What does fitness mean for a salesperson? Hint: it’s not just being buff.

Fitness is an interesting subject. It certainly means staying bodily fit–and the tens of thousands of gyms seen all over our cities serve as reminders of how much attention people have on toned physiques today. But it also means staying fit in mind and spirit, and in fact, it’s a coordination of all three.

In this ebook, Nikolaus Kimla explores what fitness means for a salesperson–and it’s a lot more than being buffed out!

Principle #1
Salesperson Fitness of the Mind

At Pipeliner we, like many today, believe that it is not only IQ–Intelligence Quotient–that makes for mental ability, but also EQ: Emotional Quotient. Emotional Quotient means the ability to empathically connect with another on an emotional level. As many experts are saying today, and as we’ll explore more in this ebook, this ability is vitally important for sales, and is a key part of sales fitness.

Principle #2
Fitness of The Body

Of the three different types of fitness we’re addressing in this series (body, mind, spirit or soul), fitness of the body is the most visible. It’s what everyone immediately sees. In that a salesperson is presenting themselves and their products or services directly to someone else, this is obviously a vitally important topic for sales. Just in walking up to someone–or even being on camera as on Skype or in a Webinar–fitness can be observed just in the way a person bears himself or herself.

Principle #3
Emotional Fitness

Emotional fitness is important for anyone, but is crucially important for a salesperson. Something like 90 to 95 percent of the interactions a salesperson has are negative. Phone calls and emails are ignored. Gatekeepers furiously protect decision makers. Many have a 5 to 10 percent closing ratio. There is even constant resistance to prospecting.

How does a salesperson deal with what we could call the “dark side of selling”?

Principle #4
Salesperson Ethics

Sales ethics is the subject of many books, and the subject of chapters of yet other sales books. It’s something that many experts think every salesperson needs to worry themselves about. And so they should! But I don’t think they should worry themselves about it in the way that these books spell out, and I think that the subject may be far simpler than many sales experts would lead you to believe.

Principle #5
Holistic Fitness and the Amazing Tom Brady

As we’ve discussed throughout this ebook, fitness isn’t just a matter of one’s body. There is also fitness of the mind, and (believe it or not) fitness of the spirit. Most importantly, these must all be addressed together, holistically, as many Asian cultures tell us–unlike the ancient Greek, who considered you could address either the mind, body or spirit separately and ignore the rest. We now know how untrue this is.

While artificial intelligence has been predicted for many years, especially through science fiction movies and television, it is truly now coming to pass. We see it with Apple’s Siri and Alexa from Amazon. We witness it with the navigation systems we have in our cars. We see it in air traffic control and in the big jetliners themselves.

But now AI is establishing an ever-widening presence in the CRM industry, and all sorts of incredible claims are being made for it. They’re saying that AI will leverage deals, allow more cross-selling, reduce sales cycles and leverage campaigns.

Given the actuality of human behaviour, these are faulty assumptions. So where does AI really fit today, and what are its limitations? It is this complex and timely topic we’re going to be exploring in this book.

Chapter 1: How Will Big Data Revolutionize Sales and CRM?

Cybernetic principles—the science of simplification of big data—is a primary application of artificial intelligence. Interestingly, just as we cannot understand big data without artificial intelligence, we also would not have artificial intelligence without big data to support it.

Chapter 2: Salespeople, AI and the 4th Industrial Revolution

What do we mean by Industry 4.0? It’s the 4th Industrial Revolution, unfolding right now. It brings internet-enabled smart devices that seamlessly interface with humans and each other. It provides for data analysis and virtual models that make it possible to evaluate and solve production issues on the fly. It’s about state-of-the-art services being delivered to companies and customers through the cloud.

Eventually, it will even mean factory modules that are enabled to replace or expand themselves.

Chapter 3: Artificial Intelligence, CRM and Sales Prediction

Two very popular buzzwords today are predictive insights and prescriptive insights. But while we’re discussing artificial intelligence, we want to pay particular attention to where AI does and doesn’t make sense in relation to these two areas.

Chapter 4: How Does Artificial Intelligence Work with Sales & Marketing Alignment?

As we know by evaluating the current state of Sales and Marketing alignment, it is still a major challenge to get these two groups working in unity. Yet today it’s vital that they do—if only because in today’s digital marketplace it’s getting more and more difficult to tell where exactly Marketing ends and Sales begins. AI can greatly assist in solving these issues.

Chapter 5: Artificial Intelligence in Sales–Let’s Get Real

I recently ran across a very interesting fact. An artificial intelligence identity, created by an artificial intelligence services company and labelled as an “AI sales assistant”, has her very own LinkedIn profile.

Chapter 6: Artificial Intelligence in Sales–Don’t Be Taken In by False Promises

I believe that Artificial Intelligence is a major asset in dealing with the complexity of our world. For example, it is used to analyze patient data in hospitals to isolate common symptoms and predict epidemics before they spread. It brings us one step closer to protecting mankind against disease. AI is used in many other practical supportive ways, such as Siri and GPS navigation systems.

But sometimes I think people are attempting to push AI as some kind of excuse, as a way to bypass the work that humans actually need to be doing, and in the process making false promises for technology.

Chapter 7: Pipeliner CRM Artificial Intelligence–Voyager

Now that I’ve taken some direct shots at the fantasies being promoted by a number of sales AI products, in this final chapter I’ll elaborate on how AI is used within my own product, Pipeliner CRM. I do this not only to promote Pipeliner but more as a demonstration of how I believe AI can best serve the sales industry today.

While it might be easy for some professions–a doctor, a judge, a firefighter, even a lawyer–to find meaning in their lives, for a salesperson it can be tough. Along with countless negative media portrayals over the years, and tainted social attitudes, a salesperson encounters the highest percentage of rejection of just about any profession out there.

How important is meaning to a person’s life? For at least one significant answer to that question, we can turn to Victor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and holocaust survivor, who founded an entire school of thought around a person’s search for meaning. Frankl saw this search as life’s primary motivation.

It is important to point out that Frankl also said that each person must discover such a meaning for themselves—nobody can give it to them. So while we cannot give each individual salesperson the meaning for their own life, we can certainly point out that they mean a great deal more than they might have been given credit for in the past.

So what meaning can be found in the life of a salesperson? Is it something to be ashamed of, or something–as we at Pipeliner believe–that should be a source of pride?

In this white paper, Nikolaus Kimla explores the subject of the meaning in the life of a salesperson–the most challenging, yet the most rewarding career available.

Chapter 1 › Can a Salesperson Find Meaning in Life?

Just based on social commentary, along with incredibly negative entertainment media over the last 100 years (think Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross, just as 2 prime examples), it would appear, at least at a surface glance, that the only meaning salespeople could find in life would come from pressuring prospects to buy things against their will, grubbing for money and, in the end, total misery.

Chapter 2 › Slapping Back at Negative Attitudes on Sales

While there are thousands of suggestions out there of what your meaning in life might be, only you can decide what your meaning in life actually is. It’s different for everyone. If meaning in life was the same for all people, then it wouldn’t be a problem finding it, would it? You could just ask your neighbour. But unfortunately, it’s not that easy.

Chapter 3 › Do You Find Meaning, or is it Forced On You?

We can fairly say that there are 2 primary concepts in anthropology or the study of human beings today, or (better) two different world views on humankind. One is the so-called socialist mindset, and the other is the more entrepreneurial approach. Because we believe salespeople are “entrepreneurs within an enterprise,” this is the one we favour.

Chapter 4 › What Factor Brings the Most Meaning to Sales?

Meaning in life for a salesperson is tied directly to altruism: the performance of good for others for no other reason than the good performed. When salespeople really benefit others, they not only make repeat customers but they help enhance their own reputations.

There is a long-term situation in sales of salespeople having a rather one-sided viewpoint: they think only like salespeople. It’s all about the pitch—selling points that they’ve seen work before, and using those to convince that buyer to purchase.

Salespeople have been operating this way since the beginning of time. The better salespeople perfected their pitches so they could recite them in their sleep—and sometimes it seemed that they were doing exactly that.

But the salesperson of old wouldn’t stand a chance in today’s sales landscape. One vital element in the sales-buyer relationship has radically changed: the buyer.

Radical Shift

Today a buyer is learning a considerable amount about a product or service before that first contact with a salesperson. It’s even been said that the majority of the buying decision is actually made before that first contact. Whether or not that’s true, it is true that a salesperson is confronting a far more educated buyer in that first meeting or phone call than in yesteryear.

Where a great sales pitch used to work before, today it’s a whole different game. A salesperson must learn all about the various actions a buyer takes in making a purchase, and most importantly learn to be rapidly responsive to those actions in ways that are meaningful and motivational.

If you think back to sales you’ve been involved with, you’ll realize that in deals that won, you successfully monitored various buyer actions in coordination with taking actions of your own. In deals which were lost, there had to have been actions you didn’t take, or at the least key indicators you missed.

To the degree that due regard for buyer actions is taken, the sale is succeeding.

Sales Process

In an effort to bring salespeople up to speed with buyers, most companies have evolved a sales process—that series of steps that take a sale from lead to close. The sales process is a path for the sales rep to follow that hopefully mirrors buyer behavior and makes for a higher closing ratio.

Selling Methodologies

There are numerous popular selling methodologies today. Consultants are hired to bring in one of these or another such method. Interestingly, each of them seeks to make it possible for a sales rep to monitor, influence and be responsive to buyer actions.

Selling System

To emphasize the importance of buyer actions and seller’s activities, we at Pipeliner recently evolved the Pipeliner Selling System. This system, which could be called a common denominator for all successful sales processes, shows that a seller can not simply march through a sales process, but must be acting to cause—and be responsive to—the various buyer actions all down the line.

What does all this mean for your sales team…and for the CRM solution that you choose? You owe it to yourself and your organization to find out.

Download our free white paper The Shoe on the Other Foot: Salespeople Must Think Like Buyers.

It can often seem that running a sales force is like fighting a war—and in fact it more or less is a war between your company and your competitors. The prize is new prospects, new customers, sales, customer retention, and market share.

As a sales manager, your troops are your salespeople. You want those troops to be as battle-worthy as possible. You want them to return as winners—for their own satisfaction as well as the bottom line.

What are the best methods to make your team battle-ready and lead them successfully?

1. A Competent Fighting Force

Before you can fight a war, you have to have troops. Similarly, to have a sales force you need to have sales reps. If that sales force is going to win, those sales reps need to be skilled and effective at what they do.

2. Withstanding the Heat of Battle

In military maneuvers, there is an enormous amount of difference between battle tactics of even 50 years ago and those of today. It’s a similar scenario in the sales battleground: That traditional sales rep is going to be left far behind in the trenches by a the modern sales force enabled by the Internet, social media and leading-edge sales automation.

3. The Sales Process: Your Tactical Procedure

For sales reps, the sales process brings an orderly progression to sales cycles, and for the sales manager it provides a positive direction through which he or she can supervise the sales force.

4. Sales and Marketing: Run Up the White Flag

As sales manager, you may have limited interest in what Marketing is up to. You may have various beefs with them, but you have been content to let Marketing do its job and let the sales force get on with selling. But Sales and Marketing are like two units of the same overall fighting force.

5. To Win Battles, You Need Great Intel

The stories of battles decisively won or tragically lost due to intelligence are legion. What would be the “intelligence” for you as a sales manager and for your sales force? With the goal of making sales and winning customers, it would be the “intel” of what your product or service could fulfill based on what potential customers need, want and desire. It would be clues to their pain points.

6. The Skill of Leadership

You’ll hear many stories from combat veterans about that sergeant they could always count on—the leader that would bring them through hell so they would survive to tell the tale. Such leaders learned to lead—and so must sales leaders.

7. The Safe Base Camp

A combat military leader knows that there must be a safe base camp—a place troops are as safe and secure as possible, and from which they venture out to battle and back again. As a sales manager your “base camp” is your sales department—the environment you create in which your salespeople can thrive and sell to their fullest. This safe place is the crux of efficient sales management.

8. Empowering the Salespreneur

Fighting forces are given little freedom of decision. They are given strict orders on how to proceed, and are expected to follow their orders to the letter.This is one way that a fighting force and a sales force dramatically differ. For as we are now discovering, sales reps require as much freedom to decide and act as they can be given.

Download Leading from the War Room: Building a Battle-Ready Sales Force now.

There has been so much talk about Social Selling and what that means to Salespeople but there has been precious little attention given to the impact on Sales Managers.

John Golden of Pipeliner and Matt McDarby of USR decided to address this issue in this collaborative ebook which offers practical advice and concrete actions that can be taken to ensure that social selling is both adopted and then managed in the right way.

Managing a Social Sales teams covers the following topics and ends with an Action Plan:

• The Sales Manager as Greatest Revenue Multiplier
• The Sales Manager as Agent of Social Change
• Using Social Profiles as a Branding Opportunity
• Using Social Channels to Align With Your Buyers’ Journey
• Typing Too Much Is the New Talking Too Much
• Likes and Shares Don’t Pay the Bills
• Measuring Success
• Patience
• Always Focus on the Buyer
• Your Social Sales Management Action Plan