Today, there’s a tool for everything. Technology is helping us find deals faster, and expediting necessary steps of the sales process so they close quicker. Most of them integrate into your CRM where you can access the information. Even still, you may need to be a Salesforce guru in order to piece it all together and there is no way everyone feels 100% confident that all the technology ties together seamlessly. Sales Stack Glue ...

Sales reps and sales executives both found TopOPPS’ opportunity specific updates very intuitive. Sales managers and sales executives thought the reporting within TopOPPS quickly and easily provides them with significant pipeline visibility. ...

Internally, you are familiar with the Expected Close Date (sometimes simply referred to as Close Date) that sales reps keep updated. Sometimes a sales team can have difficulty keeping these dates accurate; perhaps simply because of the volume of deals occurring, or because predicting the future is hard! ...

TopOPPS' forecasting methodology has a singular, core belief: People are different, and there is no one-size fits all.  We can stop flying blind through the quarter if our forecasts worked for each rep.  ...

                When I train sales manager to use TopOPPS, many want to focus on how to use TopOPPS for their one-on-one meeting with their sales reps.  It’s my experience that sales managers fall into two general camps when it comes to prepping for their one-on-ones: managers will spend time in their CRM gathering data or managers will not prep for their meetings and “wing it”.The first group will spend time in multiple CRM reports to get a better understanding of how their rep is performing while the second group will learn how their rep is performing only in their meeting. ...

A modern approach to consistency in the sales process. A sure-fire method to extend the sales cycle, add confusion to the forecast, and lose more deals is to have an inconsistent sales process. ...

Want to get to the next step? Of course, you do. You know that if there is no next step there is no opportunity. ...

You asked for 15 minutes on your prospect’s calendar thousands of times through emails. You cold called into hundreds of accounts asking for 15 minutes as well. ...

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. ...

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? ...

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”. ...

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. ...

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Overview In the previous post of this three-part series, we talked about the importance of sales management’s role in optimizing the pipeline.  This second part of the series talks about the impact of various roles of a sales team in the creation of an accelerated pipeline.  We will specifically look at the focus areas of sales representatives and sales operations and how they should interact. ...