The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

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.

1. 6 Unexpected Questions That Reveal What Your Prospect Is Really Thinking — HubSpot

Most prospects get the same questions from salespeople over and over again. Using any of these cliché, routine questions harms your credibility. Rather than seeing you as a trusted advisor, the buyer associates you with all the other reps they’ve ever spoken to. In addition, your prospect will go on autopilot and recite the same answer they’ve given on previous sales calls. You’ll lose the chance to get information your competition doesn’t have. To maintain authority, keep the buyer’s attention, and find out what they’re really thinking, ask questions they’re not expecting. 

OK, seriously, what is pre-boarding?! For most of us, pre-boarding has always been the handshake you get from the hiring manager with the words, “Welcome aboard.” And then, a few weeks later, you start work. That’s it. Nothing fancy, just, "You’re hired." But as most of us are well aware, the job market is changing with lightning speed. Blame it on technology, the Internet or millennials, but we all see the need to change with it. So, what is pre-boarding, and why is pre-boarding so important?

Storytelling is a vital part of the fabric of human interaction, and it has been since long before written language. Whether in the form of cave paintings or blockbuster films, stories transport the audience to constructed worlds and deliver powerful messages with startling accuracy.

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.

1. How Marketing Must Evolve: 19 Leaders Peer Into Content’s Future — Content Marketing Institute

What do you envision for the future of content from a marketing perspective, and how do marketing teams need to evolve to prepare? The CMI editorial team recently put this question to the pros who will present at the Intelligent Content Conference March 28–30 in Las Vegas. Here's what they said.

A few months ago I was working with our client in Los Angeles and the managers were telling me they had a feeling their salespeople were not unearthing all the needs they should in their client needs analysis process. They cited a number of instances where the Account Executive did go deep enough and huge opportunities emerged for both the prospect and my client. They wanted to see that happening more often. After exploring the problem in more detail, I made several recommendations. One of those turned out to be particularly impactful.

The contact page is one of the most important pages on a company's website. But it's also one of the pages that receives the least attention from the company's marketing team. Several months ago, I wrote a post about how to optimize a website’s contact page to increase the number of leads it creates and to improve upon tracking contacts. Little did I know that the client that I had specifically recommended this approach to would have almost three-hundred new leads over a five month period from this new contact page.  

Many sales organizations miss revenue goals because they are understaffed and have open sales positions. This silent killer of productivity is a problem for many reasons: 

It’s not that annual reviews are bad… it’s just that they’re not enough! Whether the person you are managing is doing a great job, a terrible job, or performing somewhere in-between, waiting twelve months to let them know that information is damaging to them and to your company.

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.

1. How to Know Exactly What Content to Deliver to Convert More Prospects — Copyblogger

How do you know what content to send to prospects when? Whether it's top-of-the-funnel marketing content, sales collateral, or something in between, it's critical to get content delivery right. This article provides a content mapping framework from the perspective of the hero's journey.