5 Important Blog Posts for Sales Leaders

Busy week with your sales team? We thought so. Here are links to five great blog posts you might have missed in the past week, related to topics especially important to sales leaders (including compensation, motivation, social selling, Sales 2.0, and the new B2B buyer cycle). Happy reading!

Blog Post #1: The smart way to motivate, reward, and compensate sales reps (via Sales 2.0 Conference blog)

Have transparent payout information. Salespeople shouldn’t worry if last week’s deal will be in their paycheck or not. If they can see the deal is credited toward their payouts, they can focus on the next one. According to Zuora, it’s a “dispute killer.”

Blog Post #2: Know your B2B buyer cycle (via Sales 2.0 Conference blog)

Here are three basic questions that sales leaders should be able to easily answer about today’s buy cycle:

  1. How well can your sales team build relationships with customers via a variety of channels?
  2. How well does your sales process map to the buy cycle?
  3. How empowered are your reps to have compelling and relevant conversations with qualified prospects online?

Blog Post #3: Saying goodbye to the good old days of selling (via Selling Power blog)

I have always believed that selling is an art. Today, however, no sales leader can afford to ignore science. Sales 2.0 and technology solutions are making the art of selling measurable in actual numbers. And that is going to have a huge effect on the way we lead sales teams in the years to come.

Blog Post #4: Communicating value to prospects (via Heinz Marketing blog)

Many companies include examples of the problem in their sales presentations, and wonder why prospects don’t immediately light up.

Your prospect isn’t going to buy unless the cost of changing is lower than the cost of doing the same. Isolated, anecdotal evidence doesn’t change that value equation. But communicating the scope of the problem very well may.

Blog Post #5: The effect of social on enterprise selling/thoughts on Marc Benioff’s keynote at Dreamforce (via Sales 2.0 Advocate blog)

As your customers, employees and partners become increasingly connected online, this raises some interesting questions, opportunities and risks in regards to trust:

  • Will we have some kind of open and universal access to ratings and reviews for B2B sales and service professionals as we now see on consumer Internet sites for professionals like doctors? Will enterprise products – and the companies that produce them – be subject to a proliferation of eBay or Yelp-like reviews?