The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

As a sales manager, imagine how much better your life would be if you were consistently able to:

• Forecast with better accuracy
• Improve the sales performance of your team

These elements are important, and delivering one or the other is not an option. When you have a healthy sales pipeline that is regularly monitored, both can be easy to achieve.

Training.

It is usually something that we undergo when we begin a new position or new company, but the best sales organizations, like the best sports teams, are constantly training all of their people.

Simply put, well-trained salespeople drive more revenue. 

Training should be seen as an essential ongoing investment designed to develop and help each of your salespeople grow. As you develop and invest in your people, their skills improve and ultimately drive results for the organization. It is the foundation created by effective employee training that drives performance of your team.

Conflict between sales and marketing is nothing new. The most common scenario is that marketing teams complain about a lack of timely follow-up with their hard-earned leads or them not being closed properly, and sales is often unhappy with the quality of leads they get from marketing. These two teams

Marketing teams can track the online behaviors of leads to help warm up what would otherwise be a cold call. At the same time, data and insight from your sales team can help marketing improve how they recognize leads that will most likely convert and identify the most efficient communication channels.

Bringing sales and marketing together is paramount to the growth of your company.

Over the past several months, I've increasingly heard from salespeople and sales leaders that business has slowed. Deals are taking longer to close, and accounts are hesitant to make long-term decisions. With this shift, and the need to drive more revenue, the focus on acquiring new business has increased.

While new business development is crucial for growth, many forget the importance of retaining the business they have worked so hard to acquire and develop! Getting new accounts in the door will add revenue, but it will have less of an impact if you are simply replacing dollars from existing accounts – think of trying to fill a leaky bucket.

As a Senior Consultant with The Center for Sales Strategy, I’ve reviewed a lot of proposals from salespeople over the years.

As I analyze the ideas sellers plan to present to clients, I often push them to make their proposals stronger by asking, “Where’s the plan to achieve the desired business results? How can you make it easier to buy?”

These prompts often create the awareness that we need to do a little more fishing. So, grab a fishing pole and have a seat on the dock. Today we are taking a virtual fishing trip!

As we get ready to roll in the new year, selling digital marketing solutions will continue to be a top priority and requirement for success.

To say there is one thing that will influence your success or failure at selling digital marketing solutions is a fairly bold statement… and I am going to make it.

Imagination. It’s a wonderful thing as a child, but as an adult, it can often keep you from engaging in specific scenarios.

I see it often from media sellers when it comes to being asked to sell new digital solutions… “if I engage in this conversation, what if they ask me…fill in the blank.”

Digital sales teams today have to know more than how to sell. They need to understand how to develop integrated solutions that produce the business results the accounts they work with want. And they need to have the talent to be successful.

If you are in the process of building a digital sales team or upgrading your current team, here are five things you should consider.

I will often hear sales managers confess that their most tenured, and sometimes best traditional sellers, struggle when it comes to selling more or higher value digital solutions.

As consumers spend more time with digital media and digital marketing budgets increase, it is no longer viable to have your best sellers not participating or fully participating when it comes to digital sales.

So, what is the best way to help your most talented sellers who haven’t found their digital groove?