Domestic and International Customers are more than willing to research options and do their own design work from a variety of competitors before you even know there is a requirement!

Joe Baker CEO | President | Global P&L | Manufacturing | Operational Transformation | Rapid Sales Growth - assisting Duke Energy

Global markets and new sales channels mean new opportunities as well but you need to adapt for the fast changing markets and players. Keep administrative activities under control, sales team need to focus on clients and prospectives

Paolo Beffagnotti Brand Protection Digital Manager

But process and technology have not only evolved strategic sales, it's made a huge difference with transactional. Hunter/Farmer has evolved to a range of ever more specialized roles for each stage of the funnel. The ecosystem of CRMs like salesforce, has produced accelerators like insidesales.com, and a whole range of gamification applications. Gamification is amped up social science, and this platform (Convetit) is a great example applied to market research.

David Feidner Collaborative Global Leader & Executive Coach

the last 3-5 years have seen a proliferation of "solutions selling," and trendy / slick marketing and sales techniques. Whether in the guise of proposals, presentations, or software/hardware/X-as-a-Service, or even "inventing" problems in order to market the solution

Alexander Robinson BDM Seeing Machines | Co-Founder Airly | Writer | Pilot

Domestic and International Customers are more than willing to research options and do their own design work from a variety of competitors before you even know there is a requirement!

Joe Baker CEO | President | Global P&L | Manufacturing | Operational Transformation | Rapid Sales Growth - assisting Duke Energy

My biggest surprise was - the degree to which customers embrace the self service approach that providers have pushed to customers - retail, B2B, B2C - it matters not.

Joe Baker CEO | President | Global P&L | Manufacturing | Operational Transformation | Rapid Sales Growth - assisting Duke Energy

LinkedIn became more than a career platform, and social selling took hold. Top sales people, often working with marketing teams, got really good at merging corporate with personal branding and thought leadership, creating a more efficient and effective method for nurturing all those points of contact within a long-term sales cycle.

David Feidner Collaborative Global Leader & Executive Coach

Tell a nice story and push the buyer to identify with your product. Be social, this is now the main sales channel, Facebook, Instagram, WeChat, Yupoo, VK are on the lead now based on your location. Use your authority and experts opinion to influence the buyers. Create the need.

Paolo Beffagnotti Brand Protection Digital Manager

It takes time to act as a coach. How many good managers have you encountered that have not been good coaches? Who trains managers to become good coaches? In a results-driven environment it takes special people to 'put an arm around someone's shoulder' and offer coaching.

David Cottrell Managing Director @ Gradient Limited

It's good to remember the personal side of coaching. I've worked for super-efficient people that knew everything about the business but nothing about the people that worked for them.

David Cottrell Managing Director @ Gradient Limited

Back to my sporting analogies. Do you buy the players at the top of their game and aim for short-term impact or the player that could develop and deliver 10 years of service?

David Cottrell Managing Director @ Gradient Limited

Sadly, it's frequently assumed that once the initial training is conducted and a sales rep is successful that's all (s)he needs for continued success. A professional sports team wouldn't go without a coach for one minute. Why business organizations think or act as if it's not necessary is beyond me.

Joe Baker CEO | President | Global P&L | Manufacturing | Operational Transformation | Rapid Sales Growth - assisting Duke Energy

The key to coaching - a way of engaging intentionally to develop others by asking challenging/relevant open-ended questions - is to have the trust and mutual buy-in of both coach and coachee.

Don Barefoot Principal/CEO of Integrity CEO Advisors

One of the key values that I have in my organization is ownership and responsibility. This means that every rep is fully responsible for his or her own succes, actions and obviously accounts. The reason this is so important to me is because I believe ownership increases quality and speed.

Rainier Van Rietschoten Co-founder - CCO

What has worked is a simpler approach where as a leader I shed any allusion to being an expert, and allowed myself to be taught by my team. In doing so the team became more vulnerable and open to learning, so I found an inexpensive sales training platform; https://rapidlearninginstitute.com/.

David Feidner Collaborative Global Leader & Executive Coach

There are several coaching software to play with, https://www.capterra.com/sem-compare/mentoring-software?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIwbm_5rS-2wIViz8bCh1DWgjKEAAYBCAAEgJw5PD_BwE&;gclsrc=aw.ds.

Paolo Beffagnotti Brand Protection Digital Manager

For enterprise level teams practicing account based marketing, tools like Discover.org and LinkedIn navigator are critical

David Feidner Collaborative Global Leader & Executive Coach

What tools could you not live without? Lead generation: LinkedIn Premium (but not Sales Navigator - overpriced, and not worth the difference between Premium. No real additional functionality or ability to prospect, yet.)

Alexander Robinson BDM Seeing Machines | Co-Founder Airly | Writer | Pilot

I am not going to argue that good technology is key to the success of modern day salesteams. But, tools and technologies are popping out of the ground like mushrooms and everything seems to be usefull and handy, but also takes time. Too many tools can also be a major distraction from actual selling.

Rainier Van Rietschoten Co-founder - CCO

I think that there are pitfalls to avoid when deploying resources to focus on data analytics. Most of the databases/apps I've seen are full of unusable data which you can't report on or can't verify. This usually happens because of time constraints or lack of agreed upon standards of data quality

Frank Albanese VP Marketing and Business Development

I've found that it's critical to measure the effectiveness/yields and energy/activity of each sales person's "process" in a systematic way to ensure that complacency/distraction doesn't set-in, especially with those representing an established leadership brand that somewhat "sells itself."

Don Barefoot Principal/CEO of Integrity CEO Advisors

Great technology makes things measurable. With a click of a button you can see the performance of a company, of a team and of an individual. You can also track the perfomance in every part of the pipe. You can easily and fasten than ever see what is going well and what elements need improvement

Rainier Van Rietschoten Co-founder - CCO

The reason I voted for More new opportunities - new logo/client is because that is the element that is typically easiest to automate and replasce by software, so that is where technology can be the biggest enabler.

Rainier Van Rietschoten Co-founder - CCO

Although typically not automated, analytical solutions that look at pipeline data can help identify gaps to drive individual behavior change that improves the speed and probability of deals closing. I've looked at InsightSquared which integrates with salesforce as well as salesforce's own analytics.

David Feidner Collaborative Global Leader & Executive Coach

More use of collaboration tools like Slack, BaseCamp etc. as deals are complex and need to typically keep broad cross functional teams in sync.

David Feidner Collaborative Global Leader & Executive Coach

Technology remains an enabler, the core of selling remains human to human interaction Training and standardization remain key to a succesfull sales organization

Rainier Van Rietschoten Co-founder - CCO

Technology remains an enabler, the core of selling remains human to human interaction Training and standardization remain key to a succesfull sales organization

Rainier Van Rietschoten Co-founder - CCO