Voice of Value Blog

Change is inevitable. Whether you’re working for a small business, or a company of forty thousand people, at some point you’re going to go through some sort of major organizational change.

Lately, we’ve spent a lot of time talking to people about the future of AI.

Sales Managers are often faced with ever-increasing challenges, only one of which is making sure the team is delivering the results the company demands. Working to understand their perspective, we are diving in to identify five key things sales reps should be aware of in order to be not only an A-player, but a valued member of the team.

When you look at your best prospects and customers, they should be just as distinctive as zebras.

Peter draws on 30 years of sales and sales management experience as he leads, mentors, trains, and coaches sales teams to greater heights. Leveraging the power of the ValueSelling Framework, he helps B2B sales organization worldwide increase revenue by selling value, shortening sales cycles and maximizing deal sizes.

What makes a cadence tick? What’s inside it’s DNA that makes a cadence effective? Or perhaps, not so effective?

Growing up, I remember watching the long-running TV series, “The Wide World of Sports.” The opening preamble was legendary: “Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport… the thrill of victory… and the agony of defeat… the human drama of athletic competition… This is ABC’s Wide World of Sports!” The imagery—ski jumper Vinko Bogataj in an epic crash, tumbling down the mountainside—is etched in my mind forever.

In a world where more B2B buyers are demanding a refined sales experience, enterprises have an opportunity to achieve differentiation with their sales process if they are willing to make some changes. Regardless if you are a Chief Revenue Officer or an individual sales professional there are five key elements you need to be focused on.

You’ve seen plenty of companies focused on pushing sales organizations hard to generate more revenue. There’s often a focus inside companies to get more out of the salespeople they have.

The impact of AI on sales and marketing is a pressing topic for many today, yet there is a lack of true clarity around what artificial intelligence really means in general and varied perspectives in our field specifically.

Every successful business needs to sell something at a price where they can make enough money. If they can’t, they’re going to go out of business.

David Shatz, a new member of the Value Prime Solutions team, brings to bear over 20 years of sales experience and success to help clients improve their revenue performance.

You may have a game-changing product, but if you don’t know how to sell it, that level of awesome is a moot point. On the other hand, having a more mundane product isn’t a death sentence if you know how to sell the hell out of it.

Sales has become an increasingly dynamic profession – from AI, to the evolving use of social media, to ever more complex decision making from buyers. As a result, team structures that used to work, will not work in the future.

In the most recent episode of the B2B Revenue Executive Experience, we sat down with Tim Matthews, VP of Marketing for Imperva and syndicated blogger and author of The Professional Marketer, to unravel the mystery of how to effectively align sales and marketing. We also covered challenges related to demand generation planning and goal setting.

Mostafa El-Bermawy is VP of Marketing at Workzone, but “SEO” probably belongs somewhere in his title, too.

Email is always a hot topic, and we all know that outreach is a critical component of effective prospecting.

Lots of companies are trying to map customer journeys across channels, but that may be unnecessary.

Imagine a wall. If you have an untrained sales team, and you say, “Go, go, go,” they will inevitably keep running into the wall and bouncing off. After running into the wall enough times, you have to step back and ask how to get over it. There might be a lot of ways: you might be able to bring a ladder, make a human ladder, fly over, or use a pogo stick.

“The most important and most valuable service you can provide is an excellent experience.” – Cindy Kennedy, District Manager for Corus360 Customer service is a critical component to driving revenue and account expansion. In this episode, Cindy Kennedy tells us why listening, trust, and responsiveness are inseparable from sales success.

“The more complex you make the sale, the less success you’re going to have.”

Too many sales executives get caught up in their Linkedin numbers, the followers, the contacts, the likes – but a network, like everything in sales, should be measured on its ability to produce results. To get the best results, to even perhaps get past the limits of the human brain and the Dunbar Number, there are three things a sales executive must be deliberate and consistent about with their Linkedin Network.

In Juliana Slye’s long career throughout the private and public sectors, two things have stuck with her more than anything:

Say what you will about Elon Musk, anyone who has ridden in or driven a Tesla will tell you how the ‘entire experience’ is just better. The sales model is different – gone are used car salesmen and dealerships stretched across acres of asphalt. The product is different – meticulously designed with a near perfect balance of the physical experience of driving a car and the incorporation of technology. The company is different – one of the fastest growing in terms of market cap quickly overcoming decades old competitors.

“Revenue should not be your leading indicator.” Come again?

“What’s the impact your solution will deliver to your prospect?” That was the question that I asked a sales rep during a recent opportunity review. His reply was, “well, the proposal that I’ll be putting in front of the Chief Marketing Officer will be around a half-million dollars”. I said, “I’m not asking what the cost of your solution is. I’m asking what the prospect expects to receive in the way of impact to his business.” The sales representative’s response, “I’m not sure.”

Digital transformation isn’t Mark Shank’s favorite term.

The digital agency space has seen a lot of consolidation over the years, with many getting bought up by “the Big Four.”

Every executive I know tasked with hitting a revenue target has the same challenge – getting more qualified leads into the top of the funnel. And just like the rest of us, they all hope there is a silver bullet to effective prospecting – something that will make it easier, less painful, and drastically reduce the chance of rejection of them and their teams.

Tod Caflisch has been in pro sports IT for almost 30 years, so he’s seen the incredible transformation in the fan experience at sports venues.

If you’re in sales you probably think about selling something, right. After all, that’s what you’re expected to do. Problem is, that type of thinking results in what I call “thinking small”. You’re always focused on the short term; the little picture, what you can sell someone.

There’s never a shortage of people complaining about their clients. You can get stuck in that kind of thinking, but there is another way of looking at things. It all comes down to the way you think about yourself and your client. After all, you can’t do a great job taking care of clients until you’ve taken care of yourself.

Quite commonly, founders make terrible CEOs.

I was walking into my local ice rink the other night as we had a game. I play on a men’s league team – often referred to as the “beer league”. The ice rinks are pretty quiet this time of year. The fall/winter hockey season has ended and the spring/summer leagues and training camps aren’t running yet.

One of the largest challenges for organizations I hear consistently focuses on the predictability of revenue generation by the sales teams. Critical business decisions around investments across the organization and if revenue targets will be achieved combine to create a great deal of pressure on how effective a sales team is at delivering reliable forecast accuracy.

One of the upsides in sales is that success is simple to quantify. It is always, no matter what other executives or board members or peers tell you, about the numbers. Every day numbers are evaluated, totals discussed and strategies for shortfalls analyzed.

For revenue executives concerned about hitting ever increasing targets, generating more qualified leads, increasing the return on their sales teams or creating world-class sales organizations, one of the most effective approaches is to focus on their B2B sales experience – but what does this really mean?

Sales leaders and revenue executives face numerous challenges – yet none seem as pressing as understanding how to increase the volume of qualified leads entering the sales funnel.

I was conducting a deal review with a client the other day. I was speaking with a bright, experienced sales rep who had been with the company for several years and knows her product offering very well.

Just listen and you’ll hear it. Towards the latter end of most calls the sales reps starts saying things like, “OK, I’ll send you this”. Or, “sure, I’m happy to set up that demo”. Or, maybe, “no problem setting up the next meeting and I’ll be sure to bring along our technical expert to talk with you”. It happens a lot.

Whether a deal is worth $50K or $5M the need to engage procurement early and often is something I’ve seen the most accomplished sales executives avoid or stumble over. The question I am left asking many is simply, ‘Why did you wait so long to start talking to procurement?’ The response is too often silence; however, it does not need to be. One of the critical factors today is figuring out how to engage procurement to win your deal.

There has never been a time when successfully closing complex, B2B deals depends more on a sales person’s credibility.

Reading the sales headlines lately is enough to make any sales professional anxious. Robots taking their jobs, buyers not needing them, millennials not wanting them. I am not surprised some of the professionals I talk to wonder when their career will end.

Early in the first quarter is the time to focus on building our pipelines to achieve, or even overachieve, our sales goals in 2017. This requires us to market to generate opportunities, nurture current leads, attract new buyers, capture web visitors and drip content to potential buyers, presumably, until they are ready to buy!

Having spent the last decade working for agencies I can say, from experience, it is a tough business – especially when the goal is to scale creative agencies. Digital agencies, marketing agencies, PR firms, management consulting or any other flavor you can think of, there comes a time when leadership focuses on remaining relevant and revenue growth.

Sales training, just as every other initiative in a company, must compete with shifting priorities and an often fluid business climate. When training is delayed there is an impact to the bottom line, to shareholders and to employees – but how many companies spend the time to quantify that impact? What is the actual cost of delaying sales training? While funding sales and marketing training may be a game of managing priorities – there is one priority that never goes out of fashion – REVENUE GROWTH.

GUEST: Evan Knox, CMO at Caffeine Marketing