Sales

There’s nothing worse than investing in a new sales engagement solution only to find your reps don’t use half the features it offers. 

Sound familiar, Salesloft user? 

Let’s get one thing straight: Salesloft is an amazing product. Nothing but love over here. 

But it’s not for everyone. 

And it don’t come cheap, either.

If you’re looking for something that’s a better fit for your revenue teams–with the specific functionalities that enable them to achieve true engagement right across the sales cycle—you’ve come to the right place. 

Measuring sales productivity lets you identify where your teams are struggling, so you can provide the tools and sales training they need to improve. 

But with modern sales teams generating a tsunami of data every day, how do you know which KPIs to track? 

Knowing which sales productivity metrics to measure helps you focus on the right numbers  

Well, sales productivity varies from company to company, so it’s all about choosing the right metrics for your business. 

Outreach is an amazing sales engagement tool. 

For sales teams that are all about spray-and-pray.

If, however, you need to focus on nurturing prospects and building relationships, it’s not going to cut it.

If that’s you, chances are you’re looking for an Outreach alternative. But with so many to choose from, how do you know which is right for your sales teams? 

You’re probably here because your sales teams are doing their best, but somehow they’re not hitting the numbers you need. 

And that affects your bottom line and team morale, and can even cause burnout.

Maybe you just need to hire more of them? 

Nope. 

If your revenue teams aren’t operating at peak efficiency and effectiveness, hiring more is unlikely to improve your results. But it will add to your overheads, and sow panic among your reps if there isn’t enough opportunity to go around. 

Instead, the answer lies in tracking and measuring sales productivity so you can empower your teams to achieve more with less.

Rep burnout is real. 

It’s a common scenario: you can see your sales reps are overwhelmed and juggling tons of different tasks. But even still, you’re not getting the results you expected. 

Maybe you’ve even hired more salespeople, so you know it’s not an issue of getting more sales reps to work even harder. 

Instead, you need to increase their productivity so they can quickly and effectively move more prospects down the pipeline—without burning themselves out. 

In an increasingly complex sales landscape, you don’t want your top reps juggling low-value tasks that don’t contribute to converting prospects.

You want to arm your sales reps with the tools and strategies they need to focus on finding and nurturing high-quality accounts and building strong relationships.

We’ve talked to our salespeople and other top sellers to compile sales acceleration strategies you can use to empower sales reps to efficiently and effectively interact and communicate with prospects for better results. 

Deals are won and lost in discovery. 

No pressure. 

If you qualified your prospect properly, you should already know they’re a good fit. Now, you need to use the discovery call to dive deep into their pain, processes, and find out who the decision makers are. 

And who they’re looking at besides you. 

Like we said, no pressure. 

It’s a lot to cover in one call, but failure to gather all this vital info could see you lose out to another hungry AE, even if yours is the better product. 

Feeling that pressure yet? (If not, what’s your secret, Iceman!?)

We make software for salespeople, so we know how hard it is to extract all the information you need without turning the conversation into an interrogation.

We reached out to real live sales professionals to see how they handle this critical stage. Based on those conversations, we’ve put together a checklist to help you run better discovery and boost your chances of moving prospects forward to the next stage.

An inbox is not just where your prospects spend 28% of the workday. It’s an opportunistic hub for connections, rapport building, and, if you nail your cold email outreach, a healthy-looking pipeline.

But a good sales email is like a really good blind date. When a true connection has been made, it’s serendipitous and natural. And if it doesn’t feel right? It ends up feeling awkward, or worse, sleazy.

If anything, a good sales email should open doors, not close them.

Luckily, getting on the right side of the track is doable, but only if you’re thoughtful in your approach. 

In this handy guide, you’ll learn how to write sales emails that engage your prospects and actually get replies.

Too many salespeople waste valuable time and resources going after leads that are unlikely to convert.

Which hampers your teams’ ability to hit quota.

However, asking just a few sales qualification questions can ensure you place more high-quality opportunities in your pipeline.

At Mixmax, we sell to salespeople so we know how important (and hard) it is to maximize the chances of sales prospecting success.

We reached out to salespeople on our team and in our network to sales qualification best practices. Read on to understand:

Getting a response to sales prospecting emails was never easy, but since early 2020, the volume of emails people receive has skyrocketed.

Now, prospects are so overwhelmed that it’s impossible for them to read everything that lands in their inbox.

This means you need to change up your email outreach tactics to get a response.

Before, you could blast off a quick product summary and ask for a meeting.

Not anymore.

The mission for sales professionals (whether they choose to accept it or not) is now to connect with prospects as individuals and survive “inbox triage.”

And do it all at scale. With personalization.

With this in mind, we reached out to LinkedIn sales influencers and our own SDRs to find out what makes a great sales prospecting email, and which sales prospecting email templates get results.

Quick poll:

💀 Cold calling is deader than the Dodo.

💪 Cold calling is alive and kicking.

🧟 If cold calling is dead, I need a badge that says “Zombie Team Leader” cause my sales reps are still smiling and dialing like there’s no tomorrow.

Cold calling is, of course, far from dead, but it certainly ain’t getting any easier. Nobody likes being interrupted at the best of times, and today’s prospects are so overwhelmed that all they want is to hang up and get back to their to-do list asap. 

Ask the wrong questions and they’ll shut the conversation down faster than you can say “Can I interest you in a demo?”

Keeping them on the line long enough to share your vision of the bright future that awaits them (and, more importantly, book the next meeting) requires asking open-ended sales prospecting questions to keep the conversation going. And unless you possess the conversational skills of David Letterman, you’ll need to have a few prepared in advance.

We checked out what leading sales influencers are saying about cold calling, and the techniques they use to get prospects to open up

Over 3 billion emails were sent daily last year*. 

That’s a communication tsunami. 

If that stat leaves you feeling overwhelmed, imagine how your prospects feel, drowning in their overflowing inbox each morning as your sales email bobs about among the flotsam of their ever-growing to-do list. 

Standing out from the inbox crowd these days means ramping up your game when it comes to writing sales prospecting email subject lines.

Time was, lines like “Sales inquiry” or “Request for a meeting” might have actually landed you a meeting 😱. Now, anything too salesy will get you cast into the 7th level of inbox hell (the spam folder) faster than you can say “Got 15 minutes to talk this week?” 

At Mixmax, we have to admit to having a slight advantage: We sell to salespeople, so our prospects know where we’re coming from. But that doesn’t mean our hard-working sales reps don’t rack their brains daily to come up with engaging subject lines.  

To give them (and you) a helping hand, we reached out to sales influencers and prepared a lifesaving list of email subject lines for sales prospecting that should help boost your email open rates.