After the slower summer months, many companies experience a big push through Q4. In fact, companies may do more than half of their sales during the last three months of the calendar year. The pick-up is often attributable to sales professionals redoubling their efforts when they return to their desks in September.
Warning—if you’re in an ultra-competitive industry and/or sell enterprise deals, you need to lock down your social connections. These connections are basically a tracking beacon for RFQ, RFP, proposals, etc.
Data is necessary for legitimizing a solution, but a story is necessary for promoting it.
In business, reliable data is needed to make sound decisions, but data can be overwhelming and sometimes cause inertia that slows or stops the buying process. To bridge the gap between the need for data and the need for clarity, sales professionals can include data as part of a larger narrative by leveraging a storytelling approach in sales.
I was just at a customer’s office conducting Digital Sales Leadership training, and I heard yet another war story about job changes gone wrong. The only difference was that this deal accounted for 1.5% of total annual revenue—or one sales professional’s entire FY quota. POOF, GONE, overnight.
Although many have speculated about the viability of cold calling in the face of social selling and digital selling methodologies, it seems as though even the cold call has been retooled for the modern sales department. Nothing is “dead” except for single-channel prospecting.
Salespeople and marketers tend to think of themselves as quite separate, with different goals, tactics, and roles within a company. The rise of the modern B2B buyer and their changing journey has forced many professionals in both sales and marketing to rethink this long-standing separation.
Many sales leaders are familiar with the so-called summer slump. Generally speaking, business slows down when the warmer weather arrives. Decision-makers are out of the office, and it may be more difficult to gather key people in order to make a decision.
Social selling has been celebrated as the solution to poor quota attainment among sales representatives. As older sales methodologies have become increasingly ineffective, most sales professionals have looked to social selling to boost slumping quota attainment percentages.
The market has changed globally. No matter if you live in Boston or Barcelona, San Francisco or Stuttgart, customers have changed more in the last five years than the previous 100. Europe, the Middle East, and Asia (EMEA) are no different. We’re seeing EMEA sellers drive conversations via WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Xing, and video messaging, no different than in the USA.
Sales departments have been under increasing scrutiny in the last few years. Many sales professionals are looking for ways to grow top line revenue, especially in the face of stiffer corporate goals. Even when social selling and digital selling strategies are adopted for the business, corporate goals may remain out of reach.
Sales for Life was founded with one goal – to become the most trusted sales resource for its customers. During our journey, we’ve had the privilege of serving thousands of sales professionals and leaders around the world, from start-ups to Fortune 50 corporations.
