How to Create a Coaching Culture [“Sales Shot” Workshop]
How to Create a Coaching Culture
[“Sales Shot” Workshop]
Culture + Engagement
6 Tips to Improve Marketing-Sales Alignment in Your Organization
According to data from LinkedIn, 90 percent of sales and marketing professionals believe their strategy, processes, content, and culture are not aligned.
From our experience, that number isn’t hard to believe at all.
And it’s really frustrating to see, because organizations that don’t align marketing and sales miss out on so much potential:
- 27% faster profit growth
- 36% higher customer retention
- Increased likelihood to meet (56%) and exceed (19%) revenue goals
So how do you get your marketing & sales teams in sync? Here are some tactics you can start implementing today to improve marketing-sales alignment.
What is marketing-sales alignment?
The best way to think about marketing-sales alignment is this:
Ultimately, Marketing and Sales aren’t two separate teams. They’re one team: the Revenue team.
At the end of the day, Marketing and Sales have the same goal. They simply use different tools and tactics to get there.
Marketing-sales alignment is just an intentional, strategic agreement to work with – not against – each other. There are a number of ways this can take shape, depending on the organization:
- Share common goals, priorities, & KPIs
- Use marketing tactics (e.g. buyer personas, automation) to improve sales effectiveness
- Use sales tactics (e.g. one-to-one connections, qualifying questions, pipeline automation) to improve marketing effectiveness
- Create a common lead-to-opportunity pipeline where qualification and handoff happens smoothly
- Engage in joint training sessions to help everyone improve and expand their skill sets
Because every organization is different, how to prioritize and apply these tactics will depend on your specific needs and your team structure. However, no matter which approach you take, the key is to focus on building cohesion and unity among your revenue generators.
Why does marketing-sales alignment matter?
We all know that Marketing and Sales don’t always get along. They have their territories and AORs and may not like it when the other steps on their toes.
However, this tension is detrimental to an organization’s ability to grow. Here are some stats to prove it:
- 60 to 70% of B2B content is never used because the subject topics are irrelevant to the buyer audience (Content Marketing Institute)
- 79% of marketing leads never convert due to a failure to nurture consumer connections (HubSpot)
- 55% greater increase in customer satisfaction rates for companies that align sales and marketing objectives (The Aberdeen Group)
- Companies have generated up to 208% more revenue after aligning sales and marketing (Wheelhouse Advisors)
- Marketing-sales alignment leads to 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% more sales conversions (MarketingProfs)
Why does marketing-sales alignment lead to these results? Some of the key benefits of marketing-sales alignment include the following:
Big vs. small picture
Generally, marketers look at large-scale audiences, and salespeople focus on individual prospects. Both are important for effective revenue generation. If you lose sight of the individual prospect, you’re going to start to seem out of touch. But if you focus only on a handful of people, you won’t be able to scale.
Data vs. anecdote
What do your customers want? This is a key question that every organization wants to answer, and marketers and salespeople generally use different approaches to arrive at one. Marketers rely on data, which reveals big-picture trends. Salespeople rely on individual anecdotes, which can reveal key information that may get lost in the data.
Focus your efforts
When you have Marketing and Sales working in tandem, each of them can focus their efforts on the same industries, verticals, and segments. For example, Marketing can create content that they deploy through paid ads, social media, and email. Sales can then see who engages with that content and follow up with personalized messages.
If they convert, Marketing gets attributed revenue. Sales gets warm leads. It’s a win-win for everyone!
Improve the customer experience
Marketing-sales alignment also results in a seamless experience for prospects and customers as they move from one stage of the buyer’s journey to another. You don’t want them to hear one message from marketing materials and another from a salesperson—that is jarring and reduces their trust in your organization.
How to measure marketing-sales alignment (or lack thereof)
So how do you know whether your marketing and sales practices are aligned (or mis-aligned)? What are some of the metrics you should be tracking?
Here are a few I’d recommend:
- Follow up rate for marketing leads. If your reps don’t follow up on hot leads, it either means they’re not taking Marketing’s efforts seriously, or Marketing is doing a poor job attracting potential buyers.
- Use of marketing content in sales. If your marketing team is creating content that speaks to customers’ pain points and underlying needs, then salespeople naturally will want to use it. If not, then either the content is bad, or salespeople need to be educated on its value.
- Marketing lead-to-opportunity conversion rate. If salespeople are following up on marketing leads but nothing’s happening with them, usually that means that Marketing doesn’t understand a) what constitutes a quality lead, or b) hasn’t aligned their messaging with Sales.
- Average number of touches to convert marketing leads into customers. If marketing leads take a lot of effort to convert, odds are Marketing doesn’t fully understand the ideal buyer profile.
Another thing to keep in mind: if you’re having vastly disproportionate success or failure in one team versus the other, then that’s a big misalignment red flag. If one team is dropping the ball, that’s real opportunity you’re missing out on.
How to improve marketing-sales alignment in your organization
Now let’s get into the nitty-gritty: how do you improve marketing-sales alignment within your own organization? Here are six steps that will get you on the right track.
1. Get buy-in at all levels
Before everyone gets aligned, you need to get buy-in—from C-suite, to marketing and sales leadership, to the salespeople on the ground.
The best way to do this is to communicate the value: how will marketing-sales alignment help them be more successful? You can reference info shared above to help you make that case.
2. Maintain clear, open communication
Alignment doesn’t happen by accident. You need to clearly and proactively maintain open lines of communication so everyone stays on the same page:
- What does the marketing team need from the sales team?
- What does the sales team need from the marketing team?
- From start to finish, what does the standard sales cycle look like?
- What does our ideal customer profile look like for each product?
- What does a bad lead look like?
- Which content and campaigns tend to attract the most high-quality leads?
- What can each team do better?
This approach also allows you to quickly identify gaps and get ahead of any problems.
3. Share and translate respective goals
One of the reasons marketing and sales teams so often misalign is because they have separate goals and success metrics. The best way to combat this is to create shared goals.
For instance, hold Marketing accountable for the revenue they drive (not just the value of the opportunities). They’ll quickly take an interest in sales enablement.
For Sales, hold them accountable for what they do with Marketing leads. Even if they’re bad leads, they should follow up with them and then communicate the issues so that they can be fixed.
4. Establish service-level agreements (SLAs)
Now for this next tip, keep in mind that different organizations have different levels of formality. Whether a formal, contract-style service-level agreement (SLA) is right for you depends a lot on your culture, team size, and the current state of relations between your marketing and sales teams.
However, one thing is the same for all organizations: set clear expectations for both teams.
An SLA should define the common goals for Marketing and Sales and include key deliverables:
- Marketing goals can include leads generated, qualified leads generated, opportunities created, and revenue produced.
- Sales goals can include follow-up time, frequency, and the percentage of leads that the sales team is expected to follow up with
SLAs can help establish mutual accountability and start to build trust with everyone.
5. Coordinate content marketing with sales
This is one that’s often overlooked but very important. Marketers often generate content without asking the key question: will this provide value to our target buyers? Or, is this something a buyer is even interested in?
That’s where salespeople can help. After all, they’re on the front lines with customers every day. Often, they can provide a gut-check on content, provide potential topics, and, most importantly, share real-life questions prospects ask during the buying process—which can lead to some great topic ideas.
Additionally, salespeople with active presences on social media can help promote key content and support your marketing efforts.
6. Invest in technology that supports alignment
Finally, it’s important to have the tools and technology in place to enable marketing-sales alignment. This is even more critical in a post-COVID, remote environment.
Some examples of these technologies include:
- Integrated marketing & sales CRMs
- Marketing automation tools
- Sales automation tools
- Conversation intelligence
- Asset management platforms
The more technology you have to align your team and the more ingrained that technology is in their workflows, the more aligned everyone will become.
Final thoughts: moving forward in unison
At the end of the day, Marketing and Sales aren’t separate teams. They’re one team: the revenue team. Get them aligned so you can manage and move forward together!
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Top Pipeline-Building and Recession Selling Tips
Regardless of the industry you’re in, there’s no escaping the dreaded R-word: Recession.
Some industries might be struggling more than others (over 58,000 tech workers have been laid off since 2023), and those ‘other’ industries might not even be feeling the effects at all. But the bottom line is: you never know when you might be impacted by a recession or by the mitigating factors in a nervous and challenging economy.
Whether you’re in the thick of it or preparing for the worst, if you’re in sales the good news is you’ve got plenty of ways to protect the pipeline you’ve built and keep building on strong momentum.
Factor 8 Founder Lauren Bailey recently chatted with Doug Landis – advisor to the biggest and brightest SaaS startups and current Growth Partner at Emergence Capital, and Zach Miller – a 20-year enterprise-selling veteran and Vice President of Sales at Highspot. Together they compiled essential tips for both reps and managers to keep building pipeline, continue selling, and boost company culture and morale during an economic downturn.
WATCH: How To Build Pipeline And Keep Selling During A Recession
Spoiler alert: DON’T wait to implement these or fall into the analysis paralysis trap! Vigorous execution of these strategies ASAP is the best way to get ahead.
Top 3 Tips for Sales Reps
- Get Used to Selling to New Personalities
If you’re a rep, the likelihood of the CFO getting involved in your sale just got higher. They’re often now the ones making the final decisions when it comes to implementing new tools and products and adding it to their existing budget. You may also want to get comfortable selling to procurement.
- Own Your Own Mindset
Don’t wait around for your managers to offer you more development, ask for it! If you’ve got goals you want to accomplish or skills you want to learn, do some of your own research first. Find the people who know what you want to know and utilize existing resources. Don’t make excuses to your own success – get out there and make it happen!
DOWNLOAD: Essential Virtual Selling Tips Guide
- Emphasize Loss, Not Gains
It might sound counterintuitive – but how many times do you think a decision maker has heard about all the money they’ll save if they just invest in [x] product? Probably about over a billion dollars worth! Finding ways to surpass the ROI and value your product adds by highlighting what they’re missing is the A+ solution right now.
Example: If you don’t buy today, you risk losing out on $100,000 a quarter.
(Looking for more tips on virtual selling? Factor 8 can provide the training and resources you need to excel. Learn more about our training and coaching services here. )
Top 3 Tips for Sales Managers + Leaders
- Get Involved Now
As a leader, it’s important you have a pulse on your reps’ activity without micromanaging. Both of you are in a critical atmosphere right now when it comes to sales – so make sure you aren’t waiting until there’s a problem or all hands are needed on deck before getting involved. Mitigating risk is important on both sides of the transaction!
- Protect Your Time
What’s the one thing you still have full control over? Your time! This is your best resource to utilize and protect. You may be inundated with “fire drills” from your reps – but making sure to prioritize and block off your schedule is still a crucial part of ensuring responsibilities are front and center.
READ MORE: Top 8 Sales Management Productivity Hacks
- Celebrate Wins
Quota is probably not the best way to motivate your reps right now if things are tight. So what can you do to keep culture motivated and morale high? Rethink your incentive structures! Shift from focusing on closed business to most leads, highest number of calls, or celebrate the smaller wins that might have previously been overlooked. When employees feel successful, they’ll also feel good about going back to work.
READ: Creative Tips for Rewarding Top-Performing Sales Reps
Remember: the economy is cyclical, so this downward turn isn’t forever. If you’re having a tough time adjusting to the new normal, take a deep breath and remind yourself this is a great opportunity to invest time into your personal training, building pipeline, and preparing for when business is back to booming. You’ll be ready!
Struggling to maintain your schedule? Do you want to take your team to the next level? Check out our Virtual Sales Manager Training Bootcamps.
WANT MORE RECESSION SELLING TIPS?
Join one of our upcoming Virtual Sales Training Masterclasses! We offer 4 different classes for BDRs, SDRs, ISRs, account executives, and account managers all focused on areas like prospecting, objection handling, running virtual sales demos, closing, and more!
I’m in Sales [Live Event Recording]
I’m in Sales!
[Live Event Recording]
Why Your Salespeople Are Quitting (and How to Retain Them)
Whether you believe in “The Great Resignation” or not, one thing is for sure, there has been a record number of people quitting their jobs in the past year.
It seems like every month this year we received more emails bouncing back and letting us know that “John is no longer with the company.” The more of these responses we got, the more we wondered what was the true cause of this unprecedented mass exodus (and if there is anything we can do to make it stop).
To get to the root of the issue, we surveyed thousands of sales professionals to find the true cause of attrition amongst sales teams and to learn what reps and managers want most from their employers. We received responses from every level of the corporate ladder, from individual contributors up to CEOs. Some of the responses were obvious, some were rather surprising.
Spoiler Alert: Higher compensation is NOT the golden ticket to fixing the retention problem.
In our data, we learned that 63% of reps and managers started a new job within the last year. Yikes, that’s a lot of job changes! Most leaders cited the #1 reason their employees leave was due to lack of competitive compensation. However, both reps and managers listed a lack of training and development as their #1 reason for departing. Looks like we, as leaders, need to make some adjustments to improve sales team retention.
The next surprising stat we found was about coaching. The manager responses state that over 86% of managers were regularly coaching their reps. While the rep responses showed the majority of reps desire MORE coaching than what they’re currently receiving. To us, this communicates that while there may be coaching happening, what’s really missing is quality coaching. Coaching is one of our favorite topics (and the one we have seen provide the greatest impact). Recently, we hunkered down and gave some insight on how to master call coaching and how both reps and managers can prepare for an upcoming call coaching session.
While there were certainly areas where reps and leaders didn’t align, there was one area where all salespeople saw eye-to-eye. At each rung of the corporate ladder, the survey responses told us that reps and managers both want and need more ongoing sales training and leaders agreed that their reps and managers need more training. Sounds like this might be an easy area of opportunity for retention!
Want more insight? Make sure you grab your free copy of our survey results below!
Want to know how to retain your salespeople?
Download our Sales Team Retention Infographic to learn why reps and managers are quitting and how leaders can better retain them.
The Ultimate Sales Rep + Manager Relationship [“Sales Shot” Workshop]
The Ultimate Sales Rep + Manager Relationship
[“Sales Shot” Workshop]
Creative Tips for Rewarding Top-Performing Sales Reps
Let’s talk about sales rep rewards. With employee engagement at an all-time low and more reps leaving their employers every day, we’ve got to find new and creative ways to show appreciation to our top-performing employees to entice them to stay!
If you lead a digital sales team, you’ll probably remember the days you brought big-screen TVs to the front of the sales floor for the quarterly contest. My husband and I both came up in sales, and we have patio furniture, a few game sets, and LOTS of electronics. We’ve been to countless baseball and basketball suites and even visited Maui, Whistler, and the Bahamas thanks to President’s Club Trips. I bet you’ve enjoyed the big three sales incentives yourself: Sports, Electronics, and Travel (oh my!).
They’re classics for a reason, but every once in a while I have to remind myself that classic can actually mean outdated. Here are a few creative ideas to refresh your sales rep rewards and incentives with the new generations and dispersed teams in mind:
- Combine travel and service. I love how this generation wants to give back. Can you build homes before hitting the resort in the Dominican Republic? We learned about a group called Wine To Water that provides sustainable water resources in 3rd world vacation destinations. Let your winners pick from a few choices!
- Focus on growth trips. Today’s sellers are ALL about career growth. So make the trip to a great industry conference + pre-conference certification. Or send them with a few colleagues to off-site career training + a weekend of fun instead.
- Add family. That’s right, not all your reps want to be seen in a swimsuit with the rest of the team, so give them the voucher to take their family instead!
- Go big with recognition. The top rep gets a billboard. They pick the message!
- Make quality time even more quality. How about an elegant dinner with the executives and their families? Fly them in, let them bring a guest, and have the head honchos serve them! Bonus, invite them to your President’s home to do it.
- Go social. Refresh your standard prizes by helping them post their win with a photo backdrop, custom frame, or even a great new title or award honor they can hold and post online. Because it’s not just about DOING great, it’s about being SEEN doing it!
- Combine development + time. Leaning in again to their desire to learn and grow, gift them professional training AND Friday afternoons to study, or Wednesday mornings + a personal coach for a year, or 5 Monday morning shadows with 5 top performers in the company!
- Recognize their individuality by letting THEM pick! There are really cool services today like Postal.io and Blueboard that let reps pick their own rewards. Add the recognition component by posting a picture + interview of them with their prize.
While you’re refreshing your prizes, I invite you to also refresh your criteria. Sales incentives get eye-rolls FAST if the same people always win. Do you have a contest for the newbies? For call quality? For attitude? For key performance indicators? For metrics? All of these can help spread the love for different kinds of talent and behaviors you want more of – not just for the tenured reps with the big accounts. This is critical for keeping fresh diverse talent interested! Folks are watching your leaders and your winners for signs of favoritism and inequity, and sales incentives are definitely in that fishbowl!
Not sure where to go? Pull in a few high-potential reps and ask their opinions! That’s a reward in and of itself.
Is it time to update your sales rep rewards? Invest in ongoing training and development!
Contact us today to learn about our customizable virtual sales training programs
available for reps and managers.
How to Improve Remote Sales Team Engagement
Folks, we’re over a year into this new normal. What we talked about 12 months ago to engage your remote teams, is probably not still working today. Need a few new ideas to improve remote sales team engagement? I’m here to help. I’ve collected a few favorites from my friends in high and low places in the past month. Hope you can grab something new that fits – or improves – your culture.
- Zoom fatigue is real. Hell yeah, it’s a powerful tool! But we don’t need to use it every time. Let’s pick at least one meeting a day and go old school, make it a conference call, give yourself and your team a break.
- Take a break. Since we don’t need to be in front of the camera for that meeting, let’s take that time to go for a walk or do something else healthy. Encourage your team to do the same.
- Your time is precious. Cut your standard meeting times to 45 minutes and 25 minutes. Use the “extra” time to stretch or grab a snack.
- Invest in tools. If you’ll be staying semi-remote or totally virtual in the future, you may get more budget traction with helpful tools. Start with conversation intelligence (call recording to the layperson) like Chorus, Gong, or Execvision. These tools can be used for skill/call coaching, rep note-taking, or saved for future onboarding training.
- Amp up your call/skill coaching. Manager direct coaching scratches several itches for your revenue team: 1. Skill improvement 2. Employee engagement. Both of these are doubly important in this remote world. A good portion of your workforce was likely onboarded remotely and may never have even met their manager face-to-face. Prioritize these 1:1 connections.
- Call a no-meeting day. Then call a no-Slack day. Watch your team shed tears of gratitude.
- Snail mail. Use it to send a personal note, a small gift, some team swag. Not feeling very creative? Use my friends at Sendoso.com. Traditionally, their corporate gifts were used to open accounts during ABM. In today’s remote world, more and more companies are using them to engage their own workforce. Seriously, cool!
- Go visit. Sure you may not be coming back onsite to the office in the foreseeable future. But if you, the boss, can take a trip to simply go out to dinner, it will make a difference.
- Buddy up. More than ever, we need to help employees connect – with us, with the company, and with each other. A mentor or buddy is a great way. Add minimal structure to get them started like 1-2 sample agendas, interview forms or buddy scavenger hunts to complete.
- Ditch the happy hours. Your teams are ready to get OUT of the house and see their real friends. Sorry, but you aren’t their first choice anymore for happy hour. Don’t make it feel like a requirement.
BONUS! ⬇
- Be flexible. This can be a real engagement enhancer. I’ve seen companies staying 100% virtual, others doing 50% on-site, and still others 100% onsite. If you’re running a hybrid environment, consider mandating some in-person time to ease back into office life. One of the most creative solutions I’ve seen is a satellite hiring strategy – where employees can be located up to 2 hours away from any office.
My last piece of advice, regardless of your plan, is to do all you can to retain your hires. The next five years look to be the toughest ever for hiring sales talent. Let’s give our employees every reason to stay!
Keep your sales team engaged by investing in training and development!
Contact us today to learn more about our virtual sales training programs
for sales reps and sales managers.
3 Challenges Facing Every Remote Team (And How to Combat Them)
Many of the same challenges we faced when we worked on-site carry over to this new reality of working remotely. Other, more recent obstacles are specific to virtual teams.
One advantage we have at our disposal today that was absent for the last generation is an abundance of high-end technology. Instant communication and remote workflows have become essentially mandatory worldwide as a result of COVID-19. Fortunately, there are a lot of really great ways you can use technology to make remote work more efficient and tolerable.
Here are 3 challenges technology can help solve while you and your team continue to work remotely.
Effective Communication
Working from home can be a blessing and a curse. When you were on-site, you were able to see your coworkers at their stations, in meetings, or while completing tasks as a team. How do you reconnect while maintaining high productivity?
Video communication software, like Zoom, allows you to participate in video and audio conferences, chats, and more from your computer or phone. You can share your screen, documents or other files and links amongst your team members to help overall comprehension and productivity.
Group chats are also essential for remote teams. These chat apps are useful for instant contact with colleagues, collaborators and even clients to discuss important tasks that may not require a meeting. Not sure what group chat software is best for you? Check out this comparison article to weigh your pros and cons to help you decide between two of the top contenders: Slack and GroupMe.
Sometimes too much communication can be more of a hindrance. We’ve tried a “no meeting Monday” to optimize the workweek. You could make this a “no Slack chat Monday” to allow you to focus more and limit distractions, while still leaving other communication open in case of urgency.
Time Management
A great way to better manage your time is to stay organized. Leave yourself reminders or clear notes of upcoming tasks. Label all of your important files and documents for ease of reference. This will save you from having to search when you need it now.
Another important factor for time management is your work-life balance. It can be easy to get so focused on your job that you aren’t taking time to take care of yourself. Take short breaks when you can to give your eyes, mind, and body some time away from your computer screen. Try these apps for harboring a healthy work-life balance.
Similarly, a challenge teams face while working from home is not having or taking the time to run out and shop for whatever supplies you need while working from home. This could be anything from migraine and allergy relief to office cleaning supplies. For those hectic, busy days, consider trying the convenience of a home essentials delivery service to get the household items you need without leaving your home. Use that time you just saved to make some coffee, do a quick workout, or plan for your upcoming meetings.
Remote Collaboration
It’s great that we can communicate with one another to make sure we’re all on the same page and have maintained our comradery, but in what way can technology help our teams get the job done more efficiently than ever? Try using some collaborative, coworking tools like Google Suite to help your coworkers.
What’s great about this service, and ones like it is that once the link to the document is shared, everyone with access is able to make real-time edits––no more waiting for an email response before you can proceed. Hop on a chat or video call and communicate while you edit. By utilizing this collaborative workspace, you’ll find that your team feels more apt to participate. This can cause your teammates to feel fulfilled and that their ideas and voices have been heard.
Staying connected during a global pandemic can be as challenging as it is important. By taking a look at your team’s priorities, you will be able to develop the correct solutions. Modern technology has made working remotely more user-friendly and efficient than ever before.
Share these solutions with your team and see what works best for you. At the very least, do your best to help your colleagues stay connected during these difficult times. You’ll be glad you did.
How Leaders are Pivoting their Sales Strategy
Each month I have the privilege of facilitating a by-invitation-only Executive Open Bar peer discussion. We pick a topic, share what’s working, give advice, and basically help our fellow Sales Leaders succeed (email me at 
if you want an invite or have a request).
Here we are 6 months into quarantine. What’s working and what’s not?
We put our minds together and shared some great tips, tricks and insights that we hope will help you and your teams. Check your trends against your peers below:
What’s Working
Digital Onboarding & Training – a few are having great success here. Virtual new hire onboarding is working!
Sales Targets
We’re over the excuses. Most of us are finding ways to hit goals and holding teams accountable to full targets.
Filling Pipe
We’re getting the interest and filling the pipeline. We’ve pivoted offerings, markets, industries and payment terms to make it happen. We’re just stalling at the 1 yard line. Best answer: a few creative financing solutions to help CFO’s say yes and close the deal (see below).
Team Engagement
We’re getting GOOD at this. 10+ ways to keep the team engaged:
- Do the virtual conference / SKO / celebration!
- Try adding comedy or entertainment
- Try adding skill training + live calling & contests (Factor 8 does this!)
- Play some online games. Try Jeopardy, Family Feud, The Price is Right, Pictionary, and 2 Truths & a Lie, & my fave, Let’s Make a Deal- e.g. first person who can show me expired milk from your fridge…
- Buddy System – assign team members an accountability buddy to teams (and rotate them) so they can strategize before daily huddles
- Daily Huddles – What is your objective or targets for the day? What’s your strategy to meet them? How’d it go yesterday?
- Video Always On – It drives being present, participation, and accountability
- Desk Gadgets: Silly putty, fidget spinner – get creative
- Guest Speakers – internal or external. Mix it up
- Networking: Give random assignments to help them connect
- Skip Level Meetings with Yourself – keep it personal vs. business
- Sharing – Meet the family, meet the fur family, “MTV Cribs” for fun
- Yum – Have food and/or cocktails delivered home. Hire a real bartender to do some mixology! Use a great sending service to customize your send
- Summer Fridays – Give Friday afternoons off when goals are met
What’s Not Working
Double Paying
Especially now that we’re all virtual, leaders paying double for virtual and field are working on new strategies. Best advice? Create a threshold – deals below a given dollar range or account potential range stay inside. Those above the line go to a more experienced rep to help close it while still compensating the original inside rep when it’s won. Right now, more experience won’t hurt us with challenging deal closing.
Webinar Fatigue
We’re looking for non-event lead gen, and our audiences are fatigued with theoretical webinars that are mostly pitch. Goal: Keep it tactical to drive attendance and require more info on your forms so you can get quality, if not quantity.
Hot Lead Gen Tip – Get creepy.
Several leaders are using data crawling tools like “6Sense” to target buyers searching for our services. These tools watch our searches and can rate our readiness to buy based on our frequency, recency, and other search values.
Closing Deals at Third and Goal
Across the board deals are stalling on the 1 yard line. Companies are scared to make that extra investment, and those who have the dollars now are unsure what Q1 2021 looks like. Hoarding is definitely an option. What’s worked? Delaying payment, quarterly payments, signing incentives (add-on products or time) pause and convenience clauses. We’re finding incentives for risk-averse CFOs and differentiating our offers to get the yes first.
Want more on selling to the CFO? Smart.
Their involvement in deals has nearly DOUBLED according to Chorus. They are monitoring total spend and measuring risk on every dollar. Join us for a webinar in September (or sign up to receive the recording) to get advice straight from the source where LB is joined by four CFO’s with advice for sellers.