The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

LinkedIn is celebrating the holidays by bringing you 12 days of awesome sales content. Brush up on your sales knowledge with topics like engaging buyers in 2019, sales experts you should follow, sales process steps to overcome barriers to sales ROI, and more. >>> READ MORE

Sales managers are master jugglers. In a single day, one might find herself doing everything from facilitating connections and participating in prospect meetings, to interviewing new hires and evaluating new tools, to analyzing sales strategies and helping drive deals to completion.

No wonder so many sales leaders find themselves short on time when it comes to meeting with their reps and providing personal guidance. In fact, 73% of managers spend less than 5% of their time coaching according to Altify. >>> READ MORE

As a sales manager, two of the best words you can hear are “thank you.” While it’s of course great to hear them from a customer who feels you went above-and-beyond, it’s even better to hear them from a sales rep for whom you’ve made a real difference. When your advice and input resonate, making a positive impact on another person’s career and livelihood, it’s a big deal, and helping your reps succeed can be an equally vital aspect of sales team management. >>> READ MORE

The robots are coming, and salespeople are afraid they're here to take their sales jobs. It might be true that technology can be integrated into many steps of the sales process. But, thankfully, it can't do everything. For now, there are a number of skills computers can't learn, and one of those is our human ability to create empathetic connections with prospects and customers. This is a key ability for the modern seller. >>> READ MORE

Video is an important part of any marketing and sales strategies, and utilizing video in your prospecting efforts is effective and can be achieved with a few steps. This post shares how you can send video via email for sales or marketing efforts. 

If you're a Hubspot Sales user and want to learn how you can embed video directly into your sales emails to contacts in your database, check out this post that shares how to embed personalized video into your Hubspot Sales emails.

Senior decision makers in general are becoming fatigued by salespeople’s questions. This post shares data that supports strategies to help you sell to C-Suite executives.

You can’t think of your database as just a list of names and contact information. It’s so much more than that. This data represents what’s possible for your business. It’s your future customers and referral sources. It’s next month’s closed deals and next year’s revenue. A company’s database can be the lifeblood of its revenue growth strategy.

Is cold calling dead? Let's be honest. That answer is "No." Cold calling used to be one of the best -- and only -- prospecting strategies salespeople could use. But in the past 40 years, a variety of more effective alternatives have emerged.

Like just 17% of salespeople think they're pushy -- compared to 50% of prospects.
And along similar lines, only 3% of buyers trust reps. The only professions with less credibility include car sales, politics, and lobbying.

Ouch. Luckily, not all sales-related data will bum you out. This list of sales statistics has invaluable nuggets of wisdom on everything from which words to avoid in your email subject line to the optimal number of questions to ask during a discovery call.