Sales Prospecting Perspectives Weekly Recap - Week of October 11, 2023
Happy Friday, blog readers! Here are some of our favorite sales and marketing posts that we shared on our Twitter feed this week.
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How to Measure Outbound Sales Success. Our COO Peter Gracey wrote on Inside Sales about the benefits of diagnosing your outbound efforts. He also provided critical steps for other companies to benchmark their own outbound prospecting.
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How to Listen When Your Communication Styles Don’t Match. Communication in inside sales is important. It involves both speaking and listening, and sometimes, interacting with prospects who have different communication styles can be hard. This article offers advice for how to be more open and respectful of other communication styles in order to have a successful conversation.
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Forget the Funnel, Use the Sales Radar to Find the Invisible Sale. Tom Martin, the author of The Invisible Sale, offers a new way to consider the sales funnel. With so much digital data about your company already out there, he says to consider the funnel as a radar, “contstantly pinging the world around you to identify and qualify sales prospects.” This is a revolutionary idea, and we urge you to check it out, especially his diagram of the radar, and let us know what you think!
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The Two Words That Matter Most in Sales. What are the two words that matter most in sales? Jill Konrath says: "relentlessly useful." That means consistently and persistently offering value to customers in any way possible. These two simple words can help you become a more proactive sales rep.
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Tips to Sales Success: Complexity is Just an Excuse. On Salesforce's blog, David Brock of Partners in Excellence said that presenting issues and solutions as complex might hurt your sale. A single, radically simple idea -- how to improve a specific part of the sales process -- can inspire prospects to consider your solution. Complexity is an excuse; so do your best to present solutions simply.
And here are some blogs you might have missed on Sales Prospecting Perspectives this week.
Monday: Go to that Awkward Place and Ask Prospects the Tough Questions. On Monday, a new blogger within AG Salesworks, Business Development Representative Joshua Zielinski, posted. He wrote about how sometimes sales reps need to coax prospects out of their comfort zones by asking them tough, sometimes awkward questions about their problems or needs. Most often, this tactic results in your prospect realizing the benefits of your solutions, when they wouldn't have earlier. Josh provided a personal anecdote and specific tips for asking these awkward questions without scaring prospects away. Check it out!
Tuesday: Are You A Cynical Sales Rep Craig Ferrara wrote a blog post on Tuesday, asking sales reps how cynical they really are. Over the years, Craig’s noticed that he’s become less and less optimistic. However, he reminded himself that being cynical is not the way to live. He watched a video from Conan O’Brien that inspired him. The gist was: if you have a general lack of faith in yourself, you WILL fail. It really is as simple of that. So if you’re noticing that you’re feeling cynical, watch this video and read Craig’s post about how to stay optimistic.
Wednesday: 3 Tips to Teach New Reps for Successful Sales and Marketing Alignment. On Wednesday, we had a guest post from Niti Shah, the Head of Sales Content at HubSpot and editor of the new Inbound Sales section of HubSpot’s media hub. Niti offered advice for how to teach your new sales rep about inbound sales. She included advice such as, “Understand when to contact a prospect depending on buyer’s context,” “be a consultant, not a salesperson,” and more. It’s important to train new sales reps to approach the sales process as a partnership between marketing and sales so everyone’s on the same page, especially for years to come. Read this post for great ideas about how to instill these ideas in new sales reps.
Thursday: Communication: The Best Bang for Your Buck. On Thursday, CEO Paul Alves shared his initiatives for improving communication across the entire company. He’s allowed more and more for communication to bridge gaps between higher-level and lower-level employees, allowing more and more people to add to the sales process and to the business of AG itself. People appreciate open and honest communication and transparency. Paul offered this idea to other CEOs looking to increase their company culture and their clear vision for teams and customers.
Have a great weekend, and see you next week! What were some of your favorite posts this week?
