sales productivity

Hit the Bullseye: Know and Do the Most Meaningful Activities w/Kristina McMillan

March 4, 2019 By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

In this episode, Barb talks to Kristina McMillan, VP of Research at TOPO about why it is so important to FOCUS on the right activities if you want to achieve the right sales results.

Focus – on the right activities that drive revenue goals – is always important no matter the time of year! Everyone knows that sellers need to prospect, qualify leads, demonstrate value and business acumen in their outreach to buyers, I kicked things off by asking Kristina what is happening in the market now that dictates what buyers want, so that sellers can better focus?

Sales activities should be driven by current data, trends and buyer expectations. With that in mind, Kristina shared her perspective and the research on the most meaningful revenue-generating activities & tactics reps need to focus their selling time on each and every day.

I asked Kristina what she thought the missteps were given that roughly 50% of sellers didn’t achieve quota in 2018.

As we think about how business and buyer expectations keep evolving, Kristina told me there certain critical skills that every seller should have and/or be developing to meet these evolving dynamics. Sales leaders should pay particular attention to this portion of the interview!

Kristina is teaming up with Jeremey Donovan, SalesLoft’s SVP of Sales Strategy and GM of the NYC office during a session at SalesLoft’s Rainmaker 2019 conference in Atlanta March 2019. You’ll hear what you can expect to when you attend the session. Kristina shared a couple of key takeaways. Meet Kristina and sit in on her session with Jeremey on Tuesday, March 12 @ 3:30pm for their presentation on Bullseye: Data-Driven Ways to Increase Pipeline.

We closed the interview with a discussion about what Kristina’s business/sales journey been like for her. She shared her personal learning’s and guidance to other women in business and in sales.

Listen and enjoy and insightful, power packed interview!

BTW – Get your tickets for TOPO’s annual Summit happening April 17-18 in San Francisco. Spend two days learning from the world’s best sales and marketing organizations. With over 60 sessions & workshops organized around six tracks, you’ll learn about the most important topics in revenue. See the agenda and register before the summit sells out!

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About Kristina:

Kristina McMillan is the VP of Research at TOPO. She leads the analyst and consulting teams for all of TOPO’s practices. Her organization develops and delivers frameworks and best practices that help clients cultivate world-class marketing, sales development, and sales organizations. She has worked with hundreds of high-growth companies from early-stage start-ups to industry giants, such as Google, Oracle, HP, and more.

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Thanks to our Sponsors!

This podcast is presented by our Elite Sponsor, Microsoft. Corporate Vice President and Channel Chief Gavriella Schuster, along with other female leaders in the company, are driving for change, trying to bring more women into the technology industry. Gavriella and Microsoft are committed to giving “young women better role models and a stronger voice to all women.” You can hear more from Gavriella and other Microsoft leaders, on the Microsoft Partner Network podcast. Or visit partner.microsoft.com

SalesLoft, the leading sales engagement platform. Join them this March in Atlanta for 3 days of learning, networking, and inspiration at their annual Rainmaker conference! With over 100 speakers and 40 track sessions, their annual Women’s Breakfast and a performance from Grammy winning band Blues Traveler, this conference is not one to miss. Get your tickets today at rainmaker.salesloft.com.

Thanks to our Media Sponsor. Women Sales Pros has a vision for more women in B2B sales and sales leadership roles where there are currently male-majority sales teams. We help educate companies on how to do this, and we champion women on what a professional sales career can be. We also showcase the very top women sales experts who are speakers, authors, consultants, trainers and coaches. People can sign up to get updates HERE and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @WomenSalesPros

Less is More When It Comes to My Tech Stack: Why I Love HubSpot Sales

August 15, 2017 By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

I’m on a productivity quest. To focus on the most important revenue activities each day, I need the right processes in place to ensure maximum efficiency. For me, it is an ongoing evolution in how I work. Unlike many in the sales industry who are proud of their burgeoning tech stacks, I’m focused on reducing mine. As I wrote about in a recent blog post, more of anything isn’t necessarily the answer to solving challenges facing sales teams today. More technology doesn’t guarantee improved lead generation, an increase in qualified opportunities in the pipeline or shrink the time it takes to close deals. I believe it is the combination of the right technology, process and selling skills that lead to achieving quota objectives. So, for me, less is more. That’s where HubSpot Sales comes in.

Where I started.

I started with HubSpot CRM, which I’ve been using for over a year now. After testing just about every CRM out there, I settled on HubSpot for its power and ease of use. As much as I love technology, I feel that many CRM solutions being sold today are just too complicated. I want to know about deals in the pipeline, stages of the deal progression, why I won or lost deals, and I want tools that make it easy for me to reduce administrative time, capture sales conversations, track emails and follow a consistent cadence in my sales prospecting and follow up.

I love HubSpot Sales.

While HubSpot CRM is pretty awesome, knowing what I know now, I would have started with HubSpot Sales to capitalize on the advanced sales features from the start. I suggest you start there too. HubSpot Sales includes the free CRM. Since I wanted to create a more robust sales process, and I wanted to reduce the number of other technology tools I was using, moving to HubSpot Sales has helped me achieve that goal.

Check out the Email integration and tracking feature.

Since we all still live in email, I love that HubSpot Sales connects to your Inbox. The moment I start a new email and pop in a prospects email address, HubSpot Sales opens a dialog box to the right of my screen and instantly creates a contact record. The new record is populated with contact details, company information, revenue, social media profiles and more. I don’t have to hunt down the details and type them into the system. It works the same way if I receive an inbound email from a potential buyer too. Anything I need to quickly add, say the name of a referral source, I type that in and save the contact. The manual data entry is minimized, and I have saved so much time with just this one feature. You’ll love that apps you likely use today are supported, such as Office 365, Outlook, Gmail and GSuite.

Because every email interaction is then tracked, I can view a timeline in a prospect or customers contact record to keep up to date on how our conversations are progressing. I also know when someone opened the email, which helps me know that my messages are being not just received but read.

Save time with these additional HubSpot Sales features.

With the new Messages feature, I can see who visits my website in real time, how often they visit, what services they appear to be interested in, chat with them live or give them the ability to book time on my calendar to talk to me.

With the Meetings feature, I easily set up different meeting types based on meeting length and whether that meeting will be by phone or face to face. I can embed that code on my website or include the link in emails making it easy for people to schedule time with me. I love that both features are integrated with HubSpot CRM. In other words, if someone books a meeting using my meeting link, it is automatically added to their contact record. If this is someone who has come inbound to me and not in my CRM yet, once they schedule a meeting, a record is created without me having to do anything. My other tools didn’t integrate with CRM. Thanks to these two features of HubSpot Sales, I got rid of the other tools I was using. My sales process is better streamlined, and I saved money in the process.

Stay tuned for more.

In coming posts, I’m going to talk about other HubSpot Sales reporting capabilities, productivity tools and how they help me reduce wasted effort and improve my sales results. I’ll share with you how I’ve automated my outreach while not sacrificing personalization using Templates. In the past two weeks since setting up my custom templates, I have saved hours of time. You’ll also find out why I love the Sequences feature and how to turn your Documents into trackable links enabling trigger prospecting and follow up at its finest!

Get started with a FREE TRIAL Get yourself set up and come back and share your success stories with me!

Closing the Sales Productivity Gap with Robin Saitz, Brainshark CMO

July 31, 2015 By Barbara Giamanco 5 Comments

In my recent Razor’s Edge podcast, I talked with Robin Saitz, CMO at Brainshark. The focus of our conversation was sales productivity and specifically, we talked about what is behind the sales productivity gap and what companies can do about it.

Though we’ve heard through the years from CSO Insights that roughly 52% of salespeople do not achieve quota each year (and that’s in a good economy!), Robin told me that the TAS Group reported that the number is as much as 67%. If that doesn’t keep a sales leader up at night, I don’t know what does!

As with all my guests, I learned a lot in talking with Robin.

Sales Productivity Defined

She defined sales productivity as the yield per sales rep. In other words, hitting quota in the most efficient way possible. As I came to learn and as the TAS Group numbers suggest, productivity in sales is way off the mark.

What Causes the Gap

In particular, I was struck with Robin’s point of view regarding why we have such a problem with sales productivity at all. She told me that it comes down to several things, like:

Lack of an onboarding process and specifically, a lack of focus on training selling skills. Some 38% of companies lack any kind of formal process or program for preparing new reps.

Salespeople cannot find the content/information they need when they need it. Up to 40% of their time is spent searching or trying to create the content that they need. Breaking it down that equates to 2 out of 5 sales days each week.

Sales conversations are not effective enough and there is a lack of visibility – on management’s part – in terms of understanding the behavior and knowledge of their salespeople.

What Companies Can Do

During the interview, Robin shared her suggestions for what companies need to do to close the productivity gap, who needs to be involved in addressing the issues and what to measure to ensure that you are closing the gap.

With C-Suite and corporate Board members extremely concerned about sales productivity, this interview is certainly worth 35 minutes of your time.

Learn more about how Brainshark can help your organization close the sales productivity gap.

Follow Robin on Twitter.

Hit the Bullseye: Know and Do the Most Meaningful Activities w/Kristina McMillan

Less is More When It Comes to My Tech Stack: Why I Love HubSpot Sales

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