The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

If you could start one new thing this month that increased the open rate of your sales emails by 5Xs and improved your open-to-reply rate by 8Xs, would you do it? The obvious answer is yes, but sadly, once most of you realize what it is, you’ll come up with at least one of these excuses as to why you won’t do it and still avoid it.  

Video. Yes, video! Video has the power to not only get your emails opened but replied to! Across platforms (not just email) it’s proven to help get higher response rates, inspire more action, and help sellers reach the C-Suite (source).

LinkedIn is the most popular professional social networking site out there, which means if you have a B2B business or cater to other professionals in a specific industry, it could be the ideal platform for growing your business.

By now, you’ve updated your LinkedIn profile using the Ultimate LinkedIn Profile Checklist. Now you want more engagement, you want your LinkedIn posts to attract more viewers and increase shares—but where do you even start?

From personal branding and thought leadership to prospecting, lead nurturing, and recruiting—there are many benefits to using LinkedIn as a sales professional. The problem is that sales professionals don't have time to set up or update the basics of their LinkedIn accounts to best represent them and their company. 

You can't build a great building on a weak foundation, and the LinkedIn profile is just that: the foundation that could affect the success of your social efforts. Use this checklist to ensure your profile is updated and the best representation of your personal brand, the products you sell, and what you have to offer a prospect.

Sales managers are superheroes that possess special traits that help them save the day and lead their team to improved sales performance. Here's a few traits that stand out most about these savvy business leaders (as told by GIFs). 

No doubt, the holidays are crazy. You're working hard to close out the year, planning for the next year, and trying to finish as strong as possible. Outside of work, there's a list a mile long —holiday parties, shopping, family, friends, wrapping, cooking, etc... 

In an ever-changing sales landscape, maintaining a healthy personal brand on social media has become a necessary tool for sales professionals to build and maintain relationships with prospects. According to a Forrester Consulting study, Social Selling: A New B2B Imperative, “49% of B2B enterprises have developed a formal social selling program, and 28 percent are in the process of doing so.”

Even though using social media to sell has been widely adopted in many industries, our 2019 Media Sales Report found that only 12% of sales managers said their salespeople are using social media effectively to set appointments with prospects.

If you aren’t utilizing social selling as part of your sales strategy, you could be losing sales to more social-savvy salespeople. 

Just like an athlete, you can go it alone and get some occasional wins. To win a gold medal requires a clear plan, consistent discipline, and constant improvement.

At The Center for Sales Strategy (CSS), we take delivering client results seriously. We are here to help take your sales strategy from occasional wins to gold medals. Our proven strategies help clients improve their company’s sales performance and increase their sales revenue by providing tailored solutions for their needs.

We've taken some time to dig into last year's numbers so we can analyze and improve in the coming year. Here's what 2018 looked like, and we'll be sharing 2019 soon after the New Year. 

Company culture is a vital component of a successful business -- or at least that's what 'they' say. Studies show that it affects recruitment and hiring top talent as well as retention and employee engagement. It's a baseline for productivity and can set the tone for work ethic, expectations, team camaraderie, and even brand recognition. 

You hear the words bounced around. "Company culture" is a term that a lot of people are talking about. But what are they doing about it? Is it really impacting their organizations? I decided to dig in and see what I could find as far as the impact company culture is playing in organizations. Here's what I found. 

It's not out of character to hear a sales manager say, 'ABC: Always Be Closing.' Or to have a salesperson live out that phrase daily. But in reality, to close more business, you must sell less and help more. 

This post was originally published on the LeadG2 blog.

Recently, LeadG2 shared a post explaining how to send videos via email. Due to spam, security, and email hosting features, many email clients do not allow video embeds directly into emails, so with a few easy steps, marketers and salespeople can send video via email, just not with an actual embed. If you are a Hubspot Sales user at the Professional or Enterprise level, I have good news! Not long ago, Hubspot announced a feature that enables salespeople (or any Hubspot user communicating with a contact through the CRM) to embed videos directly into their 1:1 emails! 

Here are just a few reasons this exciting feature is valuable and vital to the sales process:

1. Video creates a more personal and humanized sales experience.
2. Sales reps that use video in prospecting, relationship-building, and sales emails see 5x higher open rates and 8x higher open-to-reply rates.
3. Video can help to establish and build trust with a prospect that doesn't yet know you.