Accelerate! With Andy Paul

Jim Eberlin, is a successful serial entrepreneur and co-founder and CEO of TopOPPS. He understands the challenges involved in building high velocity sales teams. In this episode, Jim discusses why it’s vital for CEOs in start-ups and SMBs to stay close to the sales process. He also shares practical tips about how to overcome the biggest challenge that sales reps face everyday: maximizing the value of their discovery calls with prospects. The episode is also packed with tips about tools that help prioritize which prospects to work and that optimize the accuracy of your forecasting. Make sure you listen to this episode today.

Jeff Shore is the author of the best-selling book, Be Bold and Win The Sale, a speaker and nationally recognized sales trainer. With 30 years of experience, he’s a self-described “sales wonk” who loves picking up a sale and dissecting it. In this episode, Jeff unveils the concept of “comfort addictions” and describes how a sales rep’s ability to recognize and embrace “discomfort” can be the trigger to achieving sales success. Selling is a process that is inherently full of discomfort. And Jeff shows how sales reps can turn that to their advantage to win more deals. CEOs, sales leaders and sales reps need to listen to this episode.

My regular guest on Front Line Friday is Bridget Gleason. Bridget is VP of Corporate Sales at SumoLogic. With more than twenty years of sales and sales management experience in the technology sector, Bridget joined SumoLogic’s executive team to lead and grow their inside sales organization. Her recent experience includes being VP of Sales for Yesware and SVP of Worldwide Sales for Engine Yard. In this episode, Bridget and I share strategies that sales leaders should use when they assume responsibility for a new sales team. As an outsider, what are the steps you need to take to make an immediate impact? We talk about how to assess the capabilities of your new team, streamline sales processes, establish the right metrics and inspire and motivate sales reps to perform up to their potential. If you’re in charge of a sales team, be sure to join us for Front Line Friday!  

In this episode Mike O’Neil, author of Rock the World with LinkedIn, provides insight into how to kick-start your social selling efforts. Learn how to quickly assess the effectiveness of your social presence as a company and how to efficiently train your sales team to become LinkedIn rock stars themselves. Finally, Mike provides detailed guidelines for developing and implementing a social media policy that can help protect company assets, such as customer and prospect information. If you’re involved in social selling be sure to download and listen to this episode.

Howard Brown, founder and CEO of RingDNA, joins me to talk about sales enablement. In this episode, Howard describes how sales organizations can use sales enablement tools to compress buying cycles and create more successful sales reps. Learn how next generation sales enablement tools can transform sales productivity through the ability to test and measure the effectiveness of sales messaging, voicemails, value propositions. And, how they give your sales leaders the ability to coach and provide real-time feedback to their sales reps to accelerate productivity. This is a don’t miss episode for sales leaders and decision makers.

In this episode, Alice Heiman, Founder of Alice Heiman, LLC, and an expert at helping companies increase their sales, lays out a step by step plan any SMB can use to develop more prospects. Alice provides effective strategies for mining more business from existing customers, developing a consistent flow of referrals and creating a sustainable mix of inbound leads and proactive outbound prospecting. If you’re a CEO, VP of Sales or Sales Ops, or a sales leader, you do not want to not miss this episode with Alice Heiman.

My regular guest on Front Line Friday is Bridget Gleason. Bridget is VP of Corporate Sales at SumoLogic. With more than twenty years of sales and sales management experience in the technology sector, Bridget joined SumoLogic’s executive team to lead and grow their inside sales organization. Her recent experience includes being VP of Sales for Yesware and SVP of Worldwide Sales for Engine Yard. Bridget and I focus on two sales topics in this episode that you won’t want to miss. First, what is the role of luck in sales? Is it really true in sales that the harder you work, the luckier you get? And, why do sales leaders often overlook the hard work that goes into making a deal look easy? Second, we talk about why sales leads aren’t consistently followed up. The problem starts with the lack of a defined process for managing leads and we’ll tell you what you can do to fix that problem. If you’re in charge of a sales team, be sure to join us for Front Line Friday!

Barb Giamanco, President of Social Centered Selling, is one of the leading industry experts on social selling. A pioneer in integrating social media into selling, Barb kicks off this information-packed episode by clearly spelling out for you both the value, and the limitations, of social selling. She describes the power of social selling and how you should use it to make connections, develop relationships and open the door to having substantive sales conversations with your prospects. Listen as Barb tells you how to make social a part of your overall sales plan and integrate it into an effective sales process. Social is a powerful tool. But as you’ll learn from Barb in this episode, it’s just one of the sales tools you need to succeed in today’s sales environment. If you want to learn how to most effectively use social selling in your sales efforts, don’t miss this!

In this episode, Joe Gustafson, Founder and CEO of Brainshark, describes the four crucial factors contributing to poor sales conversations.

Mark Hunter is The Sales Hunter, and a master of selling high value at full price. He’s the author of the book, High-Profit Selling. In this episode, Mark describes the steps you need to take to develop the competence, confidence and credibility that enable you to sell at full price. Mark also shows how discounting changes the very nature of your relationship with your customers. (And not in a good way). He also addresses the critical importance of sales reps making a personal commitment to continuous learning and demonstrates how this directly ties to your ability to sell value at full-price and maintain relevance to your buyers. If you’re a CEO, VP of Sales or Sales Ops, or a sales leader you do not want to not miss this episode with The Sales Hunter.

My regular guest on Frontline Friday is Bridget Gleason. In this episode we discuss the overuse and misuse of the term “sales productivity” by sales managers and provide guidance on how it should be defined and measured.

In this episode, Deb Calvert (President of People First Productivity Solutions) describes the powerful research findings about the leadership mindset that all sellers should adopt to inspire and lead their prospects to making favorable decisions.

In our conversation, Matt Heinz, CEO of Heinz Marketing and a sales enablement expert, takes the mystery out of sales enablement. He places it in the right context within a sales organization and shows how companies of all sizes can use strategic sales enablement thinking, tactical sales processes and new apps and web tools to transform their sales results. The key is to just get started and Matt tells you how to take that important first step. This episode is packed with the great information that Matt provides. If you’re a CEO, VP of Sales or Sales Ops, or a sales leader you do not want to not miss this.

In this episode, Mike Weinberg (author of "Sales Management. Simplified " and "New Sales. Simplified") with his trademark bluntness, provides the diagnosis and the cure for common sales management challenges.

My regular guest on Frontline Friday is Bridget Gleason. Bridget is VP of Corporate Sales at SumoLogic. With more than twenty years of sales and sales management experience in the technology sector, Bridget joined SumoLogic’s executive team to lead and grow their inside sales organization. Her recent experience includes being VP of Sales for Yesware and SVP of Worldwide Sales for Engine Yard. Bridget and I cover a lot of topics in this episode that you won’t want to miss. Among other issues, we discuss the overuse and misuse of the term “sales acceleration” by sellers and provide guidance about how to precisely define in order to align your sales process to help buyers make faster decisions. We dive into a discussion about how sellers need to understand their “lead deficit” and what the roles of sales and marketing should be in lead generation. Also, we talk in depth the sales metrics that individuals and teams should be using to measure their activity levels and outcomes.

Alen Mayer is the author of Selling for Introverts, and the self-described Chief Introvert. Research is increasingly clear that the most successful sales reps are those who are customer focused, service-oriented and lead with thoughtful questions. Those qualities best describe an introvert, not the classic extrovert or hunter type that is often mythologized in sales literature. In this episode, Alen talks about why most sales leaders and hiring managers still define their ideal sales candidates using outdated terms like “hunter” or “closer” or “extrovert.” He outlines the strengths of introverts and how they can fill the gap that exists today between how modern customers want to buy versus how most companies continue to sell. Alen draws a clear picture of the strengths that introverts bring to any sales organization and lays out the case for sales managers to hire more of them. This is a don’t miss episode for every hiring sales manager. And, for introverts that are wondering if sales is the profession for th

In Part 2 of my conversation with Miles Austin (Founder of Fill the Funnel AKA ("The Web Tools Guy”) shares even more recommendations for tools you absolutely should be using to improve your sales productivity today. He is the expert on the sales automation tools and technologies that can truly drive improved sales performance. He’s my go-to resource when I need help choosing a technology solution in my business. Miles ran high-performance sales teams for Dell during their high-growth days so there isn’t much he doesn’t know about sales. Combined with his technical savvy Miles has become the expert who know the apps and hacks that can make a big impact in your sales results.

In this episode, Lori Richardson (the founder and CEO of Score More Sales, a sales training firm, and President of Women Sales Pros) shares her own journey as a single mother through the ranks of the sales profession, overcoming the numerous obstacles placed in her way to become the founder and CEO of her own sales training company.

My regular guest commentator on Frontline Friday is Bridget Gleason. In this episode we take a look at some of the advice and wisdom given to sales leaders that is found on sales blogs. If you’re a sales manager, what constitutes good advice? We’ll help you sort that out.

In this episode, Peter Winick, (Founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage, Inc.) discusses how thought leadership must be an important component of any company’s sales and marketing strategy.