This is the latest in a series highlighting a wide variety of applications we think are pretty cool. Most have to do with sales, marketing and productivity. Check out past featured apps here. If you’re like me, you’ve lost count of the cloud services you use or subscribe to on a regular basis. Some services you… Read More
Matt’s App of the Week: MailLift
This is the latest in a series highlighting a wide variety of applications we think are pretty cool. Most have to do with sales, marketing and productivity. Check out past featured apps here. You know what stands out to prospects, customers, partners and others today? Not email. Not a social like. How about a hand-written note?… Read More
Matt’s App of the Week: Scratch
This is the latest in a series highlighting a wide variety of applications we think are pretty cool. Most have to do with sales, marketing and productivity. Check out past featured apps here. I still use pen & paper primarily, and Dial2Do when I’m on the road. But I need to jot down a quick note… Read More
Matt’s App of the Week: SEMRush
This is the latest in a series highlighting a wide variety of applications we think are pretty cool. Most have to do with sales, marketing and productivity. Check out past featured apps here. I’m not entirely sure what animal Google is on with their frequent algorithm changes. And even though keyword direct match appears to be… Read More
Please stop writing marketing copy!
Why does most marketing copy suck? Because there’s a huge difference between what we call “copy” and what’s natural, customer-facing language. Do yourself a favor and read that next tweet or email or headline out loud. Did it sound weird? Did it sound unnatural? If so, it’s probably just copy that your customers will think is… Read More
Sales for Startups
24 Insights To Help You Design, Launch and Accelerate a Sales Program for Your Business To emerge from the early stages of building a new business, start-ups need to stay focused on two things: building and selling. The first is by far the most important. You can’t sell what you don’t ship, and if it’s… Read More
Sales productivity 101: Q&A with Elay Cohen of Saleshood
With a best-selling book and fast-growing business all focused on sales productivity, Elay Cohen has a lot to share and some important insights to help sales organizations increase efficiency and results. I highly recommend checking out the book (Saleshood: How Winning Managers Inspire Sales Teams to Succeed) or his site at www.saleshood.com. I recently had a… Read More
Secrets To Productivity, Work/Life Balance And Success
Some of the most successful and productive people I know are lazy. They’ll tell you so. David Allen, author of Getting Things Done and the godfather of productivity. Lazy. He will tell you this at the beginning of his seminar.
Secrets To Successful B2B Sales And Marketing Metrics
Much has been written on the vagaries, metrics and particulars of driving true sales and marketing collaboration in B2B organizations. This goes well beyond just attending more meetings together. Ultimately, it’s about having the same objective and working as a cohesive unit to drive higher sales.
Secrets to Successful B2B Webinars
The venerable webinar has become almost as core to most B2B marketing programs as white papers and straight batch-and-send email campaigns. And while some consider them cliché and stale, world-class marketers know that webinars can still be a highly effective and scalable means of driving significant volumes of qualified leads into their sales team’s pipeline…. Read More
Secrets to Successful Baseball Sales and Marketing
Let’s say you own or manage a professional baseball team. In the summer, your costs for the year are relatively established, but every day you play another game. And every day, there are seats that are both empty and unsold. This means that every time you fill that seat with a paying customer, you make… Read More
Secrets To Successful Cold Calling
The primary sources of call reluctance (and we all have it) are a lack of confidence and failure to adequately prepare. If you don’t feel prepared, you won’t feel confident. So in an effort to address both, here are four focus areas that, combined, will help you not only feel more prepared and confident when… Read More
Secrets To Successful Content Marketing
Content is the new currency in marketing. It has the power to drive traffic, to build instant rapport, to simultaneously nurture an infinite number of qualified but not-yet-ready-to-buy prospects. Good content flows quickly and easily from organizations that are already, organically customer-centric. If you know your customer—who they are, what they care about, what they… Read More
Secrets to Successful Email Marketing
Reports of the decline and pending demise of email have been greatly exaggerated. Sure, our inboxes may be more clogged than ever before. But that only drives us to work harder to separate the “spam” from the messages we want. Email as a communication and marketing channel is as strong as ever. Our mission—and your… Read More
Secrets to Successful Inside Sales Management
Managing inside sales used to be quite simple. It was about dials, volume, scripts and quick closes. It was inexperienced sales reps that powered through lists and sold the same way to everybody. Today’s successful inside sales environments don’t look anything like that. Inside sales is rapidly replacing field sales as the primary channel for… Read More
Secrets to Successful Trade Show Marketing
Events and trade shows represent the channel sales and marketing people everywhere love to hate. High costs, LOTS of time (before and during the event), typically followed by less-than-exciting leads and few converted sales. But when executed well, events do have their place in delivering solid, profitable revenue. You just have to get a few… Read More
Seven LinkedIn sales enablement best practices
Driving consistency, quality and habits across an enterprise sales team (or even a smaller inside sales squad) is often easier said than done. Even though, for example, it’s easy to justify a dedicated focus on LinkedIn best practices to help each rep increase their size, quality and conversion of prospects, putting that in practice is… Read More
Six rules for more effective sales lead follow-up
Earlier this week I highlighted some good & bad lead follow-up experiences I had first-hand last week. I listed a couple implications, but wanted to go deeper and get more specific on a few rules I believe constitute best practices for sales lead follow-up. 1. Document the best practice sequence (no matter how you define that) Ask 10 inside sales… Read More
Social Selling Best Practices Guide
One of the greatest opportunities for B2B organizations with the social Web is to find, engage and convert prospective customers well before they’re actively ready to buy. The channels, relationships and content available openly across the Web make it easier than ever to build strong, scalable pipelines of near-term and future business. Of course, one… Read More
Successful Selling
Many of the best sales strategy books out there are far too long. They make great points, prove them with case study after case study, and both individually and collectively represent some of the best sales insight available. They just take too long to read That’s where this book comes in. The idea was to… Read More
Why Sales & Marketing Alignment Must Come from the Top
It’s one thing to talk about a revenue-responsible marketing department at the sales kick-off. It’s fairly common these days to have sales and marketing leaders agree to common objectives. It’s quite another thing, of course, for these two teams to know how to work together on a Tuesday. True alignment between sales and marketing doesn’t… Read More
Why some companies are giving up on content marketing (and why you should double down)
We’re such an inpatient lot. The more we can measure, the more (irrationally) we expect things to work immediately. This applies to many facets of life these days, but particularly for B2B sales & marketing professionals. Despite a clearer understanding of the buyer’s journey and timeline, we still expect our leads to convert immediately. We expect new/cold… Read More
Why Your Sales Reps Shouldn’t Be Creating Content
It’s not that their content wouldn’t be valuable. It’s just that creating content isn’t worth their time. It’s just not the best way for them to spend their time to maximize earning potential for themselves, as well as for your organization. Ask me if sales reps have great ideas for content, and the answer emphatically… Read More
Your Biggest, Most Powerful Competitor is Apathy
Most of your lost deals don’t go to a competitor. They go to nothing. Literally. Your prospect doesn’t choose someone else. They choose to do nothing. Oftentimes this is for a good reason. Timing isn’t right, budget has dried up, other initiatives are a priority. This is going to happen. It’s why we call it… Read More