There is a significant difference between a Sales Playbook and a Sales Saybook, as we will discuss in some detail below. But, to quickly give you the key differences… A Sales Playbook is a complete discussion of how a company plans to go to market with its various products to achieve very specific sales goals.
There are two hidden competitors that stall sales pipeline development more than any other—and they are not the ones you are probably thinking of. In fact every company, every product, faces these two hidden competitors. You can’t escape them. Not only that, they are the first barrier you face—before you encounter any of the competitors
One of the first things we look at when working with a new client is their sales pipeline strategy. And, we are often surprised at how inadequate their sales pipeline strategy is. All the more surprising because these are typically highly experienced sales leaders. Don’t get me wrong—their sales strategies are detailed, well-thought-out, and comprehensive.
NOTE: Read this ONLY IF your team is having difficulty consistently hitting their quotas. The number one factor that affects the ability of sales leaders to hit their numbers is high quality sales pipeline. In fact, as the sales pipeline goes, so does revenue growth. Sales leaders that focus on building high quality sales pipelines
Average Deal Size is one of the most powerful and least utilized levers for increasing overall sales without incurring any additional costs.
Elevate your prospecting programs without increasing sales or marketing spend. That’s the new revenue math for the modern B2B seller.
Want to bridge the SDR performance gap? SOMAmetrics Intelligent Prospecting (SIP) delivers situational fluency for every product you sell.
Of the meetings set and attended, how many actually end up on the sales pipeline? What are our meeting acceptance rates? SIP can help.
Prospects can cancel, reschedule, or just not show up at all. A meeting is nothing without good meeting attendance rates. SIP can help.
It’s time to make sure that every connection counts and none are wasted, which is improving conversion rates are so important. SIP can help.
Connect rates have dropped by 50% since 2014, which is why practices for improving connect rates are so important. Learn how SIP can help.
The job of Sales Development Reps (SDRs) is becoming increasingly more difficult. But at the same time, their job is more important than ever before. Prospective buyers are becoming more elusive, making the job difficult. They are also more elusive than ever before, and sales executives are struggling to find qualified leads. In fact, connect
This blog outlines the top tested SDR best practices that have proven successful at over 65 companies. You will learn what SDRs should be focused on, and how to pay them to ensure that your company consistently builds a quality sales pipeline.
There are two sides to everything: Yin and Yang; Good and Evil; Hot and Cold; Black and White. For Sales Management, its two sides are the fun and not so fun parts of managing a team. While managing teams has its benefits, team management also includes making tough decisions. You might think about various practices
Your company has assigned its targets for the year. How does your team translate those targets into viable actions for them to achieve their goals? GOSPA is a short planning tool that helps team members to stay on track throughout the year.
This blog discusses the importance of building a SDR specific eco-system within your CRM. SDRs aren’t Sales people; they are tasked with finding qualified prospects which build a quality pipeline for your company. The CRM fields required to support your SDR team are addressed in this blog, and in the book The Radical Pipeline Strategy: How to Grow Pipeline and Revenue by Optimizing Sales Development.
This blogpost explains the underlying cause behind sky high, SDR attrition rates. It also delves into the effect on quotas and performance, as well as solutions for hiring and retention.
This blog elaborates on the best way to utilize Sales Performance Incentive Funds (SPIFs) to energize your team. Use SPIFs to provide an incentive to improve lackluster KPI’s and other performance metrics.
Sales leaders who want to impact this quarter will need to focus on the number of MQL’s they need to hit their SQL quotas. This blog highlights the numbers sales leaders should address, to ensure that they are primed and ready to hit their revenue targets.
Sales Engagement Platforms (SEPs) are all the rage. This blog outlines what you must do to get the most out of your SEP, since they are only great tools if they are managed and refreshed on a regular and consistent basis.
This blog presents a case for building a highly skilled SDR team to generate quality meetings and to build a sales pipeline for your Sales Organization.
This blog highlights the top questions SDR Managers will want to use to identify strong potential SDR candidates. These questions have worked at 65+ companies.
Learn effective methods for managing your sales and SDR teams through the development and implementation of task force teams.
Guiding SDRs to see that prospects are real people—by creating prospect personas—provides them with insight into your prospects’ world.
What are the challenges to appointment setting? Here are common misuses and best practices implemented by SOMAmetrics at over 65 companies.
Here are 5 reasons why your sales development team is failing, the underlying reasons for these, and how to fix the problem.
Regardless of whether the Sales Development team in your company is under Sales or Marketing, your Sales Development Manager must manage the SDR team like a Sales Manager manages her sales team. 1. SDR Team Managers need to manage by two sets of numbers Over the years, I have learned that the job of an
Before sales development representatives existed, remember telemarketers? Without caller ID, we didn’t know who was calling until we picked up the phone. We were trapped in by someone on the other end trying to sell us something, not taking “no” for an answer. We hated it. And so did the telemarketers. They mostly got yelled
Grow Your Sales Pipeline to Fix Missed Revenue Targets How can you grow your sales pipeline and consequently fix missed revenue targets? If you think of your total revenue operations, it is likely fed by four major revenue streams: New orders from totally new logos Reorders or renewals from current customers Upgrades, up-sales, and add-ons
A strategic SDR compensation plan naturally aligns the objectives of the SDR team with that of the Sales Organization. For example, restaurants figured out a long time ago that if they made their waiters share tips with bartenders and busboys, everyone made more money. In fact, the better tippers got their drinks made first and
In this blog, we will quickly cover four major mistakes made in setting up Sales Development Reps (SDRs). Each mistake has the potential of severely limiting performance. Unfortunately, a number of companies commit two or more of these mistakes, significantly hampering pipeline growth. SDR Team Design Mistake 1: It’s an Entry Level Job The work
As we work with clients, we hear the same questions over and over again: Should we hire more Sales Development Reps (SDRs), or sales reps? Or both? And our response has been invariably the same—it depends. If your conversion metrics are all good, then by all means hire more. If not, fix your conversion metrics
The Story Behind Rising Cost of Sales According to HubSpot, the cost of new customer acquisition (cost of sales and marketing) has increased by 60% over the past six years or so. What makes this even more alarming is that when we combine it with another finding. A 2019 Accenture study reported that 80% B2B
Quadrant 3 is all about encouraging existing customers to buy new products; generally upgrades, add-ons, and bundles. In general, the goal is to increase the number of products your customers use by about 15-20% per year. It may seem like a big ask, but keep in mind that, apart from Quadrant 2, these buyers have
Hubspot has shown that customer acquisition costs have skyrocketed by as much as 60% in recent years, making the customers that you do have that much more profitable to your business. As McKinsey notes, if you’ve already spent a sizable amount of time and money to acquire a new customer and they churn early in
According to Hubspot, customer acquisition costs have skyrocketed in recent years, increasing by as much as 60%. What this means for B2B companies is that it will be crucial, now more than ever, to have an effective Sales strategy that will optimize customer acquisition and drive down costs. Customer acquisition falls within the first Quadrant of
There’s a few different ways we like to categorize buyers. Though they are by no means fool-proof indicators of any individual’s behavior or preferences, these classifications can help us organize the strategies we use to educate different prospects at a more broad, macro level. In this discussion, we’ll be looking at three different categorizations of
The Sales Funnel is a way of defining the process. Prospects will go through when getting educated enough to want to meet with Sales. In the following sections, we’ll be breaking down the three stages of the Sales Funnel that make up the buyer’s journey. Additionally, we’ll highlight which Prospect Education content will be the
The Pandemic changed how we do business in countless ways, and the business leaders who have thrived post-Pandemic have been those who have adapted their strategies to the new demands of their clients. In any business world, but especially that which we’re seeing today in the wake of the Pandemic, educating prospects is crucial in order
The Four Quadrants of High Growth is a sales strategy that enables B2B companies to deploy their limited marketing and sales resources to maximize revenues.
As email marketing has become the most effective way to initiate contact with leads today, thoughtfully coordinated and targeted email sequences can drive curiosity and engagement in prospects — which will prepare them to eventually schedule an appointment with a Sales rep. Understanding your audience when crafting email marketing campaigns is vital to sending out
Engaging online content is quickly becoming one of the most important resources available to Business Development Representatives (BDRs) today. As email marketing has become the most efficient way to initiate contact with leads, BDRs are turning to prospect engagement content to get attention and pique interest when sending out emails. In the following sections, we’ll
The pandemic pushed a lot of businesses to change how they operate, including those in the B2B selling space. As Sales Enablement has adopted a wider role in business today, we’ve started to see shifts in how business leaders train their BDRs (Business Development Reps). In the following sections, we’ll look at which new practices
The primary role of Business Development Representatives (BDRs) has always been to be ‘tele-prospectors,’ using the phone to find, qualify, and set appointments. Until recently, BDRs have always used cold calling to initiate contact with prospects, but various shifts in buyer behavior have made the phone call a much less effective medium for connecting with
In the increasingly competitive market today, connecting with leads can be challenging for BDRs. Often, the difference between a successful cold call (one that ends in setting an appointment) and an unsuccessful one is as simple as how efficiently the Business Development Rep (BDR) can talk with prospects. Often, BDRs are the first people that prospects
B2C marketing these days is all about buyer psychology. When marketers create campaigns, they consider their intended demographic at every step of the way一 and tailor their approach to maximize their impact. They use the latest neurological and behavioral insights available to them to psychologically influence their exact audience, which in turn increases engagement, piques
Although millennials generally have a stronger fluency in and preference for the use of technology in the workplace, it’s only been due to the COVID-19 pandemic (and the need for high adaptability that it demanded) that they’ve actually seen a widespread professional and preferential transition to virtual technology in business. In B2B marketing, both buyers
We know that optimizing your marketing approach for each of the fundamental B2B buyer types leads to higher engagement and better brand recognition, but how can you choose the right approach一with the most effective words and the most influential underlying messages一to best speak to these audiences? How do you choose which aspect of your product
According to research from Gartner, only 6% of chief sales officers (CSOs) report that they are extremely confident in their team’s ability to meet or exceed their revenue goals. This means that for the vast majority of sales leaders, reaching revenue growth targets is a high-priority challenge. At the same time, the B2B purchasing process
Among other changes, the COVID-19 pandemic spurred the marketing and business industries to adapt quickly to an online-only working environment. This transition is something that B2B marketing has been hesitant to do for years, even though B2C marketing had largely already taken the leap. However, many of the changes to the industry brought on by
We know that it’s important to optimize your marketing strategy for each of the B2B buyer types if you’re going to make an impactful marketing campaign, but which specific strategies yield the best results for each type of buyer? What’s important to know here is that the way you’ll reach each of the buyer types
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