It's 2020 and now is the time to begin executing on your plan to blow the doors off your sales goals.
But where should you begin? What’s going to make the biggest difference? What are others doing that's working today?
To answer these questions, we looked across our sales research studies and pulled out 5 key ways Top Performers stand out compared to The Rest.
Wishing our clients, friends, readers, and followers a very happy holiday season and joyful New Year.
It’s truly an honor to be a part of your journey as you and your team unleash your sales potential and achieve your goals. Your success is our success, and we look forward to working together in 2020 and beyond.
From all of us at RAIN Group: Happy Holidays!
Throughout the year, our goal is to provide you with research, ideas, and insight to help you unleash sales potential and crush your sales goals.
From blog posts to new white papers, ebooks, infographics, webinars, and research, we've published an abundance of content in 2019 to help sellers, sales managers, and sales leaders reach top performance.
Below we've rounded up our most popular content from the year that will guide you on your path towards sales success.
With 2020 less than a month away, it’s time to think about what sales success looks like for you in the new decade.
Are changes in buyer behavior affecting your sales success? Are your accounts buying as much or as often as they could be? Are you losing big in negotiations?
Picture this: You're meeting with your prospect after months of discussions. You have a great relationship. You did facilitated sessions, interviews, and organized a global team for the roll out. If you win, this will be your biggest close of the quarter.
All signs look a-go, but you still have one remaining meeting to work out, according to your prospect, "the key terms and conditions."
You walk into the room and hear…
Sellers who win more often bring new ideas and perspectives to their buyers. In fact, 71% of buyers report that they want to talk to sellers early in the sales process when they are looking for new ideas.
But what ideas inspire buyers? How can you shape buyer agendas for action? How can you differentiate in sales?
Sales training is often approached with a car wash mentality: You're in, you're out, and you're ready to sell.
But this isn't how real learning happens. This isn't how you help sellers raise the bar and change how they sell.
It's time for an entirely new approach to sales education; an approach that overhauls the way sales training is conceived, designed, and executed over the long-term.
An approach that drives real behavior change and results.
We recently surveyed 423 sales and enablement leaders and discovered their top 10 sales priorities for the year ahead:
Delivering value, making the ROI case, retaining customers, growing accounts, recruiting top talent, forecasting, implementing a sales process, utilizing sales technologies, winning against the competition, developing sales managers, coaching sales teams, generating leads, onboarding, productivity, compensation...
There's no shortage of challenges sales leaders face.
Recently, we surveyed 423 sales, enablement, and company leaders to uncover their top challenges and priorities, and how they approach them.
What are the top challenges sales enablement and sales leaders face today? What are their top priorities?
Which are most difficult to tackle? How should they be tackled?
To find out, we asked 423 sales, enablement, and company leaders these questions.
This report contains our findings, including 3 initiatives that will help sales and enablement leaders address their challenges and achieve their priorities.
Want to succeed in sales?
Need a little extra motivation?
Looking for inspiration and best practices?
You're in luck.
We've compiled 54 of our favorite sales quotes from RAIN Group's best-selling books, research reports, white papers, and award-winning blog that will inspire you and your sales team to reach top performance.
Something new vies for your attention every few minutes: emails, text messages, collaboration tools, phone calls, co-workers, meetings, customers, and the list goes on. The result? Productivity suffers.
But with discipline and preparation, you can defeat these productivity dragons.
We know it's possible because we recently surveyed 2,377 professionals to find out which habits and hacks, when applied in different combinations, drive not only productivity, but also top performance versus peers, job satisfaction, and happiness. With only 14% of people rating themselves Extremely Productive (The XP), there's a huge opportunity for 86% of people to take control of their time, achieve top performance, and slay their productivity-killing dragons.
This infographic teaches you how to take advantage of that opportunity.
There's no denying that having a highly motivated sales team ready to give their full energy and effort day in and day out has a huge impact on your organization's success.
But how exactly can you increase your motivation and that of your team?
In this on-demand webinar, RAIN Group President John Doerr will share 3 Habits and 9 hacks proven to boost
sales motivation.
Each year, our goal for the RAIN Group Sales Blog is to provide you with research, ideas, and insight to help you unleash sales potential.
From blog posts to new white papers, ebooks, infographics, webinars, and research, we've published a treasure trove of content in 2018 to help sellers, sales managers, and sales leaders reach top performance.
Below we've rounded up our most popular content from the year that will guide you on your path towards sales success.
The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.
-Peter Drucker
With the New Year less than a month away, it's time to think about what will be different in the year ahead.
Where will you direct your focus to reach your goals and grow your sales? What are the opportunities for your organization? What do you need to do to seize them?
In this webinar, RAIN Group President Mike Schultz shares data from the RAIN Group Center for Sales Research on sellers, sales leaders, and buyers, uncovering the biggest opportunities for sales growth in the year ahead.
Seventy-five percent of purchases are strategic, meaning the buyer is making an investment and not required to buy.
Yet only 14% of buyers discover these strategic opportunities from sellers.
If you want to grow your sales in 2019, the opportunities are out there and very few sellers are taking advantage.
How can you build a team that closes this gap?
In this infographic, we share the biggest opportunities—according to our research from both buyers and sellers—for B2B sales growth in the year ahead.
Asking incisive questions is an essential part of any sales conversation.
Great sales questions help you find out what's going on in your buyer's world. They help you connect with buyers, understand buyer needs and what's important to them, and help you drive the sale forward.
In this guide, we share 50 of the most powerful sales questions you can use in your conversations.
Sales prospecting has changed more than any other facet of sales in the last 10 years. There are a lot of clickbait articles with radical advice popping up and leading sellers astray.
In our new benchmark report, Top Performance in Sales Prospecting, we undertook a study of 488 B2B buyers and 489 sellers to find out what's working and what's not in sales prospecting.
In this infographic, we contrast 5 popular assumptions about prospecting with facts from the RAIN Group Center for Sales Research.
How many attempts does it take to break through to busy buyers?
What offers are most accepted?
Do cold meetings convert to new business?
In our new benchmark report, Top Performance in Sales Prospecting, the RAIN Group Center for Sales Research uncovered the answers to these critical prospecting questions. With data from 488 B2B buyers and 489 sellers, we've cracked the code on what works in prospecting today.
This infographic highlights 30 must-know stats from our research and analysis and what they mean for sellers in today's world.
In sales, you have a finite number of hours in a day. Most of those hours are spent on the immediate sales opportunities in your pipeline—those buyers who have a need they are looking address and a timeline to act. These buyers receive the majority of your time and attention, and rightfully so.
But what about the buyer you met at a conference or have had an initial sales call with that was "interesting" and "valuable" but goes nowhere? Or the buyer who downloads something from your website but is just "seeing what's out there?" What do you do with buyers who are a perfect fit for your company, but don't have an immediate need?
This is where lead nurturing comes into play.
Buyers are awash with information, bombarded with sales and marketing messages, crazy busy, and tasked to do more with less.
Yet they still want to hear from sellers and they still accept meetings with sellers who reach out to them proactively.
82% of buyers will accept meetings with sellers who reach out.
The sellers who secure these meetings achieve significantly greater success with a much different approach.
Each year, our goal for the RAIN Group Sales Blog is to provide you with research, ideas, and insight to help you unleash your sales potential.
From regular blog posts to new white papers, ebooks, webinars, and research, we have, and will continue to release valuable insight on what you as a seller can do to set yourself apart from the rest.
In case you missed some of our new sales content this year, we've compiled a list of our top 10 most popular content pieces from 2017 that will guide you on your path towards sales success.
Most sales are won and lost based on one key factor: You.
You hold the keys to your sales success. Competitors don’t win because their offerings are more impressive. They win because they deliver a superior sales experience.
You can too.
When you look at your pipeline, do you see opportunities that just won't move?
Do days, weeks, and even months go by with the same opportunities staring back at you?
Worse yet, are you losing more of your opportunities than you'd like?
No doubt, these are the same opportunities that would make the biggest difference to your quarterly results if only you could crack the code.
In our recent Top-Performing Sales Organization study, we were particularly interested in the sales skills that stood out when sellers not only met their goals, but also believed their goals were challenging.
Everyone needs motivation to tackle different types of tasks/challenges. Whether it's hitting your personal sales goals or achieving your weight loss goals, people can't do it without some type of driving motivation.
Here's the situation: You get an introductory conversation with a great buyer—someone who fits your target profile to a T.
Not long into the conversation, however, the buyer says, "We already work with one of your competitors to do this."
What do you do next?
As part of our research this year, we have learned:
Since the term was coined in 1970, consultative selling has been the most widely accepted—and pursued—sales approach. For the following forty years, advice for how to sell had mostly been a variation on the consultative selling theme.
In the mid-1990s, a fairly common sales strategy was to give a seller a desk, a phone, a business directory, and say, "Go."
Fast forward to today, and selling has become significantly more complex. Companies report ever-increasing challenges regarding product and service commoditization, proliferation of competition, and more informed and sophisticated buyers.
Even small improvements in win rate can have a huge impact on revenue.
Based on findings from The Top-Performing Sales Organization Benchmark Report, the RAIN Group Center for Sales Research has identified 8 key areas that contribute to higher win rates that will help you beat your sales goals and reach Top Performer status this year:
Fortunately there are ways to warm prospects up, get them to talk with you about their concerns, and get them interested in hearing what you have to say. You must, however, do it within the first few seconds of the conversation.
Here's the situation: it's the first, maybe second, serious conversation with a prospect. You're asking questions, you're building great rapport, you're uncovering a slew of needs, and you're already seeing how you can help this prospect in 10 different ways. The conversation is going great. That is until the prospect says, "Wow, this all sounds good. So, what's something like this going to cost?"
Challenges abound when it comes to generating leads for professional services firms: selecting the right tactics to generate quality leads, implementing lead generation activities consistently, breaking through the noise and getting the attention of busy decision makers, measuring and tracking what's working for you, and the list goes on.
The first sales conversation with a new prospect can be tough. After all, prospects tend to distrust sales people, they're guarded with their information, and they're extremely busy. The fact that they agreed to meet with you in the first place is a great sign. But much of your selling success hinges on your ability to lead an effective first conversation and get them to agree to a second conversation with you.
Leads, leads, leads. Once the referrals and the circle of family and friends aren't enough to keep your firm growing, it's all about the leads. Yet, when it comes to generating leads, consulting firms get it all wrong in 10 very common ways.
Many people want to beleive that cold calling doesn't work because they don't want to have to do cold calling. Indeed, there are many ways to do it wrong and fail. There are many cold callers out there using deceptive tactics to get through, which leaves a bad taste in buyers' mouths.
The 4th of July has always signaled the beginning of summer to me. Fireworks, parades, barbecues, picnics, and baseball games-what better ways to celebrate the kickoff of the short-lived, New England heat?
The holiday also brings back memories of my childhood. I grew up in a small tourist town in southern Maine where my parents owned and managed a motel. Growing up living at a motel made for a pretty interesting childhood where I got to meet new people every day and make friends all over the world.
Top-Performing companies are winning 62% of their sales opportunities. The Rest? Only 40%.
While quite a bit of research has been published on what separates top sellers from the rest, there’s relatively little on what organizations are doing to achieve high win rates.
In my Twitter activities I came across an excellent post about price objections on Tom Searcy's Hunting Big Sales blog, Price is No Object.
In this post Tom writes, "A lot of the time, however, price is not the only issue and it's merely being used as a smoke screen."
I couldn't agree more. Price often is not the heart of the issue but an indicator that something else is going on. Clients will use the price objection because it's a convenient excuse.
In his article, Tom provides 4 excellent thoughts to help you get control of the price discussion. Check them out here.
I'd add a few more to his:
Most people's sales conversations could be better. Not a little better, significantly better. I see too many sellers fall into the same traps:
Retaining current customers costs 6-7x less than acquiring news ones,1 and improving customer retention rates by a mere 5% can increase profit per customer by 25%-95%.2 So it makes sense that top companies focus on building relationships, increasing loyalty, and selling more to current customers as a growth strategy.
In our 5 Keys to Maximizing Sales with Existing Accounts report, we shared the ways in which high performers outdo the rest to grow their accounts and achieve their financial goals.
At the top of the list? Providing value.
There's been a bit of a gold rush around the term "insight selling" in the last several years. Research from a variety of sources, including RAIN Group, has confirmed a simple fact:
Buyers buy from sellers who are sources of ideas.
Good negotiators have the ability to recognize the negotiation tactics and style of the other party.
When a buyer comes to the negotiation in partner mode, it allows you to work collaboratively to create possibilities that expand the pie and result in the best possible agreement for both sides.
In Insight Selling: Surprising Research on What Sales Winners Do Differently, we reveal the results of our extensive analysis of over 700 B2B purchases from the buyer’s perspective.
In our research, we found that sales winners consistently exhibit behaviors on three levels: they connect, convince, and collaborate.
In What Sales Winners Do Differently, we studied over 700 purchases from the perspective of business-to-business buyers to find out what really happened in their buying experiences.
In our research, we looked at the factors that most separate sales winners from second-place finishers. These are the essential selling skills you need to find yourself in the winner's circle.
Sales coaching has become a hot topic in business as more and more companies see a significant return on investment. However, where executive coaching and personal-effectiveness coaching yield positive results, sales coaching lags behind. Whether it's a lack of time, inconsistent coaching conversations, unavailability of tools and resources to succeed, or weak coaching skills, sales managers and leaders simply aren't producing strong results.
Cold prospecting – reaching out to targets you don’t know to generate an initial meeting – is one of the hardest parts of sales. Partly, it’s a numbers game. With decision makers more insulated than ever, it’s getting harder and harder to get past gatekeepers and beyond voicemail.
But what happens when you do get a cold prospect to pay attention – whether it’s because they picked up the phone, or responded to an email or a direct mail piece? Do you feel like you nail it every time?
Much prospecting success is determined in this first interaction. Many opportunities die here before you have a chance to engage.
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a silver bullet that would make you more successful in your sales efforts? One thing you could do to really boost your sales success?
I hate to disappoint, but the reality is, there is no silver bullet. Sales success takes hard work and commitment along with skill and savvy.
While there is no one thing that will work for you, there are a number of things you can do to help boost your overall success. You can start by following these 10 sales tips.
Imagine you're a business leader, and you're considering buying a new technology that could help your business succeed.
You log in to the web presentation and, after a few pleasantries, the presenter starts in, "We started in 1978 by John Doe and have grown into the market leader in the space. We provide efficient effective solutions leveraging a unique combination of people, process, and technology to help you achieve results…Here's a sample list of our clients…Now let me log in to the software. It's all hosted online so you can login from wherever, whenever you need to…Over here is where you control admin rights of the users…"
Boring. Unfocused. Unhelpful.
At some point the time comes for every sales person to deliver a presentation. For some this may be early on in a demo of your product or capabilities, or to share a new approach to solving a problem. For others it may be later in the sales process as you present your proposed solution. In any case, delivering engaging sales presentations is a key to success.
© 2020 RAIN Group
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