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Sales Roundup: Float Like A Butterfly, Sting Like A Bee: Killer Sales Combos

Jamie Shanks
Jamie Shanks

sales-roundup-butterfuly-bee.jpgWelcome to your sales weekly roundup for December 4 – 10th. We’ve got everything you need to know on the ultimate sales strategy combo, software predictions in the new year, managing change management and turning your sales team into thought leaders. Enjoy.

Cold Calling Is Dead…

B2B Sales leader Tony Hughes dispels myths about the death of cold calling and the social selling revolution. The phone alone is dead, and social alone is simply spam. Hughes says if done correctly, the combination approach will 1X to 3X your pipeline within 1-2 fiscal quarters. So, what do these killer combos look like?

  • The Triple: A voicemail, followed by a video email (vmail), and then an email executed in under 2 minutes flat beats just social or email every time “in some random cadence in SalesLoft.”

  • The Quad: Call, VMail, InMail, EMail (paste a screenshot of the InMail – shift command 4 on Mac) send it in the email.

  • QUINT aka Rope-a-dope: Call, VMail, eMail – internal referral (forward the email). 

6 Predictions for Sales Software in 2017

Tamara Scott, an analyst at TechnologyAdvice, lays out some predictions for the future of sales software in 2017. Along with the obvious—analytics, automation and advanced message analysis (text parsing)— Scott highlights the following key trends to look forward to in the coming year:

  • Gamification and Dashboarding. Share dashboards and leaderboards are gaining traction, improving ROI through healthy competition between sales professionals.

  • Social Media. Content Marketing Institute recently found people spend an average of 118 minutes on social networks per day, and 80 percent of that is on mobile. Both B2B and B2C teams are facing a massive opportunity to attract and convert audiences on this platform.

  • Account-Based Everything. With the rise of marketing automation, marketers have more time to allocate to customized marketing, sales and customer support. In 2017, the lines will blur and roles blend even further between sales and marketing.

5 Mistakes Employees Make When Challenging the Status Quo

Authors of the change management book Rebels at Work: A Handbook for Leading Change from Within Lois Kelly and Carmen Medina outline the top pitfalls employees who are full of big ideas make when fighting for change.

  • You fail to prioritize your ideas. Don’t be the boy who cried wolf with ideas. The authors argue if you’re constantly suggesting new ideas for change, your impact might be diluted—especially if you never implement.

  • Go go solo. You don’t need to go about your ideas alone. If you truly want to drive adoption, try and convince others the value of the change and go forth together.

  • You flunk the pitch meeting. You don’t need to fit it all in one meeting. “You only need to pitch three things: What’s at stake – the “so what” factor; what will be different if the idea is adopted; and assurance that the proposed idea is likely to work. Rather than spending 45 minutes presenting and leaving 15 minutes for Q&A, flip it. Give a tight, 15 minute presentation and then discuss the idea for 45 minutes.”

  • You give up too soon. Appreciate the little things, and don’t give up. Take it from Wharton Professor Adam Grant, who has found a sense of appreciation is the single most sustainable motivator at work.

  • You ignore personal danger signals. What you do after work has an understatedly large impact on your performance. Eat well, exercise and give yourself time away from all your big ideas.

Social Selling: Turn Your Salespeople into Thought Leaders

Marketing and sales futurist Don Peppers gives a powerful review of Jamie Shanks’ Social Selling Mastery: Scaling Up Your Sales and Marketing Machine for the Digital Buyer. We may be tooting our own horn here, but not without good reason! Peppers brings up some good points in Shanks’ book, including:

  • Successful sales has always been about good prospecting. Social selling is founded on the principle of empathy and respecting the modern buyer. When done right, it places salespeople in the minds and shoes of their buyers.

  • Social selling is also an inherent exercise in hyper-personalization. LinkedIn, Twitter, or Google allow sales professionals insights for the sole purpose of personalizing message, fostering deeper human connection and becoming trusted advisors in the sales process. This makes that sale easier to score when the conversation actually comes up. 

  • Social selling champions know how to provide value with content at every stage in the buyer’s process, from prospecting to nurturing, closing to expanding. This requires high-quality and diversified content assets produced by marketing.

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