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In business we see it time and again when a company decides to launch a brand new sales enablement initiative. Marketing churns out a bevy of fresh collateral: sell sheets, PowerPoint presentations and more. They post it all onto a shiny new sales portal and give reps access. The company waits for the money to roll in. It never does. The sales reps stick to the stuff they’ve written out themselves, and rarely even touch the portal. The whole team deems the sales content management initiative a failure. 

In this 4th piece of our 5 part series, you'll find a lighthearted guide to enabling sales reps to close more deals through a key social media technique.

Humans have an inborn desire to make connections with groups, whether it’s through a formalized social club or an informal interest forum. Psychologists find that group members hold a blind loyalty to their associates. People impulsively place value on the thoughts and opinions of affiliates and blindly ignore the thoughts of others. Psychologists label this phenomenon of illogical preference as “ingroup bias.”

Manifesting dreams: it’s a topic tackled by motivational speakers, CEOs of startups, mystics, education professionals, marketing managers and beyond. How does something go from one great big idea to one great big success?

“If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.” David Ogilvy

One hour before a scheduled face-to-face sales meeting with a new prospect, spring the following questions on a high performing all-star sales rep. Chances are, they won’t know:

You’ve just been assigned to a new role – you’re the new Sales Executive of a profitable Sales enterprise and you’ve got a sales team that’s not on target or quota. Sales are slipping. The team is discouraged and miserable, and to add insult to injury, your best sales rep has resigned last week and two more are off sick. What’s been going on here? You feel panicked and are hopeless and haven’t got a game plan of how to lift the team out of their rut. First, stop the panic. Most sales execs have faced these issues, and in the end have turned out real champions and leaders of their teams.

Perhaps this scenario is familiar: a group of sales-marketing colleagues settle in for an interdepartmental meeting. The marketing department is giddy with excitement and a fresh morning coffee buzz. The sales reps are watching the clock and cringing each time they hear their office phone ring through to voice mail.

Meeting quota is a valuable talent, but there are a handful of other performance signposts to consider when diagnosing sales team problems. With the time and resources it takes to onboard and acclimate a new rep, sales team managers learn to view team members with a holistic approach rather than firing at the first sign of a missed quota.

Browse our blog and you will find that we are consistently discussing Sales and Marketing Alignment: the process of having a common set of definitions that describe prospects and customers at each stage of the sales funnel, and how these stages start from the marketing team as prospects, and move on to the final stages of the sales process to closed business. Yes, alignment is key, but it more so refers to the linear arrangement and positioning of the two departments together.