If you’re not measuring sales engagement with customers using your CRM, then your speeches and slogans about the desire to create a compelling customer experience and build lasting relationships with customers by focusing on customer service are worthless. It’s not going to happen without holding the sales team accountable to specific measurement of the depth … Continue reading
A recently published study of email marketing subject lines points out the importance of using email analytics like open and click rates to optimize emails. The study illuminates some very counter-intuitive email marketing tips. Without analysis of email analytics, there’s no way most people could pick up on these tactics, except possibly by blind luck. … Continue reading
Can inside salespeople replace your outside salespeople? Sales is changing, undoubtedly. Thought leaders like Justin Roff-Marsh assert that field sales is dead. Here’s a fascinating webinar where Justin argues that the “sales” function can be moved inside with a smaller contingent of sales engineers for on-site visits, coordinated by the inside team. There’s no doubt … Continue reading
Getting salespeople to make their prospecting calls and getting salespeople to use the CRM are probably the two of the biggest challenges faced by a sales leader/manager. Ironically, the two objectives go hand in hand. You can’t reach your sales goals without consistent prospecting, and you can’t be sure that the prospecting calls are getting … Continue reading
It’s easy for salespeople to see themselves as the conduit for all information instead of the sales CRM, marketing messages and other sources. It’s almost impossible for a salesperson to fully appreciate how much information the customer is presented with online and how that “colors” their perspective. Retargeting is a relatively new trend that has … Continue reading
Is your CRM solution able to clearly break down the numbers that drive your marketing and sales funnel? “Sales is a numbers game.” is true. Sales performance is ultimately measured in actual sales numbers but, the meaning of the cliche is different. Winning at sales is about understanding the other numbers that drive sales results … Continue reading
The benefits of combining CRM and marketing automation are tremendous and very profitable. In fact, one of the primary reasons businesses decide to implement their first CRM solution is to get their customer and prospect list organized to enable email marketing and other outreach. Frank Paterno detailed these benefits here. A few of the highlights … Continue reading
What is the buying process your customers goes through? It’s not because they saw an awesome presentation, it’s because they have a need or a problem that is affecting them on an emotional level. Even in business situations, people buy for emotional reasons. We all have pretty basic emotional needs, and in the end, … Continue reading
Do your salespeople have goals for 2017? Whose sales goals are they, theirs or yours? If your sales team hasn’t taken ownership of the goals you have for them, then you’re in trouble. If they don’t have the means to tie their daily activities to those goals and measure their progress, then expect things to … Continue reading
It’s no surprise that acquiring and retaining customers topped GetApp’s recently released survey of SMBs’ biggest priorities for 2017. Of course, that means lead generation, customer service initiatives and maybe implementation of a CRM solution. But, there much more to it than that. First, the study showed that reducing costs and improving IT infrastructure are … Continue reading