Two summer reading to boost sales

Dear readers thirsty for reading material to end this sweet summer period. I suggest these 2 readings that should interest members of sales teams, as well as all people who manage, directly or indirectly, these teams.

Whether they are a sales manager, vice president of sales (CSO), General Manager, business owner, President, or CEO.

Let's take a look at the methodologies highlighted in these two books.

COMBO Prospecting or the art of increasing your sales by optimizing your funnel

Tony J. Hughes, author of COMBO Prospecting offers you a method that allows you to build a sales pipeline up to 3 times larger, and this, in only 2 quarters.

Nothing less!

It outlines sales activities to be carried out depending on whether your prospect is, for example, already known to your company or not. His approach is simple and very aggressive: perform a COMBO of activities in less than 2 minutes, or even 90 seconds, in order to wake up the prospect from his apathy or inaction. You know... I'm referring to those prospects who never answer :

• their phone; 📞
• Your voice mails;
• your emails. 📨

Sound familiar?

These famous COMBOs spread over several days, are composed of different methods to approach your prospects:

• Phone. No! You can't get away with it.
• Email.
• LinkedIn, via InMail ideally
• Yes! SMS. A medium not often used by salespeople for prospecting.
• Twitter. Again, yes!

The idea here is that our unresponsive prospect is bombarded with your messages from all sides, that it "rings" from everywhere and that leaves him no choice but to answer you. You talk to him and his answer is positive: Yeah, you're making progress! His answer is negative: Yeah again!
Why??? Because the sellers :

• know (finally!) what to dance on 🕺 with this "prospect"; 
• stop following him;
• return the prospect to marketing for nurturing and...
• stop wasting their time on dead wood! ☠️

Tech-Powered Sales TO AUTOMATE AND Boost SALES

Michael Justin et Tony J. Hugues (Yep! The same author as COMBO Prospecting), the authors of Tech-Powered Sales: Achieve Superhuman Sales Skills have joined forces to show us how technology will revolutionize the world of sales.

This book was recommended to me by one of my contacts on LinkedIn. This read changed my life and that's why after 35 years in sales, I decided to change careers to specialize in RevOps and end up at Auxilio writing this article! 😜

Terms like RevOps and SalesOps have only been around for a few years. So I've been preaching in the desert for all these years with very little listening... I was probably seen as an alien. 👽 Thankfully, that's changing... Phew! 🥵

Clearly, the jobs associated with sales are undergoing a big change. Here's a quote from the book:

« The decade finishes with 33 percent fewer field salespeople as resources shift to inside sales with next-generation tech stacks. Field selling transitions to domain expertise with commercial acumen. Managers and leaders become the closers of enterprise deals in the field. »

The authors present a number of technological tools to help salespeople automate clerical tasks and focus on value-added activities that contribute to improving their sales performance.

All tools are covered, including those that capitalize on artificial intelligence. A very promising avenue that will revolutionize the way we approach sales.

Two small downsides ☔️ :

1. Many of these tools are extraordinary for companies operating in the language of Shakespeare. They are a little (much!) less so in the language of Molière.
2. The book was published in 2021 and it is now 2022. An eternity in the world of technology. Indeed, many of the third-party applications mentioned are now part of the features offered by HubSpot. This is great news to avoid using a lot of applications, with all the problems of integration in a CRM, costs and security that this implies. Plus, keeping this data in sync, clean and flowing smoothly between all departments in a company requires a full-time job.

Did you know that the average SMB uses 137 different SaaS applications, while large companies use an average of 288? (Blissfully, 2020)

Happy reading and good summer holidays.