Sales 2.0

Book notes: Success is in your Sphere

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I agree with Zvi Band the author of the book Success is in your Sphere that “relationships are our most important asset”.  From everything I’ve seen, if you want to outperform in sales in the long run, you need to build your own network of people that know, like and trust you. No amount of technology or great messaging will get you even close to the salesperson with a top-notch Rolodex.

Success is in your Sphere shows you how to build a world-class network and maintain it. The book presents a framework for building relationships called “CAPITAL”. Here’s how the framework breaks down.

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Book Notes: The Sales Manager Survival Guide

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A classic issue in sales forces is promoting one of the top performing sales reps to the manager of a sales team, then having them fail in this new role.

It can be a “triple whammy” for the company as they lose the revenue of a top performer, need to fill a critical “seat” in the sales organization and have a group of salespeople that are not performing to their full potential.

I just became much clearer on why this happens and what can be done about it, by reading just one section of David Brock’s book “The Sales Manager Survival Guide”.

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Book notes: No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls.

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I’ve been reviewing some key books in sales and marketing to refresh my knowledge of some of the fundamentals to building world-class “revenue engines”. I’m sharing my summaries here.

The second book I’m covering is No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls, by Latané Conant.

Latané’s book covers an area of marketing that I have long wondered about: Should you “gate” or should you not “gate” your content?

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Book notes: The Sales Acceleration Formula

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I’ve been using the summer to review some of the classic books in sales and marketing and refresh some of the fundamentals to building world-class “revenue engines” described.

I started with Mark Roberge’s book “The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million”.

The part of Mark’s book I like the most is about hiring salespeople. If you’re going to take advice on hiring salespeople, Mark seems like a great guy to trust in my opinion. He hired hundreds of salespeople over his time at Hubspot, while building their sales and services area from 1 employee (him) to 450 employees.

The first point Mark makes in this section of the book is a killer: “World-class sales hiring is the most important driver of sales success”. He goes on to say, “Even if I was world-class at sales training, managing, coaching, and forecasting, it would not be enough to offset a team of mediocre salespeople.”

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Sales prospecting made easier

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I don’t understand why it is acceptable for a process like cold calling (now often started via email) to work one in a hundred times–or in email efforts one in a thousand times.

I used to work for a major semiconductor manufacturer. In the chip business “yield” from a silicon wafer is critical to profitability. Teams of people spend their life pushing to get a few more chips out of each silicon wafer.

I picture how a company in the high tech chip business could survive when only 1 in 100 of their chips was usable (or 1 in 1,000). Meanwhile most high tech companies accept this level of productivity in their sales departments. This content is for those who are not willing to accept those success rates.

This post describes a framework that I have found over the last two decades can really change the math on prospecting.

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