In the fast-paced world of business, staying ahead of the curve is not just advantageous—it's essential. The market is in a constant state of flux, influenced by technological advancements, shifting consumer behaviors, and evolving competitive landscapes. For businesses, this means that a once-effective sales strategy can quickly become outdated, risking the loss of market share and relevance.

It's probably the most famous challenge in sales, to say nothing of an increasingly dreaded interview question: "Sell me this pen." Even if people didn't know it before, the 2013 movie The Wolf of Wall Street made it famous. And the images of would-be salespeople foundering, trying to describe the positive attributes of a pen without any real sales strategy, are hard to forget once you've seen them.

You know the story. COVID-19 came, everyone had to sell virtually. The amount of virtual sales outreach exploded. And now, with sales teams across the globe feeling the pinch of a tight economy, it hasn’t relented. Buyers have had enough. Reply rates have plummeted, email providers are increasingly marking sales outreach as spam, and the gap between seller and buyer has never felt wider. And we haven’t even mentioned AI, which could take this to a whole new level.

You're likely not as targeted in growing your business as you think. Most service-based business development efforts are too diffuse. You have too many vague opportunities without a clear, actionable path to increase your chances of winning any of them. Your team is smart, dedicated, and hard-working -- but their efforts aren't resulting in meaningful progress.

What are customer needs? Answering that question may not always be easy – but it’s crucial for business success. After all, knowing what the customer wants is the starting point for creating winning products and services. Just as importantly, it’s the basis for forming long-lasting relationships. The State of the Connected Customer report reveals that 62% of customers expect businesses to anticipate their needs, and 73% expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.

Choose the Best Time and Strategy for Cold Calling. Ultimately, picking the right time to make your sales calls is essential to sales success. While these six rules of thumb are a good place to start, you may find different strategies work better for your business. Test these approaches and adopt the ones that work for you. You might be surprised to find how many more prospects you can reach with a few simple tweaks.

Sellers have got to work harder than ever. That’s because buyers are more informed than ever before. Buyers conduct a lot of their own research, which means they’re more than 50% along the sales journey before us sellers get in touch. The challenge for us is helping buyers make sense of what they’ve read online, but without knowing what they’ve been reading up on.

When companies are creating profiles of possible target customers, there is a dimension they often overlook: the urgency of the need for the offering. This article provides a process for segmenting prospective customers in this fashion and creating a sales strategy.

By the time we hit the age of 18, we have years of buying decisions behind us and generally feel like we’re too smart to be “sold” anything. Instead, we’re looking to be inspired to buy. Inspiring is the new selling. If you’re in sales or business development, one of the easiest ways to inspire customers is to show enthusiasm for your product. Arguably, there is nothing more contagious than enthusiasm, at least nothing that is still good for you.

Sales is a business about people and getting the right talent is vital—companies must reconsider their talent strategies and the sales roles they need to continue to drive growth.

A study of B2B companies found that just one in 20 was able to consistently grow sales faster than sales and marketing expenses. As companies seek to cut costs in an uncertain economy, increasing this commercial productivity is a smart strategy. Research shows the three ways companies can do this are to refine the go-to-market model, turn every rep into an A player, and make sales and marketing support more efficient.

Few things can be more critical to your company's growth than your sales process. But when you step back to evaluate your team's methods, you may wonder whether your process is more of a hindrance than a help. After all, as important as traits like persistence and having good people skills can be in sales, they aren't going to be enough to create a winning process on their own.

Let's start by defining strategy. There are competing views on what strategy is and how to achieve it. In my opinion, to put it simply, strategy is the determination of an organization's primary long-term goals and objectives, the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary to achieve those goals. There are two equally important perspectives to strategic planning: the mechanistic logical method and the dynamic human-centered approach.

The economy is slowing, and hundreds of layoff announcements are in the news, including Goldman Sachs (3,200), Pratt & Whitney (900), United Furniture Industries (2,700), and Meta (11,000). If you’re a B2B seller and your customers are cutting costs, what should you do?

With many organizations, we are seeing sales force reductions that parallel the layoff announcements. At others, we see sales force hiring freezes. And every sales organization is rethinking its strategy and scale.

Most salespeople spend only a third of their time selling. While the exact number ranges between 27% and 36%, depending on the survey, the message is clear: Sales reps spend the bulk of their day on activities that don’t directly generate revenue for your company.

Two-thirds of your sellers’ time is spent doing manual tasks, including record keeping, data entry, lead management, searching for sales collateral and content, and tool management.

With the New Year just around the corner, it’s time to consider the new B2B sales strategies you may have been putting off. The B2B landscape is changing rapidly. New technology and changing economic environment are forcing companies to change plans. To stay ahead of the curve, sales leaders must adapt or fall behind. This article explores the 2023 sales landscape and how sales leaders can position their teams for greater success.

Prospective buyers are generally reluctant to speak to sellers, which is one of the most considerable roadblocks salespeople face. And there are many factors that contribute to this reluctance beyond simple disinterest. For one thing, the sales landscape has dramatically and rapidly shifted in recent years. Since the late twenty-tens and accelerating through COVID-19, the sales process has become much more complex.

A trip to the supermarket this week left me shocked—and a bit worried—at the price of groceries. It isn’t just food, though. The cost of energy, clothing, and even my Netflix subscription has been inching up. At the same time, my household budget has remained the same. It hasn’t dropped, which is good, but my dollars definitely don’t go as far as they used to.

However, when the concept is introduced, it’s greeted with cold stares, heavy sighs and resistance. Whether the employees voice their concerns or keep them to themselves, they sound something like this: “I’m not a salesperson.” “I didn’t join this company to sell.” “I don’t want my customers to think I’m trying to sell them more.”

Following the expenditure of resources and time in developing a new product, the next critical consideration is locating customers who purchase it. You may be perplexed about the best way to contact a customer or have difficulty defining go-to sales strategies that produce results. Salespeople use a variety of approaches, tips, and techniques daily to get new leads. New methods are entering the picture as a result of rapid technological advancement.