Category Archives: Research
Personal Branding in Sales: An Introduction
In our digital sales age, we’re seeing increasing attention paid to the idea of personal branding. Although the idea itself is by no means new (a brief history is below), awareness of its importance and value in business – including for sales reps – is now reaching a critical mass of awareness. There’s a problem, […]
Why Emotional Connections Are Often Your Best Sales Differentiator
One of the realities of our global, digital sales world is that buyers have more options and easier access to those wider choices than ever before. What this means for businesses and their sales reps is that the objective and measurable differences, such as specific features or time to delivery, frequently aren’t strong enough to […]
Neuroscience in Sales: Note-Taking and Its Impact on Active Listening
We’ve often stressed the importance of active listening as one of the primary paths to unlocking customer needs and situations in the sales process. Less discussed in the sales world is note-taking and how the different methods neurologically impact the brain – including the tie-in to active listening. Primary Note-taking Methods 1. Pen and paper […]
How Understanding Choice Architecture Leads to More Effective Sales
When Richard Thaler and John Balz of the University of Chicago and Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School coined the phrase choice architecture in 2008, they clarified how decision makers make choices. More importantly, they illuminated how choice architects, such as sales people, can use choice architecture to “help nudge people to make better choices… […]
Motivate the Middle Tier of Your Sales Team to Maximize Sales Revenues
Although the 80/20 rule was first popularized in the business world by Richard Koch’s 1997 book, The 80/20 Principle, the concept itself was devised a hundred years earlier (1896) by Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto at the University of Lausanne in his work, Cours d’economie politique (Course of Political Economy). Subsequently, the 80/20 rule […]
Neuroscience in Sales: Negotiations
There’s a surprising amount of research on neuroscience in areas related to sales – it’s becoming a field of increasing interest as companies and academia seek to understand the biomechanics of the buying and selling processes. Today we’ll be looking at how neuroscience applies to negotiations, and how understanding how our brains act during negotiations […]
Six Keys to Manage Your Sales Territory More Effectively
You’ve just been awarded a sales territory by your sales leadership team. Now it’s up to you to properly nurture and grow that area to drive sales. In tandem with our most recent white paper on Developing an Effective Sales Territory Model, we want to share some best practices that help you maximize the revenue […]
The Power of Psychographics in Prospecting and Selling
One of the hot new buzzwords in marketing and prospecting in recent years is psychographics, or psychological metrics. The term was popularized by William Wells in his 1975 article for Journal of Marketing Research, titled “Psychographics: A Critical Review”. 40 years later, it experienced a resurgence in popularity after a Harvard Business Review article on […]
President’s Club or Short Sales Contests: Which Is Best?
President’s Club. STAR Club. Summit. The 100% Club. The Winner’s Circle. The Chairman’s Circle. It goes by many different names, but it all denotes one thing – the best of the best; the top annual sales performers in your organization. It conjures up visions of fat bonuses, expensive and luxurious trips, or both. But it […]
