The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

We hope you've had a great week! It's Friday, and today we're sharing what we've been reading online this week! Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. 10 Time Management Hacks for Sales Reps — HubSpot

We’ve all heard the saying “time is money.” This is especially true for salespeople. Time management is one of the most challenging disciplines for salespeople to master. Reps always have several important tasks competing for their attention at once. Short of adding more hours to the day, a few solid time management hacks can help reps boost productivity. Here are 10 that you may not be using yet.

The statistics surrounding the effectiveness and prevalence of sales coaching are quite startling. Research indicates that reps who have access to highly effective coaches perform 19% better than others on average. Yet surveys also indicate that approximately 25% of sales managers don’t employ any kind of coaching process.

We talk to businesses all the time who don’t have CRMs, but know they need one. I’ve written about this exact topic in the past (read 5 Reasons Salespeople Aren't Using CRMs Effectively here). While there are many obstacles to overcome when choosing any kind of new technology, the CRM seems to be an exceptionally tough one. This is due to a huge variety of options in the marketplace, a lot of previous bad experiences, fear of new technology, costs, and the potential risks involved like lack of adoption, technological barriers, training, and so on.

I get it. These are all great reasons to take this decision very seriously, but that shouldn’t get in the way of taking action.

There are just far too many benefits to having and using a CRM that can’t be ignored. Luckily, our partner, HubSpot, has made the decision a heck of a lot easier. And to help you even further, I’ve put together these five reasons why you should consider giving the HubSpot CRM a try right now:

Raise your hand if you wish you had more quality appointments each week? My bet is that nearly 100% of you raised your hand. Almost every salesperson and sales manager that I speak to these days is talking about how difficult it is to get the quality appointment. Ironically, at the same time that getting quality appointments has become perhaps the most important activity for growing business, it has also become one of the most challenging parts of the sales process. The reasons for this are nearly the same in every market. They sound like some variation of the following.

Sharing insights as part of the sales process is getting a lot of press these days. It makes sense that prospects are looking for relevant insights that will impact their business in world of abundant information. 

But there are two mistakes I see salespeople making when sharing insights. Insights have to actually be relevant to the prospect and be truly insightful in order to speed up the sale. The mistakes I see most frequestly are:

1. Sharing a deck of random facts and thinking they are insights. 
2. Sharing an insight and not turning it into an interesting conversation.

We hope you've had a great week! It's Friday, and today we're sharing what we've been reading online this week! Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. 5 Highly Effective Ways to Respond to Pricing Questions — HubSpot

You’re meeting with a hot prospect for the first time when they hit you with the dreaded price question. How you respond could make or break the rest of the conversation. Here's how to nail that response.

Okay, here’s the scenario. You’ve done your due diligence on a prospect and your extensive research tells you that:

Every week or two, in nearly every sales organization across the country, sales managers and salespeople sit down together for their regularly scheduled individual focus meetings.

You’re familiar with these meetings, so let me ask you... in your opinion, do your salespeople look forward to them? Are they anxious to share valuable information and discuss next steps in order to ensure they are moving business forward? For the most part, would you say they are a good use of everyone’s time?

Many will answer, “No.”

In my experience, both salespeople and sales managers often find themselves dreading these one-on-one meetings because they feel as though they are a waste of their time.

If you are in sales, you have to learn to effectively battle your fears. Fear of a big client leaving. Fear of a big deal falling through. Fear of your company making a change. Fear of the marketplace changing. Fear of the new boss.  

We hope you've had a great week! It's Friday, and today we're sharing what we've been reading online this week! Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. Offline & Organic: The Two Rivers That Feed Modern Local SEO — Moz

Local companies that lack a basic understanding of how customer service works in the offline world won’t be fully equipped to consult with clients who may need as much help defining the USP of their business as they do managing its local promotion. This post shows how the two work together and howt o maximize them both.

It's time to pull out the fire pit and get those spring fires burning. You need the right wood to keep a strong fire burning, just like you need the right talent to improve your sales.

Every client I am working with is telling me the changes in business are creating a need for a new breed of salesperson. In this good business climate, there is opportunity everywhere, but taking advantage of that opportunity requires stronger talent than in the very recent past.

This has everyone looking for great new sales talent to bring into their organization, and this pursuit of talent has leaders evaluating their current culture. You need the right culture to attract top talent.

We hope you've had a great week! It's Friday, and today we're sharing what we've been reading online this week! Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. How to Craft Meetings People Love (Really) — strategy + business

At their worst, meetings are like short prison sentences that have you counting the minutes until your release. Yet there are meetings that are useful and productive, and even invigorating and enjoyable. This article looks at three types of meetings that exemplify variations on best practices and are worth emulating.

The average American social media user spends an average of 3.2 hours a day with social networks according to research by Ipsos. With that much time being spent on a social network, businesses who have not developed a social media plan as a part of their marketing strategy are missing out on a lot of opportunity.

What’s the solution? Use social media! Sounds easy enough, and building a page on social media is simple. But posting once a day and tweeting is not enough. To effectively use social media for marketing, marketers need to build an audience and create engaging content that resonates with that audience.

If you are currently using social media to market your business, or you offer digital solutions and are looking to help your clients build and enhance their social strategy, here are five things to consider:

1. Start by determining which social media network(s) is the right social network.

Social networks are not all the same. They all have different audiences that engage with the content in different ways. To understand which social network(s) you should be active in, first identify your target persona. Learn how they use social media, which networks are they most active in, and which content they engage with most on your website.

Top salespeople are often the veterans. They have deep relationships, and when there is an RFP (request for proposal) or a big contract up for bid, they know just how to zero in on that transaction and bring home the biggest share of the business.

The prospect has already decided they are going to spend that money for your product or industry. It's the "money on the table" or the low hanging fruit, and the issue was always about beating the competition.

Transactional business is critical to secure, and the big wins take hard work. But those successes can blind even the best sales reps from rocking the boat enough to look for more opportunities.