Editor’s Note

Most of you must have guessed by now what the discussion would be about! Yes, we are referring to the recent report from Forrester Research that predicts that one million U.S. B2B salespeople will lose their jobs to self-service e-commerce by 2020!
That is very alarming. However, does it mean traditional salesforce activities are coming to an end?

Sales and Service Excellence June 2015 Advertisers

Can Technology Kill B2B Salespeople?: 6 reasons why it can’t

A new report from Forrester Research called “Death of a B2B Salesman,” predicts that one million U.S. B2B salespeople will lose their jobs to self-service e-commerce by 2020.
Fears over technology eliminating sales jobs is nothing new, it happened following the advent of both the phone and Internet. Fortunately, the salesperson didn’t die then, they adapted, and according to a multitude of recent studies, the sales industry is evolving and actually entering a period of expansion.

Critical Thinking: How to make customers stop, reflect, and respond with a yes?

Critical thinking gets customers out of their box. During my graduate work in training and development, I had the good fortune of taking a psychology class. Toward the middle of the semester, the professor asked me for a favor. He wanted to know if I would be willing to assist him in reviewing more than 20 years of research relating to the way people communicate. At first I was somewhat reluctant.

From Training To Revenues: Increasing customer satisfaction through training

Ever since organizational training and development entered, these functions have been considered auxiliary to core functions that are responsible for direct revenues, such as sales or finance. Today, however, more businesses are realizing the importance of using organizational training to positively affect their business bottom line.

The Secret To Closing More Sales: Never answer a question during first conversation

I have been described as a “people hacker”. When I asked a person who described me that way he told me, “You hack into what truly motivates or demotivates people to take action and create a safe path from where they are to where you’d like them to go.”
As a former clinical psychiatrist specializing in suicide intervention and FBI hostage negotiation trainer that meant having people give up either their imminent self-destructive or other-destructive impulses and come over to the side where they would do no harm.

Not Penetrating Your Market?: 5 critical mistakes you might be making

If you’ve been marketing and no one is buying, it's a clear indication your marketing is not making an impact on your business’ bottom line. In business there are specific things you must do to ensure you penetrate your market. Most entrepreneurs “take a stab” at marketing instead of identifying a systematic way to share their products and services with their ideal clients. That is where they go wrong.

Don’t Confuse Selling With Installing: Does your message translate into a deliverable product?

At Sun Microsystems, our sales representatives would often sell a customer the solution they thought the customer wanted. The trouble was that it was not necessarily the system the customer support team was prepared to show up and install. That disconnect between expectations and reality would get us into trouble if we weren’t prepared to address it head on.

How to Cultivate Credibility?: The 4 sure-fire ways

While the retail industry crisis has been well-reported, particularly with respect to dwindling foot traffic to brick-and-mortar stores. However, even as consumers turn to shopping online and via mobile devices in droves, it’s shocking to learn that fully 97% of visitors to eCommerce and other sales-minded sites bail out without purchasing on their first visit. As much concerning is the fact that approximately 70% of shoppers who do add items to their online shopping cart do not complete the purchase.

Understanding Customer Journey: It begins with customer personas

Delivering exceptional customer experiences doesn’t just happen. It requires relevant training, seamless omni-channel experiences, attention being paid to important KPIs, but mostly, it comes down to knowing your customers and what their expectations are when interacting with your brand or product through your service channels. While many company executives, when surveyed, agreed with such priorities, yet most admit to not really understanding who their customers are and what they expect.