Sales Driven Marketing Hub

When I think of employee engagement, I think about organizational commitment, empowerment, communication, and results. I think about employees who strive to "Be the Brand!" Here's is a list of five questions to evaluate employee engagement.

There are seven key areas to develop when laying the foundation for your sales team. Build on these principles, and you will set your team up for sales success!

There are some basic principals everyone should master to take their sales performance to the next level. Here are 10 tips to get you primed to be a top performer:

1. Make the Telephone Your Best Friend

If you want to succeed in sales, there is no getting around it. The phone is your number one productivity tool. Telephone prospecting is a still a skill you have to practice and develop to be a great salesperson.

Deals are won and lost in the discovery phase. Great salespeople dig deep to uncover a prospect’s priorities, goals and challenges. The best sales probing questions help us uncover the customer's need-behind-the-need. When we establish ourselves as industry experts and prospose highly targeted solutions, we increase our chances of winning the deal.

Whose sales pitch are you buying? Inbound marketers will tell you cold calling is dead. Hardcore sales leaders believe the exact opposite. Although inbound marketers have the louder voice, it doesn't mean they're right. Great organizations expertly weave both inbound marketing and outbound sales tactics into their go-to-market strategy.

Sales and marketing strategies must adapt to what customers and market forces demand. Build your plan around scalable systems and processes that keep you nimble, agile, and relevant.

It takes a lot of effort to get a new appointment. After all the time you spend on sales prospecting and inbound marketing, when you finally open a new opportunity, you've got to make it count. It's never a good idea to go into a sales call shooting from the hip. It's a rookie move and an apathetic thing to do. Success comes by careful preparation, needs based messaging, and selling in context. Here is what I suggest.

We’ve all been in a position where we’ve doubted ourselves. It’s normal. Someone always seems to come along and say, "You need to get your confidence back. Believe in yourself." Our first thought is, "You're right," and then our second thought is, "How the heck do I do that?"

Here are seven ways to build confidence and increase sales:

Successful sales professionals master the art of leveraging resources to get sales meetings and close deals. One of the most important resources a sales rep has available is marketing content. Here are three ways content can mean the difference between endlessly knocking on doors and quickly creating new opportunities.

You've probably heard the question, "If you could recommend one thing to make me successful, what would it be?"

My response is usually, "There is no one thing that makes us successful. Everything is about everything. Success in sales comes from the cumulative effect of many good things."

That said, the question remains, "Where do I begin?" Here are three winning principles to get you started. Master these principles as a way of thinking, and you're guaranteed to increase sales.

How fast does your sales and marketing team move when a new lead comes in? At many companies, the average lead response time is nearly 47 hours. That timeframe may have worked in the past, but online consumers have little patience for waiting. If you want to convert leads into sales, timing is everything. But just how important is speed to conversion, and how fast should your follow-up be? Let's see what the numbers say.