A reader sent me this link and though it nessassary to pass along. Many people in sales are looking for new and fresh leads that they can target for their product and services. LeadVine allow you to do this with thousands of other people just like you. LeadVine is an online social community that simplifies how companies find new customers. Search listings and make money with the information that you already have. How can LeadVine make you easy money? Everyday people come across information that is useless to them but useful to someone else. Ever know of any friends looking for a new job, looking to add a new room to the house, looking to build a new website, etc.? What did you do with that information? Probably nothing. There are companies willing to pay for that type of information, from recruiters, construction contractors, web developers, etc. LeadVine gives you the ability to make money with information that is at your finger tips. Use LeadVine to find companies willing to pay you for valuable information you come across.

Being in sales or having a professional position where you have to travel for business means that you have to keep your receipts. Well...keep your receipts or do not get paid back from an expense report. I can't count the number of times I have lost a receipt from a trip and had to fight the expense or just eat it and have the money taken from my own wallet. Keeping track of your business receipts is a must for any person on the road and there are many tips and tricks to doing this effectively. Skill level one is just to carry an envelope where you can put all of these business receipts instead of just stuffing them in your wallet or packet where you will probably lose them. Reciepts come in all sizes, from small sheets of paper smaller than a dollar bill and can be the size of a full sheet of paper like most hotel receipts. But the real issue is what you do with those receipts and papers to keep them organized.Having a card reader, document scanner makes all of that easy as pie. The Porsche of document scanners is the NeatDesk from the Neat Company. This ...

// --> // --> I found this subject while trolling through the B2B Lead Generation Blog by Brian Carroll and I agree with his process so I am using it and adding some of my own comments. Sales people often lack the support of a dedicated marketing team that is able to execute lead generation programs on their behalf. This is particularity true in small companies. Even some small companies that do have 'lead generation' teams do not use them the way they are traditionally intended. In dual sales groups like these lead generation is supposed to be the group going through the database and calling into cold or warm leads to gain additional information and discover interest in your product or service. Because of this Sales people have to do more than just close deals, the must pick up the phone or hit the streets to gather their own new prospects. This is never an easy task, but for most seasoned sales people this should not be new either. not the greatest part of the job, but you are in sales and you make the ...

I was invited to use an email tool called Xobni. The application is still in Beta so using the application is by invitation only (See invite below). It was recommended to me by an engineer and I figured if someone more geeky than me uses this tool, then it is worth taking a deeper look at. Xobni Insight is an add-on for Microsoft Outlook that offers effortless email management and provides instant access to the most important information in your email. After a quick install, you'll see the new Xobni toolbar appear in Outlook - and suddenly your Outlook productivity will burst to life with blazing fast email search, automatic phone number discovery, threaded conversations, and more. The program adds a toolbar to the Outlook window. If you have a small monitor or are using a laptop then this may seem like a problem but Xobni allows you to collapse the bar into a minimal state and still lets you see relevant information. At first I was thinking this would be a toolbar that I added, wrote a quick post on then removed after a couple of days. I have had Xobni running on my computer for the past week and it is making ...

Does that title sound like a gimmick? It’s not. It’s about the numbers. If you truly want to double your sales, you simply need to double a key aspect of your sales performance, asserts Stephan Schiffman, sales trainer and prolific author, in his newest book, Sales Essentials (Adams Media, 2008). His advice is rooted in the theory that when you measure and focus on a certain area, you’ll see improvement in that area. Here, he says, are five ways you can double your sales:

I come from a high-tech background and though that industry is enormous, finding qualified leads are still difficult. There are older industries out there that are much larger and the lead pools are just as hard to swim through. From telecommunications to construction and even networking equipment. If you are a sales professional in any of these areas you need a qualified list of growing companies that have some money to spend on your products. This brings me to Sales Leads Inc. who has been specializing in providing businesses leads in these areas and more since 1959. SALES LEADS, Inc. was founded by John Beecher and his wife, LaVerne, in their Westport , Connecticut home office in 1959. What started out as a few typewritten pages covering the New York City metropolitan area has mushroomed to over 400 leads per month for the continental U.S. and Canada delivered via the Internet as well as traditional first class mail. The company's offices moved to Palm Beach County , Florida in 1977 and are now located in Lake Park , Florida , a suburb of West Palm Beach . About Sales Leads' 45+ years in business, Michael Beecher says, "the reason for our longevity and ...

There are many options out there for a customer relationship manager (CRM) available. I guess they all have advantages and disadvantages but I have grown accustomed to SalesForce and have no issues with it. Besides using it for work to manage all my accounts and prospects, I also have a personal account that is available to anyone for free. SalesForce has done a good job keeping up with the needs of there corporate customers by adding new features and having a consistent update pattern that they make visible to SalesForce admins. But this is not why I love SalesForce so much. Work anywhere SalesForce as a CRM solution allows a mobile workforce to always be connected. The old school days of field sales people running their business off of spreadsheets should be trashed. Being able to access your company information from any connected device like a computer or mobile phone allows sales people and executives to review and update important data anytime of the day from anywhere in the world. Customizing reports is easy People at the top are always asking for reports. SalesForce makes this fairly simple. You can set reports up to be available to everyone or make ...

It's Q1 and if you're in sales you are starting with a clean slate. Well unless you were that bad in 2007 then you need to make up for a bad Q4. For most of us though January is a great time of the year and when all the stress for the year comes back to a mild simmer. Sales executives take the first couple of weeks to put together the annual plans for the group and you should be trying to close out all the opportunities that slipped from December. Start Selling When all is said and done you really should be putting together a sales plan for yourself. Getting self motivated is a whole lot better than waiting for your manager to get all over your ass for not hitting you goals. Most of your buddies in the sales teams will be taking it easy for the first couple of weeks. Making a few calls and 'getting ready' for the year. That's hogwash. Start sending out the emails, making the calls and lining up your target accounts for the next year. What prospects will you hold yourself to closing in the next 12 months? What needs to be done ...

Download files will be added to relevant posts. I've been working on this feature for a while and I seem to have the kinks worked out. I have a hard drive filled with sales material I have collected over the years from Training Tools to White Papers, even a few that I have developed myself. The problem was getting them out securely to all of you. Now that is a reality, and I am starting to add them to existing posts (poke around to find them) and you will see them in future posts as well. If you have a file or podcast that you would like added to this site for additional exposure, send me an email at socomsales[at]gmail.com. I'll let you know I received it and write a post about it for FREE. How can you go wrong? Get some additional exposure for your business and teach me something in the process. It's a Win Win. As an example, here is a download of a White Paper from Huthwait. A leader in creating sales excellence. -------------------------------------------------------- [download#2#nohits] [download#2#image]

A few months back I wrote "Lead management done right" with the intent of explaining how companies should approach their CRM and the large quantity of leads and data in their database. The fact is that many companies do not have a structure for this and fail to maximize on their leads. If sales is the life blood of a company then leads are the oxygen that is being carried. (o.k. maybe a bad analogy, but you get it.) If your sales people are not managing their leads correctly then fewer sales will take place and bad data will dominate your CRM. By default, if the CRM is being updated by lazy sales people with half data or no data, then marketing will have an even harder time communicating with them. huh...you don't want marketing communicating to your prospects? You need to stop seeing marketing as the enemy and hold their hands for a moment and let them do what they do best, so you can close more deals. The sad majority of companies do not operate this way and the two departments have no idea what the other is doing and therefore they do nothing together. If you don't think this ...