The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

A co-worker of mine recently posted a fun quiz on our employee Facebook page, called “Are These Marketing Buzzwords Real or Fake?” While taking the quiz, I couldn’t help but think some of the words I correctly answered were in reality just made up for fun, so I did little digging to investigate and found lots of buzzwords worthy of defining in plain English! Digital terms went from being a bunch of illusive acronyms to being a combination of words made up to define the new digital landscape. To help clear the muddy waters of digital marketing buzzwords, here are 5 defined in plain english: 

Take a minute to think about all of the sales meetings you’ve attended or facilitated. Were you disappointed or delighted? Maybe you felt bored or even punished. Did the facilitator, AKA Sales Leader, drone on, pontificate, lecture, demean, or all of the above? Was it a one-voice meeting? What was the general engagement quotient of the participants?

We've come to the end of another week, and now it's time for us to share what we've been reading online this week. Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. Best Practices for Lead Response Management — InsideSales.com

When are the best days/times to make contact with your leads? How many attempts should you be making? Learn what the most successful companies are doing to connect with and convert their leads in this infographic.

Chris Brogan recommends an exercise at the beginning of each year that he calls “My Three Words.” He uses these three words as a way to focus his energy and effort for the coming year—a creative twist on the new year’s resolution. I have seen Chris refer to this the last few years, but this is the first year I decided to take his recommendation.  

I created a first draft and set it aside a few days and then came back to put it in final form. My three words are Think, Decide, and Appreciate. Here’s what I resolve to do.

Sales meetings are often seen as a necessary evil by both salespeople and sales managers—the salespeople often think they are a waste of time (and sometimes they are) and managers generally hate putting them together (and a are often not that good at it). So, here are five tips to help you produce a sales meeting people will want to be part of, with less work on your part to provide all the content:

It's Friday! Hope you've had a good week! Now it's time for us to share what we've been reading online this week. Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. Peer-to-Peer Coaching: Your New Secret Weapon — SalesForce

Peer-to-peer coaching reinforces best practices and builds a deeper level of trust with your peers. This article examines the benefits that peer-to-peer coaching can bring to sales training. Think about what would be possible if each manager finished training with an unconditional commitment to proactively coach each other.

As a parent of two small children, I've coached my share of soccer teams over the years. I like to think that my teams learned something from my coaching and leadership, but I am starting to think that I learned more from them.

Many of the lessons I have learned can be applied to sales and specifically sales management: the team that keeps score does best, practice like you intend to play, and you are only as strong as your weakest player.

Here’s a new year’s resolution I have: I am going to try to be more demanding in 2016! Demanding about the right stuff, that is.

We can all fall into the trap of being ok with good performance (from ourselves and others)—instead of demanding great performance. An example of this for our company is in the area of insights. Many of our clients count on us for insights related to specific categories of business or overall consumer trends that impact numerous business categories. Over the last few years, we've tried to do too much. As a result, we had a lot of average content in our business category insights. This year, we are going to narrow our scope and improve our content (and design). I am going to demand it from all of us.

Happy New Year! We've collected our favorite posts and articles that we've read this week, and we're sharing them here with you. Get ready for a great 2016!

1. 3 Sales Tips to Pounce on Before the Ball Drops — Salesforce

Streamline your sales tasks with technology. This post from Salesforce explains how implementing three tips will help you be more productive in 2016.

Many books have been written on leadership and many workshops given for leaders on how to build sales teams and influence positive change in cultures. Some observations: