Based upon ES Research Group's experience and regular surveys, most decisions regarding third-party sales training content providers are made for the wrong reasons in the wrong way. The result is wasted time, money and significant lost business opportunity. 

In this new workshop, which is based on sales principles in Selling to the C-Suite and social selling strategies from The New Handshake: Sales Meets Social Media, professional salespeople learn to integrate the use of social selling skills and business intelligence tools into the sales process to develop, maintain and leverage relationships with C-Suite executives. 

When it comes to setting quotas and driving revenue, certain data and analytics are critical. There are tools on the market today that can empower your sales team to be far more effective at closing more prospects while eliminating wasted time searching for collateral and reconstructing contact histories, all while giving you actionable insights to improve close rates across the sales organization.

If your sales team has not been trained on the latest features and techniques, then they are at a competitive disadvantage. Social Selling is no longer a cutting edge practice. LinkedIn is 13 years old! Many salespeople are now driving a significant percentage of their pipeline through outbound social networking and posting content to attract buyers. According to Forbes, 78% of salespeople using social selling techniques outperform their peers.

Lack of emotional intelligence skills is the one of the biggest and overlooked reason for missed revenue goals. Often, salespeople know what to do; however, in tough selling situations, they let nonproductive emotions take over. They discount too soon, write practice proposals without proper qualification and continue to meet with non-decision makers. Their inability to execute the right selling behaviors during stressful situations lead to poor sales results. When it comes to sales, emotional intelligence skills are every bit important as hard selling skills.

Given the evolution of B2B buying cycles, sales managers must continually acquire and adopt new skills to effectively lead, compete and win. Yet too often, when evaluating their team's performance, sales managers focus exclusively on performance metrics such as quarterly bookings or quota achievement. 

The #1 challenge salespeople face is getting to their decision-makers quickly. Seasoned reps recognize that getting a meeting before clients know they have a need is even more critical. Some people say it takes seven to 12 touches to reach prospects. Is that how you want your team spending their time?

Uncommunicated expectations are often unmet expectations. That won't fly when you are trying to talk with your customers' executives! With complex solutions, often it becomes clear that higher-level support is required to make the sale. What does it take to engage your customers' executives in a meaningful way? "C"-suite executives are busy and hard to reach. They are, however, willing to meet with salespeople, but with very specific expectations. In order to be effective, your sales people need to plan carefully for the call, do their homework, and, most importantly, understand those "secret" expectations. 

Barbara Giamanco, one of the first evangelists of leveraging social media in sales, wakes you up to the reality of selling in today's digitally driven marketplace. Buyer behavior has changed with CEB reporting that customers do early stage research on products, people and companies 57% of the time before engaging sales. This shift in buyer behavior and expectations heightens the need for salespeople to implement a social selling strategy to achieve measurable results. The problem is that many sellers are using social selling tactics to short-cut the selling process leading to wasted time and no solid ROI.

How do you ensure your time and financial investment in sales training pays off? People often talk about tools that enhance sales productivity. In this webinar, we explore the common reasons sales training fails. By understanding what these pitfalls are and avoiding them, you'll set the course for successful training initiatives that lead to increased sales performance and long-term revenue growth.

Join LinkedIn for a frank discussion about how the professional network enables sales teams to engage buyers on their platform much earlier in the sales process.  Ralf VonSosen and Koka Sexton from LinkedIn Sales Solutions have spent the last half decade evangelizing social selling and its impact on sales organizations.

In a recent study on top sales execution trends, 58% of buyers disengage with sales teams and stay with the status quo. The number one reason buyers disengage is that salespeople did not present value effectively or were not aligned to buyers' specific business challenges. In today's competitive marketplace, the combination of a strong set of sales skills and a disciplined mindset will make the difference.

It seems as if Social Selling is being talked about everywhere by everyone who is anyone in the world of sales and marketing. Yet, many sales reps haven’t adopted effective methods for selling in our digital age, or worse, are doing damage to their reputations and opportunities by fumbling their way through and alienating prospects in the process.

This webinar will help participants discover the specific activities and day-to-day operations of a truly effective corporate sales coach. Tim will host this session with guest Michael Bigley from Zones, an international technology enterprise provider.

Managing your sales team to top prospecting performance begins with setting and monitoring performance expectations, then holding your team accountable. Setting the expectations is the easy part. Holding your sales team accountable is a different matter entirely. To make matters worse, the process is different with eager new hires than with the senior salespeople and creates a potential disconnect across your team.

As the Internet has changed B2B buying habits, Social Selling has proven to be an effective way to reach decision makers. Still, Social Selling has been a random, grass roots approach for most corporations. That is because apps like LinkedIn and Twitter are free tools that some sales people started using before most corporations implemented any standard training. Now, sales leaders are wondering how to standardize and manage social activities to achieve higher sales productivity.

Trainers and 'experts' talk about ways to convert more calls. But, what are the sales skills and marketing tactics that actually matter to closing more business over the phone?

Many companies make a significant investment in their sales force since this is the front line in promoting their products and services. Optimizing the use of this resource is a continuous challenge affected by many internal and external factors. As these factors constantly change, firms repeatedly must address major strategy issues to ensure continued success.

What's the difference between training targeted specifically at front-line sales managers versus general leadership training targeted at other supervisory functions within an organization? Unfortunately, in many cases, nothing. While it is clear that there is merit to tying sales manager training to an organization's competency model, most of the training sales managers receive tends to be too blunt of an instrument to address the day-to-day realities of sales management.

Today's sales and account management environment requires a level of leadership skills that not only gets things done through others (many of whom do not directly report to them) but also develops the next generation of sales leaders. Coaching has proven to be an effective way to improve sales performance as well as attract and retain sales talent.

To avoid the pitfalls of competing on price, salespeople are often told to differentiate themselves and their offering by "selling the value." Selling the value implies that the salesperson either truly understands what the customer values, or that the value offered is perceived as significantly different from the competing offerings. All too often, neither one of these is true.

Industry research indicates that the average tenure for corporate sales leaders is 22 months. As a new sales leader, you're walking into a world of unknowns - and you have a short runway to make an impact. The first six months are critical to create momentum and demonstrate measurable results for the company.

Most people operate in an environment where they fail to see, tap into and leverage most of the opportunities that constantly surround them. When sales and marketing managers help their teams to better identify, categorize and target specific and available opportunities, their team members will begin to see, act and do things differently. Using specific tools and a proven-effective process, managers can show their people how to remove their opportunity blinders, how to get out of their comfort zones, and how to seize opportunities that lead to greater personal and professional performance and success.