Elizabeth Lockwood

Customer service can make or break your business. It’s a critical part of your business that deserves dedicated attention. The work of marketing and sales teams that has taken months to build can come crashing down in a matter of seconds because of a bad customer service experience. Therefore, it makes sense that when you’re optimizing your business to improve close rates and increase sales, you take the time to improve your customer service team.

Customer service reps (CSRs) are always under the microscope. At the end of the day, despite all the other departments involved in the customer journey, the CSR is the one who ensures that the customers are always satisfied and their needs are met. Without quality representatives, companies are quickly learning that their business is suffering. One option that many businesses are choosing today is to outsource customer service representatives.

These days, sales requires more than just salespeople. Your business needs an entire sales and business development team, which consists of sales development reps (SDRs), business development reps (BDRs), and account executives (AEs), along with supervisors and others. And of course, all of these people have the same primary objective: increasing sales and driving growth.

Although most people don’t usually think of business development reps as closers, they do play an important part in the process. Their cultivation of new business gives sales reps (SDRs) the resources and insight they need to close more deals and make more conversions for your business. Without them, the entire sales process would come to a screeching halt.

As search engine optimization, or SEO, continues to change and evolve, small businesses often find themselves struggling to come up with an effective strategy. From concerns about business interruptions and changed consumer behaviors to the uncertainty of how to go about effectively implementing SEO, SMBs and their teams may be wary to invest in their optimization efforts. However, that’s the last thing that you want to do. When things are slow, when sales are down, and when forecasts are tentative at best, investing in marketing and branding can do wonders.

No two sales teams are the same, nor are their techniques. However, certain best practices work better than others when it comes to the sales funnel, especially at the closing stage. After all, this is usually the make-it-or-break-it point—very few people will give you the option to remarket to them if you can’t seal the deal the first time around.

The ValueSelling Framework® is a proven formula to help accelerate the results of any sales team. Value-based selling allows organizations to improve forecasting accuracy, sales coaching, and increase productivity. Despite the interconnectivity of the world around us, sales organizations are struggling to find their way. 82% of customers are asking for value tools that organizations don’t have, which means it’s time to step up the game. Value selling addresses a lot of this.

Sales is an essential part of many businesses. For as long as business has been around, people have been trying to perfect the sales process. This has resulted in the creation of many sales methodologies that use a variation of the seven basic steps of selling, which are the same across B2B and B2C companies alike. Understanding the best practices and steps involved in making effective sales can help companies increase their profits, improve their capabilities, and nurture better customer relationships.

Inbound sales might have been one of the best things to happen to the sales process. To a certain degree, it’s always been some part of sales—for as many cold calls as reps would make, there would be a certain number of people who were seeking out products or services on their own, bringing them to the business instead of the other way around. Over time, however, people have increasingly balked at the hard sell, causing the entire industry to focus far more on inbound selling.

There are dozens of different sales methodologies out there to choose from today. Each has its pros and cons to consider. Some are more effective for one type of business or another. In this guide, we’re going to look at target account selling, including what it is and how you can use it to boost the performance of your sales team.