Being prepared for a sales opportunity is a critical component of being a successful sales rep. Now, more than ever, being educated on your target account in preparation for an important meeting, presentation or call can be the deciding factor in whether or not the sale moves forward and the prospect becomes a customer. Account planning helps you to effectively prepare and stay focused on the prospect’s business objectives and goals to ensure that you achieve your planned results, create a consistent experience for the prospect, and ultimately identify how your product or service can make a positive impact on their business.

The issue of how a sales rep’s time is spent is not as simple as eliminating the need to do personal research by investing in sales intelligence; it is clear that the buck does not stop there. It not only takes time to do the hard research. Even if the tools are paid for, there is still the issue of aggregating all of the content and making it available, easy to find, and consolidated in one place.

Obviously, just purchasing sales intelligence tools is not enough to decrease research time and increase lead conversion rates, sales cycle time, and reps hitting their quotas. And in this economy, if you are in the bottom 30% and not correctly utilizing these tools, it has resulted in a decrease in performance rather than just minute increases. This indicates that now is NOT the time to slack; it is the time to get your act together.

You cannot just give your reps a map and expect them to drive from point A to point B if you haven’t taught them how to drive, or even more fundamentally, how to read a map.

Knowing an account inside and out has always been the key to success in making a sale, but the time it takes to get to that point is not only precious, but also far from minimal. In this economy more than ever, sales teams are on overdrive trying to make ends meet and hit their [...]

The CO’s that we have interviewed have consistently told us that companies should not only focus on selling directly to them (CIO title) but to definitely market and sell to other recommenders, influencers, decision makers and champions within the account. Selling deeper and wider into F1000 and G500 accounts is the biggest key to success. Here are 9 additional ideas for getting the best ROI from these giants.