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. 

It’s Friday morning, and you’re thinking about Monday’s management meeting - the one where you’ll be presenting your mid-quarter sales forecast to the executive team. You’ve just sent another reminder to the sales team to update their deal information in the expensive SFA tool you installed a year ago. After chasing down a few rogue reps (who act as if they’ve never seen the tool before), you’re finally ready to run the numbers. Immediately, you see that several deals are slipping. Uh-oh. How did this happen? What caused last week’s healthy forecast to take a turn for the worst? Are all our prospects getting squirrely at once? Are our reps falling down on the job?

"An incentive is something that stimulates or motivates with the intent to spur determination and action." Sales incentives studies have shown that sales incentive programs have a great influence on a company’s bottom line. A sales incentive program can be a powerful business tool that can be used to recognize and motivate salespeople. 

One of the most significant barriers to sales organizations is bringing their sales cycle under control. Read this research from Aberdeen Group to discover how the use of electronic signature tools can improve sales team performance. 

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 free Sales Enablement eBook provides a systematic approach to helping sales reps prepare for customer interactions, engage customers and prospects effectively, and advance more opportunities to close. You’ll learn how marketing, training, management, and of course, sales, each play a critical role in the sales enablement process.

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?" 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

Given the evolution of B2B buying cycles, sales managers must continually acquire and adopt new skills to effectively lead, compete and win. Yet too often, when evaluating their team's performance, sales managers focus exclusively on performance metrics such as quarterly bookings or quota achievement. 

Lack of emotional intelligence skills is the one of the biggest and overlooked reason for missed revenue goals. Often, salespeople know what to do; however, in tough selling situations, they let nonproductive emotions take over. They discount too soon, write practice proposals without proper qualification and continue to meet with non-decision makers. Their inability to execute the right selling behaviors during stressful situations lead to poor sales results. When it comes to sales, emotional intelligence skills are every bit important as hard selling skills.

If your sales team has not been trained on the latest features and techniques, then they are at a competitive disadvantage. Social Selling is no longer a cutting edge practice. LinkedIn is 13 years old! Many salespeople are now driving a significant percentage of their pipeline through outbound social networking and posting content to attract buyers. According to Forbes, 78% of salespeople using social selling techniques outperform their peers.

When it comes to setting quotas and driving revenue, certain data and analytics are critical. There are tools on the market today that can empower your sales team to be far more effective at closing more prospects while eliminating wasted time searching for collateral and reconstructing contact histories, all while giving you actionable insights to improve close rates across the sales organization.

In this new workshop, which is based on sales principles in Selling to the C-Suite and social selling strategies from The New Handshake: Sales Meets Social Media, professional salespeople learn to integrate the use of social selling skills and business intelligence tools into the sales process to develop, maintain and leverage relationships with C-Suite executives. 

Based upon ES Research Group's experience and regular surveys, most decisions regarding third-party sales training content providers are made for the wrong reasons in the wrong way. The result is wasted time, money and significant lost business opportunity. 

This free webinar will teach how coaching can immediately impact the bottom line of your company and improve a sales team performance. This is a 100 % educational webinar and there will be no selling of any kind during the webinar. If your sales team does not have a formal approach to coaching this webinar is for you!  

Negotiation has long been thought of as a soft skill or a set of counter tactics in response to a random tactic from the other side.   Over the last 15 years this myth has been disproved.  Brian Dietmeyer helps us understand why  97% of what happens in a business negotiation can be anticipated and - in many cases -  prevented by a systematic use of data.

Account Based Marketing (ABM) is hot. Red hot. According to a report by SiriusDecisions, 2015 State of Account-Based Marketing (ABM), more than 60 percent of companies plan to invest in technology for ABM to better align sales and marketing over the next twelve months.