Mike Schultz's Blog, page 8

6 Ways to Communicate Impact in Sales

You’ve worked on building rapport with your prospect and you’ve uncovered their aspirations and afflictions. The question then becomes, "So what?"

If your afflictions don't get solved, so what? What won’t happen? Will they get worse? How will they affect the bottom line of your company, division, or department? How will they affect your life?

How Sales Reps Can Adapt to the Hybrid Selling Environment

Have you met Morgan? A terrific sales rep. Except recently, Morgan has slipped out of the top tier of the leaderboard and I think I know why: she struggles to adapt to the new selling environment.

Challenges Facing Sales and Enablement Leaders

How is the current state of the sales environment impacting sales organizations?

Which sales and enablement issues are most challenging for leaders to tackle?

What are the top sales priorities for the next 12 months? How should they be addressed to ensure they're achieved?

To find out the answers to these questions, we surveyed 322 sales, enablement, and company leaders globally, following up on our original research conducted in 2019.

How to Analyze and Improve Sales Performance

People often ask us, “What should we do to drive sales success?”

It’s a complicated question. You’ll need to consider the following factors, among many more:

What to tackle
When to tackle it
What results the organization should be targeting
Where you can get the biggest bang for your buck
What it really takes to get those results

Sales Competencies of Top Sellers

You’d be hard-pressed to find an organization that didn’t want its sellers and sales teams to meet their goals in the face of challenging conditions and do so with high win rates and strong pricing.

Sales training is one obvious way for organizations to build such teams. While sales training often fails to meet its promise, our research shows that highly effective sales training is correlated with higher win rates, sales goal attainment, and premium pricing.

How to Build a Value Proposition in Sales

Ask 100 sellers at 100 companies why their customers buy from them, and you’re likely to hear 100 answers with the same underlying theme: the value we provide.

Sellers describe their value to us in several ways: we get results. Our relationships are very close. They get from us what they’ve always wanted (but never gotten) from other companies. We bring innovative solutions to the table. And so on.

Pretty obvious, right? To win sales you must maximize value.

You're Looking for Sales Productivity in the Wrong Place

One of the first things sellers learn is to keep it simple. Yet when it comes to a particularly hot topic in our industry, sales leaders do anything but. Rather than apply the K-I-S-S principle to sales productivity, many leaders instead turn to technology, tracking, and top-down governance.

The Changing B2B Sales Landscape: What Sales Leaders Need to Know and Do

Sales leaders with a finger on the pulse of B2B sales know that marked change is underway. Some changes have been spurred by the global pandemic, with others hastened by the uncertainty of the economy.

For their new report, Future of B2B Sales: The Big Reframe, authors at McKinsey & Company spoke to more than 50 heads of sales across a range of industries and geographies to better understand the shift in the B2B sales environment. They identified 5 key themes:

Business Development Tips for Professional Services

When it comes to business development for professional services, one of the biggest challenges professionals face is finding time to do it all. After all, you don't sell full-time. Your work, whether it's consulting, accounting, IT, financial services, or engineering, is what you do full-time. It can be very difficult to find time to create and develop the relationships necessary to bring in new business.

The 9 Advanced Skills Missing from Your B2B Sales Process

The world of B2B selling looks far different than it once did. Top sellers know they must go well beyond discussing features and benefits. They need to be closely tuned in to the buying process for each member of the buying committee while consistently meeting buyers where they are throughout the cycle.

That’s a tall ask, as it turns out. According to Gartner, as many as ten decision makers might make up a B2B buying center. Additional data from CMO Council shows that B2B customers actively research and compare solutions, often completing 50% to 90% of the work before contacting a sales rep.

Long story short: complexity is a hallmark of B2B sales.