The Sandler Advisor is a complimentary quarterly e-newsletter filled with relevant, real-world sales and leadership topics designed to help you succeed. From business development and sales prospecting to leadership coaching, management, and recruitment, the Sandler Advisor has it all.

IN THIS ISSUE:

The Moneyball Moment

By David Mattson

Some thoughts on Sales, Analytics, and Success in a Data-Driven World – In the AI era – the era when we all became responsible, whether we liked it or not, for data-driven decisions, meaning decisions based on advanced analytics – we have an ethical obligation to launch difficult conversations with the “old-school guys” (of whatever gender) on our team.

Sandler Rule: Be the Least Bad Cake

By Emily Yepes

Some Thoughts On When (and How) to Talk about Price in a Tough Market – Buying is a complex process these days, one with a lot of stakeholders (some of whom prefer not having to deal with salespeople at all) and a lot of moving parts.

The Leadership Lesson We Found in the Garbage

By Michael Norton

Now, you might not be used to thinking of psychological garbage – what David Sandler, the founder of our company, called “head trash” — as a real thing. But it is real. And to prove that, here’s a hypothetical example of the kind of garbage I’m talking about, and the smelly consequences of ignoring it.

AI: What I Use That Actually Works

By Jordan Ledwein

I found several tools that helped me to use my time efficiently. I’ll share one of them with you.

The Top 33 Sandler Coaching Questions for Salespeople

By Bill Bartlett

These questions are designed exclusively for use with salespeople who are personally and directly responsible for revenue creation. They are meant to be posed in a private, safe, one-on-one coaching environment.

Getting Your Head Around Sales Technology

By David Mattson

Why Senior Leadership is the Key to Revolutionizing Team and Organizational Success.

A Conversation with David Sandler

By Gregory Hobbs

A first-generation student of the Sandler Selling System details a fateful encounter with David Sandler in the early 1980s in this excerpt from the forthcoming book Sandler Yesterday and Today.

DOWNLOAD THIS ISSUE

The post The Moneyball Moment appeared first on Sandler.

The Sandler Advisor is a complimentary quarterly e-newsletter filled with relevant, real-world sales and leadership topics designed to help you succeed. From business development and sales prospecting to leadership coaching, management, and recruitment, the Sandler Advisor has it all.

IN THIS ISSUE:

Six Modern Prospecting Mistakes – and How to Avoid Them

By Emily Yepes

Full disclosure: I’m one of those weirdos who actually enjoys prospecting and loves talking about it at length. That takes a lot of people by surprise. But it’s true.

Why Sales Leaders Get (and Give) Bad Revenue Forecasts… and What to Do About It

By David Mattson

The “forecast” from the salesperson is not based on any meaningful data. It’s more of a guess. Often, what sales leaders hear is best translated as, “See, I’m a closer!” — or, if a deal collapses, as “Look, it wasn’t my fault.” Salespeople learn to give themselves some wiggle room.

The One Big Mistake That Will Sabotage Any Sales Kickoff

By Michael Norton

The big mistake that will sabotage your 2024 SKO – and indeed any SKO, no matter where or when it’s held – is not having senior leadership be present.

Leading and Retaining High-Performance Salespeople

By Allen Johnston

High performance salespeople are a valuable and rare asset. Their skill, drive, and results-oriented approach to solving customer issues go a long way toward determining the organization’s bottom line. How can we avoid the all-too-common outcome of hiring them, training them, and developing them… only to see them walk out the door a year or so down the line?

Ten Traits That Help Sales Leaders Spot the Salesperson of Tomorrow

By Bill Bartlett

If you do not adapt, you will not thrive. Sales leaders who understand that will have a significant marketplace edge over sales leaders who don’t.

Navigating the Changing Landscape of Sales

By Mike Montague

Let’s take a little journey through this metaphorical sales landscape and see what the terrain looks like in 2024.

Qualifying Hard, Closing Easy: The Sandler Pain Step (And Why Your Team Isn’t Completing It)

By Michael Norton

At Sandler, we teach and relentlessly reinforce a simple principle, an impossible-to-forget idea that carries massive implications for optimal revenue production: qualify hard, close easy.

DOWNLOAD THIS ISSUE

The post Navigating the Changing Landscape of Sales appeared first on Sandler.

The Sandler Advisor is a complimentary quarterly e-newsletter filled with relevant, real-world sales and leadership topics designed to help you succeed. From business development and sales prospecting to leadership coaching, management, and recruitment, the Sandler Advisor has it all.

IN THIS ISSUE:

Three Key Takeaways For Selling in an AI World

By Tim Roberts

In this article, I’ve shared my three biggest takeaways from 2023, the year of AI. These are the critical lessons I’ve implemented in my own world, and that I’ve been sharing with my clients.

Tie the Performance Goal to a Personal Goal

By David Mattson

Your job as the leader isn’t to repeat the corporate performance goal to me. It’s to help me connect the dots, to link that corporate performance goal to my personal goal.

The Value of Communicating With Your Client as the Year Ends

By Tina Phillips

The more opportunities you have to interact with buyers, the better! The end of the year is an opportune time to reach out and reconnect with your clients and prospects to get in front of them prior to the new year.

Sales Leaders: Improve Forecast Accuracy and Closing Ratios… by Aligning Your Sales Process, and Your Debrief, With the Buyer Journey

By David Mattson

Yet, at the same time, it’s the sales leader’s job to set the benchmark for qualification- to clearly define what is and isn’t a qualified opportunity. In other words, the quality of the revenue forecast depends on the quality of the pipeline debrief led by the sales leader.

AI and the Changing Landscape of Learning and Development

By Mike Montague

Sandler’s position is that sales leaders who understand and embrace these transformative technologies will be the ones whose organizations get ahead and stay ahead in the ongoing race for innovation, growth, and market share.

Five Powerful Behaviors That Build Customer Loyalty

By The Sandler Customer Success Team

Remember: Keeping a client is typically ten times cheaper and easier than finding a new one. Here are five powerful behaviors you can build into your account plan to support better, more profitable, and more loyal business relationships.

Sandler Research Center Survey Identifies Three Critical Best Practices of Effective SMB Sales Leaders

By The Sandler Research Center

In early summer 2023, the Sandler Research Center fielded a survey to measure current responses to a number of questions of interest to sales leaders. The intent was to provide an annual review of trends in sales leadership, and to provide a snapshot of several critical benchmarks relevant to the sales space.

DOWNLOAD THIS ISSUE

The post AI and the Changing Landscape of Learning and Development appeared first on Sandler.

The Sandler Advisor is a complimentary quarterly e-newsletter filled with relevant, real-world sales and leadership topics designed to help you succeed. From business development and sales prospecting to leadership coaching, management, and recruitment, the Sandler Advisor has it all.

IN THIS ISSUE:

The Four Pillars of Sales Tech: How to Optimize Your Sales Process

By David Mattson, President and CEO, Sandler

What is the intersection between optimal sales leadership… and the optimal use of today’s technology? As President and CEO of Sandler, I’ve come to recognize four areas that require attention. Discover how these pillars can helps with sales process optimization to enhance efficiency within your team.

Collaborative Learning at Sandler

By Lisa Ellis

In this article, I want to share our key takeaway, the one big idea that drives the design and delivery of our training programs, the “big andragogical idea” that shapes what learning with Sandler can and should look like. That big idea is collaboration.

The Sandler Coaching Contract

By Bill Bartlett

Without trust, effective sales coaching is impossible, and without a good coaching contract, trust between salesperson and coach is virtually impossible.

Aligning Sales and Marketing for CRM Success: Four Keys for Motivating Your Sales Team to Embrace the System… and Create Data-Driven Accountability

By Kerri Martinek

Sales and marketing alignment: leaders talk about it. They say it’s what they want. They notice when it’s not happening. But they don’t always offer a clear explanation of what sales and marketing alignment really is.

Discover how to align sales and marketing for enhanced growth.

Sandler’s Top 20 ChatGPT Prompts for Salespeople

By Mike Montague

In today’s hyper-competitive market, every interaction counts. You need every edge you can get to create conversations, win deals, close more business, and drive sales growth. Learn how to create content, edit and fine-tune ChatGPT answers, personalize your pitch, and expand your prospecting outreach with AI.

I Asked ChatGPT 4 to Role Play With Me. This Is Word-for-Word How It Came Out.

By Paul Lanigan

I’d like to role play an example with you. Imagine we are in a breakout session. Set up a customer facing scenario where you play the customer and I play the sales person. I want you to conduct a realistic conversation with me.

DOWNLOAD THIS ISSUE

The post Optimizing Your Sales Process for Maximum Efficiency and Growth appeared first on Sandler.

The Sandler Advisor is a complimentary quarterly e-newsletter filled with relevant, real-world sales and leadership topics designed to help you succeed. From business development and sales prospecting to leadership coaching, management, and recruitment, the Sandler Advisor has it all.

IN THIS ISSUE:

The Five Keys to Successful Virtual Selling

By Michael Norton

Today, the tactics and strategies of “virtual selling” are, for most of us, deeply embedded within the profession of selling itself. Salespeople are expected to execute some variation on an “omnichannel” sales process. But what, exactly, is the best way to do that?

Why Your Onboarding is Probably Costing You Sales Talent

By Karl Graf

It’s estimated that the cost of recruiting, interviewing, hiring and onboarding a new salesperson costs a company between $75,000 and $300,000 per rep. Unfortunately for most companies, their onboarding program contributes directly to those new reps leaving.

Pre-Call Planning: The Ultimate Virtual Selling Weapon

By Patrick McManamon

We live in an era when virtual selling has, in many industries, all but eclipsed face-to-face, in-person selling. Yet for some reason, salespeople often fail to prepare effectively for remote sales discussions.

Three Powerful Strategies for Selling Value in a Down Market

By Stephanie van Dam

These three powerful best practices will make it easier for you to connect with, and sell to, the right prospects, even in a down market.

Navigating to Decision Makers in the Enterprise Sale: The Twelve Critical Sandler Best Practices

By Mark McGraw

How do we expand our relationships within our prospective accounts and our existing accounts? Over nearly a decade, with the help of my clients and the good folks at Sandler, I’ve formalized a list of twelve critical Sandler best practices for navigating to decision makers in the enterprise sale.

Hiring, Onboarding, and Retaining Sales Talent in a Hybrid Workplace

By Suzette Patterson

Let’s address a question that leaders too often skip over: Why do good salespeople leave a company? It’s not always about the salary; many other factors can cause key employees to start searching for another job.

Transformative Video from the Sandler Summit: What Is Your USX – Your Unique Sales Experience?

By Sandler

As technology improves it’s becoming easier and easier for buyers to not engage with the sales rep. And those buyers are voting with their purchase decisions. So, the question becomes: How has the successful salesperson’s value proposition to even engage in the sales process changed?

The Five Best Practices of Effective Sales Leaders

By David Mattson, President and CEO, Sandler

These are practical leadership skills that we can internalize through action, day after day, until they become consistent, predictable behaviors.

DOWNLOAD THIS ISSUE

The post What Is Your Unique Sales Experience? appeared first on Sandler.

The Sandler Advisor is a complimentary quarterly e-newsletter filled with relevant, real-world sales and leadership topics designed to help you succeed. From business development and sales prospecting to leadership coaching, management, and recruitment, the Sandler Advisor has it all.

IN THIS ISSUE:

The Sandler Perspective

By David Mattson, President and CEO, Sandler

Many senior leaders are primarily looking to cut costs… and at the same time looking for ways to drive more revenue. We need to ask: Is what we’re doing in an effort to attain those objectives really serving us?

The Eight Habits of Salespeople Who Thrive During Times of Economic Uncertainty

By Emily Yepes, Sandler Trainer

During a downturn, many of your competitors will be sitting on the sidelines, hoping not to have to move beyond their comfort zone. That means it’s your time to shine… by practicing these eight personal habits.

Thank You, Prospects

By David Sandler, Founder, Sandler

Thank you, prospects, for every obstacle you threw my way. You made me a better salesperson by forcing me to use my creativity to find appropriate, professional responses.

5 Critical Sandler Commitments for Sales Leaders in 2023

By Bill Bartlett, Executive Vice President of Franchise, Sandler

Want to exceed team performance goals and create a working culture based on mutual understanding and respect in 2023? Here are 5 personal commitments that will help.

How to Set Your Team Up for a Great Year

By David Mattson, President and CEO, Sandler

If I could wave a magic wand that would get sales leaders to ask themselves one question that would help them set their teams up for a great 2023, it would be this one: “What process do your buyers follow?”

3 Tips for Leading the Buyer-Focused Conversation

By Mike Montague, Director of Community Engagement

Remember, your job is not to convince the buyer to sign the deal today, but rather to start an interesting, useful conversation and put yourself on the buyer’s radar screen.

Sales Leaders: Seven Reasons You Are the Organization’s Air Traffic Controller

By David Mattson, President and CEO, Sandler

If you’re a sales leader, and your team is producing, that’s because of your ability to do what an air traffic controller does.

DOWNLOAD THIS ISSUE

The post How to Set Your Team Up for a Great Year: Understand the Buyer Journey appeared first on Sandler.

The Sandler Advisor is a complimentary quarterly e-newsletter filled with relevant, real-world sales and leadership topics designed to help you succeed. From business development and sales prospecting to leadership coaching, management, and recruitment, the Sandler Advisor has it all.

IN THIS ISSUE:

Rule #52 – Money Does Grow on Trees: Referral Trees

By Dave Mattson, President & CEO, Sandler

When I was growing up and asked for something I didn’t really need, my parents responded by saying, “What, do you think money grows on trees?” Believe it or not, my parents were wrong. Money actually does grow on trees.

Gumball Prospecting

By Mark McGraw, Sandler Trainer

Here is a true story from my own childhood that may help to take some of the pressure off you, and help you spend less time trying to convince someone they should work with you.

4 Best Practices for Salespeople That Turn Emails into Phone Discussions

By Greg Nanigian, Sandler Trainer

These days, our first contact with a potential buyer may not be in a face-to-face setting or on a phone call, but via email. It’s not always obvious what we should do once we receive an email message.

The Art of Generating Referrals Off of No Appointment

By John Rosso, Sandler Trainer

Every prospecting interaction pays dividends. Even if you get a no, you can learn something and improve. And even if you get a no, you can ask yourself where the potential is—and pursue that.

Why Set WRITTEN Goals?

By Kevin Shulman, Sandler Trainer

Yes, it’s true. You might not reach all your goals. However, writing your goals and determining an action plan dramatically increases your chances of attaining success.

DOWNLOAD THIS ISSUE

The post Rule #52 – Money Does Grow on Trees: Referral Trees appeared first on Sandler.

The Sandler Advisor is a complimentary quarterly e-newsletter filled with relevant, real-world sales and leadership topics designed to help you succeed. From business development and sales prospecting to leadership coaching, management, and recruitment, the Sandler Advisor has it all.

IN THIS ISSUE:

To Grow Your Organization, Grow Your People

By Dave Mattson, President & CEO, Sandler

All too often, the working assumption is that salespeople and sales leaders really don’t have to get any special training to do what they do. But does that way of looking at our people really make sense strategically?

Ghosted: The Ultimate Negotiating Challenge?

By Clint Babcock, Sandler Trainer

When you get stonewalled by an experienced negotiator, you find yourself having to deal with a period of unexplained silence following what seemed like a productive meeting, discussion, or exchange. Suddenly there’s simply no communication. What do you do?

Four Secrets for Customer Success

By The Sandler Customer Success Team

There could be many reasons why you are now leading the account. Whatever the circumstance, it’s now up to you to make the most of this opportunity.

Salespeople: Express Your Feelings Through Third-Party Stories

By David Mattson, President & CEO, Sandler

Too often, we become a pawn in someone else’s game, especially in negotiations. A great way to keep that from happening is to address the issue our gut is warning us about … by shifting into storyteller mode.

How to Succeed at Managing Your Pipeline

By Mike Montague, Director of Community Engagement

Dave Trapani, Sandler trainer, explains how to succeed with the attitudes, behaviors, and techniques needed to be more successful at managing your pipeline.

Sales Leadership in the Post-Pandemic Era

By Emily Reggia, Enterprise Associate Marketing Manager

We sat down with Lisa Ellis, Sandler’s Head of Product Management, for a discussion about the nature of modern sales leadership — and how Sandler supports leaders in this space.

DOWNLOAD THIS ISSUE

The post To Grow Your Organization, Grow Your People appeared first on Sandler.

The Sandler Advisor is a complimentary quarterly e-newsletter filled with relevant, real-world sales and leadership topics designed to help you succeed. From business development and sales prospecting to leadership coaching, management, and recruitment, the Sandler Advisor has it all.

IN THIS ISSUE:

Selling to the Modern Buyer with the Sandler Rules

By Dave Mattson, President & CEO, Sandler

Learning and implementing these rules is far more effective, far more fulfilling, and far less stressful, than trying to manipulate buyers with scripts and scenarios.

The Sandler Rules for Sales Success

David Sandler challenged us all to think about our everyday interactions with buyers as being governed by a clear set of rules.

Is Setting a Vision Just for Big Companies?

By David Hiatt and Susan Sykes

The common belief that setting a vision is something only big companies do is a passion killer.

Five Simple Steps to a World Class Discovery Process

By Mike Montague, Director of Community Engagement

Here are five strategies we share with our clients that set up a world-class discovery process. How many can you build into your sales process?

Effective Sales Coaching with the Sandler Success Triangle

By Bill Bartlett, EVP of Franchise, Sandler

The salesperson must have a clear understanding of the top 10 behaviors that must consistently be performed on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, executed with unconditional commitment.

What is Unrecognized Pain in the Qualification Process?

Recently we sat down with Sandler trainer, author and thought leader Jody Williamson to discuss the best practices in discovery for professional salespeople.

DOWNLOAD THIS ISSUE

The post Selling to the Modern Buyer with the Sandler Rules appeared first on Sandler.