The most important rule in sales isn’t always be closing (ABC), it’s always be helping (ABH). And in order to help prospective clients, you need to ask a variety of questions. Without asking questions, it can be impossible to know how best to help a prospect, or if you are even the right vendor to […]

Imagine someone interrupts your busy day with a phone call. They don’t greet you by name or ask how you are, they go straight into pushing a product on you that doesn’t solve any of the problems that you’re currently facing, They haven’t asked you any questions, they’ve just spoken. By the end of it, […]

Opportunities form the lifeblood of a sales organization. Your sales development reps (SDRs) spend their days trying to source opportunities. While your account executives spend their days trying to transform opportunities into customers. As an inside sales manager, you need to keep a close eye on opportunity metrics. Because if your SDRs aren’t sourcing enough […]

When you get on the phone with prospects, you are the front-line emissary for your brands. With the right knowledge and attitude, your prospects will see you as an ally who is helping them solve problems. But far too often, sales reps and SDRs strike out during sales calls. Why do they strike out? Usually it comes down to the […]

What’s the single most important factor contributing to B2B sales success? A first-rate product, highly targeted data and top sales technologies are essential, to be sure. But even the best sales stacks won’t help subpar sales talent. Hiring and training the right talent has never been more important or difficult. Most newly hired sales reps […]

Sales development reps typically make a lot of calls every day. From talking to our customers, I can tell you that dialing over 100 prospects daily is not uncommon. Now imagine that you asked each SDR on your team, before they dial a prospect, what they are trying to accomplish. Chances are that reps might say something […]

Sales Hiring Is Broken Let me know if this sounds familiar. At my last company, we had to build out our sales team and scale very quickly. We had no benchmark, no structured interviews and, quite honestly, no idea how to hire for our team. We would actually hire two reps at once, praying one […]

In karate, there are a lot of skills that you need to master before gaining a black belt. You might be better at breaking boards with a high kick than anyone on the planet, but that skill alone is not enough . Sales is kind of like karate in the sense that there are a lot […]

One of the most rewarding aspects of managing an inside sales team is helping your reps to become more successful salespeople. Hiring sales reps is one of the most important investments that a company makes. And turnover is costly! In fact, a DePaul University’s Sales Effectiveness Survey found the average cost of turnover for a single sales […]

Since releasing our Complete Guide to Inside Sales Analytics, I’ve had some time to reflect on what the most important sales metric is. While there are dozens of metrics that I believe sales leaders must track in order to succeed, one metric keeps sticking out in my mind, and it’s a fairly simple one: sales conversations […]

House of Cards is back for its forth season. This is just one of those shows that keeps getting better and better and I can hardly wait to see how the latest season ends (I envision some binge-watching in my future). If you’re new to House of Cards, it’s the story of Frank Underwood (played by Kevin Spacey), […]

In my experience, one of the biggest differences between successful and unsuccessful sales reps has been the amount of sales conversations that they have each day. A lot of work goes into having a single successful sales conversation. The most successful reps follow up relentlessly, leverage tools to connect with more prospects and can keep qualified prospects on […]