Sales 2.0

Help humans meet humans

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“Your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people’s interests first.”—Bob Burg, The Go Giver

Mass outreach continues to get worse. I frequently hear from people that “email does not work” or “how can you cold call people when everyone works at home?”

There are still many people out there who think the answer to this declining effectiveness is to send more outreach. If cold email only gives you a 0.1% reply rate, versus the 1% it used to give, then just send ten times more!

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Don’t be a Brainiac!

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I got some unsettling feedback a few weeks ago. I was told I was a “Brainiac”. I want to help you avoid the same fate.

At first, I thought it was a compliment. It sounded rather flattering. OK I think I would like to be know as that. But then the next part of the feedback came. “And the client said he had no idea what you were talking about.” Uh oh!

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Are you frazzled?

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I had an interesting discussion with a friend last week. They reminded me that the biggest problem facing many salespeople and business owners is getting anyone to speak to them. This problem has gotten worse as we add new ways to communicate with each other. There’s so much to do and so much noise in our life that the last thing we want to do is waste our time with some salesperson.
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But buyers are not the only “frazzled” ones…sellers are too! Sellers feel like they don’t have any time either. (Jill Konrath wrote a whole book about time management for salespeople!)

There are ways to get your time back. I’ve personally gotten a lot of time back over the last few years. If you’re time-starved try a few of these tips to get started.

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Send Your Proposals to the DEA, Part 2

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In my last post I was ranting about how I hate proposals.

My preferred solution to this is not developing proposals at all. I highly recommend not spending your time generating beautiful documents for every person that says, “send me a proposal”. It’s a surefire way to eliminate your prospecting time and have a sick pipeline.

However, if you have situations where you have to generate a proposal, or a part of a proposal, consider the remaining two options from The 4-Hour Workweek: Delegate and Automate.

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AI in Sales: Freeing up sellers to be more human

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This is number 9 in a series of interviews I am conducting with subject matter experts and practitioners in the sales profession. I am examining where we are today with AI in sales and where we are going.

This interview is with Miro Putkonen and Anton Dobrzhanskiy of Epicbrief. Epicbrief’s mission is to make human work in sales more meaningful and valuable. Here’s a summary of our conversation and below this summary is the full transcript of our interview.

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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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