Confess, you really don’t read the “fine print” when you sign up to receive emails from your favorite brands, do you? Me either...I typically subscribe quickly because I’m anxious to receive whatever awesome offer they dangle in front of me in exchange for my email address. And the fine print is, well, kind of boring (sorry legal folks!) and doesn’t always seem like it applies to me. But it can! Does this sound familiar?

“We occasionally send out emails on behalf of third party sponsors, who pay for the opportunity to promote their products to our awesome audience. These sponsors allow us to continue to provide you with the very best content and tools possible. We promise we’ll only partner with high quality sponsors, and that we’ll never spam you.”

Today we are going to get somewhat controversial and go after one of the most widely used metric in all of sales management: The amount in the seller’s funnel.

While it is absolutely true that sales is at least in part a numbers game, this particular number creates more bad behavior than any other sales metric.

Generally, the implementation of this metric works something like this: Sales leaders decide that in order to achieve their sales objectives, they need to set some minimum performance standards around pipeline or funnel activity (there’s certainly nothing inherently wrong with that logic). This usually takes the form of an educated guess as to how many open opportunities people must have in their funnel at all times. 

For example, if the leadership believes the team has an average closing ratio of 20%, they must keep 5X their quota in their funnel at all times. If they believe the team closes more like 25% of their opportunities, they should maintain 4X their quota at all times.

While on the surface, this may seem fairly rational, assigning a single target for the aggregate amount of opportunities in their respective funnels at all times actually creates some of the least productive sales behaviors we have seen.

Let’s unpack this issue a bit more to see why this is the case and examine an alternative approach that will achieve the desired objective more consistently.

“It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change” Charles Darwin

We are in the Digital era, whether it be the digitalisation of the watch or the grandeur of the self-drive car, digital is a facet of modern day life, and encompasses our daily routines and habits. This has never been so apt as in the world of Commerce today. 

Many businesses are considering the shift to an eCommerce model as a channel for profitability and growth. But there has already been a shift. And in order for us to understand how this shift has driven not only profitability and growth, but ultimately customer success, we need to understand the transition. 

Why the move from traditional commerce to eCommerce? Is simple eCommerce enough? Where do we go next? Who is driving the future of commerce? To answer these questions, we need to start at the beginning…

It has been announced that LinkedIn Sales Navigator  will be integrated with Salesforce and Gmail. 

The Sales Navigator tool was launched in 2014 with the intent of connecting salespeople with potential clients, by means of leveraging LinkedIn’s database of information. While in Sales Navigator’s previous form, salespeople would be required to track leads manually, targeting specific clients. As of the company’s update, Sales Navigator offers a CRM sync feature that imports leads and clients automatically. Moreover, recently, LinkedIn has updated the Sales Navigator mobile app to add a Discovery screen that’ll surface up to 10 daily leads and account recommendations based on set preferences. 

Do you have a mobile phone, or cable or satellite TV? Do you stream music? Well, chances are, you’re familiar with a subscription-based purchasing model. And you’re not alone; billions of consumers worldwide are subscription customers.

In the business-to-business world, too, the subscription-based, or on-demand model, is increasingly common. In this environment, software is the most common example. Organisations often get software, such as accounting or customer relationship management systems, via subscription rather than purchasing a fixed number of licences. This enables them to work more flexibly, and ensures the very best ROI on their tech spend. 

However, this new model can pose certain challenges when it comes to customer engagement as customers have less and less need to interact with sales staff. At the same time, subscription-based models require businesses to interact with customers more regularly in order to keep them buying.