Blog

Sales Kickoff content planning

By Madeline Turner
Hi all, My team and I are in the process of planning our annual SKO for the end of January 2020.  The theme, location, hotels, and tracks have been locked down and an agenda has been proposed.  I am hoping to get input into the processes that others follow to actually develop SKO content. What are the steps to develop content (i.e. presentations) for each topic? How is content developed, who usually helps in the development process, and what does the timeline look like?  Thank you
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Organizational implications to a successful sales enablement implementation

By francois delvaux
From our research, sales enablement has gained momentum in the last two years among B2B organizations we surveyed. With many stating that its a way for them to 1) boost sales productivity and 2) achieve more impactful customer interactions and 3) overall gain better sales results.  From our Q4, 2018 survey (Minds&More, Showpad, Kynetec) where we contacted over 2000 companies and the focused our research on the 100 companies that said had a digital platform in place for sales and marketing. - 72% of them said that they   gained revenue growt h - 78% of respondents stated achieved   sales productivity improvements While part of the Sales enablement ...
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The 'U' Matters...

By Vinay Kalyan Parakala
The ‘U’ matters… Before you embark on enjoying reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it, you should know that this article would not have been possible without a bunch of professionals who I have very high regard for. Especially  Neil Barman  who has been my ideation partner and content advisor and  Abhi Bajaj  who helped proof read and edit the article.  I am greatly influenced by the work of some stalwarts in the field of sales and sales enablement,  Mike Kunkle ,  Scott Santucci ,  Tom Erdman ,  Paul Drury ,  Atul Jalan  and  Vikram Nair  amongst others. I dedicate this piece to the memory of the late  Robert Racine , a giant in the ...
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Is it really a surprise that fast paced business is moving all mobile?

By Scott Hall
Everything is going mobile or is there already. You order your food from mobile, you handle payments through mobile, you use Facebook on mobile, you book flights on mobile. The list is endless. And things are about to get even more mobile. There’s new generation hitting college who are born with touch screen. They use laptop for 0% of their tasks. Considering this, is it really a surprise that fast paced business is moving all mobile? I am on the move most of time. Meeting customers, partners, prospects or traveling between these meetings. We want to use every aspect of what today's smart phones have to offer. To revision completely the usual form-based user ...
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How To Improve Onboarding With Guided Selling

By Andrew Rhodes
Sales leaders stand at a crossroads. One path embraces the myth that great sellers are born, not made. And since great sellers are already great, that means they don’t need training.   But there’s another path you can take. On this path, sales is a science that can be taught to anyone. And with the right training, everyone can improve . The technique of guided selling delivers the right training to new sales reps at just the right time. Guided selling is one of the best tools you can use to grow your team and stay on the right path.   One Challenge With Many Faces   What’s your top challenge with new sales hires? If you’re a sales ...
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Collecting Success Stories

By Alistair Fox
The Problem One of the issues raised recently in the SES forum was the challenge of collecting customer success stories. As most sales and marketing professionals know, good success stories are a great resource for sales. They provide: Proof-points from real customers Guidance for sales on the sales cycle Differentiators and value messages for specific product-market combinations But they can be difficult to collect because the key information is often held by the salesperson, and: By the time you contact the salesperson, they have already moved on to the next sale Salespeople are not incentivised to provide the information ...
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Sales Centric Marketing Strategies

By charlene nichols
My ultimate goal in starting SellSMART was to help create synergy within my customers' business between the sales department and all other departments to create a "sales-centric" culture. Although my core offering was centered around sales training, I found that KPIs were seldom clear and identified for my potential clients. I worked backwards to find a starting place and arrived at the very beginning of the sales cycle for my customers- traffic generation. What I found is most of my customers had survived by word of mouth and foot traffic for so long, that their digital marketing strategy (where I advise my customers to focus their marketing) was basically ...
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The Birth of Today’s Mobile Salesman

By Scott Hall
In today’s new digital world the activities of the sales teams has not changed. Still required is customer contact, presenting the product, communication, closing the deal and support.  What has changed is the rapid pace of sales technology and innovation. It is transforming the way sales operates. The new generation of sales are technology focused. Everything is digital. Every aspect of a job and social life is being completed on mobile devices. From games and facetime to work activities like calls and emails. This means gone are the 9 to 5 hours and sitting at desks entering sales activities into your companies CRM.   In the new digital world, technology ...
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How to Time Manage Your Way to Sales Success

By Steve McCullough
How do sales professionals manage their time for maximum impact?   What are the right activities to focus on, and which should not have quite as much focus?     Are your priorities unclear or out of focus, leaving you in reaction mode and worried that you’re not focused on the right things?     When we slow down to really think about how and where we spend our time, it’s easy to feel that “the whirlwind” is mostly in control. But how we spend our time is the only thing we can truly control, so letting the winds of chance blow us about can have profound negative implications on sales and revenue results.   Sales professionals with properly aligned ...
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Drowning in business cards?

By Scott Hall
If you're like me you come home from conferences and trade shows packed with new ideas and huge pile of business cards. After breathing office air for a while it's time to start the follow up, right? Well, I can break the task into two significant problems, and I bet you feel my pain: I would need to convert those 100+ business cards to leads and contacts in Salesforce. I have only some gibberish notes of what was discussed and agreed with each contact. Reality check. With all the tasks piled up on my desk during the conference absence there’s no way I have time for this. Even if I would have someone to type those in Salesforce for me, they are still ...
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Break Through to Busy Buyers: 11 Ways You Can Influence Buyers to Connect

By Michael Schultz
Sellers often complain that it’s impossible to get through to buyers. Gatekeepers are tough; buyers are busy; calls go to voicemail; email goes to junk; and so on. While getting through is certainly not easy, sellers who work at it do get through. In fact, 82 percent of buyers say they accept meetings at least sometimes with sellers who reach out to them. In our latest research study on sales prospecting , we asked 488 buyers who represent $4.2 billion in purchasing power which factors influence whether or not they connect with a seller. The most influential factor for a buyer to connect with a seller is their need for the product or service, whether it’s ...
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How to win at Enterprise Mobility

By Scott Hall
The world is changing faster than ever and one major shift is from the big screen to the small screen. In the B2C markets, mobile has eaten the world. The winners are companies like Uber, AliExpress and TripAdvisor – players who understood the importance of mobile early enough. In B2B the mobile revolution is still ahead, though. In this post I’ll share my thoughts on how you can emerge as a winner – and what your reward will be. Three megatrends that drive mobility First, you should understand the fundamental trends that are currently shaping the world: Mobile first . People are on their mobiles all the time. Mobile is already bigger than desktop. Less ...
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Turn the Personality Styles into a Competitive Advantage to Increase Sales

By Sally Jo LaMont
Please join Merrick Rosenberg, CEO of Take Flight Learning, author and keynote speaker and me for an engaging and educational webinar: “ What if You Could Turn the Personality Styles into Competitive Advantage for Increasing Sales?” When:  Wednesday, May 9 th from 12:00 – 12:30 pm EST To register:      https://conta.cc/2Hbm98V If you are unable to attend, please feel free to register and we'll send you the recording. In this webinar, Merrick and I will discuss his insights from working with the personality styles and salespeople over the past 25 years. Attendees will discover: - how salespeople can overcome their natural ...
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The 4 I's of Successful Selling

By Gregg Blatt
The 4 I’s of successful selling Insight, Interaction, Innovation, Incentives   In the past 10+ years the pace of technology has changed everything we do. If you don’t recognize that in how you coach and build your sales organization you will never achieve the results you could and should.  It is clear that all of the interaction between the “buy side” and the “sell side” are both more virtual and more dynamics in this ever changing world.  How can you achieve better results as a manager or a sales leader.  It starts with building insight, that will lead to a better interaction.  Then thinking about what the customer really wants and innovating ideas around ...
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Why Granular Sales Content Matters, and How to Achieve It

By Mark Populorum
A key element of sales enablement is providing sellers with relevant and useful content in a timely manner during the sales process. And most sales organizations spend a lot of time and effort to do just that. However, according to SiriusDecisions, “60 to 70 percent of content produced by b-to-b marketing organizations goes unused.” Let me start with an example of why this is such an important issue. Assume you are field sales rep conducting a call on a buyer who doesn’t know you or your company very well, and your goal on the call is to develop the buyer’s needs. As you conduct the call you must get the buyer to say “yes” on a number of questions: ...
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My Definition of Sales Enablement

By Bob Junke
Defining sales enablement is very important. The definition should serve as a beacon, identifying what we need to do to make sales enablement successful. Numerous definitions exist; Google “sales enablement definition” and you’ll get plenty of results. At the Sales Enablement Society conference in Dallas this past October, the Definition Working Group unveiled their definition: Sales Enablement ensures buyers are engaged at the right time and place, and with the right assets by well-trained client-facing staff to provide a world-class experience along the customer’s journey. While utilizing the right sales and performance management technologies, in addition ...
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SES Blog Submission Guidelines

By Jeremy Shere
Purpose: The purpose of this document is to provide clear, simple guidelines for contributors to reference when creating and submitting content for the SES blog What we’re looking for: We prefer original (previously unpublished) thought-leadership, platform/vendor agnostic, 800 word (or less) articles that offer actionable tips for our readers. That said, we are open to working with previously published content that has been revised / repurposed for our blog. Like any submission, we will consider repurposed content on a case-by-case basis. Article types may include: Editorial/opinion How to (Ex: How to Promote Sales Enablement ...
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Introducing the Sales Enablement Society Blog

By Jeremy Shere
Welcome to the Sales Enablement Society blog! This is the first entry in what we hope will be an ongoing series of articles about all aspects of sales enablement. The purpose of the blog is simple: to provide a space for Sales Enablement Society members to share insights and ideas about what sales enablement is, why it matters, and how best to put its core principles into action. As we begin publishing and build up an archive of material, we hope that the blog will become a rich repository of thought leadership and a prime destination for anyone seeking to learn about the theory and practice of sales enablement. The blog will include a variety of article ...
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