Whenever the level of confusion on sales enablement is discussed, another area of confusion is ignored. And that’s the question: what, exactly, is sales operations? And what’s the relationship between the two?Some people say, “Oh no, sales ops is well defined, the confusion is about...
Announcing the release of the 2018 Sales Operations Optimization Report.Sales operations has been a staple within sales organizations for almost 30 years. It may be a dedicated person, a full team or perhaps the activities of forecasting, territory planning and the like are spread throughout...
Increasingly, sales is more science than art. Ask large corporate recruiters what they want for salespeople and the answer is increasingly likely to be someone with experience, with relevant expertise, highly adaptable to change, comfortable with technology, and a high propensity to learn. “People skills”...
Last week, we discussed what buyers want salespeople to do more often and more consistently, based on our 2018 Buyer Preferences Study. Four behaviors were at the top of their list, and one of them was to focus on post-sale.“Post-sale? But that’s a service...
In my last blog, I talked about the “apathy loop” in which buyers across industries and across geographies are marginalizing their relationships with salespeople. While buyers are not demanding that their sellers be replaced by artificial-intelligence fueled bots, they certainly wouldn’t fight to keep them.Yet...
Over the last two weeks, I’ve shared some of the highlights from our first ever Buyer Preferences Study. First, I discussed if salespeople are relevant to the modern buyer based on the buyers’ perspective. We have seen that buyers don’t necessarily perceive salespeople as business partners....
A few months ago, we talked about how bullish salespeople were on sales as a profession. Of over 900 salespeople surveyed, 90% said that they would highly recommend a career in professional B2B sales to someone just coming out of school. They espoused the relative...
Here we go again with more facts based on our 2018 Buyer Preferences Study.Last week, I discussed the question of how relevant salespeople are to the modern buyers when solving business problems. More than 70% of buyers usually engage with salespeople later along their customer’s...
Today we continue our conversation with Mike Ahearne, Professor of Marketing at the University of Houston and Research Director at the Sales Excellence Institute. An interesting finding from recent research by Mike and his colleague Tom Steenburgh is that when selling new or innovative products,...
If you are following my sales enablement research, you know that I’m hammering home the vision that sales enablement as a discipline has to engage, equip and empower salespeople to become and remain relevant, valuable and differentiating in every interaction with prospects and customers, along their...