AI tools now give sellers back an average of 4.8 hours a week, according to Gartner. Yet 72% of sales organizations fail to reinvest that saved time into high-value selling. Winning back the selling day takes two moves, not one: use AI to clear the four biggest time sinks (research, data entry, drafting, meeting prep), ... Read Post
To improve CRM adoption among sales reps, make the CRM give more than it takes: cut manual data entry to minutes a day, configure the pipeline around how deals actually move, run every forecast and pipeline review from inside the CRM, train reps inside their live deals instead of a sandbox, measure usage weekly for ... »
Sales forecasting comes down to five steps: define your sales process and forecast period, gather your historical deal data, choose a forecasting method that fits your data, build the number, and review it against reality on a fixed cadence. The method you choose matters less than most teams think. The discipline of the five steps ... »
The difference between AI agents vs assistants comes down to how much they do on their own. An AI assistant helps you do a task faster when you ask, like drafting an email or summarizing a call. An AI agent takes multi-step action toward a goal on its own, like researching an account, preparing a ... »
There are literally hundreds of pain points that plague a sales manager. In Pain Points of Sales Management, Nikolaus Kimla gives you a fascinating and insightful tour of the most important of these. These pain points can be broken down into 3 categories: Management Technology People Throughout the book, pain points fall within one or ... Read Post
Stop Paying for a Patchwork Sales Stack. It’s Time to Build a Profit Engine Does your company’s sales stack feel like it’s held together with duct tape and expensive subscriptions? You started with a CRM, then added a scheduler, an email marketing tool, an account planning app, and more. Each new app promised efficiency, but ... Read Post
Our self-gradable test will show you where you can improve the management of Leads and Opportunities to Increase Sales Velocity and Close Rates From a Lead to a Closed Sale As a Lead moves along the sales pipeline, at some point it becomes an Opportunity. This means it has the real potential of becoming what ... Read Post
The use of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to measure a sales team’s growth or contraction have been used for many years. Some examples include gross sales, net revenue, products sold, and others that demonstrate how a company has succeeded (or not) through a particular period (quarter or year). Read Post
This is a book about freedom—the freedom that once existed, the little freedom we have left that we can still take advantage of, and a strong hope for a greater freedom in the future. Within these pages I am opening some old yet crucially relevant arguments and placing them squarely on the table for discussion, ... Read Post
CRM and Sales Performance: An Empirical Study Authored by Daniel P. Strunk, Professor Emeritus and CRM Curriculum Developer, this research systematically examined Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems within business enterprises. The study’s primary objective was to elucidate the efficacy of CRM systems in enhancing sales performance, with a particular focus on aspects of ownership/account control, ... Read Post
Sales and Marketing Alignment Sales and Marketing have long struggled to align in a cohesive way. These two teams are both very different, but also very necessary. When they are disjointed or do not collaborate, huge problems can ensure that will end up costing you customers and losing the company revenue. 70% of the buyer’s ... Read Post
It is always better to have less but more highly qualified opportunities in your pipeline than it is to have a lot of poorly qualified ones. Resources and focus are better served where you have a realistic chance of success. This tool will help you evaluate opportunities and see if they are worth pursuing. Read Post
Sales POP! is your shortcut to sales, marketing and leadership excellence, offering short, insightful episodes with top global thought leaders, hosted by John Golden.
Olivier Roth, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer at The Swarm, explains how relationship intelligence helps B2B sales teams turn hidden network connections into warm introductions. He shows how mapping investors, advisors, customers, and former colleagues surfaces paths CRM records alone can’t reveal, and why treating LinkedIn as an audience rather than a network changes how teams should prospect. Learn more at https://www.theswarm.com/.
