August is here! We're past the halfway mark in 2019, which means you only have five months left to crush your sales targets.

One way to make your challenge easier is finally taking advantage of sales automation. Automate the repetitive and frustrating parts of sales, so that you can focus on what truly matters: having engaging conversations with your prospects and customers. Stop grinding away at those unnecessarily tedious tasks and let the robots take the wheel.

It’s just selling, isn’t it? I’m sure you’ve heard this question a few times after you’ve mentioned you work in business to business sales. Such an assumption makes your eyes roll because business-to-business sales, more commonly known as B2B sales, is a tough field in which salespeople face demanding professional buyers and overzealous decision‑makers.

Yes, business to business sales is just that, sales from one business entity to another, and therefore, requires persuasive communication and strong negotiation skills. However, mastering business-to-business sales is much more than just selling. Due to the complex scope and scale of the business-to-business model, salespeople must achieve a thorough understanding of a prospect’s needs, so they can adopt a consultative role.

Because the way people buy has changed, this is the right moment to review what makes business-to-business selling different, and how technology is changing this way of doing sales.

In sports, many teams use a playbook to chart out potential in-game scenarios, outlining the teams' strategies, tricks for avoiding common impediments, and tips for reaching goals smoothly. Similarly, a sales playbook can help sales teams build systematic winning habits and processes.

Integrating sales playbooks into your business strategy ensures better attainment of quota, increased customer retention rates, and improved lead conversion rates.

If you’re an angler, you might be interested to know that the newest estimates say there are about 3,5 trillion fish currently living in the world ocean. If you’re a B2B sales professional, you probably don’t care about things like how many salmons there are in the Pacific Ocean. What you want to know is the number of companies that can be successful with your product or service, and what revenue these potential customers can generate you–your total addressable market.

Sales calls where salespeople read from generic cold calling scripts convert at an abominable rate: Less than 1 percent. That means if you make 100 calls, you’ll only get one meeting. Unsolicited cold calling sucks for the salespeople but is probably worse for the prospects.

The phrase “always be closing,” popularized in the 1992 film Glengarry Glen Ross has no place in today's world of informed buyers. In 2019, salespeople have to follow a totally different mantra: always be helping.

We all know that time is money, and that’s especially true for small businesses. As a matter of fact, 82 percent fail due to cash flow issues. Keep in mind: cash flow is not just about money coming in and out. It’s also about timing. Even if you have a proven product, with too long a sales cycle you might end up experiencing cash flow concerns.

This is why many sales organizations focus on improving their sales cycle speed. They look at each phase of their sales process to check for problems and provide steps for optimization. Their very survival may depend on their ability to decrease the sales cycle length.

In this article, we’ll show how you can boost your sales cycle speed with these 9 proven tips.

Predicting the future trends in B2B sales is becoming an annual tradition here at Vainu. This is already the fourth time when we sat down together and discussed what’s happening in this space. In the previous years, we've accurately predicted the rise of micro-targeting, sales automation and the explosive growth of AI-powered sales tools.

There are also trends that we missed such as conversational marketing which got a lot of coverage in industry blogs this year and was quickly adopted in different parts of the world. This time, it was fairly easy to put together a short list of 15 sales trends but much harder to narrow it down to the list of final six. But here they are:

Networked society has given buyers easy access to more information about endless solutions and purchasing alternatives. Most B2B sales professionals think this automatically means that their customers are in the driver’s seat – empowered, armed to their teeth with information, and clear about their needs.

Customers, however, seldom see it that way. More information begets more questions, which leads to customers working harder to ensure that they fully understand the requirements and the alternatives of every offer.

When some people imagine sales, they think it’s like the film The Wolf of Wall Street, where people with sharp elbows will do whatever it takes to make the sale. You as a salesperson know this is far from the truth. You don’t have to be a wolf to be a premier salesperson. In fact, you should often be the opposite.

After decades of hunch-based, adrenaline-fueled cold calling and Hail-Mary revenue generation, we’ve recently entered an entirely new era. An era steered by intelligent, laser-targeted prospecting, tuned by personalization and driven by data.

Thanks to new technological innovations, a relatively old business selling model has become more common lately: the account-based sales model. With the use of sales intelligence, companies can now more efficiently than ever before discover the most viable accounts based on a wide range of criteria and create a tailored sales and marketing strategy for them.