Expert Tips & Actionable Insights

Let’s help you put a plan in place for year-end success. One that focuses on elements that every salesperson can control.

we are joined by Matt Phillips, a High-Performance Sales Leadership Coach and Mental Toughness Expert at Matt Phillips Leadership Coaching. Matt is a former professional baseball player in Austria's Bundesliga (first league) and a Division-1 college baseball player in the United States. He also has an extensive background in operations, accounting, and business development, having worked and consulted for multiple Fortune 500 companies worldwide.

Sales planning - a daily discussion topic for every CRO and sales expert. Only a handful of organizations are really able to drive their sales numbers, while others feel like getting stuck.

We are all looking for that next referral. Someone to say something nice about us. Someone to tell their friends how great our company.

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.

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.

Webinars. They’ve been around a long time, but are they still relevant? At times, they can get the reputation of being too time consuming and not providing the return that they once did. But, that doesn’t have to be if you know how to harness their superpowers.

If 40% of registrants for a webinar show up, you’ve succeeded beyond your wildest dreams.

I get it, there’s some natural friction between sales and marketing. It’s okay, though. It’s a healthy form of competition, a symbiotic relationship keeping both sides sharp.

More and more organizations are implementing virtual selling as they reevaluate their travel budgets, cost of sales and changing desires of buyers.

If you’re in sales and you’re facing a day of prospecting, you’re basically ready to give up by 8:40 AM

You’re your worst critic, especially when it comes to seeing yourself on camera.

With a rise of big data, there are more and more opportunities for companies to leverage their analytics and drive different approaches to business return.

You can’t choose your sales team like you choose dinner.

Turn on the news and you hear countless stories about store closings and forgotten malls – no doubt casualties in the evolution of retail. With ecommerce displacing brick and mortars, it’s easy to cry “death of retail,” but retail is very much alive and thriving.

Many executives saw the rise of blockchain and cryptocurrencies as just a craze. Whatever it was, it was going to pass.

What happens when your sales teams get too emotionally attached to their prospects?

Cybersecurity is always a fun topic. Everyone knows it’s important, but most only do the bare minimum to prevent attacks.

What’s on your company’s blog? Pet pictures? The company dodgeball tournament results?

If you’ve been within earshot of a classroom over the past century or two, you know the Industrial Revolution is what kicked off modernity.

Everyone agrees that relationships are incredibly important in business.

When you’re selling to the public sector, navigating the sales process is a lot like finding your way through the wilderness. There are a lot of odd rules and cultural expectations and it is an arena that is completely unforgiving of mistakes.

Inboxes fill up, task lists go unchecked – we all have times when we struggle with maintaining the balance between our personal and business lives. But if we want to be our best, we have to take the time to work on ourselves first, and understand who we are and what we bring to our relationships.

Everyone is familiar with the phrase “customer experience.” But what about the experiences a customer has with a sale before signing on the dotted line?

The world is continually going through a great deal of transformations. Whether these are digital transformations or sales transformations, they all mean the same thing: change has become the norm whether you like it or not.

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

Most of us fear public speaking. That’s a problem in client-facing professions like sales, where presentation skills can make or break relationships.

Employee learning. Does this conjure up hours upon hours of staring at videos?

Stop wasting time & resources on Customer Acquisition…

We claim to understand the importance of customer experience. Yet, too often we fail to truly internalize how customer experience affects buyer behavior, and impacts the way individuals interact with brands, with sellers, and with marketers.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM). By now, we’ve all heard of it. But really, how do you successfully execute it?

Vlogs. Are they something that you are incorporating in your company? In the past few years they have exploded in popularity for a good reason.

These days, when everyone has a digital camera in their pocket, you’d be hard pressed to think of a more obsolete sounding industry than camera film.

When a company is trying to figure out how to move its product and set itself apart from the competition, the first question in this process should not be, “how are we better than the competition?” But, “what is the customer trying to accomplish and what role can we play in enabling that?”

The number of people talking about how B2B buyers have changed and are more informed today are legion. The question now becomes how do you understand them, how do you connect with them, and what do you need to know in order to connect with them effectively to drive revenue growth and results.

Leadership is a challenge with a diverse generational workforce requiring varying types of motivation and leadership styles.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” warned management icon Peter Drucker.

Most people don’t actually know how to use email marketing.

Imagine you’re preparing for a meeting with a new prospect. What steps are you taking beforehand?

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

Get your 500 keyword rankings for only $500! Here!

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

Quite commonly, founders make terrible CEOs.

What is one of the most important career-building skills to have in your arsenal?

On the latest episode of the B2B Revenue Executive Experience podcast, we spoke to Gary Walter, President and CEO of Infutor Data Solutions, to find out what it takes to go from a family-owned business to a private equity-owned entity.

If you’ve ever been faced with a period of stagnation, it can be taxing trying to figure out what went wrong and why others are able to scale quickly when you’re stalling out.

Do ethics even exist in sales? Well, yeah, but it’s not exactly full of ethics and integrity, right?

Quantifying value is a vital step in the sales cycle. It proves that salespeople have a developed understanding of a prospect’s business issues and the impact of the proposed solutions — critical ingredients to building buyer confidence and helping prospects justify the purchase. Let’s look at a four-step formula for how to quantify value in sales.

Value selling is a sales methodology that focuses on the buyer and the value they receive by doing business with you.

It’s no secret that successful B2B companies are more focused on customers and how to provide tangible ROI. What’s surprising is that many companies fail to harness one of the most powerful tools to ensure customer acquisition—their value proposition.

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

ValueSelling

As we look to the end of Q4, external factors continue to play havoc with our ability to win new business – and yet, there are reasons to be hopeful.

In a new era of B2B buyers shifting towards eCommerce and online buying trends, we ask the question, “How can sales professionals and retailers be competitive?”

It’s become a cliché almost instantly, but “the new normal” is so apt. Even if you were remote before, now every day is take-your-kid-to-work day.

As executives grow their businesses, they often experience a lonely road of solitude and don’t think to reach out to others for support.

As millennials continue to make up the majority of the workforce, it’s evident that they’re the group that’s least engaged in work.

As social networking online continues to evolve, less and less salespeople are comfortable picking up the phone and calling decision makers. Some may even think that cold calling doesn’t work.

As toddlers, if we are around other humans…we can’t help but learn to communicate. We all learn how. But we could all benefit from doing it more effectively.

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

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.

These days, it seems romance can only be found on dating sites.

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.

Data breaches, like the recent Facebook debacle, have put companies of all sizes under increased scrutiny when it comes to data privacy. New data protection laws and regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU, are being established to combat data breaches and provide increased transparency when it comes to data usage.

Is your selling method not working anymore?

If you’re losing money on a product, what do you do? Do you rush to double production? No…?

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.

Any B2C company knows that customer experiences are a number one priority. What can B2B sales organizations learn from B2C customer experiences? More than you would think.

80% of content that marketers create is never used by sales. That’s like a knife to the chest.

Content. Content. Content. Content is king. Content is everything. Content is what matters. Right?

In the world of Sales, it’s either ‘Feast’ or ‘Famine’. One moment you have plentiful clients and the next you’re left high and dry…

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

In your business, be greater than a leader: be a hero.

Advertising is an industry seeing a lot of change recently. Yet, ROI from advertising is one of the easiest ways to get traction. Especially, when you advertise on LinkedIn.

Authority marketing can separate you from competitors, drive revenue and turn you into a niche celebrity. But for many salespeople, it’s a struggle with where to start and how to get it done.

There’s a piece of folksy, conventional wisdom everyone knows. It states: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Loyalty is a critical component of any business.

AI is a hot topic these days. Whether it’s in an incoherent tech-startup pitch or ominous warnings from scientists about a techno-dystopian future, everyone seems to be talking about it.

Sales training has long been viewed as a necessary evil, lacking a major component to success: negotiation training.

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.

At some point, every company has to consider what type of a sales team they will use. Outsourcing sales can benefit companies by not only improving ROI, but by providing a core competency in something that a business might not have.

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

Founders and CEOs often expect immediate results from new sales teams and employees. But that isn’t always realistic, or sustainable. To find out why, we sat down with Jacob Baadsgaard, CEO of Disruptive Advertising, a team-enabled agency that uses analytics and data to help clients grow their businesses, leveraging platforms like Google and Facebook.

Authenticity is one of the biggest challenges for salespeople in a profession that’s so laden with rejection that many fear it. Yet, authenticity is what separates the sales reps from the sales professionals and it’s what buyers want.

Everybody’s got one. Maybe you spent tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on yours. Or maybe your son built it for free.

The power of public speaking should be an integral part of your sales and marketing strategy. Being a compelling speaker can position you as a thought leader and lead to more closed deals.

The industry of sales training has been revolutionized by the idea of prescriptive training.

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

You’ve no doubt heard the phrase “content is king,” but content alone is never enough. To be a successful content marketer, especially in the B2B world, you need to be plugged in to the sales side of things, and vice versa.

Good coaching empowers individuals, inspires teams and drives results. But it’s often undervalued because it’s not always accessible and its importance may not be obvious.

One of the biggest choke points in companies is often not the sales reps.

The internet has permanently changed the sales experience in brick-and-mortar stores.

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

Coaching is a critical component for the success of any sales organization. That’s why we often push front line managers to focus on coaching.

The term “sales enablement,” is thrown around a lot and can mean different things to different sales professionals. We sat down with Paul Bickford, Denver Chapter President of the Sales Enablement Society, to discuss what sales enablement is, why it’s effective and how it can be leveraged as a resource.

Most people, if they had zero clients, would throw in the towel.

The path to leadership is broken. We spend so little time developing leaders.

There’s a very fine line between success and failure. How do you ensure that you’re on the right side of it?

Your mother was wrong. You are not as unique as you think you are, and Chris Orlob, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Gong.io, which increases sales through science, can prove it.

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