Sales Expects Advice and Tips

[icon name=”video-camera” class=”” unprefixed_class=””]Watch this fascinating panel discussion with these three top experts

Since the beginning of the modern business, Marketing and Sales have existed pretty much in separate silos. Yet they both have the same goal, although through different channels: to increase revenue and make the enterprise a great success. Today these 2 vital departments are still often at odds, much of the time in regard to leads: Marketing provides leads to sales. Sales say they’re not of high enough quality. Marketing says that Sales just isn’t closing them. But we can no longer afford to have them at odds–it is the age of Sales and Marketing Alignment.

Matt Heinz’s career has focused on delivering measurable results for his employers and clients in greater sales, revenue growth, product success, and customer loyalty. Heinz Marketing, helps clients focus their business on market and customer opportunities, execute a plan to scale revenue and growth.

Samantha Stone helps unleash the possible in organizations with complex selling processes. She’s a fast-growth, B2B marketing junkie, author, speaker, and consultant. She has launched go-to-market initiatives and led marketing strategies for award-winning, high-growth companies.

Tony Perzow is a former negotiation trainer at the Karrass Organization and Vice President of negotiation training at Strategic Pricing Associates, Tony’s mission as a is to help others be insanely successful. He has trained top executives from many of the leading Fortune 500 companies.

Most people associate “sales pitch” with a pushy salesperson trying to manipulate you into buying something. In reality, this isn’t a very accurate description, but the fact remains that a pushy message isn’t often well received. Instead of pushing your message onto potential buyers, John Livesay, interviewed by John Golden, explores ways to pitch, not push.

This expert sales interview explores the secret to pitching, including:

• The importance of storytelling
• Unspoken buyer questions
• How to answer the unspoken buyer questions

The Secret to Pitching:

The whole secret to pitching, and not pushing, is to become a storyteller. Stories pull people in, as opposed to pushing people out, which is what makes them stand out as a unique tactic. “Storytelling is so powerful because it’s in our DNA. Back around the caveman days, we’d set around a fire an tell stories. Now we do it through technology,” said Livesay. There is a biological basis for why storytelling is effective. The left side of the brain is number based and more analytical. When you make a pushy pitch and say, here is why you should buy this, you’re analyzing. But, if you’re telling a story, buyers relax and move towards the right side of their brain where storytelling and emotional engagement happen. “You process the information differently. You start with an emotion, then back it up with logic. Storytelling is that emotional hook,” said Livesay.

Unspoken Buyer Questions:

There are a few unspoken questions that people have when listening to a pitch. Often, the prospect won’t ask these questions outright, but if you’re telling a good story, then you’re going to answer them. The three questions are: Do I trust you? Do I like you? And, will this work for me? Answering these questions for the buyer helps them feel comfortable, and encourages them to make a purchase.

Do I trust you?:

This question is more of a gut thing. “The handshake came about just to show that we didn’t have a weapon,” said Livesay. “So, if you’re in sales and trying to get someone to trust you, credibility, not exaggerating, and making eye contact are all essential parts of creating trust.”

Do I like you?

Moving from the gut to the heart carries us from exploring trust to exploring like or dislike. The best way to increase your likeability is by increasing your empathy. “Put yourself in the other person’s shoes, and having language that matches theirs shows that you see things from their perspective,” said Livesay.

Will this work for me?

This question is the most logical. It’s really where the storytelling comes in. If you can share a story that peaks the buyer’s attention and tells of someone else that you’ve helped that has bought your product or service, you have an advantage. If the buyer sees themselves in the customers in your story, you’re telling them, my product or service will work for you.

For more details on how to answer the unspoken buyer questions, and understanding the secret to pitching, watch the expert sales interview!

About Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

Pipeliner CRM empowers salespeople for great pitches. Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.

Account based revenue strategy (ABR) has been a buzzword in the sales world, yet few people understand it or use it properly. Trish Bertuzzi, interviewed by John Golden, explores the ways that using ABR can help, or hurt, your organization.

This expert sales interview on ABR includes:

• Defining account based revenue strategy
• The first steps a company should take when introducing ABR
• The importance of proper account selection
• How ABR is an organizational strategy

What is account based revenue strategy?

“In reality, it’s a lot of hard work,” said Trish Bertuzzi. Companies go to market in different ways. For those companies that are doing enterprise selling, or selling large ticket items where there is a decision committee, they have to figure out a new way to reinvent themselves. “They have to get between the huge wall that buyers have put between themselves and potential sellers,” said Bertuzzi. This idea originated with account-based marketing but has since expanded to include more than just marketing. Account based revenue allows companies to look at the bigger picture. It’s not just about tactics; it’s about what you do actually to drive revenue from a very specific set of accounts.

First steps to AMR:

The first thing you should do is figure out if it’s even right for you. The first question to ask yourself is: Where do you want your revenue to come from? Once you figure that out, you can decide what strategy, or strategies, will work best to help you achieve your goal. If you say you want all your income to come from the enterprise, ABR is likely for you. If you say you want 50% to come from the SMB and mid-market, and 50% to come from enterprise selling, you might need two strategies.

The Importance of Account Selection:

Once you have identified that ABR is the right strategy for you, you must select the appropriate kinds of accounts. Often, people are a little shy on understanding is how to choose the proper accounts for them to go after, and end up making poor choices. “You can’t just randomly select people to add to the list of leads, it should be very scientific, data-rich decision making,” said Bertuzzi. There are predictive technologies, buyer intent data, and other information available to help facilitate account selection and secure the best possible accounts for your company to go after.

An Organizational Strategy

ABR is an organizational strategy; it’s not a sales strategy. To make this strategy happen, there are several steps. It begins with an organizational readiness workshop to ensure the leadership team shares the same vision and goals and expectations around what this is going to mean. It requires significant investment, so you want to make sure that your leadership is on the same page. From there, you can do marketing readiness workshops, sales readiness workshops. “You want to make sure your entire organization understands the why, of why we’re going to do this, and the how, of how we’re going to do this,” said Bertuzzi.

For more steps on ABR, and a deeper understanding of if it’s the right method for your company, watch the entire expert sales interview.

About Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

Pipeliner CRM empowers salespeople to truly sell. Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.

Wouldn’t you like to be able to unlock the salesperson secret code? Ian Mills, interviewed by John Golden, explores the secret of the top five or ten percent of salespeople, and what makes them successful.

This expert sales interview explores elements of the salesperson secret code, including:

• What is the salesperson secret code?
• How was the secret code developed?
• The importance of destination beliefs

What is the salesperson secret code?:

What is it that makes the top five or ten percent of salespeople distinctive? What is it that goes on internally? What beliefs do they hold? What attitudes do they have? What are the values by which they operate? These were questions that Mills explored to try and decipher the salesperson secret code.

A Research-Based Method:

To explore these questions, meticulous research was done. “To get greater gravitas and greater credibility, you need to conduct professional research,” said Mills. To facilitate this research, Mills’ group approached multiple organizations in different geographies in different sectors and asked them to provide salespeople who were top performers and bottom performers for interviews. The interview was conducted for an hour and a half to obtain deep, scientific results. They also analyzed behavioral preferences, attitudes, mindsets, and motivations. In essence, a library was built of millions of data points, creating the ability to undertake a comparative analysis of all the salespeople. “It was that comparative data that enabled us to unpack the difference between successful salespeople and unsuccessful salespeople,” said Mills.

Destination Beliefs:

After completing the research, the findings were distilled into five of the most common destination belief areas. These are things such as communication, influence resilience, control, and fulfillment. “What we found from the research is that every salesperson that we connected with had strengths in each of those areas,” said Mills. Each of those areas had sub-beliefs or motivators. The two of them that contributed to each destination belief is a blend, and what distinguishes the top performers from the rest of the salespeople is that unique blend, and the level of intensity that they hold. Everyone has both, but the top performers had a greater degree of intensity in areas that you might not imagine compared to the rest of the salespeople. This provided some concrete results, enabling them to create a psychometric measure of salespeople.

Fulfillment:

One of the destination beliefs is fulfillment. This is something that most people hold, that they are most fulfilled when they are successful. Two motivations cause this. One motivator is that they are fearful of failure, so they must win to avoid it. The other motivator is the drive to be better than they ever dreamed they could be. “What we found is that the top 5% of salespeople have a much greater level of intensity around the idea of being better than they ever imagined they could be, as opposed to being driven by failure,” said Mills.

For other examples of destination beliefs, and more information on cracking the salesperson secret code, watch the expert sales interview!

About Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

Pipeliner CRM empowers sales management to pinpoint reasons for sales success.Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.

In this day and age of the sales world, you might think that sales and marketing engagement would be very integrated. However, this isn’t exactly the case. There is still a struggle between sales teams and marketing teams, and this difficulty unifying them had consequences that affect the entire organization. Joel Capperella, interviewed by John Golden, discusses how marketing can truly engage with sales.

This expert sales interview explores sales and marketing engagement:

• Learn how the two teams can serve each other
• Why listening to the customers can help facilitate the integration
• How metrics serve as a distraction

Learn to Serve Each Other:

Marketing people don’t always understand or know how to engage well with sales. Part of uniting these two teams and encouraging engagement is for marketing to appreciate that the sales role is the only entrepreneurial role in an organization. “That level of pressure is mediated by many marketing professionals. Marketing doesn’t realize that the most qualified lead in the world is the one not yet into the sales pipeline. No matter how qualified the lead is, that’s when the challenge for the sales pro begins,” said Capperella. Closing the gap between when a lead leaves the marketing funnel and goes into the sales pipeline is critical. Understanding the way sales goes about doing their job, how they prospect, and how they move things through the pipeline is vital to healthy engagement. “If we truly understood those things, and marketing has a deeper appreciation from them, we’d be able to serve each other better,” said Capperella.

Listen to the Customers:

We have to run our business, we have to sell our products or services, we have to listen to our customers, but we get caught in this cycle of serving the immediate need for the customer. We’re not able to look a few steps beyond why they need our products or services. What ends up happening is, instead of serving their future, we’re serving their past. The first order of business is that marketing needs to talk to customers all the time. Salespeople need to understand them, even better than the salesperson does. The marketing team has more flexibility because they don’t have the necessity of closing deals and retiring quota. They can be more flexible in how they get to know the customer. That is without a doubt the first step in serving sales better.

Stop Serving the Metrics

“What I’ve seen happen across marketing organizations is that it’s filled with tactics of advertising, social media management, and demand generation. Those things are all good, but the idea and the concept of a go to market strategy that drives the tactical execution, is absent,” said Capperella. Marketing automation has allowed this to happen because the focus has been on metrics. As a result, the marketing team starts to serve the metrics, and miss that challenging area of the market and the sales transitions, and driving deals further into the sales pipeline. “If we’re more strategic in our approach, that focuses us on being ahead of our customers, and become more prescriptive of what they should do,” said Capperella.

For more insights into sales and marketing engagement, watch the expert sales interview, and check out the sales and marketing section on SalesPOP!

About Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

Pipeliner CRM empowers sales-marketing alignment.  Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.

If you ask people what’s important in their sales force, often, they’ll say the pipeline. But, that can mean a lot of different things. This vital tool is essential for most sales organizations, yet it’s often not used correctly, or not understood fully. Jason Jordan, interviewed by John Golden, explores proper pipeline management.

This expert sales interview explores pipeline management, including:

• Defining pipeline management
• The importance of having a common sales language
• Two mistakes to avoid

Pipeline Management Defined

If you don’t have pipeline management defined, it’s impossible to use it. The biggest misconception about a sales pipeline is that it is the same as sales forecasting. Forecasting is looking to the future and trying to predict where you’ll be at a certain point in time. Pipeline management is trying to get there, and managing the deals that you have. A pipeline is also a collection of current opportunities. When a lead comes in, you qualify it, and it becomes a real opportunity with a discrete beginning and end. A pipeline is a collection of those. It is a collection of your opportunities.

Common Language:

Having a common language or understanding of what different things mean is critical to being able to manage and measure. One of the most significant barriers we see in sales forces is lack of common language. This is in part because there are very few programs out there for teaching sales, and most salespeople enter the workforce as novices. One of the biggest things that go undefined is a sales process. If you don’t have a laid out sales process, then you have nothing to manage. “The number one thing we found that made a productive sales pipeline was having a well-defined sales process,” said Jordan. “Without it, you can’t measure it or coach it.” Ensure that your organization has similar language to define and understand things and that each part of your sales process is transparent.

Pipeline Sizing:

There are several mistakes that sales managers make when it comes to managing a pipeline. These mistakes can be severely detrimental. The first mistake is that managers think a bigger pipeline is a better pipeline. This isn’t always the case. If you can determine the proper size of a sales pipeline, it eliminates all of the “junk prospects” that extend the sales cycle and reduce your closing rates.

Sales Manager Engagement:

Another mistake is the tendency of sales managers to engage too late in the sales cycle. Sales manager tend to focus on deals that are about to close. This makes sense on the one hand because you don’t want to lose the sale. But, the research shows that engaging earlier in the sales process is more impactful for sales productivity. For one, you start to pull out the bad deals early. You can coach your team how to shape the transactions in the customer’s mind from the beginning, and help your salespeople close better deals sooner.

For more information on pipeline management, watch the expert sales interview!

About Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.

Per a recent study, sales managers aren’t taking the actions that would help their salespeople become more successful. Isn’t that what it’s all about? A wide range of skills are required to become a successful sales manager. What are they?

Pipeliner CRM empowers sales managers to skillfully manage salespeople. Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.

Super Star Sales Presentations
#SalesChats: Episode 41

Sales presentations are a crucial part of a salesperson’s job, and if they’re not done correctly, you will miss out on revenue and waste the time that you spent prospecting. Patricia Fripp discusses super sales presentations in this #SalesChat, hosted by John Golden and Martha Neumeister.

Fripp explains:

• The fundamental presentation mistakes that salespeople make, including not focusing the presentation on your particular prospect, not practicing their sales presentations, and not rehearsing beforehand
• The best ways to customize a representation and ensure that it is tailored to the audience
• Utilize specific tactics in order to stand out and be unique using a formula centered around talking about the prospect
• How to get more buy-in when speaking from the point of view of the listener
• Watching the “you” versus “I” balance in your sales conversations
• How to help your prospect come up with their own conclusions about the helpfulness of your product or service
• Techniques to get back on track and refocus a sales presentation when you fumble
• Ways to make your presentation memorable
• Using stories and shorter sentences to convey your message

Our Guest

Patricia Fripp

When your message must be memorable, your presentation powerful, and your sales successful, call Patricia Fripp. She is a Hall of Fame keynote speaker, executive speech coach, sales presentation skills and on-line training expert. Learn to improve your sales presentations easily and conveniently with FrippVT.com, Patricia’s interactive online training program.

Links › fripp.com | twitter.com | linkedin.com

Our Hosts

John Golden

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

Martha Neumeister

Martha is social media strategist, responsible for all social media platforms of Pipeliner CRM. She is a communication expert with social media affinity, which she has been focusing on throughout her professional career. She has a bachelor´s degree in Entrepreneurship & Management and a master´s degree in Online Marketing which supports her in her career as Social Media Strategist.

About SalesChats

SalesChats is a fast-paced (no more than 30 minutes) multi-media series that provides leading strategies, tactics and thinking for sales professionals worldwide. It can be found on Twitter (#SalesChats), as a live Google+ Hangout, and as a podcast available on iTunes, SoundCloud and right here on SalesPOP! If you think you would make a great guest for #SalesChats, please contact co-host Martha Neumeister.

SalesChats is co-hosted by John Golden, CSO Pipeliner CRM, and Martha Neumeister, Social Media Strategist Pipeliner CRM.