Aaron Ross Author / Cofounder
Predictable Revenue, Inc.
Anthony Iannarino President & Chief Sales Officer
SOLUTIONS Staffing
Jill Konrath Author & Keynote Speaker
Townsend Wardlaw Coach to CEOs
A fantastic group founded and led by Mark Birch. Headquartered in New York, they now have chapters all over the world.
If you live in a major city anywhere in the world, there’s probably a group of salespeople meeting nearby. They’re easy to find by going to www.meetup.com and searching “Sales.”
Sales Development Pros
Specifically created for specialists focused on the first half of the sale (finding and engaging prospects), this Slack community has grown to include some of the best in the business.
With members hailing from both Sales and Marketing, this group is helping further the conversation around what it means to enable sales professionals in the modern age.
As part of the growing movement to highlight and encourage women in sales, this group features a great blog and fantastic Slack Community.
Here are a few of the most notable tools we see helping sales professionals achieve success. We’ve included several big names, but also a few of our favorite up and comers.
These tools are rapidly changing and even well-established brands can get overturned at any time. Spend a little time every quarter staying on top of the latest tech.
Client Relationship Management (CRM) Software
Sales Data
Sales Acceleration
Sales Coaching
Predictive Scoring
Glossary of Terms
Accounts: For oor purposes, synonymous with “Companies”. Depending on the customer relationship management (CRM) tool, Accounts may refer to a specific type of record.
Buyer: Someone who is capable of purchasing a product or service.
Cadence: A series of pre-planned sales activities intended to get a prospective buyer to engage with a sales representative.
Closers: Sales representatives responsible for finalizing purchases, or “closing” sales.
Cold call: An outbound phone call made from a sales representative to a prospective buyer who does not know the sales rep. The call is not anticipated or requested by the buyer.
Cold email: An outbound email sent from a sales representative to a prospective buyer who does not know the sales rep. The email is not anticipated or requested by the buyer.
Contacts: For our purposes, synonymous with “Person”. Also a type of record in the customer relationship management (CRM) tool.
Customer relationship management (CRM): A database used to store information about a person or company including contact information, history of interactions, and any relevant purchase information.
Dials: For our purposes, a phone call made by a sales representative.
Drip campaign: A series of emails sent over a given period of time without the sender needing to initiate each individual message.
Full cycle sales: Sales activity comprised of everything from finding, to engaging, to closing sales with prospective buyers.
Funnel: For our purposes, a commonly depicted illustration of the way buyers move through the buying process.
Generalists: Sales representatives who handle all aspects of a sale from start to finish. See “Specialists”.
Inbound sales: Sales opportunities generated by buyers initiating the conversation with the company as opposed to sales representatives making initial contact. See “Outbound sales”.
Lead scraping: A technical term for finding and extracting information related to a prospective buyer. May be performed using automation though can be done manually.
Leads: Depending on the sales methodology followed, this term may refer to companies or contacts, produced either via inbound marketing or outbound selling.
Marketing: The act of promoting a product, or the department that performs such promotion. Marketing leverages messaging at scale (one to many) as opposed to sales (one to one).
Outbound sales: Sales activity that generates opportunities through outreach to prospective buyers who did not request contact.
Pipeline: The list of all sales opportunities (current and past). If a prospect enters the pipeline, they are generally both qualified and interested in making a purchase at some level.
Prospect: Short for “prospective buyer” – see “Buyer”.
Prospecting: Outbound sales activity intended to identify and engage the interest of prospective buyers.
Quota: A required number of activities or results as prescribed by sales management. Some quotas are tied to financial incentives including commissions and bonuses.
Sales: The process of helping a buyer through the steps required to make a purchase. Involves educating the buyer, driving interest, and answering any questions related to the product.
Social selling: A newly popularized term that describes a host of sales-related activities carried out on social media.
Specialists: These are sales representatives who handle only part of the buying process (like driving initial engagement or “closing” a sale).
Swimlane: Refers to the sum of all companies who may be able to benefit from a product. Limited in scope by criteria like size of company and location.
