Entering the Sales world is a lot like engaging in a boxing match. How do you make your emotions work for you?

Knowing Your Opponent

For many in Sales, stepping into a sales opportunity is like stepping into a boxing ring. You’re going to be throwing punches, ducking and weaving — avoiding blows that could disable you or knock you out. The goal is to remain focused at all costs, not lose your nerve, and engage every tactic at your disposal to win.

Emotions are actually involved in a sale from the very beginning, even before you are. People inquire about your product or service in the first place because of an emotional response. The first act in establishing a seller-buyer relationship is fully understanding the emotions connected to the buyer’s issues, because their emotions will guide you all the way through a sale.

The Emotions

Fear

A lesson we can learn from Muhammad Ali is a very profound one: It isn’t the fear that you feel, it’s what you do with it that matters.

Anger

Anger can certainly be justified. But even in dealing with something or someone that makes you justifiably angry, if you don’t pull yourself out of it to some degree, you’re not going to be able to communicate rationally on the subject, or deal squarely with the situation.

The opposite of anger would be best be described as empathy. When you’re lost in anger, a person is deliberately not engaging in empathetic thoughts or behavior, and in fact is refusing to do so. In empathy, you reach out, strive to understand, and to some degree identify with other people.

Sadness

Sadness is another emotion we all experience sometimes. Despite our best efforts, it’s going to happen; it’s a part of life.

What might be the opposite of sadness? Most would probably say happiness. For a salesperson happiness might accompany a won deal, or perhaps even the completion of a stage of the sales process.

The Power of Nurturing the Positive Emotions

What about positive emotions such as joy? Believe it or not, they require as much care as the negative ones, maybe even more.

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In any field, being good is one thing—but becoming a champion is quite another. Taking swimming as an example, some people swim very well. But to become a champion—such as 1972 7-time Olympic Gold Medal winner Mark Spitz, for example—it requires serious dedication, training and practice.

Fortunately, becoming a champion salesperson—what we call a salespreneur—doesn’t require the length of time and physical endurance necessary to become a champion swimmer. But it does require a level of skill and knowledge well beyond that what has traditionally been required of a salesperson.

This book covers what it really takes to become a champion salesperson—a salespreneur.

There are many issues to take into account when choosing a CRM solution. But chief among these considerations should be onboarding—that is, how easy is it to implement, train your users on, and administrate your new CRM solution?

There are several reasons to pay attention to onboarding:

• The longer it takes to integrate and bring the system online, the longer will it will take before your CRM solution begins showing a return on investment.
• The same is true for the length of time it takes to train your users. This is especially significant if a CRM application is complex and has a long training runway. The most important CRM users are your sales reps. How long can your company afford sales rep downtime while they’re training on CRM, even part time? Another factor is that salespeople are slowed down in sales velocity as they’re having to train, while they’re forced to work back and forth between existing solutions and the new CRM solution.
• Administration can reap serious cost when it comes to implementing a new CRM solution. With traditional CRM applications, there is training needed for CRM administrators. Then once the solution is up and running, it can take one and sometimes more full-time administrators for CRM.
  This White Paper addresses the various factors of CRM onboarding in detail—and illustrates with real-world numbers how Pipeliner CRM addresses these issues for a fraction of the cost of its competitors.

Hard Numbers

For this white paper, we actually surveyed our customers and got real-world numbers on onboarding Pipeliner CRM. We then compared these figures with known data about onboarding our chief CRM competitors.

Direct comparisons were made in the areas of:

• How complicated it was to get the CRM application up and running
• Length of time of the onboarding process
• Difficulty of implementation and rollout
• Ease of data migration

Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.

Central to any company’s sales efforts is, of course, its sales force. A topflight sales force isn’t just something that happens all on its own—it is composed of individuals, each of which have become properly skilled.

Today an expert sales force cannot exist without the right CRM solution—and an effective, empowering CRM solution is central to keeping a sales force sailing along on an even keel through revenue highs and lows, and through personnel arrivals and departures. That CRM solution is the key to increasing sales force effectiveness, and providing many other needed benefits.

Chapter 1: How to Build the Vital Sales Force Skill Ladder

It used to be that a sales rep making halfway decent numbers had a future. But in today’s highly competitive marketplaces and internet-assisted buying, it takes more than just numbers for a salesperson to truly survive. A topflight sales force must be composed of experts in every area of their craft.

Chapter 2: Selling the CRM Solution to the Sales Force

Obviously CRM benefits should be demonstrated to management – in the end it will be management that will cut the check for CRM purchase. But it will be the sales force that ends up having to use this new CRM application. It will be they who take to it happily or begrudgingly.

Chapter 3: CRM Solutions and Sales Force Turnover

Turnover is especially painful when it comes to the sales force, if only because you’re dealing directly with company revenue. A sales rep departs and you’ve immediately lost regular sales from that territory or area. It’s the CRM solution that can ease the difficulty of that transition…or not.

Chapter 4: Increase Sales Process Effectiveness Without Doling Out More Cash

Putting in a CRM solution that actually follows your sales process and possesses proper metrics allows you to monitor – and improve – that sales process all the way down the line.

Chapter 5: Breaking Down the Wall Between Marketing and the Sales Force

In some companies it’s obvious, in others it’s more subdued. But it’s normally a constant situation: marketing and sales just can’t see eye-to-eye. They snipe at each other, each criticizes the other to management, and in some measure each is deemed responsible for the other’s perceived shortcomings. If a way were found for the sales force and marketing to work in complete cooperation, the war could actually be won by both sides.

Chapter 6: Where Sales Force Technology has Brought Us

For buyers and for the sales force alike, the sales landscape looks completely different than it did even 20 years ago.

Cloud computing is bringing about an entirely new business paradigm. Steel and glass buildings, oppressive cubicles, office politics, and traffic jams are being replaced with reporting to work over the web, virtual companies with staff scattered throughout the world, and individual freedom to contribute and create as never before.

What does all this mean for employers, employees and their relationship? How does it affect the knowledge worker of today? Perhaps most pertinently, how does cloud computing affect sales and sales management?

Chapter 1: Cloud Computing and the Brave New Corporate World

Throughout history, there have always been visions of the future. For example, Jules Verne showed us submarines and flying machines long before they came about. But with cloud computing and the technological advancements all around us, it doesn’t take a science fiction writer to point out how our corporate world will soon appear – for not only are we seeing examples of it right before us, we all now have the tools to bring it about.

Chapter 2: Cloud Computing and the New Employee Democracy

The new virtual office model now proliferating through the business world means that company stakeholders are all working from their own locations, “coming to work” via cloud computing.

Chapter 3: Cloud Computing and the End of Office Politics

The advent of cloud computing is bringing about a new corporate environment in which there is no office. Everyone is working remotely from their own locations and the physical building is a thing of the past. In addition to many other benefits, this scenario spells the end of office politics.

Chapter 4: Cloud Computing Business Environment: The Three “Cs”

Cloud computing is bringing about a whole new business paradigm. Such an environment could never happen without adequate supporting technology. If we take a broad overall look, this technology can be broken down into three “Cs”: Communication, Collaboration and CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

Chapter 5: Cloud Computing and the New Employer-Employee Relationship

Thanks to the innovations of cloud computing, the whole morbid office system is being completely challenged and is disappearing. The “drudge workers” of yesterday are today becoming free, able to live their lives without being imprisoned in offices and – most importantly – becoming truly active participants in their employers’ success.

Chapter 6: The New World Sales Force

For the sales force, the revolutionary new cloud computing business model has a particular significance, requires vital tools and engenders some new methods of operation.

Chapter 7: Cloud Computing: Impact on Sales Management

Thanks to cloud computing, it’s a new virtual business world. This new model has a profound impact on everyone involved. It has a particular significance for sales management.

Chapter 8: Could Computing Corporate Culture: Are You Alone?

Science fiction long ago predicted that a totally automated age would bring about a complete departure of the human element. Are these dire visions coming to pass – or is it merely a matter of adjusting what we do within the new paradigm?

A CRM solution is the backbone of a company’s sales efforts. For that reason choosing a CRM solution should be done with the greatest of care and attention—this isn’t a task that you should take lightly or skimp on.

The next step is CRM implementation—which also must be undertaken with care. In fact, it will be found that skimped implementation, especially with users, is a primary reason for costly CRM failure.

In this ebook we guide you through the steps necessary to choose and implement a CRM solution wisely.

Chapter 1: Before Choosing a CRM Solution, Define Your Terms

“If you would argue with me, first define your terms!” This famous demand was first made by French philosopher Voltaire way back in the seventeenth century, yet it finds complete applicability today—especially when it comes to the specification and selection of automation tools such as CRM solutions.

Chapter 2: 5 Qualities of Your Own Self-Designed CRM Solution

Completely putting aside the real world for the moment, what if you could build your own ideal CRM solution for your company, from the ground up, that functioned exactly the way the company needed it to?

Chapter 3: CRM Solution Implementation: Doing It Right

All too often a company purchases a CRM solution, implements it, and gets everyone using it—without having taken some very necessary steps beforehand.

Chapter 4: Finding the Perfect Marriage of Sales Force Skill and Automation

With the sales force, the skill of selling must be perfectly supported with computerized automation in the form of a CRM solution. But as with a car and driver, both the salesperson and CRM solution must be brought to certain levels before they work well as a unified whole.

Chapter 5: CRM Solutions: Issues for Sales Management

Sales reps often complain that traditional, cumbersome CRM solutions benefit sales management, not the sales force. What the reps can’t see—simply because they are not there—is that sales management is suffering because of these CRM applications also.

Chapter 6: Sales Forecasting Begins with Sales Force Organization

We’ve all been there. A sales forecast is done and a corresponding sales quota set for a quarter or a year. About four-fifths of the way through that sales period everyone realizes that without a few miracles the quota will not be met. Taking a very broad look, this is actually a problem of accurate sales forecasting.

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