Guest Post: Tim Foster, Sales Director EMEA, The TAS Group

Over the first month of this year, I asked a lot of sales people and their bosses a simple question; “What is the most difficult element of selling in 2012 and what will make or break your year?”. The same two answers came up frequently:

• I can’t get access to the decision makers
• Customers don’t follow through on their committed actions

These are not new problems, and not ones that seasoned sales professionals like to admit to themselves. But things have come to a head. For the last five years sales people have been…

In my blog post My Social Media Experiment,  I bemoaned the fact that most of the focus in reporting on the Social Universe has been on B2C examples, and B2B use-cases are extremely rare. Also, it has been hard to know where B2B customers actually ‘hang-out’ in the Social Universe.

Over the last 18 months or so I’ve been trying some B2B models. The core philosophy has been to shape thinking, cultivate customers and earn permission to engage. We now have the answer to Which B2B Social Network is the Most Valuable? (see below) and through our various activities we have also…

In a previous post, I recounted the returns companies get when they deploy a sales methodology, and also the reasons why many companies invest in methodologies only to see them languish in the abyss of poor adoption. I’ve written also about the value of a sales process, and the need to integrate both methodology and sales process in  the CRM system. Through the work we have been doing with the Dealmaker Index Global Sales Benchmark study, we can now report the impact of applying all of these best practices together.

Dealmaker Index is a global sales benchmarking service that is free to all, where…

Guest Post: Bruce Wedderburn, EVP Channel & Enablement, Huthwaite Inc.

As we kick off 2012 with a heightened sense of optimism after the past few years, we all hypothesize what the new year will bring to our organizations, our people and our clients.  And typical of this time of year there are no shortages of prognosticators who are allegedly spotting the trends that are going to take the sales and business world by storm.  Having read many of these predictions and having had a chance to cross reference them against what we are seeing at Huthwaite as we look into 2012,…

The Dealmaker Index has been running now since early November 2011 and we have been learning a lot from all of the participants. Here is sample report so that you can see the kind of information you can get if you participate in this free study. The report comes in four parts: Summary Infographic, Executive Summary, Detailed Analysis and Personal Dealmaker Index Report. The Executive Summary and Detailed Analysis components each relate to the company Dealmaker Index score, and the Personal Dealmaker Index Report is tailored to the individual who completed the study.

Summary Infographic

The infographic is a quick summary or dashboard…

It is almost impossible to have lived through 2011 and not get all caught up in the social media frenzy. The launch of Google+ was one of the most talked about events of the year among the technorati. Was this to be the end of Facebook?  How would Twitter react? Even though Google+ amassed a user base of more than 10 million in three weeks (including the Dalai Lama), Facebook didn’t collapse, but pretty much just copied the Circles feature from Google+, and Twitter changed its approach to be a broader service instead of purely being a micro-blogging site.

How all this…

During 2011 this blog was visited 286,000 times, and including this one, we managed 51 posts.  But what did you find most interesting?  What did you care about?  The most important measures for me – in addition to the number of reads – is the level of interaction measured by comments or ‘Likes’, and the number of times you share the posts on Twitter.

By those measures (in ranked order) these are top ten sales blog posts you deemed to be most valuable.

1. What motivates sales people? Results / Analysis / Commentary

2. Are weighted pipeline values entirely without value?

3. Is ‘Social…

1. Being a pioneer is sometimes a lonely place, but a pioneer can build a community

2. There are only 2 reasons why you lose a sale

3. The impact on a customer of a bad buying decision is greater than the impact on a sales person of a lost deal

4. Even if your forecast says so, deals don’t always close on the last day of the month

5. Early failure is better than late failure

6. Winning sales cycles are getting shorter – you need to know why

7. You can’t actually ‘take the personalities out of it’

8. Trust is not transferable

9. The only way…

If you read one sales book this year, The Challenger Sale should be the one.  Actually, if you don’t generally read sales books at all, you should make an exception in this case and read this one.

The Challenger Sale comes from Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson of the Sales Executive Council, part of the Corporate Executive Board.  The hypothesis it sets out flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that suggests that complex B2B selling is all about relationships.  Instead it describes a new kind of  B2B sales winner – the Challenger – who has six specific attributes.

The Challenger …

1. Offers…

It has been a while since the last post in this series.  We’ve been really busy with the launch of the Dealmaker Index global sales benchmark study.  The data that we’ve gathered from that study underlines the need for sales and marketing to be on the same page.  In my post The Actual Cost of Sales and Marketing Misalignment, I draw from the Dealmaker Index data to show that there can be a difference in quota attainment of up to 25% between those organizations where sales and marketing are singing in harmony, versus those where these two interdependent functions are just…