Insights
Mutual Success Plans: Land and Expand Faster
In the current noisy, competitive market environment with very busy buyers, sales teams need to shift from a focus on individual sales transactions to a focus on continuously deepening and expanding value across a series of connected conversations. The best tool to...
Content Marketing as Revenue Enablement
Content marketing, in all its many forms, plays a critical role these days in supporting purchasing decisions. However, despite increasing volumes of content being produced for use in sales, marketing and customer success, the great majority of content is missing the...
Anchor on Buyer-Defined Value
CEOs and revenue leaders often ask me “What is the most important thing I can do to drive sales revenue more consistently?” My response is always the same: “Train your sales team to start and end every sales conversation on buyer goals and payoffs.” If you anchor...
Trust Building as a Behavior
People in sales and business know instinctively that trust is key to selling. LinkedIn’s annual State of Sales report reinforces this with its survey data, calling the need for building trust building skills “an enduring trend.” In the 2018 report 49% of sales...
Selling the Success Narrative
In the fall of 2019, I was on a video call with Christina Yu, Mursion's Vice President of Marketing, strategizing on how the marketing team could do more to support the company’s rapid sales growth. In 2015 Mursion had started the market for immersive, virtual...
The Prospecting Sleuth: Reward the Hunt
When AdmitHub was emerging as the premiere AI-based conversational messaging platform to help colleges with new student enrollments and higher student retention rates, most of its new prospect leads were inbound from director-level or manager-level staff in admissions...
Buyer Voice, Seller Voice: Unlocking the Value Pathway
The current selling environment is complex. As Gartner has shown there are often 7+ buyers in the B2B sales process and vendors participate in less than 20% of the entire buying process. All of this means less opportunity for quality conversation and more potential...
Find Your Buyer’s Value Pathways
Sellers do not close deals, buyers close deals. The role of the seller is to guide the buyer to a close with the right questions - questions that surface a prospects’ pain and turn them into potential value. This sales truth was impeccably documented1 by Neil...
Deal Stalls: Three Unforced Errors
The majority of sales meetings miss the mark for both the buyer and seller. A few years back Forrester did research showing that 80% of executives do not find meetings with sales representatives valuable. Recent research from Xant (formerly InsideSales) on more than...
Prospecting as a Trusted Advisor
Sales teams make two big mistakes in their prospecting work. First, in their messaging they rely too heavily on product pitching, content and attention grabbers that lead to an information blur and cause prospects to check out. Second, in their outreach approach,...
Value-Driven Growth: It Matters More Than Ever
Most sales and marketing teams spend too much time leading with their product and product functionality. Product pitching typically causes buyer disengagement. A few years back Forrester found that 80% of executives believe meetings with sellers are a waste of time...
Forecast Accuracy: It’s All About the Buyer Gets
Deal Drift Most mid-stage deals are poorly qualified . Recent research from Xant (formerly InsideSales.com) on more than a quarter million sales deals shows that only 28% of closed deals are predicted accurately 90 days out, and the actual close amounts differ by 31%...
Cold Calling is Dead, Long Live Cold Calling
Cold Calling is Dead When the Internet, then email, then social media came along to transform the way people and businesses communicate, the “death of the sales representative” was widely and broadly predicted. Even Neil Rackham, creator of SPIN Selling asserted in...