The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

What worked a few years ago and helped gain successful sales leads might be outdated and could never work now. For instance, there were times when cold calling was king, but it's not as effective in this age of digital marketing.

Therefore, adjusting your strategies is incredibly crucial in ensuring you get quality sales leads. Here's a detailed look at some of the strategies you can use.

When it comes to B2B lead generation, leveraging the right platforms is a practical step for growth.

Among the myriad of available options, LinkedIn stands out as a powerhouse for connecting businesses with ideal prospects. With an extensive professional network predominantly composed of business professionals, LinkedIn offers outstanding opportunities for lead generation.

There are four key performance indicators I recommend everyone keep a weekly focus on.  If you are a manager who does weekly individual focus meetings with your AE's or if you are a manager managing managers, these four things will help you keep the focus of the individual and the team on things that are crucial in moving the needle. 

These four essential metrics will tell you if you are on track for success. 

Salespeople often slow down a sale or lose it altogether because they are not willing to create tension. I am not talking about relationship tension. I am talking about task tension.  

You want to get to task tension as quickly as you can. This is what sales acceleration is all about. However, smart salespeople know you need to create a foundation of relationships—essentially reducing relationship tension so you can create task tension. You can’t rush to task tension until you remove relationship tension. You remove relationship tension by helping the prospect see that you are someone who can be trusted and could bring value.

Moving into 100% commissioned sales in my 30’s was one of those “what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger” moments in my life. Truth be told, it wasn’t a moment; it was a journey. I remember trying to learn all I could from the veteran salespeople on my team. But, when I read the book Sales Dogs I began to understand that the answer was not to be found in trying to copy the talents of other salespeople, but to learn how to leverage my own unique mix of talents.

There are core sales talents that people need to be successful in sales. Yet even the most talented salespeople will have a unique mix of those talents, and how they play out in practice is as different as one dog to the next.

Sales can be fun. Sales can be stressful. Sales can be rewarding. Sales can be life-changing. Here are some gifs to bring a little humor into your week and get you on track to improve your sales performance (we hope you are as pumped as #5) and help your clients crush their goals with your solutions (see #7). And then, we hope you end up like #10. 

I read a recent study that shared many interesting things about music and how much it does for humans. Some things noted in the study are that music:

• Enhances intelligence, learning and IQ
• Improves memory performance
• Improves concentration and attention
• Helps work productivity
• Helps fight fatigue
• Improves mood

Whether you're motivating yourself or your sales team, I think anyone in sales would like a little bit of all of those. So with that said, I've collected a list of songs from our team and compiled a list of motivational songs to help you boost your sales productivity! 

Recently, I've had a few run-ins with bad email etiquette. Not just in a quick email thread from a co-worker (I'll admit, my email etiquette gets sloppy in this arena), but I've received emails from salespeople attempting to get me (the marketing manager) to subscribe to their software, utilize their platform, or allocate some of my budget to their product, and all had major email etiquette issues, misspelled my name, or included verbiage that clearly showed me we aren't on the same wavelength. I also received an email from a potential candidate for a freelance writer that included major grammatical mistakes... WHAT!? 

I’m sitting in a hotel lobby enjoying my dinner. But I’m only steps away from the front desk. I can easily hear people checking in. What surprises me is the number of arriving hotel guests being greeted by their first name—before they hardly get in the door. There are warm hellos, how is Jane (the wife of a guest), how is your mom doing, and this goes on and on the entire time I am eating (and working!).

I can’t help but wonder—are most salespeople this engaged with their customers? Have they built the kind of relationships this front-desk staff developed? These hotel guests don’t arrive with luggage every evening. Some may check in once a week, others probably once a month or less often, but wow, this hotel has it mastered. It’s amazing to watch. I can say that I don’t recall this level of service at most establishments, much less a hotel.