SocialPoints for Marketing Automation

The Marketing Automation space is rather well defined with Constant Contact, ExactTarget, and Responsys publicly traded and each generating over $100 Million in revenue last year. Other power players in this space are Genius.com, iContact, Vertical Response, HubSpot, SIlverPop, Cheetahmail, YesMail, Epsilon, Aprimo and Pardot.  Eloqua and Marketo put much of their emphasis on larger [...]

The Three Best Sales Books You Need to Read

I have been asked what the best books on selling are on more than one occasion. Obviously I am predisposed to Rick Page’s Hope Is Not A Strategy, seeing that I worked for the man for over two years. That notwithstanding, it is perhaps the only primer you need on strategizing a multi-vendor, multi-decision maker, [...]

Do the Best Sales Reps Make the Best Sales Managers?

Most of us are aware of the Pareto Principle. Not to be confused with the Peter Principle – where employees are promoted to their level of incompetence. The Pareto Principle is the 80/20 rule and it applies to selling in that 80% of the productivity will come from 20% of the sales people. It is [...]

What Closes the Deal? Sense vs. Source of Urgency

Isn’t it great when a month ends on a Friday? You get a chance to wrap up both the month and the week in the same day. If you are like most sales people you also get a chance to lean on your prospects just that much more to get the deal in. After all, [...]

Guest Blogger: Phil Johnson on Why Sales Training Still Doesn’t Work

Phil Johnson is President of Revenue Revelation – a friend of mine and friend of the firm – The Complex Sale, Inc.  Revenue Revelation specializes in helping organization get the most out of their sales training and are experts on sales adoption / reinforcement. If you read Scott’s first installment on this subject, you were probably not surprised [...]

Sales Training Doesn’t Work

This might seam like a fairly unproductive point of view from someone who earns his living training sales people. However, that is precisely why I believe sales training – on its own – doesn’t work. I receive plenty of calls from sales leaders asking us to participate in their sales kick-off because they want one [...]

Measuring the Impact of Sales Training

            I think the more you can narrow the scope to what the “training” is trying to improve, the more likely you are going to be able to correctly measure its impact. If you are just looking at revenue numbers, then there are far too many variables. I like to [...]