HBR recently published a post that stated innovative leaders manage risk, demonstrate curiosity, and seize opportunity better than non-innovative ones. Whether you manage sales at an enterprise organization or a startup, in IT or manufacturing, these traits are both universal and undeniable.
That’s why we’ve curated our top performing posts of 2016 for sales leaders who know how, or want to know more about how to manage change.
Gone are the days of taking a backseat to innovation. If you want to stay on top, you need to adapt. This roundup provide valuable tactics, cutting-edge methodologies and boundless opportunities for sales leaders’ further learning.
The reality is that someday, over time, most companies are going to embrace social selling. We’re still very much in the early adopter phase of the maturity curve. The question is: why is your company doing it now or evaluating doing it in the future?
One of the biggest barriers to launching a successful social selling program is securing executive buy-in from upper management. Especially as Jill Rowley says, “that 50-year-old white guy on his 3rd marriage who probably manages your sales team,” still might not see value in social. But this support is key: without it, programs don’t gain the traction they need to spark long-term behavioural change.
Whenever you’re creating a program for social selling, I want you to picture the Emerald City the Wizard of Oz. The Emerald City is the end place that Dorothy is trying to get to. The only way to figure out how to get there is to reverse engineer what you need to do every day, week and month to get to that goal. That would be the yellow brick road.
“Why isn’t it working?” That’s a question you often hear in training, especially when someone is starting to test the limits of a new skill that he or she just learned. Social selling is no exception. This new approach to dealing with buyers takes time, practice and repeated course corrections. Similar to their teams, sales leaders should lead by example and adopt the same prescriptive routine that their team is supposed to follow.
Listening to podcasts is a terrific way to nudge your mind out of its accustomed habits and whet your creative edge with some fresh ideas. Numerous thoughtful sales and marketing innovators share their very best insights in short, easily absorbed bites that you can listen to while you’re driving to your next meeting. Here’s our choice for the ten best sales and marketing podcasts out there.
As the title of this blog states, I’ll provide a list of top books sales leaders should read for high performing teams. But let me preface this post by saying that I’m not intending to leave anyone out, and if I’ve left your book off this list, I apologize.
Another post about social selling, really? Not quite. I wanted to outline some of the strategic reasons why social selling should be one of your top priorities for this year. I won’t aim to convince you of its necessity – there is plenty of good reading here for that.
The CEO of Sales for Life Jamie Shanks recently sat down with Salesforce’s new Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist, Tiffani Bova, to talk building high performing sales teams and the future of digital selling. This is a segment of their interview.
Did you know that the average B2B company is at risk of losing nearly three-quarters of their current customers in the next four years? A massive Gallup research study of over 108,000 respondents worldwide found that only 29 percent of B2B customers are entirely engaged, while the remaining 71 percent are potentially ready to switch their loyalty to competitors. How can you stem this discouraging tide?
What do hundreds of sales, marketing and sales enablement leaders and professionals think about social selling? Our latest research set to find out. A few weeks ago we published an infographic outlining the details of our State of Digital Sales Survey. We highlighted sales leaders top priorities and challenges, as well as the benefits of a consistent social selling approach.
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Author: Jamie Shanks
Jamie Shanks is a world-leading Social Selling expert and author of the book, "Social Selling Mastery - Scaling Up Your Sales And Marketing Machine For The Digital Buyer". A true pioneer in the space of digital sales transformation, Jamie Shanks has trained over 10,000's of sales professionals and leaders all around the world.
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