Salesforce Canada

There’s no way to know for sure if you have a great idea until you have something in the market, so many of them have adopted something that sales professionals could make their own: a minimum viable product.

Sort through Facebook’s vast database of social information with its graph search feature. It’s invaluable for marketers, too, for market research and advertising.

Sales playbooks have become fairly common in large organizations, for example, where there’s a recognized need to have consistent, repeatable processes for processing purchase orders and essential market research.

In a lot of small and medium-sized businesses when it comes to sales leads, particularly in the B2B, when customers download an asset like a white paper, click on a call to action in an e-mail message or actually pick up the phone and leave a voice mail, companies aren’t always quick to respond.

If you're on LinkedIn daily — and many business professionals are — you've likely seen a growing list of notifications that nearly outnumber requests to be connected to new and former coworkers. These notifications usually say something like this:

Your salespeople know they need to be on social media. Help them use each site more wisely with the tips and data in this infographic.

As the volume of customers multiplies and the range of products and services grows, the sales process can become more complex. This is when what’s known as “sales operations” comes in — the group that develops and helps run processes that make sales teams run more efficiently.

Do staff ever need help resetting their passwords? When it comes time to upgrade or purchase new technology for the company, do you make the final call? Congratulations! You’re not only an SMB owner, but a chief information officer!

"Now calm down, young lady. It's not my job to handle that. To be honest with you, you're wrong." Those two sentences are chock-full of phrases that spell doom for any company that wants to excel in customer service, according the experts. They are culled from a recent blog post on Forbes that tried to hone in on the worst things people working in call centres or other channels can say to clients coming to them with a problem.

The obvious concern, of course, is how the average SMB can find, train (or even afford) a demand generation consultant if they're only working with a handful of people in their entire sales group. The answer lies in understanding more about what the role encompasses and how it could be applied successfully within your environment.