The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

I wonder if the following scenario sounds familiar:

You call on several hot prospects and leave voice mail after voice mail, and yet... nobody returns your call. Was it a wrong number? Is everyone really that busy that nobody can find time to call you back?

But you know the answer. They're probably not that busy (not any more than everyone is always busy all the time), they just don't want their time wasted, and something you said on your voice mail indicated that talking to you might just be a waste of their time. Don't worry -- we can help you fix that.

Salespeople and sales managers universally loathe the individual focus meeting. That's too bad, because it's a wonderful way to connect with your employees, act as a resource, and let them know you trust them and are interested in their success.

Everyone gets busy, that's for sure, but you shouldn't get too busy to sit down with your salespeople once a week for one-on-one time with each salesperson who reports to you.

Follow these three steps and make your individual focus meetings more effective and productive.

Last month, all of us at The Center for Sales Strategy attended our annual summer company meeting. In preparation for the meeting, a small group of people were given the responsibility to bring with them a leadership quote that they really liked and that they could share with all in attendance at the meetings. The quotes were fantastic and lead to a lot of great discussion. We liked them so much that we thought we would share with you. Feel free to share this blog post and we hope you enjoy these quotes as much as we did.

12 Quotes About Leadership, from The Center for Sales Strategy's Annual Meeting

1. There are no traffic jams along extra mile. -Roger Staubach Click to Tweet!

2. Excellent firms don't believe in excellence only in constant improvement and constant change. -Tom Peters Click to Tweet!

3. There are a lot of people who touch the customer. -Roger Staubach Click to Tweet!

4. At a car dealership the seller is the hero, but if the service department doesn't service well, the customer doesn't come back. -Unknown Click to Tweet!

Here at The Center for Sales Strategy, we strive to make our clients happy. In fact, we pride ourselves on client satisfaction and retention. Read below for four ways to achieve client satisfaction as a B2B salesperson.

Now, you know the keys to making sure your clients are happy. Are you holding up your end of the bargain when it comes to client satisfaction?

We would probably all agree that strong athletic coaching is key to maximizing the performance of an athlete.  Effective sales coaching is just as essential for maximizing sales performance!

If you are a regular reader of our blog or a current client of The Center for Sales Strategy, you know that we believe strong coaching plays an enormous role in the development of people and their natural talents.  This slide show presentation will depict for you the five ways that sales coaching and athletic coaching are most similar and give you some important things to consider when coaching others.

 5 Parallels Between Athletic Coaching and Sales Coaching

The Center for Sales Strategy is proud to share that we’ve been named a HubSpot Platinum partner,  one of only twelve platinum partners in the world.

Patrick Shea, HubSpot Senior Manager of Channel Marketing, spoke highly of The Center and this accomplishment, “Achieving this exclusive status of becoming a HubSpot Platinum partner represents the highest standards of inbound marketing success and we are thrilled that The Center for Sales Strategy has reached that level. They not only specialize in delivering exceptional client results, but in sharing their expertise with marketers and business owners through world-class educational resources.”

How We Got Involved—and Grew—with Inbound Marketing

The Center for Sales Strategy is a sales performance company with a simple mission statement: To help our clients turn talent into performance. Our clients implement a seven-step process we created, called How Selling. Of course, we eat our own dog food and follow the same steps:

• Find the strongest potential leads
• Select the best prospects using the Ideal Customer Profile
• Approach these prospects using a Valid Business Reason
• Define the prospect's real needs using the Hourglass Needs Analysis process
• Solve the prospect's specific problem with a collaboratively developed plan
• Confirm the sale
• Deliver better-than-expected results
  

This is the tenth and final in our series of blog articles related to the findings of our 2013 survey of media sales managers and salespeople. The complete report is available for download here. Some of the major findings simply confirmed what we—and most of you—knew already. But others were unlikely to have been on anyone’s list of guesses as to which challenges, from lists offered in separate questionnaires given to sales managers and salespeople, would have finished near the top once the numbers were crunched.

(By the way, we did not conjure up those potential challenges in a dark room, but rather they were the fruit of 65 lengthy, open-end interviews conducted by our professional staff prior to fielding the questionnaires.)

In this series, we’ve reported specifically on the top four finishers for sellers and their managers. Making the salespeople’s list at #4 was It’s difficult to nail down a clear assignment from the prospect. Would you have guessed that? It’s equivalent to sellers crying out, “Help! I’m not too good at the most important part of my job!”

The total-revenue budget is historically a media property’s single most important measure of success. If that number is hit, the pressure to make some of the lesser targets is greatly relieved. But that pattern has been changing in recent years.  

Today, the digital-revenue budget is often the one that gets the most scrutiny—from the boardroom all the way down through the organization to the newest seller on the team. It’s not only because the total-revenue number is getting tougher and tougher to hit, but because everyone knows that revenue related to digital offerings represents the future, and most everything else is part of a past that is destined to decrease over time.

For several years The Center for Sales Strategy has been saying that the combination of outbound marketing plus inbound marketing is the exact sweet spot where marketers can earn the greatest results. This is a reality because it's how the consumer wants it, and when it comes to achieving results that's what matters most. 

It happens all the time when you hear or see a commercial message; it sparks an interest or a thought or an idea and while you might not be ready to be a customer at that exact moment, you are interested enough to want a little more information. So what do you do?  Nowadays most people take out their phone and google it! Or if there is a memorable (vanity) URL they might even go directly there. And if the marketer has done their job correctly, when the consumer arrives to the site, it will be the perfect landing page optimized with responsive design and presenting the exact information the consumer is looking for. 

What happens next?