Super Mushroom your sales team

INDUSTRY NEWS

Super Mushroom your sales team

Securing additional budget to expand your sales team can sometimes feel like battling a fire-breathing Koopa without a Super Mushroom power-up. If you’re confused by the analogy, there’s a good chance you haven’t seen the Super Mario Bros. Movie. It’s also how your CFO feels when someone doesn’t use financial language to appeal for more budget. According to Simon Escobar, a director of sales operations at Gartner, there are five powerful levers sales leaders can pull to build a case for sales force sizing. If CAGR, CAC, and EBITA make as much sense as Kamek, Bowser, and Luma, it might make sense to brush up on your financial terms – and see the hottest movie in America.

Prompt sales

Fyre Festival is a good example of how dangerous it can be to get swept up in a ton of hype. That’s a lesson you don’t have to learn twice (or do you?). There is also a ton of hype around ChatGPT, and it makes zero promises of access to rock stars and supermodels on a luxurious Caribbean island. If generative AI lives up to the hype, B2B sales is one area where it can have a massive impact. While ChatGPT is proving to be a powerful technology, reps don’t need to be polishing their resumes quite yet. To learn how generative AI can enhance the B2B sales experience by delivering improved insights and productivity, check out the latest article in the Harvard Business Review. It’s not as titillating as a fatally flawed music festival, but it might actually make you some money.

The three SEAs

If “reading,” “writing,” and “arithmetic” were referred to as the three R’s in school, you’re going to love learning about the three SEAs. That’s because we’re talking about the three main types of Sales Engagement Applications, and only one of them starts with “C.” When the sales engagement category on G2 features 86 different vendors, how do you begin to make sense of them all? If you ask Gartner, you first break them down into three types: “CRM providers expanding core sales force automation (SFA) capabilities; providers focused on building exclusively on top of CRM megavendors; and stand-alone vendors offering bidirectional sync with multiple SFA providers.” See more in Gartner’s 2023 “Market Guide for Sales Engagement Applications.”

IN THE GROOVE

Inbound magic

A fairy godmother comes in handy when you want a pumpkin to turn into a horse-drawn carriage or when you want to magically increase your MQL to SQO Conversion Rate by 2X. Although Groove’s Salesforce-native architecture does work like magic, you don’t need a magic spell to do the latter. All you need is Groove and a clever inbound strategy. That’s exactly how a Fortune 100 technology company overhauled its inbound process and increased meetings booked by 64% with the help of Groove and consulting partner RevShoppe. No fairy godmothers required.

LEARN SOMETHING NEW

Pack sellers

The lone wolf hunts, well, alone. But the hungry seller works best in a collaborative pack. For a long time, sellers were touted as lone wolves, but this siloed approach no longer serves sellers in today’s competitive environment. The answer? Collaborative selling. When each member of the revenue team works together to leverage their unique strengths and skill sets, everybody wins. The Sales Readiness Group defines collaborative selling as the future of sales. When being the lone wolf gets lonely, turn to your pack for support. After all, the pack hunts better together.

4 problems

Jay-Z might have “99 Problems,” but sellers have four. They are resistant buyers, unengaged reps, poor coaching, and bad results. On top of this, the current economy is not helping your team hit their numbers, and the leaderboards show this to be true. The good news? By changing the mindset of executives, sales leaders, and reps, the problems are fixable. Co-founder and CEO of ASLAN Training, Tom Stanfill, says there are two key shifts to make to overcome your big selling problems. With this advice, you might have 99 other problems, but selling ain’t one.

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