Have you ever tried to set up a meeting with a senior-level executive? If so, you know how tough it is to connect with busy executives who are never in their office, rarely answer their phones, and seldom reply to voicemail or e-mail.
To add insult to injury, executive-level assistants are trained to be gatekeepers. They are paid to protect the C-level from unnecessary interruptions— meaning, if you don’t reach your intended target directly, your message might never make it to them.
Thankfully, B2B sales expert Jill Konrath has solved this problem in her book SNAP Selling: Speed Up Sales and Win More Business with Today’s Frazzled Customers.
Continue reading “A B2B Sales Rep’s Guide to Meeting with the C-Level”
The importance of data cannot be understated in the modern sales landscape. Gone are the days of strategies based on instincts and educated. Now, data and analytics reign supreme when it comes to running a successful sales organization. But here’s the thing– the world of data and analytics has made massive strides in recent years and many organizations have yet to catch up.
Whether you’re a hiring manager, sales leader, or the CEO of a company, you know it can be difficult to identify and hire top sales talent. Although an intensive interview process can help you weed out unqualified applicants, you never really know how well a candidate is going to perform until a few weeks or even months into the job.
From the time social media became a viable marketing channel, B2B companies have been looking for ways to automate social processes. Although social media tools have made this easier—with features like post scheduling, conversation monitoring, and hashtag tracking—some aspects of social selling can’t be pre-planned.
Most marketers operate under one primary goal– to generate leads for their business. But, if you work in marketing, you know not all leads convert into paying customers. So that begs the question: How do you determine which leads are most likely to become buyers? And, how can you optimize campaigns to generate better leads?
Discord between marketing and sales departments is an age-old story. The marketing team gets annoyed at the sales team for failing to follow up on leads and in return, the sales team is annoyed with the marketing team for generating low-quality leads in the first place.
Every sales manager wants their team to be successful– but sometimes, that’s easier said than done. Sales reps face a number of obstacles that can keep them from their goals and it’s your job as their manager to help them overcome these challenges. To put it simply, sales reps are only as effective as their managers enable them to be.