RAIN Group's Best of 2019

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.

Our Most Popular Content from 2019

Blog Post: Planning to Win: Your Sales Negotiation Checklist
Preparation is often the greatest determinant of negotiation success. Sellers who fail to plan often get taken advantage of. Don’t enter a negotiation unprepared, expecting to improvise. Knowledge is your source of power. It gives you the confidence and information you need to be successful. In this article, we identify 7 elements of a successful sales negotiation and provide you with a checklist to help you prepare for any sales negotiation.

Webinar: How to Inspire Buyers with Ideas, Differentiate, and Win Sales Sellers who win 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? In this webinar, we share the keys to inspiring buyers with new ideas—an essential skill for winning in today’s competitive marketplace.

Blog Post: How Do You Build Rapport with Customers?
The consequences for selling are profound, and it all starts with building rapport. Rapport is the foundation for building relationships. Sellers, professionals, and leaders who have great relationships tend to have great success. As you're building rapport with customers, think of it less as a mechanical part of how you should lead a meeting and more as an investment in building a relationship. In this article, we share the 4 ways you can build rapport with customers and a video to get you on your way.

Infographic: Defend Yourself Against Productivity Dragons 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. 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.

Blog Post: The Sales Training and Enablement Revolution
In the world of sales training and enablement, change is explosive. There's a revolution going on in training and sales enablement that organizations can no longer ignore. Looking forward to the 2020s, it's more important than ever to have sellers who are multi-skilled change agents. Sales training has struggled to keep up. Organizations that only recently established sales training and enablement programs now expect them to drive competitive advantage, do it fast, and keep sellers in the field as much as possible. In this article, we share how you can develop a sales education system that builds sales team capabilities and transforms the way sellers sell.

SlideShare: 54 Sales Quotes to Motivate and Inspire 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.

Blog Post: 6 Common LinkedIn Selling Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
LinkedIn is a powerful prospecting and sales tool. It’s a great way to connect with new buyers, stay top of mind, and engage with your network. The vast majority of buyers, especially company execs, engage with sellers on LinkedIn before making a purchase decision. With so many buyers connecting with sellers through LinkedIn, you're missing a huge opportunity if you don’t optimize your profile and reach out to prospects. Avoid the 6 mistakes featured in this article to maximize your success with this powerful platform.

Infographic: 10 Ways to Achieve your Top Sales Priorities We surveyed 423 sales and enablement leaders and discovered their top 10 sales priorities. Do you share the same priorities? In this infographic, we offer research-backed tips on how to tackle them.

Blog Post: What Does It Mean to Be Extremely Productive?
Productivity is often misunderstood. One person might think being productive is conquering their never-ending inbox by the end of the day, while another perceives it as working as many hours as possible. Here's the thing: it's not about getting through your email, and it's not about being a workhorse and cranking out eight or more hours of work every day. It's about working smarter. (Cliché, yes, but still true.) In this article, learn how you can take your productivity to the max.

Guide: The Complete Guide to Sales Training Success 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. 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. In this sales training guide, we walk you step-by-step through developing a sales education system that not only builds sales team capability, but also enables sellers to apply those capabilities and transform the way they sell.

White Paper: The 5 Most Effective Negotiation Tactics Buyers Use on Sellers In this white paper, we share select findings from the RAIN Group Center for Sales Research's recent Top Performance in Sales Negotiation study. We analyzed data from 449 buyers that represented $2.59 billion in annual purchases. Among the findings are the 5 most effective tactics buyers use on sellers. If you're looking to arm yourself with the skills you need to negotiate the best solutions while maintaining relationships and winning sales, this white paper is a must-read.

We hope you enjoy this content, and that it helps you on the way to achieving your sales goals. We look forward to bringing you much more in 2020 and beyond, so stay tuned.