Barry Trailer is the Research Principal and Co-Founder of CSO Insights. ...

Collibra’s sales operations team faces many challenges that most fast-paced sales organizations experience every sales period. Led by Erica Boccard in their New York office, Collibra needed predictability in their sales outcomes, more effective sales meetings and better visibility in sales rep’s pipelines. Being a Data Governance Company, Collibra knew they could only be as effective as their CRM data, or as Erica puts it, “we needed to build enough trust in the data to where it unlocks its full potential to drive competitive advantage for our sales team”. Now, a customer of TopOPPS, Collibra is leveraging artificial intelligence to help her sales team become more effective and predictable. ...

  In January 2015, Matt Dooley decided to use TopOPPS to help his team keep their heavy equipment rental calendar booked to prevent lost opportunities and to reduce idle equipment. Forecasting was historically difficult causing lack of confidence in inventory availability. There was insufficient pipeline data to effectively plan. Matt expressed that he didn’t want his reps to feel he was shoving them into the CRM, yet he needed to plan for the proper utilization of equipment. “I felt like I was constantly saying Update, Update, Update.” Buckner needed to know which deals would close and when. Without this empirical data and facts - they could not add the inventory necessary to meet the potential revenue. ...

Mark Kosoglow has been in B2B inside and outside sales since 2000. He’s currently the Vice President of Sales at Outreach, a sales engagement platform empowering faster and smarter communication workflows for sales teams ...

Consider the case of Interactive Intelligence, a global leader of cloud services for customer engagement, communications and collaboration. ...

Jeff Lamb has been involved in sales ever since receiving an MBA from Gonzaga University, and has since worked in multiple sales roles before joining Degreed in 2014. ...

Maximizing Reps Sales performance is the number one objective for Sales Leaders. We have published a step-by-step guidebook that does just this - Maximize Sales Performance. But in short, the following details what every Sales Leader needs to know like the back of their hand. ...

Barry Trailer is the Research Principal and Co-Founder of CSO Insights. ...

Khristian Gutierrez is the Chief Revenue Officer at Passport located in Charlotte, North Carolina. ...

Most sales leaders analyze their pipeline the same way they’ve done it for years - this is why sales is still a grind, forecasting is still a struggle, and there are still surprises and disappointments at the end of the sales period. Your pipeline analytics should answer these questions with precision: ...

Frontline sales managers have to coach, manage, be engaged with and sell alongside the sales team. They need to understand the analytics of how a deal moves through the sales funnel to be more effective in coaching. ...

One of the most valuable qualities in life is your ability to maximize the value of anything you buy, acquire, or are given. You have to know when you’re leaving money on the table, paying too much or not getting enough value out of something. ...

Business leaders from all over the country expected on May 18th at Downtown TREX ...

ST. LOUIS— Recently, Gov. Eric Greitens announced four business expansions across the state including TopOPPS, Inc. which is growing their startup in St. Louis City, with plans to create more than 35 new jobs. ...

Do you "trust" your forecast? For many, it’s that time again…..It’s time to forecast for next quarter.  For serious sales leaders, this is no trivial task. ...

  Chris Noordyke is the Chief Revenue Officer at Blue Medora, and a new customer of TopOPPS. Chris posted this blog on LinkedIn about how his team achieved great results from their 1-on-1s using TopOPPS technology. My team likes to win and they know that knowing their metrics is what it takes. Through automation of our policies, systems, and tools we have reduced the amount of time the sales team needs to focus on our CRM system to less than fifteen minutes per day.  My reps appreciate the time we take to review how they’re doing and strategize how to blow their number out. Since implementing these two coaching strategies, we have seen reduced sales cycle times and increased win rates. ...

  Clinton McDaniel, Enterprise Business Development and Channel Sales Leader at GENBAND, posted this article on LinkedIn on January 28th, and graciously gave us permission to post it on our blog. ...

A sure-fire method to extend the sales cycle, add confusion to the forecast, and lose more deals is to have an informal sales process.  Having a B2B sales process that’s too simplistic leads to inconsistency and confusion. Imagine if a recipe just listed “add ingredients, mix, then heat”. Or a football running play, like the counter, was described as “run, fake, handoff”.  You would not have much success in the outcome of either of those scenarios.  So, don’t expect much sales growth when you have a few general sales stages that leaves a lot to the imagination.  Your reps will be all over the place when they strategize on next steps, report deal status or provide a forecast.  Your sales process has to be well aligned with the activity that goes into a successful sale - that is based on how your customers buy.  It should also help in making decisions on next steps and be consistently understood by the entire sales team (sales rep, sales ops, sales management). ...

Sales reps don't always give their managers the ability to forecast in one general way. No matter how much a manager will try to promote certain behaviors throughout their sales team, some sales teams will just have a variety of sales personalities that can forecasting an ordeal. However, there are optimal forecasting methodologies for different types of sales reps and knowing the different methods could make or break your quota this quarter. ...

Business Intelligence software for sales reporting is missing the mark.  It makes it easier to build a report with elegant looking graphs - but the substance of the reports doesn’t provide real information.  Most often, sales analytics produced from BI tools is just a roll up of numbers called out in a forecast call.  So the sales leader and the sales rep have a lot of work to do to make these reports provide any value. ...