Special Report

Today’s sales reps have all the tech they could possibly need at their fingertips: CRM, lead generation tools, email management software...you name it. There’s an abundance of technology geared toward helping reps do their jobs better, but not a lot that makes their lives easier.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is critical to how companies market to, sell to and service their customers, but it’s inherently an internal tool focused primarily on process adherence and control. Although “customer” is in the name, it’s often not in CRM software’s DNA.

A lot of us are enjoying limited face-to-face interaction again, and we’d like more. Whether it’s meeting colleagues around the water cooler or meeting new sales accounts at an event, we look forward to additional in-person collaboration and connection.

As we look into the future, it’s important to remember that real widespread change happens slowly for such a large industry. People have been talking about assembling customer 360-degree views and utilizing “Big Data” for closing in on 20 years, and articles detailing how effective and popular artificial intelligence (AI) will be in marketing go back nearly a decade.

Through four years of testing and development, SalesFuel created a sales microcoaching platform, SalesFuel CoachFeed. It contains four essential elements for upskilling your sales reps.

Sales managers can take heart in a Sales Management Association study that shows effective sales coaching leads to an increase of up to 23% in rep performance. One would assume with an impact like that, sales managers would commit a significant amount of time to coaching. However, the same study reveals that 76% of sales managers spend too little time coaching. The demands of the job — being constantly pulled into meetings, putting out fires and feeling pressured to meet the short-term quota — make coaching less of a priority.

Embracing digital buying processes —  from the research phase to post-sales — is the only way to keep up with customers’ evolving expectations, says Marie Hattar, CMO at Keysight Technologies. She offers these tips for improving the B2B digital buying experience.

More than a year of working from home has shown that online video meetings and remote demonstrations work just fine most of the time for business-to-business sales. Many customers, it turns out, actually prefer the virtual approach.

Steps leaders can take to make employees feel supported and safe ahead of an eventual return to the workplace.

According to Gallup, worker engagement ping-ponged in 2020. It's important for managers to be aware of some of the facts about worker engagement.