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. 5 Highly Effective Email Time Management Hacks — HubSpot

Most salespeople spend hours in their inbox every day: Writing emails, scheduling them, reading them, and organizing them. If you could save just 10% of this time, you’d have more time for actual selling. To shrink your email investment by 10% (or more), try these five effective email time management hacks.

Sometimes the most revelatory meanings come from parables. Storytelling is an art and has been a part of the human experience since cave men started drawing pictures on cave walls, since troubadours roamed the countryside telling stories through their songs. Storytelling helps us make sense of the world.

One of the most effective ways of telling a story is through a parable. It’s a short, allegorical piece meant to teach a lesson. It’s told in words that convey images people can easily understand and often include animals and nature like "The Three Little Pigs" and "The Grasshopper and the Ant."

For those of us who are parents, we know that while we try to help our children avoid mistakes, we also want to give them some leeway to have learning moments of their own. Of course there is a time and a place for learning moments. The same goes for our teams when they are prospecting for new business. We shouldn't allow our newer salespeople as much leeway (like our younger children) as we do our more seasoned veterans (our older children) especially when it comes to prospecting. 

Here are 5 tips to help newer sellers determine their best prospects:

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. 14 Places to Research a Prospect Before a Sales Call — HubSpot

The more you can personalize your conversation to a prospect and their business, the greater the chance that you’ll capture their interest—and hopefully their business. To do that, you'll need to research the prospect. Here are 14 places that will help you.

Today we have a guest post from Danny Wong. Danny is a marketing consultant, sales strategist and writer. He does marketing at Tenfold, a seamless click-to-dial solution for high-performance sales teams. Connect with him on Twitter @dannywong1190.

Growth is good — it means that goals are being met and revenue is up. But hiring new team members brings challenges. The responsibilities of a sales manager change drastically as your sales team expands. Managing a modest team of five to 10 reps is easy when compared to overseeing a department with 30, 40, or 50 salespeople.

Here are three things you must keep in mind as a sales manager as your team begins to grow from small to large:

Great coaching is hard to find.

Most people aren’t born to coach, but those that are, the ones who are great at growing and developing people, can forever change the lives of those around them.

I talk about coaching in sales and management all the time, but the same lessons can be drawn from and applied to sports, education, really everything. People do not grow in a vacuum.  They only grow in relationship to another person.

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. 11 Techniques to Run Efficient and Effective Sales Meetings — HubSpot

Time is precious, and wasting your prospect’s time is the fastest way to ensure you won’t ever get more. The 11 techniques in this article are the key to making sure you’re running efficient, effective sales presentations that will keep your prospects engaged until the end of the process.

Do you ever tell horror stories about the worst hire you ever made? These bad experiences tend to stand out, don’t they?

High turnover is a big problem for many sales organizations and hiring the wrong people for the job can be a big contributor to that turnover. It’s extremely important that you hire people with the right talents for the position.

Do your due diligence before you hire someone so you are not surprised by mediocre performance later. Perfecting your interview process will help you to put the right people in the right positions.

Here are some tips on how to get the most from a candidate interview:

1.  They don’t hear “yes” often enough.

2.  They don’t hear “no” often enough.

When you talk to salespeople all time as I do, it’s easy to see the biggest problem with many proposals is that they seem to fall into a black hole, an abyss, where salespeople don’t hear either "yes" or "no." That’s a problem.

It’s better to hear “no” than nothing. As a result, salespeople feed pending information to their managers each week, which includes proposals still hanging out there, and sales managers continue to miss their projections with faulty data. Experience shows that each week that goes by between presentation and getting an answer, the chance of closing a proposal goes down. In fact, the closing percentage on proposals over 30 days old is usually less than 10%, far less than what the salespeople are projecting. The reality is a no answer is usually a “no” answer.

So, how can salespeople avoid having their proposals drop off the face of the planet, never to be heard about again? Here are some steps that should be useful: