SAP Sales Effectiveness Blog

Welcome to our blog focused on the hot topics that are driving sales effectiveness today. You’ll hear from a variety of experts, including SAP Staff, partners, and leading sales thought leaders in the industry. Please feel free to join in the discussion.

  • Inside View Logo

    Why Prospect Research Is Sales Best Practice

    Effectiveness Trends
    Published April 17, 2013 by

    Most sales managers expect reps to reach a certain number of phone calls, emails, or tweets every day in their efforts to contact prospects, and some companies reward reps for maintaining a high volume of calls each day. That being said, doing your research is as important as contacting a lead. We’ve put together a few reasons why pre-call research should be a standard sales practice for every rep.

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  • PartnersInExcellenceLogo

    Moving From Value Creation To Value Co-Creation

    Customer Centricity
    Published April 11, 2013 by

    In the past 15-20 years, we have adopted the view that “value is in the eye of the beholder.” Sales people are now trying to understand what customers value, then present their solutions in the context of what they value. Marketing provides tools to help sales people do this, whether they are questioning guides, justification guides, or other tools.

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  • Inflexion-Point Logo wih Tagline

    Why does sales training have such a poor ROI?

    Coaching
    Published April 9, 2013 by

    The statistics certainly make for uncomfortable reading. According to a substantial body of published research – some of it by sales training companies themselves – only a tiny fraction (less than 15% seems to be the consensus figure) of the content delivered in traditional sales training programmes has any practical impact on the sales person’s subsequent behaviour.

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  • Inside View Logo

    Useful Tactics for closing a B2B Deal

    Coaching
    Published April 4, 2013 by

    B2B customer purchases usually follow a particular supply chain and business model . A B2B salesperson must not only understand products and people, but also market trends, industries and external and internal business processes. Closing time comes as a sweet victory to sales reps who’ve toiled for months over complex deals, and after all their hard work, the close is final step to triumph.

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  • Sales Benchmark Index Logo

    Does Your Sales Incentive Plan Drive Customers Away?

    Effectiveness Trends
    Published April 2, 2013 by

    The following is from one of the organizations that allow us to guest post some of their great content, Sales Benchmark Index.  You can find the original post here. It has [...]

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  • Inside View Logo

    Motivate Your Team to Sales Success

    Coaching
    Published March 28, 2013 by

    With fiscal year end in sight for many sales organizations, December can usher a pressure unfelt throughout the rest of the year into a month already packed with holiday parties and vacation plans. As some companies strive to clear out their cash buckets and others fight to fill theirs, sales representatives can find themselves in an overwhelming obstacle course of sales quotas, deadlines, and hard to reach prospects.

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  • PartnersInExcellenceLogo

    “Intelligent Leads”

    Effectiveness Trends
    Published March 26, 2013 by

    I was recently asked to share my views of the impact of Big Data, business intelligence, and data analytics in sales. We are only beginning to scratch the surface in leveraging Big Data, particularly in sales. Many other functions have been leveraging big data and rich analytics for years, with great impact. I’ve been quoted a lot about my view that Big Data and rich analytics are the “pot of gold at the end of the rainbow” for sales and marketing. These have the greatest potential in driving both sales effectiveness, but also customer experience of anything that I’m seeing.

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  • Inflexion-Point Logo wih Tagline

    Why the COI (Cost of Inaction) always needs to come before the ROI

    Effectiveness Trends
    Published March 21, 2013 by

    If you’re selling high-value B2B products or services, you’ve probably been involved in coming up with ROI (return on investment) calculations to justify your proposal. You may even have been tempted to market your offerings on the basis of the superior ROI you believe they can generate. But even if you present your prospects with what looks like a compelling ROI-based argument, chances are that on many occasions, you still won’t win the deal – and it’s not just because (even though it’s undoubtedly true) most buyers don’t trust the ROI calculations that vendors come up with.

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  • PartnersInExcellenceLogo

    People Don’t Dislike Sales People, They Dislike Bad Selling!

    Effectiveness Trends
    Published March 19, 2013 by

    People don’t dislike sales people, they dislike bad selling! I wish I had said that, but it originally came from Andy Rudin—thanks for the great quote.
    There’s a lot of data going around about customers not wanting to engage sales people until very late in their buying process.

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  • Sales Benchmark Index Logo

    How to Anticipate the Next Compelling Event of the Buyer Process

    Effectiveness Trends
    Published March 15, 2013 by

    To know a Buyer’s compelling event is critical. Why? Because this is the real reason the Buyer is buying. Compelling events are the engine of the Buyer Process. Now is the time to identify Buyer compelling events.

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