There’s an ongoing debate about whether or not cold calling is dead. Regardless of what you’ve read or heard elsewhere, the truth is cold calling is alive and well. A recent study revealed that 71% of buyers want to hear from sellers when looking for new ideas to improve their business. In the same study, […]

It’s another Monday morning, and you find yourself surrounded by yawning colleagues, open laptops, and Starbucks disposable cups in the conference room while your sales manager drones on with the latest numbers and pipeline update. You check your email, check the news, and check your watch – can we get out already? Why do sales […]

According to a study by CSO Insights, sales organizations are using an average of 10 sales tech tools, with a plan to add another four in the next 12 months. Affectionately named the “sales stack,” these tools are all supposed to help a salesperson become more productive and yield metrics that managers can use to […]

Things are going great with your sales contact, you’re making steady progress towards a deal. You’ve had several excellent calls with them. They seem to be fully engaged and enthusiastic about your product. They asked lots of questions during a recent demo and appear to be very excited about your customized proposal. You’re expecting a […]

Some advice just doesn’t work. New parents can relate – they constantly receive unsolicited advice, often based on old wives tales, on parenting from friends, family members, even random people in the grocery store. Smokers from the big tobacco era of yesteryear can relate too. “More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette” an ad […]

Ever since the introduction of sales automation software, the great debate has been ongoing: What activities, interactions, and conversations should be automated so prospect can interact on their own, and what should be done with the help of a human? The automation side of the debate has fueled its fair share of anxiety that humans […]

I recently read some psychology research that transformed what I thought I knew about multitasking. The article, published by Wharton researchers in the December 2018 issue of the journal Psychological Science is titled “The Illusion of Multitasking and Its Positive Effect on Performance.” Although it is about general human psychology, it has big implications for […]

Sales is an ever-changing profession. Before the internet became mainstream, customers relied on companies and their sales reps to provide product information. Today, 74% of business buyers conduct more than half of their research online before engaging in a sales process offline. What these well-informed prospects want is a very different experience from those of […]

Today’s sales reps are surrounded by distractions and faced with ever-increasing goals. There is something to do from the second you sit down at your desk until you leave the office, but there is also something to distract every time you set about to start something important. Psychology research is clear that there is a […]

Do you have any New Year resolutions for sales performance improvement? With the hope of change and improvement at the start of a new calendar year, resolutions can be difficult to resist. That’s why so many people have at least one, even if they don’t write it down. Sadly, these goals are often abandoned by […]

Like many things in life, the answer is “it depends.” Live or recorded sales calls are both a critical component of sales coaching. With inside sales teams becoming more prevalent, it’s no wonder that coaching is often at the top of a sales leader’s priority. And for good reason — CSO Insights found that a […]

Storytelling works in sales because humans experience life as one big story. Scholars like Walter Fischer, a USC professor and researcher, have been have been studying how we interpret our experiences and how that affects human communication for decades. The resulting theory, called the Narrative Paradigm, helps explain why humans are more often persuaded by […]