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The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

5 Highly Effective Ways to Respond to Pricing Questions + More

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We hope you've had a great week! It's Friday, and today we're sharing what we've been reading online this week! Here are our "best" from around the web.

15 Highly Effective Ways to Respond to Pricing Questions — HubSpot

You’re meeting with a hot prospect for the first time when they hit you with the dreaded price question. How you respond could make or break the rest of the conversation. Here's how to nail that response.

Topics: Inbound Marketing Sales Wrap-up

Increase Your E-mail Open Rates and Avoid the Trash with These 10 Subject Lines

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Okay, here’s the scenario. You’ve done your due diligence on a prospect and your extensive research tells you that:

Topics: email Sales

3 Steps to Make Sure Individual Focus Meetings are Never Mediocre

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Every week or two, in nearly every sales organization across the country, sales managers and salespeople sit down together for their regularly scheduled individual focus meetings.

You’re familiar with these meetings, so let me ask you... in your opinion, do your salespeople look forward to them? Are they anxious to share valuable information and discuss next steps in order to ensure they are moving business forward? For the most part, would you say they are a good use of everyone’s time?

Many will answer, “No.”

In my experience, both salespeople and sales managers often find themselves dreading these one-on-one meetings because they feel as though they are a waste of their time.

Is Your Hunger Greater Than Your Fear?

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If you are in sales, you have to learn to effectively battle your fears. Fear of a big client leaving. Fear of a big deal falling through. Fear of your company making a change. Fear of the marketplace changing. Fear of the new boss.  

Topics: Sales

Offline & Organic: The Two Rivers That Feed Modern Local SEO + More

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We hope you've had a great week! It's Friday, and today we're sharing what we've been reading online this week! Here are our "best" from around the web.

1Offline & Organic: The Two Rivers That Feed Modern Local SEO — Moz

Local companies that lack a basic understanding of how customer service works in the offline world won’t be fully equipped to consult with clients who may need as much help defining the USP of their business as they do managing its local promotion. This post shows how the two work together and howt o maximize them both.

Topics: Inbound Marketing Sales Wrap-up

There is Only One Place to Coach Salespeople

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I remember when I took private pilot's lessons there were two places learning took place. The first place was ground school. We learned how airplanes are constructed, how they fly, which radio frequencies to use, and how airports are laid out – literally hundreds of  topics one would need to know to pilot an airplane.

Improve Your Sales with Hot Coals

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It's time to pull out the fire pit and get those spring fires burning. You need the right wood to keep a strong fire burning, just like you need the right talent to improve your sales.

Every client I am working with is telling me the changes in business are creating a need for a new breed of salesperson. In this good business climate, there is opportunity everywhere, but taking advantage of that opportunity requires stronger talent than in the very recent past.

This has everyone looking for great new sales talent to bring into their organization, and this pursuit of talent has leaders evaluating their current culture. You need the right culture to attract top talent.

How to Craft Meetings People Love (Really) + More

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We hope you've had a great week! It's Friday, and today we're sharing what we've been reading online this week! Here are our "best" from around the web.

1How to Craft Meetings People Love (Really) — strategy + business

At their worst, meetings are like short prison sentences that have you counting the minutes until your release. Yet there are meetings that are useful and productive, and even invigorating and enjoyable. This article looks at three types of meetings that exemplify variations on best practices and are worth emulating.

Topics: Inbound Marketing Sales Wrap-up

5 Tips to Building a Strong Social Media Strategy

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The average American social media user spends an average of 3.2 hours a day with social networks according to research by Ipsos. With that much time being spent on a social network, businesses who have not developed a social media plan as a part of their marketing strategy are missing out on a lot of opportunity.

What’s the solution? Use social media! Sounds easy enough, and building a page on social media is simple. But posting once a day and tweeting is not enough. To effectively use social media for marketing, marketers need to build an audience and create engaging content that resonates with that audience.

If you are currently using social media to market your business, or you offer digital solutions and are looking to help your clients build and enhance their social strategy, here are five things to consider:

1. Start by determining which social media network(s) is the right social network.

Social networks are not all the same. They all have different audiences that engage with the content in different ways. To understand which social network(s) you should be active in, first identify your target persona. Learn how they use social media, which networks are they most active in, and which content they engage with most on your website.

Topics: Digital

Are Your Best Salespeople Leaving Money on the Table?

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Top salespeople are often the veterans. They have deep relationships, and when there is an RFP (request for proposal) or a big contract up for bid, they know just how to zero in on that transaction and bring home the biggest share of the business.

The prospect has already decided they are going to spend that money for your product or industry. It's the "money on the table" or the low hanging fruit, and the issue was always about beating the competition.

Transactional business is critical to secure, and the big wins take hard work. But those successes can blind even the best sales reps from rocking the boat enough to look for more opportunities.

Topics: Sales