The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

An effective omnichannel strategy integrates various channels, ensuring a consistent and personalized customer journey that leads to better brand recognition, customer satisfaction, and increased conversions.

As sales cycles embrace a hybrid model, the buyer's journey now spans multiple physical and digital touchpoints before making a purchase. To optimize the omnichannel experience and foster customer retention, it's crucial to understand customer expectations, map their journey, leverage data insights, align stakeholders, and continuously enhance the post-purchase experience.

At the core of every successful workforce management practice is communication. As managers and sellers adapt to this new normal, clear communication, and scheduled talk time are more important than ever before. Talk time comes in forms such as:

• Manager to seller talk time
• Manager to key customer talk time
• Seller to key and secondary customer talk time

Email is great for communicating data and confirming details, but nothing beats a conversation. Especially when the person on the other end of the line—phone or video—has a problem and needs to tap into your problem-solving expertise.

Whether with your sales team, customers, or prospects, regular check-ins promote open communication and stop larger issues from festering, as well as allow for immediate feedback.

While marketing strategies and sales tactics are crucial, the power of building strong relationships should never be underestimated. Genuine connections forged through authentic interactions and a deep understanding of your client's needs can pave the way for sustainable business growth.

By focusing on creating valuable and meaningful bonds, you can establish a loyal customer base, foster trust, and ultimately drive long-term success for your business. Discover how to leverage the power of genuine connections to stand out in a crowded market and unlock new opportunities for growth.

Referrals are the lifeblood of sales success. They are the ultimate "social proof" because people trust friends and influencers more than any advertisement delivered by the brand.

A referral is someone who has a personal reason to check out your brand and who approaches your products or services with a positive-leaning curiosity. They may even be a pre-qualified lead if the referral itself was based on personal knowledge.

Therefore, inspiring and rewarding referrals is a process that every brand should master. In this post, we'll break down a five-step plan to consistently generate a high volume of quality referrals. Here's how to create a smooth-running referral machine.

A good salesperson knows that success starts with making connections, building rapport, and creating a positive space.

Short and irritable prospects make it difficult to have any meaningful conversation and make your job much harder than it needs to be. 

Building rapport and making connections doesn't have to take long, and it's well worth the investment. Let's look at some simple techniques that you can use to improve a prospect's mindset so they're more comfortable and open to hearing what you have to offer.

As a leader, your time is precious. You're pulled in a million different directions, trying to drive your organization forward while also striving for some semblance of work-life balance.

The national bestseller "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Tim Ferriss has captivated readers with its bold promise of escaping the daily 9-5 grind. While some of the book's ideas around minimal work may be controversial, it contains several productivity gems that every successful executive should embrace.

The best way to fall flat on your face in a business conversation is to start the conversation talking about business.

Cultivate the art of small talk, and chances are good that once you do get around to bantering about business, the conversation will be meaningful.

How much more productive would you be if you focussed on your inputs? This means avoiding all distractions and only working on planning, pitching, and following up—all the factors that budge the needle, not those that don't. 

A lot of valuable time is wasted focusing on things we cannot control. For example, we have zero control over the economy, competitors, pricing, inventory, or customers' attitudes. Improving sales performance often requires changing focus from things that are out of our control to things we can control.

So, what exactly should you focus on? Here are several things within your control.

Spending time observing salespeople is something all leaders should do occasionally. You can learn so much more by observing first-hand how your salespeople interact with clients and customers.

This can work by physically accompanying a salesperson in the field or translating to online sales by listening to sales calls or observing emails and chats.  

Salespeople fill a fundamental role in society, so why do they get a bad rep?

In a HubSpot’s Research study, Buyers Speak Out: How Sales Needs to Evolve, respondents were asked to submit the word they most associated with salespeople.

The number one response was “pushy."

Persistence is part of being a salesperson, but there’s a difference between consistently adding value with each check-in and rambling about the benefits of what you’re selling. It’s decades and decades of the “pushy” kind of sales tactic that has made the average salesperson somewhat unpopular. We’re here to help change that with an updated look at the customer-focused sales process.