Sales Cloud

Sales professionals spend a lot of time cultivating deep, meaningful relationships with customers in order to grow their business. If they’re successful enough to be promoted to sales manager, though, they often have to start focusing on building a different kind of relationship: the one between supervisor and team.

Sales teams are taking and making phone calls all day. They have to respond to a slew of urgent emails. There are often sudden – and potentially challenging – meetings with customers. It’s not the easiest job in which to practice “mindfulness.”

What is lead-to-revenue management? Learn how it can benefit SMBs and how to get started.

It seems almost unfair to ask sales professionals to think about training and development at this time of year. After all, having spent the last 12 months trying to land new customers and close more details than ever before, this is traditionally when they should be taking a well-earned break. Based on what customers are saying, however, they may not have much time to prepare for the challenges 2016 will bring.

When sales reps look to the new year, they probably think about the new customers they hope to win, rather than how the tools they use will change. Yet the future of CRM could wind up having a lot to do with how they’ll grow their base in 2016.

We all know that what goes up must come down—which is fine when you’re talking about the law of gravity, but more painful when you’re talking about sales performance.

If you only have an hour of the sales team’s time, what can you really teach them about how to use social media in their day-to-day work? The answer depends on how well you plan up front to make the education process as compelling and simple to digest as a post on Twitter or Facebook.

It’s customary this time of year to start sending out holiday cards or even a friendly email wishing customers well as they begin to enjoy the season. Hidden underneath that good cheer, though, is the worry that things will start grinding to a halt as more people leave for vacation.

Most of us are familiar with the “carrot and stick” concept of motivating people with something they might like, but Sandra Butler has taken it to a whole new level.

First there was competitive intelligence—data that helped organizations understand what their rivals were doing to grow their business. Then came market intelligence, which looked more broadly at the economic forces and buying patterns across a sector.