CSO Insights 2013 Key Trends Analysis provides an overview to the eight key attributes found in high performance sales organizations. Download now and compare how your sales team's best practices align with the high performance organizations in this study.

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?" 

With a speech analytics application, businesses have access to invaluable information contained within their interactions with customers that can help them gain flexible, scalable business intelligence, enhance revenue, and diminish risk.

The cash vs. tangible incentives argument is an old one. This paper suggests that there is room for both, and both can be effective when used in the proper application.

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.

Sales Enablement: How do we do it? The phrase sales enablement has become a standard term in the language of those who support sales performance. There are currently 37 LinkedIn groups with this phrase in their titles. There are software companies, products, consultancies, and all kinds of online resources that include sales enablement in their names, descriptions, or value propositions. It's a great descriptive phrase for marketing products and services, but, like many such catch phrases, means different things to different people. This free white paper from Dr. Carl Binder, originator of The Six Boxes®, will help your sales leadership team understand and implement these concepts and - yes - enable your sales team to perform at its highest potential.

In November 2010, Jeff Weiss and Jonathan Hughes, along with Major Aram Donigan published an article in Harvard Business Review called "Extreme Negotiations".  It described the temptations we all face when negotiating under duress - for example, acting too quickly or relying too much on coercion - and suggested that the principles of effective negotiation become even more important when the stakes are high and the pressure is on.  The authors used examples from military negotiations in Iraq and Afghanistan to illustrate those principles. Harvard Business Review followed up with Weiss and Hughes to understand more about how readers could apply these negotiating principles to their own situations.

Engagement, the employee’s commitment to their organization and their willingness to perform beyond expectations, has become a focus area for management. Engagement is more than mere job satisfaction; fully engaged employees are motivated and dedicated to making the organization a success. At the most simplistic level engaged employees lead to happy, loyal customers and repeat business. Importantly engagement also leads to improvement in retention levels. In short, it impacts the bottom line. Dale Carnegie Training asked MSW Research to undertake a benchmark nationwide, cross industry study of 1500 employees to explore engagement in the workplace. The study discovered that although there are multiple factors affecting engagement, the personal relationships between a manager and his or her direct reports is the most influential. 

"If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think."  - David Ogilvy David Ogilvy, the famous marketing and sales executive, said it this way, "If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think." Nelson Mandela said it like this: "If you talk to [people] in a language [they] understand, that goes to [their] heads. If you talk to [them] in [their] language, that goes to [their] heart." The ability to communicate—whether to persuade or just to understand—goes beyond using words well; it requires the ability to use words in a way that has meaning for those with whom you are speaking. The ability to talk with someone in his or her native language isn’t just about them understanding you; it’s about you understanding them—their experiences, their thinking, their beliefs, and their values. While definitions lie in words, meaning lies in the people who use them.

Join LinkedIn for a frank discussion about how the professional network enables sales teams to engage buyers on their platform much earlier in the sales process.  Ralf VonSosen and Koka Sexton from LinkedIn Sales Solutions have spent the last half decade evangelizing social selling and its impact on sales organizations.

In a recent study on top sales execution trends, 58% of buyers disengage with sales teams and stay with the status quo. The number one reason buyers disengage is that salespeople did not present value effectively or were not aligned to buyers' specific business challenges. In today's competitive marketplace, the combination of a strong set of sales skills and a disciplined mindset will make the difference.

It seems as if Social Selling is being talked about everywhere by everyone who is anyone in the world of sales and marketing. Yet, many sales reps haven’t adopted effective methods for selling in our digital age, or worse, are doing damage to their reputations and opportunities by fumbling their way through and alienating prospects in the process.

This webinar will help participants discover the specific activities and day-to-day operations of a truly effective corporate sales coach. Tim will host this session with guest Michael Bigley from Zones, an international technology enterprise provider.

Managing your sales team to top prospecting performance begins with setting and monitoring performance expectations, then holding your team accountable. Setting the expectations is the easy part. Holding your sales team accountable is a different matter entirely. To make matters worse, the process is different with eager new hires than with the senior salespeople and creates a potential disconnect across your team.

As the Internet has changed B2B buying habits, Social Selling has proven to be an effective way to reach decision makers. Still, Social Selling has been a random, grass roots approach for most corporations. That is because apps like LinkedIn and Twitter are free tools that some sales people started using before most corporations implemented any standard training. Now, sales leaders are wondering how to standardize and manage social activities to achieve higher sales productivity.

Trainers and 'experts' talk about ways to convert more calls. But, what are the sales skills and marketing tactics that actually matter to closing more business over the phone?

Many companies make a significant investment in their sales force since this is the front line in promoting their products and services. Optimizing the use of this resource is a continuous challenge affected by many internal and external factors. As these factors constantly change, firms repeatedly must address major strategy issues to ensure continued success.

What's the difference between training targeted specifically at front-line sales managers versus general leadership training targeted at other supervisory functions within an organization? Unfortunately, in many cases, nothing. While it is clear that there is merit to tying sales manager training to an organization's competency model, most of the training sales managers receive tends to be too blunt of an instrument to address the day-to-day realities of sales management.

Today's sales and account management environment requires a level of leadership skills that not only gets things done through others (many of whom do not directly report to them) but also develops the next generation of sales leaders. Coaching has proven to be an effective way to improve sales performance as well as attract and retain sales talent.

To avoid the pitfalls of competing on price, salespeople are often told to differentiate themselves and their offering by "selling the value." Selling the value implies that the salesperson either truly understands what the customer values, or that the value offered is perceived as significantly different from the competing offerings. All too often, neither one of these is true.

Industry research indicates that the average tenure for corporate sales leaders is 22 months. As a new sales leader, you're walking into a world of unknowns - and you have a short runway to make an impact. The first six months are critical to create momentum and demonstrate measurable results for the company.

Most people operate in an environment where they fail to see, tap into and leverage most of the opportunities that constantly surround them. When sales and marketing managers help their teams to better identify, categorize and target specific and available opportunities, their team members will begin to see, act and do things differently. Using specific tools and a proven-effective process, managers can show their people how to remove their opportunity blinders, how to get out of their comfort zones, and how to seize opportunities that lead to greater personal and professional performance and success.

Optimizing your lead funnel is expensive and fraught with peril. Different leads are ready to buy at different times - how can you keep track of them all without overloading your sales team? How can you choose among the myriad lead management solutions available?