Having taken part in numerous Sales 2.0 conferences, the focus is often on how buying has changed, and with it the need to change how companies sell. But the majority of the concepts presented regarding what Sales 2.0 looks like are concerned with how salespeople...
As sales organizations mature, they inevitably decide to segment their customer base. In this blog, we’ll define customer segmentation as categorizing clients/prospects into groups with similar characteristics.Customer segmentation, in theory, allows the sales team to focus more precisely on discrete parts of the client base....
The title of this blog is one of my favorite quotes from business guru W. Edwards Deming. His observation was one of the drivers behind us starting CSO Insights in 1992. Our goal from the onset was to conduct primary research in order to quantitatively...
Sometimes the best insights start as a joke. In facilitating a meeting of marketing and sales executives at a high tech manufacturing firm, the focus of the conversation started to center on the challenge of filling a sales territory pipeline. Marketing articulated the process they...
We have written a lot this year about the low win rates of forecast deals, which came in at 45.9% as part of CSO Insights 2015 Sales Performance Optimization study. When you are wrong more than half the time about what deals will close or...
With constant pressure on companies to grow revenues, they are always searching for new ways to increase sales performance. As part of CSO Insights’ 2015 Sales Performance Optimization (SPO) study, we asked the 1,000+ sales and marketing executives we surveyed to tell us their top...
As part of CSO Insights 10th Annual Lead Management & Social Engagement (LMSE) study, we asked the marketing teams taking part in the survey to rate their effectiveness in terms of the quality and quantity of leads they are providing sales teams. The following chart...
As part of CSO Insights’ 11th annual Lead Management and Social Engagement (LMSE) study, we did an indepth analysis into the role that social media/engagement is playing not just in marketing, but in sales, as well. The following chart from the survey shows a summary...