Step 1: Coaching on Sales Techniques & Process ...

I’d have to say I agree with 99.9% of the insights in Matthew Dixon & Brent Adamson’s book, “The Challenger”, but not all of it. ...

Cold calling, lead hunting and everything else that goes into sales development should be easy, right? ...

Flawed thinking has it that there’s nothing important or exciting about the “middle.”  Just ask Jan Brady or any nose tackle on a defensive line.  But the middle of your sales funnel is really important – opportunities have to be watched and decisions made based on status and progress.  Which ones will make it?  Which ones will fall out? What’s my next step?  The decisions we make on opportunities in the middle of the pipeline will prevent surprises later and will help us to put the right resources on the right deals at the right time.  If we don’t make the right decisions, or worse, neglect these deals, it usually results in fallout, or what I call “zombie” deals that linger around cluttering up the pipeline. These zombie deals steal time away from us on thought process, manager conversations and important resources.  If we do go about it the right way though, more closes, faster cycles and accurate forecasts happen. ...

Remember BANT, that old way to qualify deals where we find Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline? Well guess what? It just doesn’t work anymore for SaaS sales. Here’s the reason why: ...

Identifying a sales process for a new business can be difficult. We are a perfect example of how matching your sales process with your customer’s buying habits is extremely important. As we’ve evolved our process and matched it with our customer’s habits, it’s become evident that gaining buy-in from all stakeholders is the most painful part. We came to a realization that getting buy-in from an entire team meant a few things, and one of those things was that we needed to be more transparent with our sales process. Who knew transparency can set expectations without causing an awkward moment? ...

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I may be biased but as the relationship between sales and technology continues to grow stronger, companies with tools like TopOPPS will have a significant competitive advantage. Today, it’s not just about getting the information into the system more efficiently, it’s also about what we do with that information once it’s there. CRMs are like relationships, you only get out what you put in. Unfortunately, CRMs are infamous for being  “junk in junk out” machines. So how can we trust the data? Better yet, how can we make the process of entering crucial data into the CRM quick and painless while still maximizing the amount of impactful information decision makers receive in return? ...

This may seem like a silly question - everyone knows what a sales process is, right? ...

What information can you extract from your sales forecast or sales pipeline? Does it help management understand which deals will close? Can management and the sales team rely on it? How confident does management feel when they discuss with senior management or the board about deals that are closing? ...

Usually when I hear the word “share”, it’s in a positive connotation and it’s in a sentence declaring something we should do. “We should share” is something we’ve heard since we were kids.  So, what if we completely shared our sales process with our prospects and existing customers that we have opportunities with? Could it be that we could engage more, drive deals quicker and be more predictive of which will close as a result? ...

TopOPPS is excited to be recognized in the Gartner's 2015 Market Guide for SaaS-Based Predictive Analytics Applications for B2B Sales and Marketing.  The guide is purposed to understand how these applications are helping B2B sales leaders more effectively win deals.  Gartner included TopOPPS due to its "focus and early success". ...

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Inaccurate sales forecasts are a great way to kill the board’s confidence in you.  So, let me tell you a personal narrative having to do with that. Right after getting out of a board meeting once, I found out that my sales forecast was way off.  A few of my bigger deals fell out that really changed the outlook.  It was one of my first board meetings with this particular group of investors, and I was hoping to gain a lot of confidence out of the gate. This did not help. ...

Overview As founder of two market-leading tech startups, and now a third company that is well on its way to be, I have a lot of experience in building sales teams. One thing that I’ve picked up along the way is that you have to be extremely aware of your company’s stage to determine the best time for adding to the team. Below are three stages typically experienced, and the strategies implemented based on where we were at as a company. This is my personal account of what we did and why. ...

As an experienced sales person you can always spot a rookie rep on a bad sales call. They have a lack of confidence in their voice, unprepared answers to the most common objections and then there is the epic meltdown: a 15 minute uninterrupted sales monologue. The client will try to interject, but there is no stopping this locomotive. The rookie will continue to spew out unnecessary information until they run out of breath. This is what we call “word vomit”. ...

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In today’s technology industry, business-to-business decisions are rarely made by one person. The typical buying decision cycle is overly democratized with input from the following personnel: ...

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