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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The search for the perfect balance between what your sales people say and what the data in your CRM reflects reminds me of reading about Ponce de Leon’s 16th century search for the Fountain of Youth. Expeditions were provisioned and  ships set sail for the new world, but despite great effort and expense, the fountain remained elusive and ultimately undiscovered. ...

GlobalHack II kicked off tonight at the Cortex Innovation District. ...

The evolution of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems has had a major impact on sales forces across the world. It’s given companies a place to store knowledge, which in turn gives them the opportunity to deepen customer understanding, grow revenue and improve internal communications. These are the benefits of CRM. ...

Venture For America, a nonprofit group that places college graduates with early-stage companies, has placed five of its fellows in St. Louis. ...

In the sales industry, you can teach many skills: how to create a report, how to negotiate on pricing and even how to craft a persuasive pitch. All of this instruction is done to lead to the greater objective of building a savvy sales team. One that has the confidence and edge in their ongoing training to close more deals. Of course, this is much easier written down on pen and paper than done. However, as competition in the global marketplace grows, it’s become more and more evident that such a task is not infeasible, nor a years long undertaking. ...

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  Managing the sales pipeline is absolutely one of the most critical processes for a sales manager or sales VP to master throughout their career. The sales pipeline is designed to show all opportunities from newly identified opportunities through opportunities about ready to close. Organizations that fail to have adequate pipeline visibility tend to experience major challenges in accurately predicting future revenue, analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the sales team, accelerating deals through the pipeline, and ultimately ending up with inaccurate forecasts and missing their quotas. ...

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Do you need more visibility into the sales pipeline? Need better sales forecasting? Evaluating tools and consulting to solve this problem? This article will simplify your decision making process and spell out exactly what to expect with our tool - no fluff, just the info. ...

OGSystems, a Washington, D.C., tech firm that develops software for federal and commercial clients, will spend $50,000 to sponsor the second GlobalHack competition. ...