In an effort to test the impact of different incentives, a global telecommunications firm worked with BIWORLDWIDE to study the performance of its call center employees. Our findings confirmed previous research: non-monetary rewards drive greater performance than cash and cash equivalents.  We also found that individual goal setting delivers stronger results than tiered goals. In other words, setting your own goal improves performance significantly more than receiving pre-assigned goals.

Over the past several years, Qvidian has surveyed hundreds of executives and sales leaders around the world from various industries, markets, and company sizes to create a comprehensive ongoing study of the changing objectives and challenges facing sales leaders.   This Sales Execution Trends Report investigates new obstacles sales organizations face to meet these objectives, as well as explores current conditions and investment areas needed to improve sales execution; providing further market insight into the state of sales today. 

Sales are the lifeblood of every business. A company that is more effective at selling its products will out perform its competitors, even if they offer higher quality or better value. It is, therefore, essential for businesses toemploy a highly dedicated and motivated sales staff. While many companies reward salespeople on a commission basis, research demonstrates that non-cash incentives such as gift cards are more effective at improving motivation, boosting performance, and increasing a company’s bottom line. 

Common wisdom to increase production would dictate a change in the monetary compensation plan. Pay more cash and get more results. Everyone likes money - it is a simple and rational choice. And if money is so desirable, why not use it as a reward to induce more desired behavior? Many corporations do just that. It is undeniable that money works to drive behavior, and money used as an incentive yields positive results - up to a point. The fact, however, is that money is not the optimal reward to get extra effort from people.

As sales organizations endeavor to escape the constricted economy of the 2009 recession, one of their most significant barriers is stagnant progess regarding bringing their sales cycle under control. Aberdeen research conducted in March, 2010 for the benchmark study of 441 corporate sales teams,Automating Lead-To-Win: Shrinking the Sales Cycle and Focusing Closers on Sealing More Deals, included 37 companies currently deploying CPQ technology, and analysis shows that these organizations are realizing concrete performance advantages over other survey respondents.

Without a doubt, technology has become a great tool for improving the effectiveness of B2B marketing. Social media, marketing automation, mobile marketing, and search engine arketing all aid in efficiently generating a high volume of leads. Whether marketing teams support sales efforts by generating and nurturing high quality leads or following up on events, technology can make their work more efficient and productive. However, smart businesses know that purchasing decisions are made by human beings who respond to personal interactions with other human beings. Though many simple business transactions can exist entirely online, effective marketing practices must include a human touch.

Team selling today is no longer required just for blockbuster business-to-business sales pitches. Whether you are in consulting, investment banking, or technology or are a financial advisor, home remodeler, or lawyer, pivotal meetings with customers and prospects now often involve more people — on both sides of the table. In fact, according to Harvard Business Review, "…the number of people involved in B2B solutions purchases has climbed from an average of 5.4 two years ago to 6.8 today."

In today’s sales environment—where product and service solutions and customer relationships are growing more complex—there is an increasing need to continually raise the skill level of salespeople. Managers play a critical role in making sure those skills are learned and used. Statistics speak loudly that manager support/coaching is the number one action that can amplify organizational sales performance: Organizations can gain a 29% increase in top-line salesforce performance due to the skills of sales managers, independent of the skills of their salespeople. Manager coaching has a great impact on performance over and above the impact of training alone. In our study, while just training salespeople resulted in a 43% improvement in performance, when manager coaching was added, overall performance improved 67%, a 24% improvement over training alone. Unfortunately, sales manager coaching is at an all-time low, resulting in as much as 85% of sales skills never being used to drive performance. Why aren’t sales managers dialing up the decibels?  

Competing in the world of selling today means understanding the changing world of your buyers and adjusting your sales approach accordingly. The biggest change for sellers is that the game has gotten harder, and sellers need to execute at a higher level than ever before to compete. Committing to this level of change is the difference between college sports and pro. The players are bigger. The game is faster. The conditions are more challenging.

Business leaders look for predictability. They seek insight from mounds of data to get just a glimpse of the future. They demand their sales and marketing executives put the business on the right path to meeting or exceeding sales and margin goals. Sales executives create detailed business plans to identify new opportunities and retain existing customers.  They train sales reps and channel partners on product benefits and teach them to overcome objections. They develop compensation plans aligned with corporate goals to encourage growth. Marketing leaders identify competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. They define buyer personas and construct profiles to ensure the right messages reach the right prospects. They carefully map out every step of the buyer’s journey to know when and how to influence behaviors. All this to increase the likelihood of success, to gain more certainty and predictability. Shouldn’t your sales incentive program work this hard to engage your participants? Knowing how and when to nudge your participants could mean the difference between blowing past your goals and scrambling to explain a disastrous failure. This eBook maps the sales incentive journey which participants embark upon when engaging with a program. We’ve developed it from insights gained during almost 50 years of observing and influencing participants, and it can help put your program on the road to predictable success. Click below to download this eBook.​

Why Your ROI Story Is Stronger Than You Think If you’re in charge of training a sales team, you know how hard it is to ensure they properly receive and retain training while in the field. But since organizations often treat sales training as an unavoidable cost of doing business, you may find it even harder to justify investing in technology that would improve your learning program. Sales, sales enablement, and sales training leaders often don’t realize how much investing in sales training technology contributes to a stronger ROI. That’s because most companies haven’t instituted best practices for identifying the business impact of better sales learning. Most limit their tracking to activity metrics like usage and adoption, or they capture anecdotes about how a recent training contributed to closing a specific deal. Quantifying the full return on your sales training investments helps you more effectively champion your initiatives and win more resources. That way, you can improve your team’s performance and create a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement. Here are four sources of ROI you’re already delivering that you should capture to demonstrate how sales training contributes to the bottom line of your organization. Click below to download this eBook.

Sales is in an effectiveness crisis, with 47% of sales professionals failing (according to CSO Insights studies). It's easy to blame outside factors. But the truth is, if we're going to turn sales performance around, we have to take a good, hard look at sales process.  To achieve consistent results, your sales team needs an actionable and measurable sales process consisting of your best practices. It needs to be repeatable and easy to follow. Download this white paper to: Learn why mapping out a formalized sales process is worth the effort. Get practical guidance on how to do it successfully. Learn how technology makes effective execution achievable for any sales organization. See inside an organization that increased their profit margin by 50% by better executing their sales strategy.

Welcome to the 100 Sales Enablement Best Practices! We set out to curate best practices from sales enablement practitioners in the trenches so we could publish them for the benefit of the sales community. We invited the community to submit their best practice suggestions. As we reviewed all the submissions, it was difficult to find ones to exclude, as so many contributed valuable tips. When we narrowed the submissions to the 100 best practices provided by actual practitioners, we found found they naturally fell into five categories: Strategy, Leadership and Management, Training and Development, Content and Cadence, and Sales Coaching. While there were common threads, each best practice is a unique perspective on what all sales enablement leaders struggle with: how to provide sellers the right tools, skills, methods, content and processes to enable them to create more pipeline, nurture prospects, and improve win rates. We sincerely thank all those who took the time to submit their best practice. We hope you find these sales enablement best practices as valuable as we did. Mario Martinez Jr. CEO and Founder, Vengreso  

Companies around the globe have canceled sales meetings and training sessions and are enacting work from home policies to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. Yet sales enablement professionals must get new hires up to speed and keep teams on track in a world where face-to-face meetings are impossible. Traditional training and sales enablement approaches won’t solve this challenge. But building a virtual training program when you’ve relied on in-person sessions can feel like an overwhelming task. Fortunately, there are proven tactics that organizations can employ to train across geographies and time zones. Use this guide to learn how the right strategy and technology can help you manage high-performing virtual teams.

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.

The world of business has changed — especially for salespeople. The better you are, the more likely you are to get fired or retired - especially if you’re at the very top of your profession. Robert Workman’s Hired Gun II is the sales bible used by salespeople who want proven methods to defeat industry politics and stay at the top of your game. As a #1 salesperson, sales trainer and entrepreneur for over four decades, Robert shows you step-by-step how to ensure that adversity and politics don’t destroy your high-performance salescareer. He locks and loads both barrels with invaluable tools and secrets like: The risks of being the best and how to use them to your advantage. How to choose a mentor or coach who will provide the most value. Identifying internal company changes that aren’t in your best interest and leveraging them for your benefit. Using your single greatest asset to achieve top sales status and stay there.   Hired Gun II is the ultimate resource for top performing salespeople to maximize sales, crush the competition and use today’s hardball business tactics to your advantage.

Managing remote workers has always been challenging, particularly with sales teams where everything is measured on productivity and results. With more employees working from home than ever, sales managers must learn to manage a distributed workforce from a distance. For those organizations new to the world of a remote workforce, managing from a distance has presented unforeseen challenges.  So how do we know, then, if our sales team is cut-out for remote work? How do you gauge how well your team will adapt? We don’t have all of the answers today, but we can take a look at what successes and challenges remote sales teams have experienced, what new challenges organizations are seeing and how they are addressing them, and how sales managers can support, engage, motivate, and assess their newly remote workforce. We can use this information to help our salespeople adjust and thrive in a remote environment. 

There are no best-sellers written about middle performers who stayed in their lane. But there are libraries written about the well-loved top performers. And bottom performers get plenty of attention, in part because sales managers would rather drag them along than replace them.  Here is why the next chapter in your company’s history should focus moving the middle.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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