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When I started managing, I was focused on things such as ...

Almost every prospect has objections -- and most have several. It's difficult enough to change someone's mind when money isn't on the table, so doing so when the outcome has a financial impact is really tough.

You may be feeling like you have tried everything in the sales book to reconnect with clients or stay in touch over long sales cycles. But have you ever thought about sending them a personal video?

Heading into a closing conversation with a prospect is always nerve-wracking. No matter how impressed they seemed during your demo or how enthusiastic your champion is, there's always a chance you'll lose to the competition, they'll decide to postpone their decision until next quarter, or they'll ask for a price you can't deliver.

Research shows there is a weapon you can use to increase your sales performance -- a sales strategy that's effective no matter where you work or what you sell.

What is this sales strategy, you ask?

I talk often about a new performance management culture taking hold in the today’s “B2All” marketplace.

To meet that challenge, leadership skills must evolve. Your sales manager’s number one job now is to teach and refine the skills of sellers to help them hit their peak and stay there.

Salespeople shouldn’t send “just checking in” emails for one very simple reason: They don’t work. Buyers feel like the rep is virtually poking them, making them reluctant to answer. Not only do “checking in” messages rarely garner responses, they can even turn prospects against their senders.

But reps still need a way to get in touch with buyers who’ve gone dark. Enter these 23 email templates.

If you want to be great at sales, you need to get comfortable with failure. Selling requires you to constantly put yourself on the line: From requesting referrals and calling new prospects to pursuing a whale or entering a highly competitive situation.

Being your own boss, calling all the shots, hustling to hit your goals -- for many people, entrepreneurship is the ultimate career goal.

But as awesome as running your own business sounds, it’s also incredibly difficult.

If you had to choose between LinkedIn or Facebook for connecting with prospects, which would you choose?

The right answer might be Facebook. According to the 2017 State of Inbound report, salespeople have more success reaching buyers on this platform than LinkedIn.

Before you go to the next article, I know what you’re thinking: “Ugh, something about baseball. So boring.”

But this article isn’t really about baseball -- it’s about a single lesson I learned through playing baseball over 20 years that I now apply to sales every day.

Even in field sales, prospects don’t want to have a first meeting with a stranger in person. They prefer an introductory phone call. If things go well, they’re open to the idea of a face-to-face meeting.

Your product is a great fit for the prospect. It’s in the right price range for their budget. And you can even get them a discount based on the size of the purchase.

But even though this should be a slam dunk, I can tell you they won’t buy unless there’s urgency.

Top-performing sales teams have significantly higher win rates, revenue growth, and sales goal attainment than the rest. They're also more likely to set challenging targets. They shoot higher and still achieve.

If you believe LinkedIn InMails “just don’t work" for connecting with prospects, you're experiencing user error -- not medium error. The user error is simple: Your messaging sucks!

As we launched a new social selling training product for the SMB market, I wanted to test an assumption on messaging effectiveness using LinkedIn InMails.

We’ve all heard the saying “time is money.” This is especially true for salespeople. Allotting time to one prospect over another could be the difference between closing a million dollar deal and having the door closed on you. Spending a certain amount of time on one group of activities could set a rep up for record week, while concentrating on something else might launch you down the path to a slump.

In the past 30 years, I’ve listened to a lot of smart sales leaders and experts tell me breakup emails are effective.

I respect these people deeply -- but none of them have ever convinced me. If it were up to me, salespeople would never send breakup emails.

True or false: A 30-minute connect call is less likely to lead to a deal than a 60-minute connect call.

Before we get to the answer, here’s some context.

In almost any career, selling skills are important. Whether you're fundraising for your startup, getting early adopters for your product, or convincing internal stakeholders to back your campaign, knowing how to show others the value of your idea or solution will make a huge impact on your career.

Corporate America talks a lot about the power of teamwork. Companies hang posters on the wall featuring people rowing in unison and the word “SUCCESS.” Leaders use phrases like, “There is no ‘I’ in ‘team.’”

In B2B, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a topic as widely-loathed as sales and marketing alignment.

For all the content dedicated to the subject, sales-marketing alignment remains a pie-in-the-sky industry concept to most B2B sales leaders.

In sales, it’s important to separate fact from fiction. You might discover the latest trend everyone’s touting isn’t so effective after all. On the flip side, trying out a new technique might lead to amazing results. The better you become at learning what’s hype and what’s real, the more successful you’ll ultimately be.

It’s a fact -- salespeople prefer making “warm calls” to “cold calls,” and they always will. Fortunately, if you’ve got a LinkedIn account and a few active connections, you’re in a good position to use the networking site to elicit powerful referrals that make a “warm” call a whole lot easier to execute.

Optimizing prospecting and sales emails is something you could probably dedicate the rest of your life to. You might even argue that that’s a good part of what you’ve been doing to this point. Because, if your sales team can’t stand out in the inbox, grab attention, and ignite a response from their prospects or accounts, how are they going to close a deal?

There’s nothing more frustrating than getting your prospect’s commitment to buy -- before realizing they’re not the decision maker. It’s going to take much longer to get the deal done than you’d anticipated (that is, if you close at all).

You just crushed a demo, you’re making good progress toward quota, and you’re ready to get on your next call and crush it, too.

But 10 minutes after the prospect is supposed to join the meeting, they still haven’t shown up. You’ve been no-showed.

Discovery and qualification are more important than a hard close in modern sales, but that doesn’t mean you no longer have to ask for the business.

The information you learned from your prospect at the start of the sales process only gets you 95% of the way to a deal.

You’re meeting with the buyer for the first time when they hit you with the dreaded price question.

There are five potential responses.

As a sales professional hustling to grow sales and revenue, you’re always looking for new ways to work more effectively, but that can be difficult.

In How to Hire and Develop Your Next Top Performer: The Five Qualities That Make Salespeople Great, Herbert Greenberg found that 55% of salespeople don’t have the skills to be successful.

Desperation turns people off fast. If you've ever cooled on a suitor or friend because of overt neediness and constant invitations to meet up, you'll know what I mean.

Most of us know not to cross the line between eagerness and desperation in social situations. However, when your job is on the line, good judgment can fly out the window.

So you’ve done your homework, and you’ve identified the ideal contact within the account to reach out to.

But three weeks and a dozen phone calls later, you’re still no closer to actually talking to the decision maker.

If you adopt a new sales methodology without simultaneously adopting new sales metrics, you’ll have a much harder time tracking progress. That’s why companies transitioning to an account-based framework should update their KPIs and leading and lagging indicators of success.

If you asked most people what activity they associated most with sales, I’d guess that many of them would respond the same way: Closing.

A company retained a sales consultant to increase sales. After visiting clients, observing the sales team, and quickly identifying ways to improve, the consultant worked closely with the Head of Sales to put in place a plan that yielded a 20% increase in sales revenue for the company over a six-month period.

Soon after I started my current sales role, I realized I was competing with the best and brightest sales talent. Before this job, I’d always managed to excel -- but to stand out here, I really had to up my game.

Many modern organizations ignore face-to-face selling in favor of its younger brother, inside sales. That’s understandable given an inside sales team is anywhere from 40% to 90% cheaper than an outside sales team.

Let’s be real: Most salespeople are annoying. They view their prospects as numbers in their sales funnel, not as people. They believe earning your business is a chess match and a signed contract means they “won the game.”

Following the loss of Advanced Search in the recent LinkedIn update, hundreds of salespeople announced they were cancelling their accounts.

Can you spot the two letters in this line destroying the entire sales pitch?

“If your organization needs help managing X, then Y is the perfect solution for you.”

You’re on a call with a prospect, and everything is going smoothly. You are both cracking jokes like old friends, and there’s a strong rapport.

Your prospect is from Minnesota? What a coincidence! Your grandparents lived in Saint Paul for ten years before they moved to San Francisco. The conversation couldn’t be better.

The traditional breakup email doesn’t work as well as it used to. Prospects are tired of reps asking if they can close their file or if they haven’t responded because they’ve been eaten by a bear.

A pushy salesperson isn’t good for anyone.

Sales today is about helping people solve problems like a doctor or a consultant -- not slamming deals like a used car salesman.

We've launched another episode of Sell Like a Human. Who better to have as a guest than the one and only Queen of Sales, Jill Konrath?

Jill offered the Sell Like a Human audience an amazing number of insights and tips in just a 20-minute interview. 

Who’s likelier to make a mistake: The rookie sales rep who’s never sold a day in their life, or the veteran rep who’s been on the front lines for nine years?

The reality is, they’re both going to screw up. Experienced salespeople simply make different mistakes.

The first hurdle for any sales training program is to capture and keep your sales reps’ attention. If you bore them, you will lose them. According to Xerox, 87% of sales training content is forgotten within one month of the training. 

The good news is that sales training doesn’t have to be boring and unforgettable. 

If you’re a B2B salesperson, you’ve probably heard about SPIN Sales. It’s one of the most well-known -- not to mention oldest -- selling systems. SPIN gives reps a research-backed framework for working and closing complex deals with extended sales processes.

Have you ever walked out of a sales meeting wishing it were always that easy? I’m talking about the kind of call where you're high-fiving after. The client hung on every word, finished your sentences, and didn't flinch at the price.  

Salespeople evolve. In stage one, they’re learning the ropes. It’s usually an epic battle to make their quota every month or quarter -- if they hit it at all.

In stage two, reps have developed the right systems and honed their sales skills. They’re meeting quota almost every month or quarter.

Let’s get real: Sales is freaking hard! It takes a lot to be a great salesperson, but most people don’t understand that. In fact, sales is probably one of the most misunderstood jobs.

But we get it. We understand the pain and the hustle and we want you to know something: You are not alone, my friend.