Executive Summary How do you know if your executive presentations are effective? In this white paper I am going to give you a series of tests you can use to form an objective assessment about the quality and effectiveness of your presentation. I have spent nearly fifteen years researching and reviewing literally hundreds of sales tools and presentations from big companies to small boutiques, and many in between, and believe the effectiveness of an economic impact sales tool used in (and after) the sales process boils down to these important criteria:

Soft skills play a key role in your sales reps' ability to successfully turn a prospect into a client. This eBook discusses how your sales team can put themselves in their prospects' shoes emotionally, overcome any objection thrown at them and close the sale. Click below to download this eBook.

Measuring the impact of learning and readiness initiatives on revenue is the billion dollar question. In today’s uncertain environment, the answer is even more important. Rapidly changing markets, disrupted supply chains, and increasingly knowledgeable customers mean that companies must upskill employees to compete. But the ability to optimize learning—and maximize productivity—takes deep insight into how employees think, learn, and perform, insight which many companies lack. Today, there’s a new breed of platform that combines learning, communication, and collaboration tools with analytics for a holistic view of learning and development’s impact on results. Workforce readiness technology allows organizations to move beyond assessments and scores to understand how to target activities that move the needle.

Over the past year, I have written  blog  post after blog post at my site, http://www.thesalesblog.com.  Most of what I have written was written to be published later as book.  That book is coming in the not too distant future.      Of  all  the  topics I have written on, what I have written about cold calling has always struck  a  nerve, eliciting strong opinions—either for or against. Much of the email I receive is for advice and  ideas  about  how to be more effective at cold calling, or it is to remind me that Sales 2.0 has replaced cold calling (an idea to which I am vehemently opposed with every fiber of my being).      I collected a few posts on cold calling here to serve as a guide for those who would endeavor to improve their cold calling skills.  I hope you find it useful in improving your effectiveness and that you adopt these ideas into all of your prospecting activities.  

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

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

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.

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).

At CeBIT 2014, Gary D. Burnette, VP of sales transformation at IBM, gave some insight into why and how IBM had deployed Sugar from SugarCRM to support a global sales force of more than 45,000 sellers within 12 months of a successful pilot. IBM's successful approach provides a valuable lesson for organizations embarking on major multi-country or global customer relationship management (CRM) deployments.

Improving sales performance has never been more important for major global corporations. After years of recession-induced cost cutting, leaders are putting increasing emphasis on implementing go-to-market strategies to boost both top- and bottom-line results, and expecting their sales organizations to execute them. Unfortunately, experts agree that most growth strategies fail. As competition from low-cost competitors increases, and aggressive buyers become even more demanding, it has become even harder to close the gap between go-to-market strategy as articulated by senior management, and its profitable execution, when the salesperson is face-to-face with the customer.

Download this helpful infographic as a reminder of the 4 steps for leading virtual teams.  Outcomes of using Improv techniques to manage virtual teams Greater trust within virtual teams  Speed to deliver on business outcomes  Radical collaboration = quicker turnaround  Balance accountability with autonomy  Accountability and engagement on tough projects  Practical skills to manage difficult or negative conversations in a positive way  Techniques to improve empathy and patience

Selling has grown increasingly complex and difficult. Research shows that over the past 5 years win rates have fallen and no-decision rates have grown.   Complete the form at right to download this article and learn the 3 questions that every sales leader must ask to make the best go/no-go decision.

  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" 

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)

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 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?

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.

ASK MORE, TELL LESS Many of the skills of a great coach are equally effective for a great leader - emotional intelligence, able to provide feedback, capable of creating strong working relationships, comfortable challenging the thinking of another, willing to ‘speak the truth’ when it’s most important, and the list goes on. Of course the question is which coaching skills might a leader adopt to get the best results in these all-important human interactions. Click below to download this White Paper.

With unprecedented adoption among businesses and consumers, the iPad is quickly becoming the preferred device for mobile sales professionals. Find out how enterprise adoption of iPads gives organizations an advantage when in sales and marketing.

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.

Read research by Aberdeen Group on how top-performing sales teams are using contemporary technology tools to reduce their sales cycles and increase their win / loss "batting average". Learn about how to better leverage people, process and technology to optimize your sales cycles. 

A sales rep turns a corner while driving to one of the biggest calls of the year when a jolt from under his car forces a change of plans: he just ran over a pothole and now needs to swap out his tire, except he’s never actually done a tire change by himself before. There’s no time to wait for AAA so he must figure it out himself. What does he do? In 2019, he calmly pulls up YouTube and watches a user-generated video demonstration of exactly how to perform the tire change on the make, model and year of his car, before turning around, grabbing his tools, and successfully executing the task himself. Within twenty minutes he’s back on the road driving toward the meeting feeling ready for anything. This is what it feels like to be ready in a world where you can pull a device out of your pocket and extract whatever day-to-day lessons you need from somebody else’s life experiences. Sales reps already use consumer apps like Waze to learn about open routes in real time based on other drivers’ experience of current road conditions, or Duolingo so they can practice and learn new languages using friendly competition with other would-be travelers. But what about the tasks involving the actual substance of salespeople’s work? What if our rep were to hit a different kind of "pothole" that day: one in the form of a text message from his internal champion letting him know that the company’s CFO would be joining the call unexpectedly? He doesn’t normally call on CFOs, and would need a five-minute debrief with a colleague to understand the pertinent discussion points to use, but no one is available right now. Click below to download this eBook.

Most sales managers I know have a love/hate relationship with the prima donnas on their sales teams. They love the star player’s passion and hard work; they hate the self-centered behaviors that demoralize or discourage the rest of the team. That leaves sales managers with a dilemma: If they come down hard on a prima donna, that salesperson may just take his/her talents elsewhere. Not good. But a sales manager can’t afford to ignore the situation, either, because prima donnas are often engaged in behaviors detrimental to the team. A simple truth in sales management is that what you don’t confront, you condone. What can you do then?

It's not WHAT you do, it's HOW you think. Your Mindset Impacts Your Sales Results You've probably paid thousands for sales training, read every book on sales, and devour all the weekly tips sales gurus have to offer. You may have applied some of this knowledge fleetingly, but never achieved any results you could brag about. Deep down, you've wondered, 'I know what I should do, but why can't I seem to make myself do it?' What if you could discover what common beliefs hold you back, learned how to change them, and could create a process that would unleash better results and higher sales?   Download the eGuide: Mindset Matters and discover how certain beliefs impact your ability to be successful and improve in sales. Get actionable steps you can do now to develop a sales growth mindset and get the results you seek.