Sales Prospecting Perspectives Weekly Recap – Week of August 16, 2023
Happy Friday, Sales Prospecting Perspectives readers. Here in the office at AG, we can tell that prospects are returning from vacation: there are more conversations, and less sales reps blocked by an away-from-the-office message. Fall is just around the corner!
This week, we’d like to share two articles. First up is Do You Have a Killer Communication Strategy? In this post, Paul McCord discusses a “killer” communication strategy, and the connotation of that word isn’t good. So many sellers end up teaching prospects and clients to ignore and avoid them because they have nothing of value to communicate, and do so at inopportune times. Instead, you need to develop a communication strategy that teaches prospects that they’re worth your time. Read the post to see if your communication strategy is “killer” to your pipeline.
Second, we’d like to share John Golden’s The Patience of a Wolf, from Direct Marketing News. Upon reading a book about leadership lessons from nature, Golden realized that salespeople should be more like wolves: patient in observing, following, and planning how they’re going to execute a successful strategy and curious about every inch of the terrain they’re covering. In the changing environment of sales and marketing, salespeople need to have the same level of curiosity and patience that a wolf exhibits. This was a very interesting post; read it and analyze how much of a wolf-like salesperson you are.
If you’d like to see more great sales and marketing blog posts from other bloggers, follow us on Twitter. We share a mix of the latest and greatest articles from sales and marketing professionals throughout the workday. You can get your must-read links there every day!
Now, on to the weekly recap.
Monday: On Monday, Laney wrote How a Strong Company Culture Will Boost Customer Service Levels. Her post detailed how to create this kind of company culture, which you can see in action at Starbucks and other favorite customer service joints, by hiring the right people, rewarding and incenting employees, and exercising customer service internally. “Treat your employees like you would want them to treat the customer,” is a very apt quote for this article. Read it to learn how your customer service levels can be improved by a strong company culture.
Tuesday: On Tuesday, Mike Ricciardelli reviewed the book, “The Challenger Sales” by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson in his post, Coaching and Challenging Prospects Through the Sales Process. Don’t allow prospects to convince themselves that they have no interest in you; instead, challenge their way of thinking. This blog post shows inside sales reps how to challenge themselves to challenge prospects’ responses and objections, ultimately passing more leads closing more sales.
Wednesday: Our guest blogger on Wednesday was Adam Becker, the Director of Sales at TinderBox. He wrote How Deals Die in the Final Mile of the Sales Process with illuminating facts such as that most sales reps only spend on average 40 percent of their time selling. All that other work goes towards administritave duties, drafting campaigns, etc. Sales managers then must execute quick turnaround for their team’s contracts, easy-to-read sales documents for prospects’ needs, and buyer intelligence to gain visibility into what matters to the prospect. Getting any of this wrong can kill a deal in its final stages, so be careful of those inefficiencies at the finish line. Read this post for more information.
Thursday: CEO Paul Alves wrote The Upside of Creating a Learning Culture at Your Company on Thursday. He detailed the win-win situation that is a learning culture: team members have the opportunity to improve their skill sets, customers benefits from more skilled sales reps, and the company benefits from increased productivity and ultimately, profitability. Paul shared a story about how our own marketing team is embracing the learning culture here at AG Salesworks. As a strong proponent of healthy company cultures, Paul challenges you to look at your company culture: do you encourage your employees to try new things for the business? Or are they stuck doing the same things every day? Read this post and comment with your experience.
Friday: Lastly, on Friday morning, Digital Content Manager Megan Toohey wrote How to Eliminate Fluff From Your Business Blog. As she reads several marketing and sales blogs every day, she tends to see a lot of fluff: uninformative, unhelpful posts with stale points of view. In this post, she gives advice for eliminating that fluff from your business blog, such as having multiple people generate content to incorporate fresh ideas from people with different views and tones. Read the rest of the article for more advice from the manager of this blog!
Now let’s hear from you, readers. What was your favorite article this week? What topics would you like to see more of?
