Sales Tips

Earlier this week, as part of GMIC 2013, the G-Startup Competition named Badger a Top-20 finalist. We were ecstatic to receive the award mostly because of the opportunity to learn about and from other startups, particularly in our space. The conference lasted two days, featuring fun competitions and great take-aways. We began to understand the challenge it is to sell at conferences. Although it is expected that these events will attract like-minded individuals, most attendees go in with a pitch rather than a need making it exceedingly difficult to initiate discussions about your product or service when all anyone…

Creating and sticking to a solid sales cycle is critical to expanding your client base. Staying on top of all of your leads and existing clients can be difficult. Not keeping up with the steps in your sales cycle can end with losing leads and the interest of current clients. This might seem straightforward enough, but often times it’s easy to stray or lose your drive to the bigger end goal. Here are three things to always keep in mind to help you stay focused and shorten your sales cycle. Don’t Skip Steps Sometimes it may feel as though you’ve developed…

Using LinkedIn to boost sales is not a secret. With over 238 million users in over 200 countries and territories, “LinkedIn is the defacto social network for business”, said Joel Marans from TheSocialWhat.com.  Many salespeople use LinkedIn to warm up leads, avoid the dreaded cold call, and collect intelligence that can help them sell better! Harvard Business Review ran a study on 54 top salespeople who sell to IT departments of mid to large size companies; asking them how they use LinkedIn to research accounts, prospect for leads, and generate sales. Here are their results:

Most outside salespeople wake up in the morning with only a rough idea of how to make best use of their day. They have several customers they would like to visit, and perhaps some others along the way they do not know about, but may not have a good schedule planned out. This shortcoming ending up in either backtracking or simply running out of time. The fundamental lack of sales route planning leads to missed customer visits and lost opportunities. This problem has long been studied by mathematicians who know it as the “traveling salesman” problem. The problem calls…