Sales Pipeline Radio

Mark Hunter is here to talk about sales. His new book: High Profit Prospecting, and his best seller give him the credibility that you need to listen in, take notes. We dove right in. If you have to discount the price to close the deal, that means you are prospecting the wrong people. You can't make a WalMart shopper into a Nordstrom Customer. Social Media without Social Community is Social Stupidity. It's a conduit. You must have something to share that is of value. Think about this, too - how to leave an 8-11 second voice mail message. Stop embarrassing yourself. Matt reminds us that phone and email are NOT dead. The phone is the most valuable tool he uses. Stop being afraid to prospect and defaulting to social media. Don't hide behind social posts, tweets, likes, and emoticons. PICK UP THE TELEPHONE. It's an amazing tool when used right. You should learn one piece of information about them in the first call and begin to engage them. Do you have call or prospecting reluctance? Why? You don't have to close them in the first call. Your objective is to earn the right, privilege and respect to be able to call them again. COLD calling is dead. NOT CALLING, COLD CALLING is dead. You need to know something about them, their industry, their pain. There are valuable tips in this episode, questions you need to ask yourself and your reps. About Mark Hunter: (LinkedIn) (Twitter) (Website) Mark Hunter is "The Sales Hunter." He helps companies and salespeople find and retain better customers. He is also the author of the best-selling book, High-Profit Selling. He is recognized as one of the "Top 50 Most Influential Sales and Marketing Leaders." All of this has him traveling globally nearly 230 days per year, working with companies to help them grow their top-line sales and bottom-line profits. He is known for his sales growth strategies and consultative selling approach to business. Mark Hunter is frequently quoted in the media and is a keynote speaker at major conferences on the subject of sales and sales leadership. His sales techniques are in use today by salespeople on 5 continents and in more than 100 different countries.

Guest host, Robert Pease went through this pipeline performance checklist. Get your notepad out for this one. A few of the steps included: 1. Understanding our target customer.  What makes the best customer for the product you sell? What makes for the longest term customer? The goal is to get into the consumption patterns of this optimal customer. You have to be stingy with sales time and efficient with marketing spend. You don't want to reach out to marginal prospects. 2.Knowing what a qualifying customer looks like. It isn't just the person who has downloaded your most recent whitepaper. They are most likely not ready yet. 06:08 3. The message that you use.  Speaking to your ideal customer profile to attract the qualified leads you are looking for. Understanding their problem and provide the solution they are seeking. Understand a day in the life, the pressure - LISTEN first.  Be patient with the overall sales process. 07:00You can't close in the first contact. 07:15 11:15 4. Understanding your Conversion rates. It's not about quantity. Don't like the numbers? It's either you are not giving them what they expect on the landing page, your content stinks or they were not your target in any way. 5 visits and 3 conversions is better than 100 visits and 1 conversion. This is simple. 17:15 5/6. Follow up and Engaging context. If you tell someone your going to do it, do it. If you promised to follow up with information, do it, send it. You'll need to listen to the full show to get all the tips and explanations.

Reviewing your pipeline, making sure you have your fundamentals in place, taking a look at what’s working and making sure your reps and your team are performing optimally...all are vital to your sales success. Today’s guest, Steve Richard, is a perfect fit for our recent conversations. Steve Richard is the founder of Vorsight and Chief Revenue Officer of ExecVision. “Chop the dead wood out of your pipeline.”  Sales managers should be identifying what reps could be doing in the field to improve - more isn’t always better. The conversations sales reps have with customers is an asset. Get them into your CRM system.  Get Steve’s advice on how to coach your sales reps and make sure they are taking ownership of their own work - listen to one of your own sales calls per week. Cull the time spent on coaching. Even the best need coaching - continual improvement is the key. Ask yourself: What do my best reps do differently? This is a powerful episode filled with actionable tips for making the most out of your reps’ sales calls. Don’t miss it!

We’re walking you through some ideas and tactics you can employ right now if you are already behind on your sales pipeline goals; there are things you can do from a marketing perspective, you can take a look at your pipeline and get yourself back on track. What can you do at the beginning of the sales cycle to set the tone and feel successful? Get yourself positioned to hit your number. What are you doing daily in a disciplined, precise and focused that is helping you close those deals?  Matt covers a few scenarios of salespeople: employees that are doing everything right - focusing on the right things, doing the daily work of moving deals forward - but are not hitting their numbers, and salespeople who are hitting their numbers but not going about it the right way. Do you let them go? Who is coachable? Who is working with the core values of the company? This is an information-packed episode, and this time you get Shark Week comparisons. Don’t miss it!

What are we really doing to get prepared for the next selling season? We’re taking a look at why a lot of people don’t hit their number. Any time there’s an end of month or end of quarter, it’s a good time to reflect on what went well and perhaps what didn’t.  We’ll take a look at some things companies can do monthly or quarterly to review how sales and marketing is working. “Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the mouth." Why aren’t you making your sales goals?  1. You don’t have a plan to begin with - Setting a sales goal is NOT a plan. 2. You don’t commit the resources required to sell - do you understand what you need? No guest today, but we took live calls, which is a first for us - we tried something new for this show. Matt covers topics including, “How big does your pipeline need to be?” and “How many qualified leads do I need?” Don’t miss this episode! It’s basically a free consultation.

Listen in as we hear from Sedric Hill, Entrepreneur, Author, Thought Leader, Business Coach, Consultant, Sales Expert. The journey to creating a more profitable business can only begin when people identify specific knowledge and skills that are necessary to skyrocket their businesses. In order to do so, they must learn how to unlock implicit cognitive skills present in everyone. Consciously applying these skills will help to increase profitable sales as well as overall personal success. In order to avoid wasting valuable selling time, business professionals must harness what the author calls “the expert advantage.” Simply put, they must learn how to communicate persuasively with clients, prospects and other stakeholders. Connecting with their audience is simple once the essentials that most influence successful outcomes are learned. Cognitive-based skills for communications are rarely taught today, especially in the sales and marketing fields. Hill, however, believes such skills are critical for anyone whose success depends on persuasive communication. He proposes two methods for increasing these mental skills, one cognitive and one app-based, that enhances skills with minimal time and effort. Novice and experienced salespeople can both learn from the strategies Hill presents in this book. Additionally, trial lawyers or people in any field requiring the use of persuasive communication will find Hill’s suggestions beneficial. Succes http:// s in selling is not reserved for the experts; with the right tools, anyone can cross the bar to the next level of sales performance. If you would like more information about this topic, or to schedule an interview with Sedric Hill, please call Nickcole Watkins at 516.900.5674. About the Author: Sedric Hillhas twenty-five years’ experience working in sales, training and development, and senior management. He has written several articles for mailing industry publications. Additionally, he is president and co-founder of Sales Development and Performance, a sales training and consulting firm located in Irvine, California. Expert Selling: A Blueprint to Accelerate Sales Excellence by Sedric Hill was released by Morgan James Publishing on May 3 2016. Expert Selling—ISBN 978-1630477165—has 254 pages and is being sold as a trade paperback for $17.95.

Brian Hansford has been with Heinz Marketing for over four years running their marketing department. He's the head of Marketing Technology. They started with the overall landscape and Matt asked: How do you recommend a strategy? Brian says to: Assess your current state: what people, what workflow, what tools, what data, are you currently using. Identify what are your objectives are: customer engagement, revenue objectives. Think about these first and the technology after. That path will lead you to a technology structure that will support your objectives. Keep it simple to start with. You want to make sure you have good utilization of your CRM and then move on to your marketing automation. If you start buying these niche platforms you'll end up with a ball of gum. It will be hard to measure success and efforts coordinated.  Continue this conversation with Brian on Twitter: @remarkmarketing How do Martech & Salestech work together? How do you prioritize? How do sales teams prioritize to maximize their active sales time? You'll have to listen to get the answers. Logical tips and steps you can implement and explore immediately.

Joining us for this episode is Norman Behar, CEO & Managing Director at Sales Readiness Group and co-author of:  The-High Impact Sales Manager.   This book draws on over 30 years of personal experience and our proven sales management training methodology. What makes this book unique is that it is highly practical and provides sales managers with the systems,processes, skills, and techniques to: Hire the best people and hold them accountable. Manage sales performance by focusing on the underlying behaviors that drive results. Manage the sales pipeline and produce accurate sales forecasts.  Provide personalized sales coaching that results in better skills and hire win rates. Lead, motivate, and inspire their sales team.

Our Guest this week: Sanjay Puri, Co-founder & Partner at 9Mile Labs 9Mile Labs is a high-tech accelerator based in Seattle, WA, focused on Enterprise / B2B software and cloud technologies.Are there fewer start ups in the B2B space?If so, why?Consumer side startups sometimes have good crazy and some bat-poop crazy ideas - that's what innovation and entrepreneurship are about. The ideas flow freer with B2C.Enterprise level B2B start ups usually started out in the industry for year seeing the pain experienced and wanted to solve those pain points.It has to do with a vision around a product. But what is lacking is the customer conversation and intimacy to take the initial idea and taking it to a bankable product or service.It has to be incessant customer conversations involving insights as to how this idea will be shaped moving forward.You need to listen to this show for the insights and experience by 9Mile Labs and Sanjay directly.Sanjay started his career building database applications at Oracle. Sanjay co-founded thinkIndia.com in 1999 which exited successfully in 2001. As a products executive at startups (iConclude, Opsware, Edifecs) and large companies (Microsoft and HP), Sanjay has helped companies achieve successful exits and exceptional revenue growth. Sanjay holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and an MBA.Listen in on our lively discussion.

What an honor to have Jill Rowley with us, the queen of social selling herself.   Keynote Speaker ** Social Selling Evangelist ** Startup Advisor ** Modern Marketing Expert ** Change Agent During this episode Jill shared her thoughts on social selling and the fact that it can be a differentiator, but it is sitll an incremental channel. Traditional channels are not dead: phone, email.  Social selling is a refined and updated way of selling.   Jill lives by a few hashtags, this one, in particular:  #knowthybuyer - you need to understand the world in which your buyer lives: demographics, industry. She saw the changing buyer, how they were transforming by doing research on the web. leveraging content to self-educate. Buyers are allergic to being sold.  She tells us, "My job is to help you, not sell to you. My job is to BUILD relationships of credibility and trust. The modern seller has to be one that is willing to help." Find Jill's original content via LinkedIn and all things Jill on JillRowley.com Leveraging other people's content from the industry. Great way to build relationships and share posts of value. Best of the best curated content. Learn from her example - sharing other people's content broadens your views, knowledge and shows your value to your readers and those who produce the content you share. What does that mean for traditional channels like phone and email? Prospects are used to the old way of: Call, email, call, email. And they respond with: Ignore, delete, ignore, delete. Give them something VERY specific to that individual, company or industry that gives an insight - something of VALUE to them - then they respond. Social is the channel to do research to be relevant, to build relationships.  You'll have to listen to the show to get the rest of her insights and tips.