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Have you ever called a lead on a Tuesday morning and heard nothing, but tried that same lead two days later and they responded back almost immediately? That’s not luck -- there’s some science behind why this happened. According to research from James Oldroyd and InsideSales.com, effectively reaching out to prospects comes down to one thing: timing. For example, did you know 4 to 5 p.m. had a 164% better connection rate than 1 to 2 p.m.? Or that connection rates drop by 400% if you respond in 10 minutes instead of five? The following infographic reveals the best times and days to connect with respond to prospects. Science and data are starting to dominate sales. Are you keeping up?...
Salespeople shouldn’t send “just checking in” emails for one very simple reason: They don’t work. Buyers feel like the rep is virtually poking them, making them reluctant to answer. Not only do “checking in” messages rarely garner responses, they can even turn prospects against their senders. But reps still need a way to get in touch with buyers who’ve gone dark. Enter these 23 email templates. These “just checking in” alternatives simultaneously add value to the prospect while putting the salesperson back on her radar. She’ll want to restart the sales conversation -- so it’s a win-win....
If you’re a B2B salesperson, you’ve probably heard about SPIN Sales. It’s one of the most well-known -- not to mention oldest -- selling systems. SPIN gives reps a research-backed framework for working and closing complex deals with extended sales processes. You can use SPIN principles along with your current sales methodology. The strategy focuses on asking good questions in the right order, using active listening, and translating the prospect’s needs into your product’s features. (Many of SPIN’s principles align well with inbound sales.) To help you implement the most useful tips, aspects, and templates from SPIN Selling, we’ve put together the following guide:...
Breaking the fourth wall happens in performance when an actor (improviser, comedian, etc.) interacts with the audience and brings them into the performance. It creates the “we.” It says to people that there is no wall between us and the audience. And, in the corporate space, it signals that there is no wall between the company and its customers.
Truly, there isn’t—there is only the shared “we.” Improvisers (I am a businessperson and an improviser) know this well. Without your best customers, you have no brand. They own the brand, so it’s time to let them in on where it makes sense. As I said to the attendees at the Visual Storytelling Institute Conference when I gave my keynote, “When you break the fourth wall to engage your audience, you create magic.” Because when you allow people to participate in the direction of the experience as it happens, you create a shared experience of “we.”...
Just as the best athletes constantly practice, improve, and refine their strategy, successful salespeople are always experimenting with existing techniques and trying out new ones. After all, the second an athlete or rep stops striving to get better, they backslide.
We’ve rounded up 56 one-sentence tips to keep you in peak selling shape. Whether you want to focus on your presentation skills, your approach to calling prospects, your methods for closing, or all of the above, you’ll find some great words of wisdom in this list....
Trying to better understand your competitors has always had a negative stigma. “Isn’t spying on them considered corporate espionage?” someone recently asked me. But in today’s online and interconnected world, there are plenty of tools that allow you to legally gain important insights on industry players. These platforms can help you better understand how your industry operates, who the relevant players are, how you can gather leads, and what the ecosystem comprises of. In today’s corporate climate, the usage of these tools is widely accepted and even encouraged within mainstream industries. Let’s look into five strategies that will help you to better understand your competition and explain how you can gain a competitive edge....
When reps need to connect with particularly important or hard-to-reach prospects, normal research methods usually won’t suffice. To grab these buyers’ attention, earn their respect, and provide them value, salespeople must go deeper than a basic LinkedIn skim. These five methods will surface extremely helpful details about an organization, its strategy, and its individual leaders....
How often do you get a call from a prospect you’ve never spoken to before who says, “I love your service and it’s the perfect fit for my business. Where do I sign?”
Probably not that often.
That’s where persuasion comes in. Some deals are easier to close than others, but all sales conversations will involve some degree of persuasion -- even if both salesperson and buyer know your offering is the best choice.
It’s not easy -- if persuasion were simple, far more than one-third of all salespeople would make quota. But adopting the techniques below can make you more convincing, and influence prospects to buy....
I’ve been selling for 30 years, and it’s been a blast. I’ve seen some incredible changes, and I can say without a doubt that right now is the best time to invest in a sales career. Sales is fun, critically important to scaling businesses, financially lucrative, and intellectually stimulating. But being a salesperson in 2016 is very different than being a salesperson in 1986. Buyers have changed, and so top salespeople have to change with them. Things that worked 30 years ago don’t fly anymore, but it’s for the best. Although it’s arguably more difficult to sell effectively in 2016, it’s easier for top performers to differentiate themselves. And the first thing you need to do is drop the eight tactics below. These are all things that worked when I started out in sales, but smart salespeople should never try these tactics today....
Deftly diffusing a potentially conversation-ending roadblock is one of the hardest parts of a salesperson's job. While specific sales objections vary significantly based on the specific product or service that's being offered, most can be grouped into larger categories: price, timing, disagreement among the stakeholders, etc. Wouldn't it be nice to have a strategy guide that could help you rebut these common doubts? The wise people at RAIN Group have heard your pleas. The infographic below lists 18 oft-invoked objections, along with suggestions on how a salesperson could overcome them. Forward this to your sales team, and fear the dreaded "but" no more....
You know what tips buyers off that the email they're reading is a sales pitch?
"Hi, My name is John Smith, and I'm a sales rep at Company."
Yup. That'll do it.
While you should never actively hide the fact that you're a salesperson from buyers, there are far more creative and engaging ways of opening sales emails than the standard name-and-company introduction. "Hi, I'm a salesperson" encourages readers to hit "delete" immediately, which is a shame because you probably have something valuable to offer. Changing up your opening lines to position yourself as a consultant, business expert, or interested party will do you justice and keep the prospect reading.
If you're struggling to think of alternatives to the standard opening line, take one of these for a spin and see how they perform for you. ...
The most effective way to open a conversation is to connect your call to one of these trigger events. Here's how.
...The trick to using trigger events is creating a reasonable link between the event and what you're selling. The more logical the link, the more likely that bringing up the trigger will result in a conversation....
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78% of social sellers outsell peers who don’t use social media. Go to where the buyers are. Build a strong network with prospects and customers by offering value. It’s simple. It makes sense. For speaker, advisor and sales leader, Jill Rowley, social selling is one of the most important tactics a salesperson can employ. It also happens to be one of the most haphazardly applied and misunderstood concepts in the industry today. Building a strong network by listening to individual’s needs and providing solutions means they will turn to you when they are ready to buy. They will also be more willing to spread your message. As it turns out, your best salespeople aren’t always on your payroll. LeadGenius sat down with Jill Rowley, to discuss how social selling is effectively applied at leading companies such as GE and Affinio.
When I discovered these two facts, I was shocked. 44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up. 80% of sales require five follow-ups. In other words, 44% of salespeople aren't putting in 1/5 of the effort needed to close the deal. Too often we give up after one follow-up email, despite data proving that multiple follow-ups are required. Yet persistence is only one lesson that can be learned from the following 107 sales statistics. There are countless others to be revealed. Check out this SlideShare to sell smarter, stop wasting time on useless tasks, and start closing more deals in less time:...
The Harvard Business Review reported cold calling is ineffective 90% of the time, and more recent research shows that less than 2% of cold calls actually result in a meeting. Assuming a 0.3% appointment-booking rate and a 20% win rate, it would take 6,264 cold calls to make just four sales. 15 Lead Generation Alternatives to Cold Calling What can the modern business do to protect its future and get new leads without cold calling? The good news is that it doesn’t involve a circus act or shameless begging of any sort. The bad news is that it requires a completely different way of thinking and some serious energy and hard work. Here are 15 alternatives to cold calling salespeople can use to generate leads....
According to HubSpot, 65% of survey respondents say that generating leads is their top challenge and even more (74%) say that converting leads is their top priority.
If you’re reading this, you likely know that landing pages are the best asset in your digital marketing arsenal to generate leads and sales. Every stage of the marketing funnel can utilize landing pages, but one type of landing page helps qualify leads for sale unlike any other: a demo landing page.
Demo landing pages are typically included in the decision stage of the buyer’s journey, at the bottom of the marketing funnel. In the decision stage prospects already know they have a problem, they’ve evaluated all of their options, and are now deciding who to purchase from.
Lead capture forms tend to be longer on these pages because companies want to know more about the prospect to ensure they are qualified for the sales process. With this in mind, let’s take a look at 10 demo landing page examples to see what works well and what could be improved....
Like writers, sales reps often develop bad habits. But without paying attention to what they’re doing and examining their behavior, these habits can cause mistakes that end in deals falling apart, annoyed prospects, or missed quotas. Just like a double negative can wreck an otherwise solid paragraph, all it takes is one cringeworthy phrase to kill a sales follow-up email. The phrase I’m thinking of is nothing short of poisonous to deals, and should be cut from the vocabulary of every sales rep. Can you spot it in the following email?...
According to a 2016 study from HubSpot Research, “Buyers Speak Out: How Sales Needs to Evolve,” prospects want to work with salespeople who can offer advice and expertise beyond just a description of product features. Sixty-one percent of buyers say reps can provide a positive experience by providing relevant information. Roughly half of buyers appreciate when salespeople recommend multiple strategies beyond their business offering, and 45% want salespeople to be invested in their goals.In other words, prospects want to work with reps who understand their unique priorities, challenges, and industry landscape. You can learn some of this information through traditional methods, such as asking your prospects directly and reading their company websites and blogs. But these sources won’t lead to all the answers you need. In addition, you can earn trust by beginning the sales conversation with an intimate understanding of the buyer’s business -- rather than relying on your meeting to get the facts. These five unexpected places you can research prospects will clue you in....
Negotiation isn’t just something that ambassadors and heads of state do, it’s part of our daily lives. Many commonplace interactions involve negotiation, whether we realize it or not. Unless you are alone on the road, the very act of driving is a constant negotiation. The tips in this infographic won’t help you with deciding who’s going first at a stop sign, but in any negotiation situation where you can talk to the other party, you’ll get good advice here....
“The right thing at the wrong time is the wrong thing.” - Joshua Harris Have you ever called a lead on a Tuesday morning and heard nothing, but tried that same lead two days later and they responded back almost immediately? That’s not luck -- there’s some science behind why this happened. According to research from James Oldroyd and InsideSales.com, effectively reaching out to prospects comes down to one thing: timing. For example, did you know 4-5 p.m. had a 164% better connection rate than 1-2 p.m.? Or that connection rates drop by 400% if you respond in 10 minutes instead of five? The following infographic reveals the best times and days to connect with respond to prospects. Science and data are starting to dominate sales. Are you keeping up?...
Most prospects have tens (or even hundreds) of pending LinkedIn invites to respond to -- which means that when they finally get to yours, it’s only getting mere seconds of attention. And in such a short span of time, a single bad line can condemn your invite to the “ignore” pile. If you want your invites to get accepted, check out nine clunkers to never use again...
It’s a pretty common lament online amongst brand marketers that the market is so spoilt by those offering everything free to the consumers, that there’s hardly anybody wanting to purchase anything at all.
Now we all know that isn’t true, because research every year points to fast growing volumes of internet selling and buying, and the trend seems only more increased with mobile now becoming the medium of choice for even more buying and selling than before. Could it be that it’s not really the customers online who are window shopping for freebies, and it’s the marketers who are assuming that customers want things free and will not pay?...
It’s incredibly rare that a prospect responds to a salesperson’s first outreach attempt. This necessitates following up … and following up on your follow ups.
But how many prospecting touchpoints should salespeople make before they call it quits? When should they send these messages? And should they email, call, or reach out in another way? The “how,” “when,” and “what” of following up is important to get right if a rep hopes to snag the buyer’s attention and make a sale.
Here’s a guide that can help you optimize your prospecting process and significantly improve your response and connect rates, even with no changes to the content of your messaging.
...Calling somebody cold.Out of the blue. No referral. No information. No relationship. No trust. No credibility. No rapport. No introduction. No qualification. Just cold.
Why would anybody with half a brain and bills to pay ever do that?
Then I read more of his article and found he made some pretty good points and I cooled down a bit....
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![107 Mind-Blowing Sales Statistics That Will Help You Sell Smarter [SlideShare] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/q6eUjzK0qq7w93EtyWDhgzl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
![The Best Time to Call Prospects, Based on Data From 100,000 Calls [Data] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/yhuIPF32t5WqfnU8bJrF1jl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
HubSpot shows when to connect with prospects by phone and by email.