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 Creative Sales Prospecting Ideas You've Never Tried Before — HubSpot

Sales success largely depends on routines. There are only so many hours in a day to sell -- the more practiced salespeople are at completing everyday tasks, the more time they can allocate to high-value activities like meeting with prospects or learning new skills. But sticking to the same process isn’t always a good thing. If you rely on the same prospecting methods and never try anything new, you’ll miss out on valuable opportunities. Use these six ideas as inspiration.

Salespeople look for opportunity. Yet sometimes getting the first appointment or even connecting with the decision maker seems impossible. You might say you have “a snowball’s chance in hell” of moving the deal forward. Unless something changes, unless “hell freezes over.” Then your snowball’s chance doesn’t look so bad.

It’s the same way with certain clients and prospects. Your chances of getting that appointment may seem impossible. What could make your chances look better today than they did yesterday? What could make them look fantastic tomorrow?

How can you make the seemingly-impossible possible? 

By finding the valid business reason you need to move forward with the prospect, that’s how. Who you know and what you know will improve your odds of finding a really strong, door-opening, valid business reason. 

You probably have some ambitious sales goals for Q1 of 2017. And to reach those goals, you've got to get more high-quality appointments. If you aren't sure how you're going to get there, check out these free resources.

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. The Secrets To Keeping Your New Year's Resolutions— FastCompany

If you’re like the majority of Americans, you’re probably thinking about making a New Year’s resolution. From losing weight to getting organized, spending less/saving more, and enjoying life to the fullest (last year's top four resolutions), we often make grand plans every January. Unfortunately, just 8% of us will be successful, according to Statistic Brain. But your odds don’t have to be so disheartening. Here are some proven tips that can put you in the 8% that make it happen. 

Today we have a guest post from Rachel Davidson. Rachel is a content specialist for Highspot, the sales enablement industry’s leading platform for content management, customer engagement, and analytics.

As sales teams grow, it can be challenging to make sure each team member has quick access to resources needed to do the job: case studies, email templates, product sell sheets, whitepapers, etc.

When huge amounts of content are fragmented and spread throughout multiple systems and platforms, reps can spend more time searching than selling. This is where sales enablement technology comes into play. By using a smart sales enablement tools that allow reps to access content and automate tasks, sales teams put themselves in better position to save time and engage customers more effectively.

At its heart, sales enablement creates more opportunities for reps to do what they do best: sell. Today we’re going to share ideas on improving the bottom line of your business by achieving faster conversions and higher sales via sales enablement.

We publish a lot of posts on our blog in our effort to help sales managers and salespeople get better results. Every so often, we look back at our analytics to see which posts were the most popular, so we know what's of interest to people (and what we need to focus on with upcoming posts).