Sales Training Journal

Maximizing sales effectiveness and revenue growth is a challenge facing not just sales management but front line salespeople as well. If sales effectiveness is about the ability of a sales team to successfully convert prospects into customers and achieve sales goals, the question is, how does a company go about boosting sales performance? What are the various strategies, techniques, and tools the sales organization will use to improve the efficiency and productivity of the sales process?. In a nutshell, the sales strategy defines sales tactics, and sales tactics define sales effectiveness—the type of actions salespeople take to open opportunities, move deals forward, and then close. To maximize sales effectiveness, then you must first understand the externals in your business and then make choices about how your strategy proposes to deal with the opportunities and threats inherent in those market realities. In any business, value is created or...

Sales training programs fail due to not understanding the pitfalls in selling to today’s connected buyer and the solutions they expect, which go way beyond the product. Read on to why many sales training programs fail and why. Sales training programs are critical to a business seeking to acquire new customers and deepen relationships with existing customers. They say the stated aim of any business is to acquire, develop, and maintain customers at a profit. So how do sales organizations do this in a highly competitive and noisy market? How do sales coaches and sales trainers stimulate new ways of thinking and provide salespeople with new ways of operating in a data-driven sales environment to increasingly savvy customers? For many organizations, even the agile ones, ongoing sales training can be expensive with hard-to-quantify impacts on s...

How to close a sale with twelve techniques that have been tried and tested, because closing sales is about the salesperson’s attitude as much as the sales skill. There is no doubt that sales cycles have gotten longer, and closing a sale is nearly a process in itself. Close rates are falling because many salespeople are focused on selling the wrong thing. They focus on only one aspect of the sale: You pay me this for that, or you give me this for that. A good place to start on how to close a sale is to first ask yourself: Why would anyone want to buy my product or service or have sales conversations with me? If you can’t understand the value proposition of what you are pitching or selling, how can you expect others to understand? Understanding the motivations and values of the buyer can greatly increase your opportunity for sales success and closing sales. Do your very best to get into their head before you pitch anything. ...

  A sales pipeline is a representation of the steps a prospect goes through from initial contact to closing the deal. It helps any salesperson to track the progress of deals, quotes, and potential customers and manage all the sales steps effectively. Too often, salespeople have all of their customer information spread out across different channels. This practice not only is inefficient but also interferes with a consistent customer experience. What Is A Sales Pipeline? So, the sales pipeline will allow salespeople to monitor deals and track customer interactions alongside comments, feedback, and next steps. A steady pipeline of new business opportunities can be the secret to nurturing leads into clients. But where will they come from, and how do you go about converting them? Here is a breakdown of the typ...