Edmunds believes in the philosophy of making their sellers more effective versus enabling them to sell better. They achieved staggering results utilizing Rehearsal’s video-based practice and coaching platform. Not only does Edmunds have greater confidence that training is being delivered accurately and consistently, but those that practiced with Rehearsal doubled the revenue of those who did not. 

The holiday season means major shopping. And your customers are looking for the best deals. As companies try different tactics to reward loyal customers and attract new business, some incentives will work better than others. Learn how you can stand out from the competition this year. Download our 2023 holiday sales incentives guide and learn how you can send digital gift cards that encourage customer loyalty and attract new business.

Imagine attending a dinner party where someone sitting next to you asks "So, What do you do for a living?" if you respond that you work as an accountant or an attorney, the person would undoubtedly nod in acknowledgement of a familiar answer. However, if you said "I'm the head of sales enablement for my company," the next question likely would be "What is sales enablement?" 

This preview chapter will allow you a peek into this guide to the iterative organization, the only kind of organization that can learn and adapt fast enough to keep up in today’s world. For anyone running a team of managers, or advising someone who does, it describes the fundamental behaviors that create iteration, explains how to implement them, and includes videos and online assessment to get the process started. Iterate defines what management really is and helps readers create a fast, flexible, focused management team that does it well. Ed Muzio, award-winning author, CEO, and "one of the planet’s clearest thinkers on management practice," provides a research-based blueprint for a management team that will take the next best step for the organization in any situation. This book enables senior leadership, front line and middle management, and human resource executives to equip their teams with both knowledge and practical skills so that they not only understand their own purpose but also perform that purpose well amidst ever-changing conditions. Iterate will help readers create measurable business results on any management team, of any size, in any industry where complex work and frequent change are the norm. Click below to download this preview.

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. 

Imagine your sales team gets invited to attend an exclusive networking event filled with senior decision-makers at companies that fit your ideal customer profile. Would you expect them to do their homework before they arrive at the event? How would you expect them to behave at the event? Would they grab a cocktail and stand against the wall for the entire event, quietly making comments to people as they pass? Or would they work the room, confidently striking up conversations with people they’ve researched online, connected with and began developing authentic relationships proving they have the experience these buyers are seeking from a seller? As a sales leader, you’d never hire a rep who couldn’t represent your brand at an important event without proven experience and know-how to conduct meaningful conversations with qualified buyers. This is precisely how high-performing and experienced sales professionals approach digital selling with LinkedIn.

The media sales industry, along with many others, took a hit during the pandemic. The industry has bounced back as it continues its transition from traditional to digital formats. Our recent 2023 State of Media Sales survey of nearly 500 media sellers and sales managers reveals the challenges they face are not unlike those across the selling profession. We also discovered the best ways for sales managers in every vertical to improve their outcomes this year.

Each sales opportunity presents its own unique dilemma in terms of identifying the "real buyer". Further examination of a sales opportunity will yield additional information regarding the viability of the opportunity as it relates to the product and service offerings available from the salesperson's company. One of the most important steps in the sales process is to identify the real buyer ‐ an individual I'll call the "relevant executive" for the sales opportunity. Recent research (like that shown in my book Selling to the C‐Suite) shows that key executives typically get involved early in the buying cycle to understand the issues creating the need for a solution. They will often delegate the middle phase of the buying cycle—exploring options, setting vendor criteria and evaluating solutions—to others at lower levels of the organization. Senior executives also get involved in the project again during the final phase to help plan the implementation and measure the results. That’s why waiting to get involved with an organization when the RFP is initially received can be problematic. The better strategy is to gain access to the relevant executive early in the buying cycle, at a time when it is possible to actually influence RFP criteria by showcasing the benefits and value of your products or services. Click below to download this paper to help you and your team develop the right strategy for targeting and engaging with the right - and relevant - executive.  

Today's B2B marketing organizations claim that the fundamental task of generating leads is their most significant challenge. Activities like social media marketing can be powerful, but they can also distract marketing from its core business objective, which is to generate qualified, actionable leads for sales. Outbound lead generation via telemarketing promises to resolve this challenge. Telemarketing generates high-quality leads that empower sales to drive business growth. However, many marketers' budgets are being examined with a critical eye. The phrase "do more with less" has become a dominant theme in many marketing departments. Marketing is being tasked to generate higher quality leads and do so with ever-decreasing budgets. Once marketing recognizes that telemarketing can be part of a cost-effective lead generation program, the next step is determining how to go about it. The primary consideration is whether it should be done in-house or outsourced.

At one time or another, every sales manager feels like they are stepping into an abyss.   They have to replace the sales rep who just left. Or they’re tasked with expanding their department to meet the challenge of growing sales for the company. Either way, they have to make a big decision.The candidate sitting in front of them could be an outstanding addition to the team, or they could be the manager’s worst nightmare.   Hiring an employee who turns out to be toxic can cost the company lost sales, higher rates of sales rep turnover, and turmoil. Research shows 1% of people are psychopaths and 4% are sociopaths, while another 2-3% of the population might end up behaving in a toxic way in the workplace. When you add it up, that’s one out of 13 people.   In this book, we offer a glimpse at 13 types of toxic personality types we’ve identified in the workplace for sales teams. We have ordered the chapters by the most difficult and problematic, the Jungle Fighter, to the least likely to be problematic, the Martyr. Using documented case studies, we also outline the steps you can take to address toxic behavior and restore harmony to your organization. In some cases, you may be able to adjust the work environment and coach employees who exhibit toxic behavior. In other cases, the best strategy may be to avoid hiring employees with toxic behavioral tendencies. If they are already on the payroll, you’ll have no choice but to get them out of your organization.

A recent survey conducted by SAVO Group of more than 500 executives at 125 successful companies found that organizations that practice sales enablement consistently out-performed the Fortune 500 average year-over-year growth rate by nearly four percentage points. This white paperdescribes the seven attributes that separate these top-performing companies from the rest and the ways in which you can enable your sales team to consistently make the sale and increase overall revenue.

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?  

Think about the best manager you ever had. We are assuming, of course, that you’ve had at least one good manager in your lifetime. C’mon, there’s got to be at least one. Think back to all the teams you’ve been on. This person could’ve been your boss at that horrible minimum-wage high school gig that you only showed up for because this person made it worthwhile. Maybe you had a strong leader during your college part-time work. Or, like many in today’s workforce, your first full-time, professional manager played a major part in developing you during your formative years into the kind of executive you are today.

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! 

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.

Analytics are at the heart of a modern data-driven business.   When it came to content, we used to rely almost entirely on anecdotes and guesswork. That is no longer good enough - content is at the heart of the sales and marketing process and we must know how it is being used and how it is performing.   Marketing Automation tools made that a reality for marketing content. They let marketers analyze and optimize content marketing efforts during the first half of the sales cycle, providing analytics to show how effectively content moves customers through the funnel. But until recently, as soon as a deal was handed off to the sales team, it entered a content black hole.    There has been no way to answer very basic questions about sales content. Do reps have what they need? Do they use it? Do customers pay any attention to it? Does any of this actually generate real revenue? Even in our increasingly data-driven world, sales content has remained back in the days of guess and hope. But an emerging set of Sales Enablement platforms has changed that. They manage sales content throughout your sales engagements and use analytics to give you full visibility into how that content performs.   This guide walks through eight reports that answer the key business questions about sales content and shows how to use them to optimize the way your company engages with customers.

Planning for the Next Normal Sellers are working harder than ever—and sales enablement has never been more important than it is today. The business of sales has been completely disrupted by COVID-19 and the resulting shutdown. At the start of the pandemic, you may have shifted overnight to virtual selling, with the expectation of returning to normal within a month or two. Experts now say we’re not going back to the way business was done. But the processes and tactics you put in place in the spring likely weren’t designed for the long term, and sales teams have often had to learn on-the-fly how to succeed when in-person meetings aren’t possible. It’s time to figure out what works in this new world and what doesn’t.

Many companies approach orientation like it's a formality. It has to be done, but no one wants to waste too much time on it. So, new employees are ushered in, given a quick tour of the office and a rundown of the benefits offered, and then they're expected to get right to work. It seems leaders assume that more detailed information on things like the company's processes and customers will simply be absorbed by new hires as they go along.

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.

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.

Mastering Virtual Selling Virtual selling—working a deal remotely when you can’t be there in person—is the new normal for B2B salespeople. But being a great virtual salesperson doesn’t mean simply conducting every meeting via video conference. Virtual selling means understanding a prospect’s mindset when you can’t meet in person, using all the tools and techniques available to close the deal. While the fundamentals are the same, you have new obstacles to overcome and new skills to master. Allego’s learning and enablement platform accelerates results for virtual teams. From our work with hundreds of thousands of sales professionals around the world, we’ve developed unique expertise in virtual selling techniques that can give you the edge you need to hit your targets. This guide distills that learning to help you and your team understand how to master virtual selling and stay ahead of your competition.

A brief scanning of The Wall Street Journal - or, tellingly, almost any other newspaper in the country - reveals the alarming prevalence and far-reaching impact of organizational dishonesty. Reports of malfesance or criminal conduct in corporate governance, accounting practices, regulatory evasions, securities transactions, advertising misrepresentations and so on have become all to commonplace. Its no wonder that business schools across the country have been rushing to design and introduce courses that emphasize a subject traditionally given short shrift: Ethics.   

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.