In a recent podcast I did with Richard Harris, he used the phrase “stop accelerating the suck.” This was in reference to the automation technologies being deployed by SDR teams around the world to drive more meetings into the pipeline. He was referencing the fact that organizations are placing so much emphasis on driving more […]
If your entire sales organization is not using all the available tools that they have at their disposal to both create leads by hunting and close them when the deal matters most. You are wasting company resources, and you are likely not meeting your own personal goals. When a manager you go begins to train a new sales rep and gives them the “throwaway” leads, the manager essentially gives them something that represents both time and money. Why wouldn’t they be given the best shot at closing anything they can get in front of? Why would you hire someone great, only to provide them with a low chance of success? That is a rhetorical question. The sales manager does this because they want the sales rep to learn in a non-critical environment. Ultimately, the Sales Manager is afraid that the sales rep does not know enough to adequately hold a conversation with a very rare and precious lead.
As a new Sales Development Representative, entering an organization, have you ever looked around and wondered why the top reps always seem to win, and the reps at the bottom are always at the bottom? Here at ABSTRAKT, we believe sales is a skill, it can be learned. Putting aside personality characteristics or level of education, sales comes down to some core fundamental skills. The best sales reps are currently looking to tools like Conversational Intelligence to learn from their mistakes. The problem is, when a Sales Development Representative reviews a call where they lost an opportunity, they are listening to their mistakes, not their success. This creates a negative feedback loop.
The opposite is true for success. Each good thing that happens, tends to lead to more good things that happen. Think about the last time a demo or call went really well. Usually, the turning point of a call can be attributed to a foundational element of success that is built upon.
Sales Representatives and Sales Leaders can look into their various dashboards to track activity. That is nothing new. For anyone who wants to be successful in Sales Management the key is to dig into what the data is not showing and help the Sales Representatives on your team to be better across the board. In closing, I think the hardest lesson I learned stepping into Sales Management was that what worked to get me to quota, isn’t going to work for everyone else… it likely won’t. My personality is unique to me and asking my reps to be like me resulted in very poor results and frustrated reps.
I get it… no more cold calling, chasing contracts, constant asks from your manager about deals in the pipeline. Life as someone “carrying a bag” (quota-carrying) is a life that experiences more failure than success. In fact, in software sales Sales Representatives fail 80-90% of the time. It shouldn’t be a surprise to me having […]
The fact is cold calling works. Not like you would think though. Is it possible to find a great-fit customer, find new contacts at their locations, and manage to pull them into a sales process that results in ….
Sales leaders and reps today have a plethora of tools available to help them communicate with their customers, and we know it is important to …. What factors make Call Intelligence Software stand out? Why is it so different from some of the reactive, call analytics tools on the market today?