The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Today we have a guest post from Allison Delagrange. Allison is is a General Sales Manager for Federated Media in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She’s a 2005 Taylor University graduate, coach to a team of top-notch sellers on 97.3 WMEE, mom to a little princess and twin boys, and wife to one handsome dude. Allison loves to help others succeed and share insights she’s learned over the course of her 10-year career in sales.

Sometimes great insights come from the most unlikely places. Just in time for Halloween, I’d like to share with you what a little green monster taught me about sales talent.

Today we have a guest post from Sherrie Roberts. Sherrie has been crushing sales goals and breaking records for over 20 years from local broadcast to national networks and rep firms. Serving in roles as salesperson, sales manager, General Manager and Founder.

It’s tempting to approach all prospects with the same strategies and tactics—it’s much easier and quicker to use a “one-size-fits-all” approach. But no two prospects are the same, especially the big ones. 

I’ve had several opportunities to earn the business of “whales.” Two of those were company record breakers, and a few were against all odds. These experiences had three common traits that stood apart from the rest. 

In just a couple of weeks, the LeadG2 team will be heading to Boston for INBOUND 2016—the yearly marketing conference hosted by HubSpot. As a Platinum Partner of Hubspot, we appreciate how HubSpot continues to lead the industry in research studies, thought leadership, and educating marketers. We learn so much each year at the conference.

Over four days, five keynotes, and hundreds of workshop sessions, we’ll be increasing our knowledge so we can better help our clients, and we’re looking forward to that! 

Nonprofit Development Officers are busy people who are often pulled in many different directions. How they spend their time is very important and is linked to the decisions they make.

Making a not-so-good decision leads to wasting time. Making great decisions leads to revenue development and a great ROI on task-to-time spent on a project.

In working with companies large and small and in cities large and small, the number one thing I hear most often from managers is how hard it is to recruit. There is no doubt that it can be challenging, especially if there isn’t a clear strategy in place to tackle it. Most managers don’t make recruiting a priority until when? Yep, you guessed it: when there is an open position. That is exactly the wrong time to do it (or to start doing it).

Campaign recaps are the norm when it comes to digital marketing. In an integrated marketing campaign, those results are usually separated out even though we design the campaign to work together. All too often, the digital portion of a campaign recap is simply a beautified spreadsheet or PowerPoint that includes creative images and a handful of metrics like impressions delivered, clicks, click-through rates, and sometimes view-throughs. These types of reports do very little to show how the campaign is actually achieving the goals of the client—and when that is the case, they can result in a cancellation or non-renewal.

The goal of a campaign recap is to sell the results back to your client so that you can retain and grow that piece of business. You want to make it clear that you are driving results—making the connection between the numbers and the emotions of your client. So how do we move beyond the simple delivery of numbers, to effectively sell the results of our integrated campaigns?

Here are three easy steps to get you there:

Our research shows that the very best salespeople out there are highly competitive, focused, passionate, and good at solving problems. So it would make sense that these same people would be excited about the opportunity to experience a virtual version of what it’s like to work for a company while scoring badges, earning points, and competing to win. It also stands to reason that highly competitive organizations would want to set themselves apart from the competition by turning to unique forms of recruitment to attract the most high-potential hires.

The traditional ABCs of selling were "always be closing." Coffee was only for closers, and closing was a single, major event. The concept of "always be closing" is valid in that it’s important to always be moving the sale forward.

Too Many Pending Lists Give No Indication of the Last Move Forward

Before Google, LinkedIn, or social selling, Steve Marx, founder of The Center for Sales Strategy, taught that closing is a series of small yeses leading to the ultimate yes that confirms the sale.

After spending over a decade helping sales organizations select highly talented employees and coaching those salespeople and sales managers to turn talent into performance, I have discovered what I believe are two undisputable truths:

• A shockingly high number of people are not engaged at work.
• Talented people who leave their jobs usually point to their manager as the problem.

The latest numbers from Gallup tell us that 70% of our employees are disengaged in their jobs and a recent study by SAP and Oxford Economics revealed that one in five of our top performers are likely to leave their jobs in the next six months!

This means it’s not enough to hire highly talented people into your organization and it’s not even enough to put them in the right positions so they can effectively use their talents (although both of these things are critical!).

Once hired, these talented people need much more from their manager in order to consistently feel engaged and fully realize their potential.

So what can you do to increase employee retention and maximize the performance of your people?

Today we have a guest post by Mikita Mikado. Mikita is the Co-Founder & CEO of PandaDoc, a platform helping sales teams create, deliver, and track intelligent sales content to close deals faster. To learn more about simplifying your sales documents, connect with Mikita and the PandaDoc team on Twitter, and LinkedIn.