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

Your sales forecast should be the single source of truth when it comes to making the decisions that drive your business with confidence.  For example, do you know exactly when the revenue in your sales forecast will hit and can you comfortably plan around it? 

Economic news is not rosy and buyers are changing their priorities. What are the best ways to coach your sales team to find new accounts, expand existing ones, and retain more of them? Join Carole Mahoney, author of the upcoming book "Buyer First" and discover what sales research and the largest data set of sales performance suggests you focus on for more predictable revenue attainment and retention of your best sellers and customers. 

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!

It may seem simple—just move your sales meetings online, right? But that isn’t all you need to master virtual sales and keep up with the competition. Being a great virtual salesperson doesn’t just mean long days of videoconference calls. You have other new skills to learn.

Most proposals aren’t effective at winning new business, especially in highly competitive situations. Why? The most common reason is that proposals tend to focus inwardly on you organization and its capabilities, instead of outwardly on the client and their business. Why does that happen and how can you prevent it? Tune into this webinar to find out.

Recognition and rewards can drive performance increases of 20% or more by leveraging the power of motivation psychology, social dynamics and workers’ desire for aspirational awards within a positive culture that encourages the collaboration and success of all individuals and teams.  This seems like common sense, but it is not easy to implement in the workplace unless you create programs that are designed with recognition and reward best practices. There is an art and a science element to effective recognition. This includes smart program structure, rules, training, recognition tactics, reward choices, actionable analytics and more. 

For CLOs, Training Managers, and all L&D professionals who want to learn about the new Adobe Learning Manager...

How would your career change if storytelling was your new superpower? 

A single sale alone does not make for a successful sales career. Top sales performers know that securing a sale is not the final goal but the first step in acquiring a loyal customer who will champion your solutions.

Persona-based marketing has been used for decades to help craft targeted promotions and messages that appeal to prospects. Personas have a role in sales and marketing webinars as well, but they are often misused, resulting in diminished effectiveness and persuasiveness of your message.

You see the Google Analytics stats showing that people visit your website. Prospects meander through your site. They spend time reading your content. But they don’t fill out your web forms - and you have no idea who they are.

How often do your salespeople practice sales conversations?  When you ask your salespeople to do a role play exercise, do their reactions range from polite eye rolls to outright hostility?  But here’s an important question - if your sales team is not comfortable practicing with each other, where are they practicing?  Are you ok with salespeople practicing with prospective clients?

Sometimes it seems as if today's "winners" have some kind of magic going for them. They always seem to make just the right impression - even with difficult people - and get exactly what they want.

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.

This the third in Mike’s incredibly popular Super Simple PowerPoint Slide Design series. Learn how to make simple yet engaging and professional slides quickly. Mike shares new, innovative designs that you can easily make—when you know how. Using the latest trends, discover tips, tricks, and techniques to developing amazing slides. Less is best in this session.

Leadership is hard! But it doesn’t have to be hard to understand. In this fast-paced webinar, you’ll learn the surprising essentials that improve leadership growth, impact, and enjoyment. The time-tested lessons and insights you’ll learn are drawn directly from the leadership trenches, and include:

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" 

Over the past 18 months, we’ve seen a global pandemic, social unrest not seen since the civil rights movement, working parents stressed with having to home school, and a country deeply divided, we’ve also seen a changing workplace, where remote employment now being the norm in many office locations, and employees demanding that DEI (diversity / equity / inclusion) becomes a corporate initiative.  The boundaries between work - life have never been less clear.

Selling is social — but onboarding new revenue professionals often lacks the social and collaborative aspects of actual sales. This is especially true in virtual learning, when new sellers are onboarded ad-hoc or with LMS-based experiences that do not equip them with the sophisticated capabilities they need to drive revenue growth.