Sales

Expert Advice to Guide Your Sales Career Path

It’s a common trajectory: do one to two years as an SDR and then become an AE. But what if your career path in sales looks a little different?

In our latest episode of The Closing Show Live, we sat down with Kristen Twining, the SVP of Global Sales for Illusive, an enterprise cybersecurity solution for preventing ransomware and other cyber attacks.

Kristen's had an uncommon career trajectory, transitioning straight out of college into a field sales role, and then going somewhat backward to work as an SDR before becoming an inside sales director and ultimately a senior vice president.

We asked her what makes a great AE, how to get a job as an AE, and how to transition into senior management.

Kristen loves being mentored and mentoring others. Keep reading for her hard-earned advice, or watch the full interview here.

Sales Is Tough: How to Adapt to the Current State of the Market

When we look back at mid to late 2022, will we see the start of a major recession or a small market correction?

No one knows for sure.

What we do know is that because of this uncertainty, selling is hard right now.

So, we sat down with Asad Zaman, CEO of Sales Talent Agency, during our latest installment of the Closing Show Live. We uncovered the current state of the market and what sellers can do about it.

Click here to watch the full interview, or keep reading for Asad’s best tips.

What Is Sales Velocity & How to Measure It With 3 Examples

Sales velocity is hands-down one of the best metrics to keep your eye on if you’re looking to increase revenue.

Without a clear understanding of your sales velocity, you might be analyzing your pipeline, your deal sizes, and your sales cycle without a good way to put all of this data together.

You won’t be able to forecast your revenue accurately or offer a North Star metric to your sales team to keep them on track with achieving goals that really matter to the business.

Luckily, sales velocity offers a lot of insight and inspiration. And it isn’t that hard to measure.

You should already have access to the data you need to calculate sales velocity for yourself as an individual contributor and for your team.

In this guide, show you how to calculate and utilize this metric. Plus, we offer a few examples of different velocities you can measure.

The Pro’s Guide to Handling Objections During the Sales Process

Objection protection—that’s what we want you to have.

We want you to know how to preemptively handle objections and how to get to the root of the customer’s concern.

To get all of this valuable info, we sat down with Morgan J Ingram in a recent episode of the Closing Show Live on LinkedIn.

Morgan is the VP of GTM Talent and Development and a sales consultant who upskills teams of AEs and SDRs.

Check out the full interview with Morgan or keep reading for his best objection-handling techniques.

Personal Branding Tips for Sales Professionals [Online & Offline]

Personal branding can open new doors.

But even if you never go viral, your brand comes into play during client interactions and can really impact your numbers.

Will Aitken has certainly experienced all of the benefits of having an online presence and a unique style. Known for his humorous sales content, he’s transitioned from a sales role to a full-time content creator dedicated to edutaining salespeople. He now holds two titles: Head of Sales Content at Sales Feed and Video Content Creator at Vidyard.

Will is a firm believer that sales professionals need to have a solid understanding of their personal brand—both for client calls and social media content. And he’s showing us how.

Keep reading for his best advice, or catch the full conversation on our recent episode of the Closing Show Live on LinkedIn.

Proposify’s List of the Best Voices in Sales

Need to freshen up your LinkedIn feed with content relevant to your role?

LinkedIn can be a treasure trove of sales playbooks to try, mistakes to avoid, and good ole motivation.

But who do you follow to get the very best that LinkedIn #sales has to offer?

We’ve surveyed our own AEs and SDRs to find out who they love to follow on LinkedIn.

And so we present Proposify’s List of the Best Voices in Sales.

Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) Explained

If you want to know which contracts are in effect (and what stage they’re at), then you need to manage contracts throughout their lifecycle.

Unfortunately, we’re often too busy to manage contracts effectively. Managers and business owners simply save the PDF contract in their downloads folder, and forget all about it. But this paves the way for legal and financial risks.

Sellers need to improve their proposal and contract operations, while buyers need to rework how they track contract fulfillment, compliance, and renewals to be sure they’re maximizing every contract.

In this guide, we dive into the key stages of contract lifecycle management and showcase smart tools to help you manage your contracts proactively.

10 Steps for Fixing Your Marketing and Sales Alignment

On our latest episode of The Closing Show, Chief Revenue Officer Connor Cox and some of our marketing and sales leaders talk about the dire misalignment they were dealing with and how they finally got aligned.

Who Should Own SaaS Upsells? (And Why We Chose Customer Success)

In our recent episode of The Closing Show, we dove deep into our motivation for transferring the ownership of upsells from sales to customer success—and exactly how we did it.

The conversation included Chief Revenue Officer Conor Cox, Customer Growth Manager Scott Tower, and Customer Success Manager Jasper Goodwin. In this blog, Conor takes us through the SaaS upselling techniques shared in the show.

4 Tips That Will Make Any Proposal More Likely to Close

You’ve based your recommendations on your client discovery process. You’ve added all the essential sections to your proposal. You’re ready to hit send on the proposal and hope it will close.

But what if there were just a few simple tweaks you could do to make sure to increase the chances that it will close?

We researched over 1 million proposals that were sent with our software last year to discover what great closers do before and after they hit send.

Below, we’ve pulled out some of the best tips from this research to help you in the final stretch.

Get all of our research. We’ve included dozens of simple, data-driven proposal tips in The 2022 State of Proposals.