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The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Elissa Blankenship

Elissa Blankenship

I've started and managed digital sales organizations for a decade and a half. Understanding the digital AND marketing ecosystem and how they work together allows me to lead our teams to drive the best results for our clients.

Recent Posts by Elissa Blankenship:

How to Find New Sales Leads in a Difficult Market

How to Find New Sales Leads in a Difficult Market

As a sales team in the business-to-business (B2B) space, finding new leads is a never-ending challenge.

In a highly competitive market, it's essential to be creative and use unique approaches to stand out from the crowd. In this blog, we will explore some unconventional ways to find sales leads that will help you get ahead of the competition.

Topics: prospecting Generate Leads

6 Weeks to Impact 2023

6 Weeks to Impact 2023

This is the glorious time of year when most leaders are engulfed in budgets, planning, meetings, and deadlines. 

With less than six weeks until 2023, let’s dive into a few things to check off or add to your list.

Topics: sales and marketing alignment leading indicators

How to Approach Setting Realistic Sales Goals in 2023

How to Approach Setting Realistic Sales Goals in 2023

Setting meaningful as well as realistic goals is a skill that all sales leaders know is crucial. When looking at sales goals, let us clarify that they need to be both meaningful, with a focus on hard, not vanity metrics. They also must be realistic to your industry, region, market, team, and organizational capacity.  

One of the best ways for sales leaders to set realistic goals is first to look back. History can offer meaningful data and will provide checks and balances when dealing with projections and not actuals. 

Topics: leading indicators

Cleaning Up Your Sales Pipeline

Cleaning Up Your Sales Pipeline

Keeping a clean pipeline for your sales team provides incredible insight into several areas of your sales department. It takes a particular discipline to stay on top of the pipeline, and it is well worth the effort. 

To start, you need a tool that will allow you to access your pipeline at any time. At The Center for Sales Strategy (CSS), we use HubSpot. The deal stages provide tremendous insight into seller activity and success and show signs of potential derailments to a deal.

Topics: sales pipeline

10 Things Your Clients Won’t Say Out Loud

10 Things Your Clients Won’t Say Out Loud

Creating an environment of trust and becoming a trusted advisor is one of the most important roles of a successful sales professional.  

That requires a shift from focusing on selling your product or solution to understanding and meeting the needs of the prospect or client in the now, near, and far.

Topics: customer satisfaction setting expectations Sales

Stop Spinning Your Wheels: Selling Techniques for Fast Closes

speed up sale

 

Stop spinning your wheels on lousy prospects!

Slow kills deals.   

Every seller knows (and loves) the feeling of a textbook sales process that goes from identify to closed-won, quickly.  The benefits of moving prospects to customers quickly through the pipeline expose several key leading indicators of the health of your sales team and sales process.

Topics: Sales

Sales Pipeline vs Sales Funnel: Do You Know the Difference?

Sales Pipeline vs Sales Funnel

Often, a sales funnel and sales pipeline are confused. 

They are not the same, and both have a distinct purpose along the path to purchase. They both provide an incredible amount of intelligence when examined in part and as a whole. 

Marketers and sales leaders that collaborate closely will learn that ensuring the sales funnel and pipeline are both full, healthy, and clean defines some of the biggest indicators of revenue success. 

Topics: sales pipeline sales funnel

Media Sales: Where to Spend Your Time and Energy in 2022

Media Sales - Where to Spend Your Time and Energy in 2022

2022 is poised to be one of the most disruptive years for media sellers. 

Organizations faced with staffing challenges and companies struggling to recover from losses —  businesses in every category feel the impact. And often, there are stark differences based on category and region. 

Generally, businesses are looking to grow new business and revenue. Bolstering sales, disruption in the workplace, supply chain challenges, and a host of other opportunities means a laser focus on how to sell in 2022 will be vital to success. 

Sellers and managers can win more deals by focusing on several cornerstone principles and repeating them daily.  

Topics: sales process media sales

Strategies to Enhance Your Recruitment Strategy

Strategies to Enhance Your Recruitment Strategy

Your recruitment strategy pivots on how you effectively use and deploy different tactics (and mindsets) to reach ideal candidates.   

There's no question we're in a talent shortage, and if you're curious about some of the ways to reach candidates using social media, make sure you take a look at these insights on best practices.

Topics: recruitment sales talent

A Social Media Strategy for Recruitment

Social Media Recruitment

The pandemic has made the job search for both the candidate and the recruiter challenging.

Never has a tight labor market had a deluge of resources in the talent search coupled with savvy job seekers. Online recruiting is not new. In fact, in the mid-1990s, the first online job boards changed the way candidates applied for jobs.  Goodbye cotton resume paper, and hello to the digital CV.   

There's no question that organizations worldwide are searching for talent, and that net is wider than ever with work from home and work from anywhere.

Topics: Social Media recruitment