Insights

In the early stages of my career, I used to get offended when people told me that I was a good salesman! I used to think of Vinny working customers at his used car lot and didn’t really want to associate myself with that particular persona. Maybe these compliments were backhanded at times, and at other times, maybe I mistook even genuine compliments to be backhanded. But as my career progressed and as I moved towards leadership roles, I really discovered how valuable my sales skills were. These skills weren’t always exercised in the context of selling products directly (though that was a large part of it); often it was selling investors, advisors, mentors, and even family members on my vision. Once I realized how essential sales was to being an effective leader, I fully embraced this attribute and doubled down to become an even better salesman. In the [...]

In our engagements with sales teams, we have encountered multifarious issues that impair sales team performance. Perhaps one of the most disproportionately overrepresented, however, is the problem of misaligned sales teams. Our data is not the only data to tell this story:numerous publications discuss the high cost of misalignment between sales and marketing teams. By some estimates, businesses lose an incredible $1 trillion annually due to wasted resources in sales and marketing. Organizations with well-aligned sales and marketing teams, on the other hand, surpass their competitors in revenue by 208%. In fact, sales consultants have found misalignment to be one of the top issues sales teams face. Although sales/marketing misalignment is the most common type of misalignment in sales teams, alignment issues are not exclusive to sales and marketing. Our data has revealed that sales teams have challenges with misalignment in a number of areas and with a [...]

The purpose of a CRM system is to foster the creation and preservation of meaningful and lasting customer relationships. CRM systems track historical customer details that will help businesses tailor solutions to fit the exact needs of a customer, and they can help employees understand how to best communicate with particular customers. Moreover, CRM systems ensure that critical customer knowledge is shared among employees, so that if one employee leaves the company, organizational knowledge does not go with that employee. CRM systems also track employee progress so that everyone is held accountable for their work. While the benefits of a CRM system are many,  the adoption of a CRM system often proves more complicated than anticipated. Obviously there are many questions an organization needs to ask before it adopts a CRM system. Every organization has different internal requirements and customer needs that must be met, so before looking [...]

On a scale from rocky to rough, how smooth are your enterprise sales negotiations? When nearing the suspenseful closing phase of a large sales negotiation, tensions typically run high. Depending on your relationship with the prospect in question, you may know very little about how they operate, negotiate, and maintain relationships post-sale. Combine that with your own internal metrics of how you are compensated or incentivized (net new logos, revenue targets, pipeline velocity, win-rates etc.) and you have the perfect storm for a challenging situation. The bottom line is you will do anything it takes to “win”. I place “win” in quotation marks because it’s a common misconception that there are winners and losers in negotiations. This notion should be thrown out the window, preferably from the 40th floor or above. The goal should be to strike a deal where both parties walk away feeling good. No one likes [...]

[...]

[...]

[...]