The Best Time to Cold Call in 2023

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.

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10 Pitfalls That Destroy Organizational Trust

In order to trust you as an organization, your stakeholders need to believe three things: that you care about them (empathy), that you’re capable of meeting their needs (logic), and that you can be expected to do what you say you’ll do (authenticity). Just like when people lose trust, organizations that are losing trust — or failing to build as much trust as they could — tend to get shaky or wobble on one of these three dimensions.

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5 Ways to Make an Impact at Work Now

Companies have been bracing for a recession all year. Although GDP continues to grow, most firms are still anticipating an economic downtown, and many have made talent changes already. With so much economic concern, experts say, it’s essential that employees continue to show their value, particularly as managers begin preparing for year-end performance reviews.

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Being a Manager Does Not Make You a Leader. Here’s How You Can Be Both

You can be a manager without being a leader. Management is a position bestowed upon you, which sets out roles and responsibilities, in relation to yourself and your team. But you cannot be a truly successful and highly competent manager without learning and integrating key leadership qualities. And in today’s fast-changing and increasingly remote business world, managers need to be effective leaders.

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Potential Client Not Ready to Change Their Solution? Here's How to Counter

"I am fine with my current product lineup..." is one of the worst things that a salesperson can hear. They are happy with what they currently have, and if they are already using a solution of yours you have to tread very carefully to ensure that you don't lose a current customer in pursuit of a higher package or price tag. So today, I wanted to share with you a few responses

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Want to Sell More? Don't Start With Your Product or Service — Start With Yourself.

People today are bombarded with messages from morning until night. We can't check email or drive to the store without seeing flashing banners, mostly aimed at selling us something. Today's consumers are experts at tuning these messages out, leaving salespeople with an important question: Do you ensure your message is seen and heard? Connecting with clients today is often about building trust.

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What Relationship Builders Do Better Than All Other Salespeople

Last week, I posted an article on the Impact of Relationship Building Challenges in Sales. The article explored what happens to salespeople who are skilled at selling, but aren’t very good at building relationships, as well as those who are great at building relationships but aren’t very skilled at selling. While there were some terrific insights, the one thing that was missing from the article was what great relationship builders do that everyone else fails to do.

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From Stress to Success: How to Cultivate Productive Leaders, Teams, and Organizations

Looking holistically at talent is crucial for recognizing the full range of an individual's abilities. Enhancing adaptability, fostering diversity and psychological safety, and creating more inclusive environments whereby everybody has the opportunity to thrive shows that the uniqueness of each individual is valued. Not to mention, it harnesses their potential for the benefit of the individual and, ultimately, the organization.

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How to Stop Taking Work So Personally

Taking things personally at work is not a sign of weakness, but a reflection of your passion, commitment, and deep sense of responsibility. But what if your professional role has become too intertwined with your sense of self. While equating your value as a person with your performance at work is common, it’s also possible to break free from the pattern. In this article, the author offers five strategies for how to approach situations with more objectivity so that you can navigate your professional journey with greater clarity, balance, and effectiveness.

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How to Develop True Grit

In 1968, Charles Portis’ book True Grit was released. The book and two subsequent movies told the story of a young woman’s pursuit of justice in the American West circa the 1870s. But that plot was more window dressing for a far more interesting story of an aging, curmudgeonly U.S. marshal who went by the moniker Rooster Cogburn. Cogburn was the agent through whom Mattie Ross would seek justice for her father's death.

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How Asking The Right 3 Questions Can Inspire Great Leadership

Times of crisis and terror bring out the worst in some and the best in others. The latter are the stories that need telling. No one could reasonably expect these kinds of largess. Most of us might reasonably wonder whether we could summon the generosity and creativity to emulate such acts of generosity. But a word describing this sort of expansive impulse is this week’s addition to the Ethical Lexicon

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How to Use Human Psychology to Crush Your Sales Goals

Although the marketing world has been changing drastically over the years, some things have stayed the same. I'm talking about human psychology. There are tried and true tactics that win every time based on how we behave and what signals our subconscious behavior and emotional triggers. According to McKinsey & Co., 80% of consumers want retailers to personalize their experiences — so when you use sales psychology, your audience will believe you understand them and their needs.

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Don’t Call, Just Text: How to Sell to Millennial Buyers

Six in 10 of today’s tech buyers are millennials, and they hold the largest number of decision-making roles in corporate buying. If you haven’t already learned how to sell to millennial buyers, it’s past time to get caught up. Millennials are the first generation to grow up with computers and internet access, and their habits are shaped accordingly. Millennial buyers spend more time researching online, abhor phone calls, and are socially conscious.

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How to Apologize to a Customer When Something Goes Wrong

Businesses are bound to make mistakes and disappoint their customers. But how you build your apology message and your careful attention to executing it appropriately can make the difference between losing those customers or increasing their loyalty. When delivered well, your apology message can improve the customer relationship to the point where it is stronger than if the mistake had never happened — a phenomenon known as the service recovery paradox.

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The No. 1 Key to a Happier, Longer Life—‘that younger people don't know, according to the oldest and ‘wisest’ Americans

I once interviewed Karl Pillemer, the Cornell sociologist and author of “30 Lessons for Living: Tired and True Advice from the Wisest Americans.” He’d seen numerous studies showing that people in their 70s, 80s, and beyond were far happier than younger people. He was intrigued: “I keep meeting older people — many of whom had lost loved ones, been through tremendous difficulties, and had serious health problems —

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Help Your Employees Develop the Skills They Really Need

The future of work will not be determined by technology, but by creating the right mix of education, exposure, and experience needed to develop skills and put them to work, creating a vastly more productive workplace and economy. In this article, the authors recommend a “70/20/10” learning model, in which only 10% of learning comes from formal instruction (education), 20% from social learning or mentorship (exposure), and 70% from hands-on, experiential practice with feedback (experience).

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