attitudes, we have debated how this group will likely affect our business moving forward and how we can best develop them to succeed.

This understanding is vital since they will soon fill half of our entire labor force, and Pew Research reports that 58% of them expect to leave their jobs in three years or less. That kind of turnover can be a killer to a sales organization, so we need to figure them out and connect with them in a meaningful way.

But how? It may not be as hard as you thought!

Thanks to technology that enables people to learn just about anything in a matter of seconds, the buying process has become more personal. Thanks to the fact that every online buying experience is customized to the individual, people are starting to expect the B2B buying experience to follow suit.

A salesperson who hasn’t done their research and isn’t coming to the first appointment with very specific ideas on how to provide relevant value to a prospect isn’t going to make a sale.

We've come to another Friday, and we hope you've had a good week! It's time for us to share what we've been reading online this week. Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. Helping Buyers See Value — Salesforce

Stories are naturally visual, and allow you to help prospects see themselves in successful outcomes based on how you position what you deliver. The power here is that rather than “selling” you're sharing experiences of other similar scenarios, and helping them see the possibilities. This article shows how you can use stories to help buyers see value.

I am often asked by clients, what is new in media sales? What do you have that is new? What is the new and improved way to sell? 

I’m a mom. A lot of you are moms and dads as well. I often see parallels between “managing” my family and managing a team of salespeople. I noticed something the other day that I think I’ve noticed before, but hadn't made the association back to managing a team of salespeople until that moment.

Here we are at the end of another week! It's Friday, and it's time for us to share what we've been reading online this week. Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. Stop! Read This Before You Send Another Cold Email! — SalesForce

When you send cold emails, you’re a stranger to your audience. They don’t know anything about your company and how awesome it is, nor do they care. If you want to connect with them and receive a response, you have to tap into their emotions, and play on their existing fears and desires. These three steps will help you start many more warm conversations through cold email.

Here’s why. When you have a passion or burden for something, there are fears that come with it. You can only be a fearless leader if you are leading in an area that you don’t have a passion for or don’t really care that much about. So rest assured the fears are normal. The real question is, what do you do with the fears you have? I have a two-step plan that I think will help.

We're at the end of another week! It's Friday, and it's time for us to share what we've been reading online this week. Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. When Was the Last Time You Asked, “Why Are We Doing It This Way?” — HBR

When stakes are high, it can be difficult for leaders to pause before acting. We all tend to take the safe route of doing things the way we've always done them. Here’s some good advice for how to give yourself time to reflect and lead with questions, to make sure you're taking the best route, not just the one most familiar.

There was a post on LinkedIn recently about the importance of making a good first impression. The post focused on professional men in beautiful, well-tailored suits, smiling, making excellent eye contact, and shaking hands. Surely there must be more than that.

First impressions are frequently discussed in the context of business meetings. Is it an important first meeting for a job interview? Or is it the first meeting with a client to conduct a needs analysis? It doesn’t matter what the situation, since memorable impressions are critical to both.

We're at the end of another week! It's Friday, and it's time for us to share what we've been reading online this week. Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. 7 Smart Strategies to Speed Up Your Sales Cycle — HubSpot

To figure out the perfect, predictable sales cycle would be like discovering the holy grail of sales. That’s not to say that there aren’t ways to make sales cycles more predictable. Here are seven ways to speed up the sales cycle and do just that.