White Papers & eBooks


Our post-pandemic recovery has left us with instability in our supply chain, inflation, and a unique work environment. As a result, even the most solid retention and growth strategies must adapt and continue to raise the bar to ensure their contributions to brand and business value keep pace. There has never been a better time to reconsider the role of Business-to-Business (B2B) incentive and loyalty strategies. This ebook makes a case for why B2B incentive and loyalty program strategies must be refreshed or redesigned. Then, we will explore how to do that by exposing the three major reasons brands do not make these changes today. Finally, we will provide a checklist of the steps you should follow to refresh and reinvigorate your programs. Brands who simply roll over their program from year to year risk, at best, missing out on incremental revenue that could be achieved by reassessing your target audience's values. At worst, these brands face customer retention issues and lose share to their competitors. On the other hand, brands that redesign and make their programs smarter can experience about 20% gains in Return On Investment or more. Let’s dig in! 
It’s the most important thing you can do as a sales leader: Master the skill of sales coaching It’s the difference between hitting your number every once in awhile and achieving over-goal performance year after year. It’s the difference between moving up in your career or moving out. Yet so few sales leaders know how to coach their salespeople. Do You? Sales Coaching Success: Five Secrets Will help you: ✓ Know why the goals you set with your reps aren’t working very well. ✓ Discover the powerful habit that supercharges any salesperson. ✓ Create a cadence of accountability that drives real revenue results. ✓ Learn a proven process for conducting effective weekly one-on-ones. ✓ And best of all, love being a sales leader again!
Introduction When Peter McLaughlin and I first began talking about the topics of communication and feedback specifically, we quickly realized we had several things in common. We both felt that we were not particularly effective in giving feedback. In fact, we felt that we were pretty bad. We enjoyed the challenge and the positive results that come with a successful feedback conversation. We wondered why we had not naturally learned to give feedback. We agreed that if we were provided with a roadmap or model for giving feedback, we would have performed much more effectively in such situations. Looking back at particular examples, we both had a sense of delight from the positive encounters, and a sense of dread over the sessions that left us feeling discouraged, beaten down and lackluster. So why did we begin a project filled with such negative emotion? The answer—both to improve our own feedback skills and to examine what it would take to teach a new perspective and help "turn the opinion tide" that has made feedback a dreaded negative topic. Who doesn’t want to get better? Have you ever known anyone who said, "Nah, I’ll just stay mediocre and by the way, I don’t want a raise, promotion or exciting project…" Probably not. Our internal drive propels us to strive, learn and improve.
The Sales Leader’s Guide, 2023: Mitigate Market Risk and Drive Sustained Revenue in an Uncertain Economy With 2023 around the corner, it’s no secret that rumors of a recession are looming as inflation is at its peak and the market continues to fluctuate. While economic uncertainty is difficult to ignore, what does it mean for sales leaders and businesses? Readjusting expectations and evaluating processes will be a big part of successfully mitigating market risk and driving revenue in an uncertain economy. However, rather than reacting to market conditions, the successful leader will purposely pivot - using strategy, data, and resources efficiently to make better, data-driven decisions for their organization. With employee churn at a high, factors including upskilling and retaining talent, focusing on the quality of conversations, streamlining your tech stack to preserve time and budget, and mitigating organizational risk are just a handful of factors to consider when evaluating your readiness for the new year. This eBook outlines the following ways in which sales leaders can purposely pivot and utilize both data, technology, and strategy to remain resilient and overcome obstacles presented by a changing economic environment: Readjust your expectations to adapt to the changing economy Ramp new hires to full revenue productivity sooner Focus on quality conversations, not the quantity Mitigate organizational and budget changes by improving sales effectiveness Consolidate resources to better preserve time and budget Streamline tech to provide a seamless loop of insights and integrations Tailor your communications to avoid fines or upset consumers Ensure that your decisions are data-driven; it’s more important than ever
We all know we need to coach sales reps. In the face of The Great Resignation, a staggering 60% of reps say that they’re more likely to leave their job if their manager is a poor coach (*The Center for Sales Strategy.) However, successful coaching is not always as easy as it seems. A sales leader’s time is spent on a multitude of tasks - accurately forecasting revenue, understanding where deals are, getting on calls with customers - and often, as a result, they don’t know where to begin a formal coaching process. Whether your goal is to improve rep performance, onboard new hires faster, speed up your sales cycle, or boost retention rates, effective sales coaching driven by data can be a game-changer for your organization. This guide demonstrates: How sales tech can identify coaching best practices and increase coaching effectiveness and efficiency. How to use data to improve sales coaching, including real-life examples. How to leverage sales tech to better identify "who" to coach, "what" to coach, and "how" to coach it!
Your buyers’ lives, preferences, and expectations have changed. Two-thirds or 67% of buyers prefer remote or digital interactions — and they expect those interactions to be substantive and valuable. They hold your sellers to a high standard. That means the buying experiences of the past — in-person meetings, transactional conversations, and linear sales funnels — no longer deliver. Read this Essential Guide to the Buying Experience of the Future to learn how a unified, three- pillared revenue enablement framework of preparation, tools and assets, and communication empowers your customer-facing teams to thrive in modern selling environments.
As many of us are all too painfully aware, we have had to adjust to "new normals" in all arenas of life; a noisy and unpredictable universe has accelerated the need for better Influence.  Of course, technology is transforming our very lives, but, even if we’re all connected, we’re losing our personal touch. Our interpersonal skills are becoming rusty. Indeed, studies by the World Economic Forum and Harvard Business Review say that Influence and Social Skills will be among the top required capabilities by the year 2023 and beyond.
Several years ago I got word that a large tech company was going to send a "Request for Proposals" out to several vendors for a large consulting and training contract. My advantages - I had already worked with several divisions of the company. I understood the culture - its habits, strengths, and weaknesses and "lingo". My work had gotten consistently good ratings from the groups I had worked with. My disadvantages -Would the decision-makers worry that my "lean and mean" operation could not deliver on a huge contract? Who were the decision-makers, and how would they decide? What were their decision-criteria?
Aside from my usual training/consulting business at that time,I also had a business in what was called "premiums or "custom publishing". You have likely gotten a mailing from a magazine, offering you a subscription with a free gift - a gadget, a diary, or a book of tips or ideas. I’d come up with an idea for one of the magazines in the Time-Life group. First, they would test it by send out a mailing offering my idea as well as two other ideas to a test audience. Whichever of the 3 ideas got more responses was the winner, and that idea was then "rolled out" for a much larger project, sometimes to a million or more potential customers. Usually, they got about 5,000 affirmative responses. What this meant, to a small vendor like me, was that I’d have to create the actual 5,000 booklets (at enormous cost, usually a loss) to fulfill the first 5,000 customers.
Several years ago, one of our Affiliates in the San Francisco Bay Area who said she had a "lead" for me from a large defense contracting company, which said they needed some training in "presentation skills". (let’s call her "C") Before going to the meeting, I learned that the division which had called was a group of elite physicists, who had not had a lot of work to do since U.S. involvement in wars had slowed down. (this was before 9/11,before our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq)
Displaying 11 - 20 of 146 total records
No Resources were found.