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)

  Several years ago, I gave a speech to about 300 businesswomen, "How to Manage your Time for Success. After the talk, I handed out a simple handout of tips and exercises. Afterward, two women came up to me and asked if they could "use" my handout packet. They were the Circulation Managers for Working Woman magazine (readership about one million) They wanted to use the booklet as a "premium" - a free gift for new subscribers. I was delighted but said that since this was my copyrighted material I couldn’t allow them to reproduce the booklets; instead, I would sell them the booklets they wanted. After some negotiating, they ordered 100,000 copies of a 12-page booklet, which I wrote, designed and had printed. Click here to see the full list of Influence "hacks" 

Forrester conducted an online survey with 440 respondents and four interviews with sales enablement strategy decision-makers in North America to explore this topic. We found that organizations understand the value of agile content, but can’t always produce and use agile content across the enterprise. This recent Forrester report, Agile Content Strategies Deliver Business Results And Drive Sales Adoption, reveals how sales content has evolved and how business leaders must adapt. Download your copy today to see how you can overcome business pressures changing sales content management. You’ll learn: 3 key sales content research findings Why marketing content is an essential sales tool How lack of resources and incentives limit sales content impact 3 agile content best practices to increase buyer engagement 4 recommendations to gain significant business benefits

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 oranization. This guide will demonstrate.

Think about the growth your company could achieve by tripling your revenue. That’s what one company was able to do by following this free guide, Why Your Hiring Process Is Broken and How to Fix It. It enabled them to hire more people like their top performers, ultimately achieving a 338% boost in annual revenue. You can do it too, and it’s easier than you might think. Learn how to supercharge your hiring process to build a team of all-stars that can dramatically grow your pipeline and consistently close deals.

Today’s buying experience is extremely challenging to navigate - with a plethora of choices, easy access to research, and competing (and often contradictory) voices. Buyers struggle with being overwhelmed, indecisive, and trusting the information that’s presented to them (among other things).   For buyer-facing teams, the struggle is also very real. How can they communicate the value of their solution in a way that meets buyers’ wants, needs, and expectations while meeting their own goals and those of the organization?   We teamed up with Heinz Marketing in a recent research study to discover the roadblocks revenue- generating teams encounter in preparing buyer-facing teams to be ready in today’s market. We did so with a vision of the future to bring you recommendations on how to invigorate sales enablement and facilitate changes for buyer-centric sales strategies to create highly personalized experiences that people and brands will love and therefore increase the bottom line.

Work isn’t working for a large percentage of employees. If there is any hope of reversing the current challenges of recruiting and retaining skilled, productive workers across all professions, companies must get better at winning the hearts of their employees. This white paper takes a closer look at three core principles that managers should adhere to in order to increase productivity by winning the hearts of their employees. The strategies are offered by Marcus Buckingham, the head of people and performance research at ADP Research Institute (ADPRI).

Sales enablement intelligence is a data-driven approach to learning, coaching, and content to maximize revenue per rep. Sales enablement intelligence harnesses your sales analytics to help you identify strengths and weaknesses—and gives you actionable insights to achieve your goals. More importantly, sales enablement intelligence will help you lead a winning team.

A year into virtually all sales teams working from home, salespeople have adapted to the new normal of selling and organizations have updated their tech stacks to help their teams through the remote process. However, now that teams have acclimated to remote selling, it’s time to turn your sales team into a data-driven machine and accelerate pipeline, advance deals, and close more revenue. Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered guided coaching is an investment in your sales team’s productivity. AI assistants identify coaching needs in real-time, providing your reps with the right messaging during live calls to improve performance and progress deals. With the guided coaching capabilities of conversation intelligence technology, sales leaders can provide their remote salespeople with even more informed coaching insights than they could while in the office. This guide demonstrates: What sets real-time AI-guided coaching apart from other sales tools How AI-guided coaching can benefit your sales team What to look for in an AI-guided coaching provider Features to look for in a solution, and more!

As we enter 2022, Covid-19 and uncertainty continue to impact every aspect of incentives. Adaptation, flexibility, and communication will continue to be key as companies weigh their options about bringing employees together, whether it’s opening the office or travelling on an incentive trip. Incentive professionals are called to motivate a changing workforce while corporate goals also continue to change. For the foreseeable future, a remote and hybrid workforce is here to stay. A Mercer survey last May found that 83% of employers will continue to provide flexibility at greater scale post pandemic. Given the importance of recruitment, retention, and engagement, incentive programs will be more important than ever. Dramatic hiring shifts are driving companies to examine how to be even more competitive in the job market, and a robust incentive program is an important part of a company’s full benefits package. According to the IRF’s Industry Outlook for 2022, overall incentive budgets are expected to increase by 34% in 2022, with the per-person spend increasing to $806 from $764 the prior year - although these budgets will need to accommodate price increases resulting from workforce, inventory, and supply chain challenges. Click below to download this important report.

Learn the #1 skillset sales leaders and professionals most need to create personal success today.   Sales is the growth engine of any successful organization. Modern sales skills will position you to earn trust and help your clients solve their biggest challenges. These skills are even more critical in times of disruption and uncertainty. Written for sales leaders and sales professionals, this eBook offers modern strategies to win new business, expand your current clients, and create stronger relationships.

Good onboarding is critical for sellers—it sets them up for success or failure. Yet too often, it's overlooked or poorly conceived.   In our new guide, you'll learn how to ensure your onboarding process is efficient, engaging, and effective.   Download the guide to discover: Proven onboarding frameworks that drive results A simple checklist to build a seamless onboarding experience Real-world success stories that highlight high-impact onboarding ...and much more. Get your copy today.

Download this eBrief to find out how to streamline sales content management to a digital approach that solves content challenges—for sellers AND buyers.

Before you embark on expanding your initial sales team, focus on equipping your sales team for success. Thinking about your sales organization as a machine will help you focus on the critical success factors (outlined in this e-book) needed to build a repeatable and predictable revenue stream for your company.

The foundation of Customer Success is an effective process for customer onboarding, implementation and launch. This reduces the time it takes for customers to see value from their purchase, known as Time to First Value (or TTFV). But what exactly is TTFV, why is it so important, and how can you minimize it? In this whitepaper, we explore the concept of Time to First Value, which is just one aspect of Imparta’s Customer Success & Renewals program, and describe the 7 techniques you can use to reduce TTFV to benefit your customers, and your own organization. 

Uncover the sales negotiation fundamentals that are most often overlooked and misunderstood by salespeople, including both positional (win-lose) and principled (win-win) negotiation styles. You’ll also learn how to defend against the six most advanced procurement tactics that you may not even realize you are coming up against, such as: Best-of-the-Best Pricing Reverse Auctions and eBids Limited Authority Discomfort Nibbling Reopening

Modern Corporate Training Today, modern corporate training programs must focus on building a culture of learning to engage, train, and retain employees. They must also prove that these programs impact business growth. To help you prioritize initiatives, we’ve identified six of the most important trends shaping corporate training today.