The New Rules of Customer Engagement

Selling Is Not About Relationships

Breaking News – Solution Selling Pronounced Dead – Again

Role-Playing: Making Your Formal Sales Training Programs More Effective

B2B Sales: Look Before You Provoke

How to Kick Off Successful Sales Training? Ask, Don’t Tell

11 Ways to Grow Sales With LinkedIn

Six Ways to Rethink Sales Training for Today's Economy

The 7 Deadly Sins of Sales Management

Seven Essential Apps for Your Sales Team

Featured Articles

1. Performance Optimization: Having the Right People in the Right Roles Explore solutionsellingblog.com (May 1 2013) Sales Management Bad sales hires cost organizations through lost quota, revenue, and compensation. Not to mention the recruiting costs, onboarding costs, potential damage to client satisfaction, and the potential for increased churn as others within the organization become upset and disillusioned with their organization’s inability to hire quality people to support them. (Read Full Article)

   Mentions:   Aberdeen Group

2. McKinsey: Salespeople Need To Improve Their Social Media Skills Explore forbes.com (Apr 16 2013) Sales 2.0 Sales organizations in business-to-business companies have only scratched the surface of using social media. While salespeople have long been known for their social skills, those who can hone their social media skills will thrive in the digital age. (Read Full Article)

3. Are You Paying Enough Attention to Your Sales Force? Explore HBR Blog Network (Apr 11 2013) Sales Management There's a question all top managers should ask: How can I make my sales force, which is one of the biggest and most important investments my company makes, perform more effectively?" Improving sales force management is a huge opportunity. We believe that sales force improvement initiatives typically produce incremental short-term revenue gains of at least 10%, and long-term increases of 50% or more. Consider the following examples of companies that have implemented sales force improvement initiatives that had big positive bottom-line impact. (Read Full Article)

   Mentions:   Harvard Business Review

4. The Rise of Pre-Emptive Selling Explore solutionsellingblog.com (Apr 9 2013) Sales 2.0 For forward-thinking sellers, the current signs predict a radically different approach to selling today, not 40 years from now. It is no longer advantageous to ignore the Internet and social media, when so many buyers are using these to find someone to solve a problem or fill a need. Indeed, top sellers are already using the tools at their disposal to win deals vs. their offline counterparts. (Read Full Article)

   Mentions:   Aberdeen Group

5. Insights from Gartner's Social Marketing Survey Explore Gartner Blog Network (Mar 27 2013) Sales 2.0 On the heels of publishing Gartner’s marketing spend survey comes another on social marketing.  Gartner’s 2013 Social Marketing Survey Finding: Content Creation Fuels Social Marketing, is now available. Gartner expects growth in social marketing across all industries, but there are barriers in the way as companies and whole industries still work to determine how to reach their customers and support corporate goals. (Read Full Article)

6. Positioning The Enterprise For The Big Social Win Explore forbes.com (Mar 14 2013) Sales 2.0 The socially enabled enterprise—in which social extends beyond marketing and is integrated into multiple internal and external touch points in the corporate infrastructure—is beginning to materialize.  Businesses today have an unprecedented opportunity to gather and leverage holistic big data, including that gleaned from the vast, fast-moving social web.  But are businesses adequately positioning to seize on that kind of customer experience advantage? (Read Full Article)

7. Embracing Social Sales Inside And Outside The Organization Explore forbes.com (Mar 13 2013) Sales 2.0 Social media is often thought of as an external, customer-facing sales tool. But inside the organization, social technologies are powerful tools that you can use to engage your employees for real-time feedback, enabling them to collaborate on tasks and connect to the resources they need for success. Imagine your ability to harness and develop new business ideas when your employees are all connected, working together, real-time. (Read Full Article)

8. Is Your Sales Organization Good or Great? Explore HBR Blog Network (Mar 8 2013) Sales Leadership What separates great from good sales organizations? After working with over two-hundred different companies, the evidence suggests that the best business-to-business sales organizations share specific patterns of organizational structure and behavior. These similarities can be defined into the seven different attributes listed below. Conversely, underperforming or weaker sales organizations tend to be missing some or all of these critical characteristics. (Read Full Article)

9. How Not to Lose a Sale Explore HBR Blog Network (Mar 1 2013) Sales Leadership The sales opportunity was mine to lose. And I lost it. (Read Full Article)

10. Improve Your Sales Hiring Success Rate Explore Business Development Consultants (Feb 28 2013) Sales hiring is one of the most important tasks an organization undertakes. For the rrecord, I have personally hired a countless number of successful—and not so successful—sales people. In many organizations it's the role hired most often; usually in field locations far from any hiring process oversight. Because of this, it is easy to become complacent and stray from established hiring process disciplines. Your sales team is the face-to-face embodiment of your brand and may be your one-and-only chance to convey your organization’s capabilities to potential buyers. An inappropriate sales hire, who misrepresents your company ... (Read Full Article)

11. The End of Solution Sales? Not So Fast... Explore Business Development Consultants (Feb 20 2013) Sales 2.0 What do Neil Young, Betty White, Bob Hope, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and Paul McCartney all have in common? Great comic timing? A villa in Tuscany? A love of the Classics?  No, they were all victims of a premature obituary.  It happened to Mark Twain twice, resulting in the now famous quote: ”The report of my death was an exaggeration.” Based on a recent Harvard Business Review article: ”The End of Solution Sales,” we can now add Solution Selling to that list. (Read Full Article)

    Mentions:   Harvard Business Review

12. A Call for Mandatory Social Media Upskilling Explore SiriusDecisions (Feb 15 2013) Sales 2.0 , Sales Training Today, I listen to conversations about the merits and future of social media and networking for b-to-b. I sit across the table from b-to-b executives who don’t believe that social is impacting or will impact their buyers’ behavior. The most common myth repeated over and over again to me is: C-level decisionmakers don’t have time or are just too important to use social media. To be honest, it feels like déjà vu — it’s the exact same dialogue the industry had about impact of the Internet on b-to-b buying. And I’m pretty sure that, down the ... (Read Full Article)

13. Research identifies the personality traits for effective leadership Explore The Commercial Appeal (Feb 10 2013) Sales Leadership , Sales Management The conventional view that extroverts make the finest salespeople is so accepted that we've overlooked one teensy flaw: There's almost no evidence it's true. When social scientists have examined the relationship between extroverted personalities and sales success — that is, how often the cash register rings — they've found the link to be flimsy at best. Does this mean instead that introverts, the soft-spoken souls more at home in a study carrel than on a sales call, are more effective? Not at all. (Read Full Article)

14. Importance of Leadership in a 5-Star Company Explore Value Investing (Feb 5 2013) Sales Leadership , Europe , North America Study the results of several 5-star companies to understand how the quality of the board members and key executives contribute to long-term profitability and sustainable growth. (Read Full Article)

15. Optimizing the People Who Lead Your Sales Teams Explore CSO Insights (Feb 5 2013) Sales Leadership , Sales Management Sales Managers can make or break your year. What are you doing to help them excel at their jobs? CSO Insights recently conducted a webinar to review the results of our 2012 Sales Management Optimization Report. These are answers to the questions from attendees. (Read Full Article)

    Mentions:   Jim Dickie

16. What We Can Learn from Fortune 100′s Most Social CMOs Explore InsideView Sales Intelligence (Feb 1 2013) CMOs at General Electric, Google, Apple, IBM, SAP, Dell, Exxon Mobil Corporation, Cisco Systems and Raytheon rank as the top ten most social. From LinkedIn and Twitter to Facebook, these executives get first-hand experience with social media by using their personal public accounts. And they aren’t just sharing what they had for lunch; these CMOs use social media to announce company news and launches, discuss their upcoming speaking engagements and conferences, chat about travel and share their bylined articles and blog posts. They also share inspirational tidbits, promote content from thought-leaders in various industries and share what they learn ... (Read Full Article)

17. Daniel Pink: Putting Your Best Pitch Forward in a Society of Salespeople Explore Knowledge@Wharton (Jan 30 2013) Sales Training , North America Most consumers have a negative view of salespeople. But the truth, according to author Daniel Pink, is that we all spend at least some part of our work or personal lives selling something, whether it's marketing a product or service or convincing someone to go out on a date. At a recent Authors@Wharton lecture, Pink detailed what he has learned about selling, described what personality types make ideal salespeople and suggested the best ways to make a sales pitch -- all topics covered in his new book, To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others. (Read Full Article)

18. A Bank Executive They Call "The Social Media CEO" Explore forbes.com (Jan 30 2013) Sales 2.0 , Sales Leadership , North America I know a lot about the CEO of ING DIRECT Canada, Peter Aceto. He has three kids and a loving marriage. He enjoys taking his kids to hockey, volleyball, and music lessons. He’s a student of leadership and shares case studies and best practices from leaders in other fields. I know this information because Aceto is one of the most active, authentic, and transparent bank executives on social media. No surprise, he was recognized as Toronto’s Communicator of the Year in 2010. ING DIRECT is also among the “most admired” in Canada and ranked as one of the ... (Read Full Article)

19. Make Your Sales Vision Come To Life Explore forbes.com (Jan 23 2013) Sales Leadership Sales leadership is the toughest of the functional leadership roles. No other position demands such a disparate set of competencies, ranging from financial management and forecasting, to inspiring and motivating a geographically dispersed team. (Read Full Article)

    Mentions:   Harvard Business Review

20. Delivering On the Brand Promise Explore SalesAndMarketing.com (Jan 22 2013) Solution Selling The need to get a better understanding of what a customer’s problems are and how to solve them requires a change in the way we market and sell our products and services. It may also require a retraining of our sales force. Those reading this are probably familiar with the term “solution selling.” It is a term that in the past meant a coupling of hardware and software that we thought delivered a total solution. Not so today. Today, solution selling is all about combining products, services and industry expertise to clearly define a business issue a customer is ... (Read Full Article)

21. Solution Selling® 2.0 and Social Media Webcasts Explore solutionsellingblog.com (Jan 18 2013) Sales 2.0 , Solution Selling Announcing two upcoming webcasts: Introducing Solution Selling 2.0, Adapting Sales to the New Buyer Paradigm: Is Your Salesforce Keeping Pace?  and New Imperatives for Social Media Success. (Read Full Article)

22. Social Marketing in 2013 Explore Gartner Blog Network (Jan 15 2013) Sales 2.0 Gartner’s social media survey performed year after year continually shows that the top reasons for businesses investing in social media is for improving customer relationships. The top reasons for investing in social media are the following: 1. Strengthen Relationship with Customer 2. Enhance Brand Awareness or Brand Preference 3. Share Information and Ideas With Customers, Suppliers and Partners 4. Establish Interactive Relationship With Customers 5. Increase My Organization’s Revenue Through New Products, Customers (Read Full Article)

23. The Dawning Age of Mass Collaboration Explore Gartner Blog Network (Jan 8 2013) Sales 2.0 , Sales Leadership Mass collaboration is the future of competitive advantage in business. See Gartner’s infographic on the evolution of business. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter may be all the rage today. But they’re only the beginning of something really big. Their true impact is that they’re spurring a new era of mass collaboration. Hundreds, thousands, even millions of people can effectively collaborate – like never before – to achieve unprecedented results. Yes, the marquee social web successes like Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook are great examples of mass collaboration in general. But what’s more profound is the impact ... (Read Full Article)

24. The Social CXO | An Executive's Guide to Social Business Explore forbes.com (Jan 8 2013) Sales 2.0 , Sales Leadership A lot of executives struggle with social business, because it doesn’t follow simple, regular business patterns. There’s no obvious strategy, process or ROI. A tweet or a blog post just can’t compete with a lead or an order in the CXO mind. Social business is uncertain and ephemeral. Outside the firm, customers make choices based on conversations. Inside the firm, CXO’s drive profit through policies and procedures. It’s a fundamentally different dynamic. For many CXO’s, it’s much more comfortable to sit snugly behind the corporate firewall surrounded by obedient hierarchies, simple processes and ... (Read Full Article)

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