The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Case Studies and campaign recaps are powerful tools to help sell success. When managers share individual wins with their team, it boosts morale, sparks ideas, and motivates others to do similar work.

Salespeople value the real-life experience of their peers. After all, the best part of working in sales is celebrating your biggest wins after hours, weeks, maybe even months of hard work. Sales wins are a combination of strategies, tools, and content — doesn't other players on your team want to know what worked well for the salesperson who sealed the deal?

When you've been in the industry for a while, you realize the astounding similarities between sports and business. Like sports, sales is a highly-competitive field, and you must have the ability to think on your feet with rock-solid professionalism.

In both, success boils down to having a winning attitude that demands discipline and attention to detail regarding how you prepare and perform.

As an athlete, it’s vital to understand the basic concept of agility — the ability to change your body’s position by having quick feet. As a sales manager or consultant, rather than applying the phrase, “Move Your Feet” to your body, you must apply it to your mindset and tactics.

Once you present a solution to a prospective buyer or client, two things happen.

It becomes either Close Won or Close Lost. Close Won is obviously the ideal or desired scenario, but what happens when your pending deal is Close Lost? Is ALL lost? Maybe not. 

Ask yourself these three questions to determine if you can change a Close Lost scenario into a Close Won.

Someone once said that perceptions can’t be wrong because it’s a perception, an opinion and impression of someone else. However, perceptions are often wrong because if they were right, they would be called facts.  

Whether we deserve it or not, we’re judged by every person that we connect with. The words that come out of our mouth firmly establish an imaginary tattoo on our forehead as we stand in front of a quality prospect.

Perception is everything, and how you’re seen by your team, prospects, and clients is a key to success. New research shows that you have 27 seconds to make a positive impression and 1 minute to prove value in any given situation. Like it or not, how you look, dress, and speak helps people to form an opinion of you.

Social selling is a powerful part of the approach in our now transparent sales landscape.

By now, every salesperson should be embracing LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Facebook, as they plan to approach and attempt to engage with new business prospects.

Whether you choose to use paid services or choose to navigate social media on your own, it’s a platform where you can earn trust and establish credibility with your very best prospects.

It’s also a platform that if used incorrectly, could damage your credibility with your very best prospects.

There are two poisonous mistakes that will kill a presentation: using jargon and using stock phrases.

Making either of these mistakes will drastically reduce the chance of getting a second meeting with a prospect.

Let's start with HOW NOT to start a presentation and finish with the HOW TO of communicating an engaging proposal.

“To know your prospect, you must become your prospect.” 

- Ancient Chinese Proverb

This quote came from a salesperson who knew how to get an appointment.

Getting the first appointment with a prospect is getting harder year after year, and making yourself relevant to the prospect is the first step in overcoming that challenge.

As a daring and ambitious salesperson on the search for customers to serve, you must seek relevance like a duck seeks water. The question is how.

Improving your staff's productivity and efficiency is difficult when there are so few of you. That doesn’t mean it isn’t impossible to delegate work in a way that compensates for being short-staffed, but sooner or later, you’ll need to find the right sales structure for balance or hire more employees, or you risk burnout.

Hiring employees may be the best option if you’re experiencing a sudden influx of work. There's also the option for leased employees, who can be placed as temporary workers and don’t require you to handle their HR or payroll employment duties.

First, let’s take a look at how your company can stay productive without hiring more employees. Then, we’ll show you the telltale signs of when it’s time to take the outsourcing plunge.

If you think cold emailing is dead, you're wrong.

59% of B2B companies say email is the most effective channel for generating revenue. It's one of the most cost-effective forms of outreach that there is.

At the same time, you need to realize that you're not the only one sending emails. HBR reports that on average, professionals have more than 200 emails in their inbox and receive 120 new ones each day but respond to only 25% of them.

If you want to get a response to your emails, you'll need to employ the magic of etiquette, one of the best ways to create a human connection with the reader.

In this post, we talk about a few common mistakes people make writing cold emails, and some advice on how to improve these areas.