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.   

Over the past year, I have written  blog  post after blog post at my site, http://www.thesalesblog.com.  Most of what I have written was written to be published later as book.  That book is coming in the not too distant future.      Of  all  the  topics I have written on, what I have written about cold calling has always struck  a  nerve, eliciting strong opinions—either for or against. Much of the email I receive is for advice and  ideas  about  how to be more effective at cold calling, or it is to remind me that Sales 2.0 has replaced cold calling (an idea to which I am vehemently opposed with every fiber of my being).      I collected a few posts on cold calling here to serve as a guide for those who would endeavor to improve their cold calling skills.  I hope you find it useful in improving your effectiveness and that you adopt these ideas into all of your prospecting activities.  

While it is all well and good - even honorable, really, to associate selling success with being a trusted advisor, what does it take to earn that status with customers in today’s buying environment? Research by CSO Insights, the Aberdeen Group, and others has shown that just telling salespeople to be trusted advisors has not worked: win rates have fallen and no-decision rates have grown. Customer behaviors seem to be saying that they don’t trust salespeople’s intent, and don’t see them as a credible advisor. To address this concern, let’s explore three key principles that point the way to becoming a trusted advisor.

Selling has grown increasingly complex and difficult. Research shows that over the past 5 years win rates have fallen and no-decision rates have grown.   Complete the form at right to download this article and learn the 3 questions that every sales leader must ask to make the best go/no-go decision.

Business-to-business leaders are searching for ways to improve sales productivity, battle rising selling costs, accelerate skills development and transition to solution selling. What most don’t realize is that the quality and effectiveness of their sales content are critical to addressing these issues.

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. 

Improving sales performance has never been more important for major global corporations. After years of recession-induced cost cutting, leaders are putting increasing emphasis on implementing go-to-market strategies to boost both top- and bottom-line results, and expecting their sales organizations to execute them. Unfortunately, experts agree that most growth strategies fail. As competition from low-cost competitors increases, and aggressive buyers become even more demanding, it has become even harder to close the gap between go-to-market strategy as articulated by senior management, and its profitable execution, when the salesperson is face-to-face with the customer.

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.

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. 

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?" 

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.

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.