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3Sixty Insights and Sales Conservatory Announce Strategic Partnership, Enhancing the Expansion of Research to Sales and Sales Enablement

Posted on October 28, 2022October 28, 2022 by 3Sixty Insights Editorial Team

BOSTON, October 28, 2022 – 3Sixty Insights and Sales Conservatory jointly announced today the formation of a strategic partnership. Enhancing research and consulting capabilities in sales and sales enablement for 3Sixty Insights, the partnership creates additional consulting offerings around sales and sales enablement to its loyal client base. “We have long admired 3Sixty’s commitment to quality research,” said Dr. Tom Tonkin, CEO of Sales Conservatory. “We are proud to bring our sales and sales enablement expertise to their team and their clients.” The partnership empowers both organizations to offer well-researched consulting solutions to a dynamic array of industry partners and clients. From a conceptual standpoint, this newly launched Sales Readiness & Enablement practice area contends that sales force evaluation is the epicenter from which all […]

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5 Tips to Telling Great Customer Stories

Posted on September 30, 2022September 30, 2022 by Jennifer Dole

The headline for one of my most successful LinkedIn posts in 2021 was “How do we help customers tell better stories about their success when advocating on our behalf?” At the time, I led a Client Success Partner team and needed to prepare for sales presentations on the topic of customer advocacy. The post returned a lot of responses that were very helpful — they shifted how I approach storytelling and advocacy. Here are my five takeaways from that post: Make the story about a character When I read Income From Outcomes author Paul Henderson’s comment on my post, “Our champions should not have to tell the success story. We should do that. It’s part of a Hero/Heroine program,” it really stood out to me […]

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Research Note: DiSC Profiles Do Not Affect Sales Performance

Posted on August 23, 2022August 23, 2022 by Mark Tuggle, PhD and Tom Tonkin

What You Need to Know The sales profession is rife with psychometric models that profess to identify and measure various personality traits supposedly advantageous to success in sales. Many of the most popular fall short of their claims. This research note delves deeply into two experiments testing fundamental hypotheses implicit in DiSC, one such personality test. What Is DiSC? In case you are unfamiliar with the DiSC assessment tool, here is a brief description: “DiSC is a personal assessment tool used by more than one million people every year to help improve teamwork, communication, and productivity in the workplace.” The DiSC acronym stands for: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Compliance. Disproving the Utility of DiSC Regarding sales skills, DiSC purports to aid sales professionals by helping them […]

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The Bo & Luke Show Guest Podcast: How To Get 3X More Sales in 2022 with Tom Tonkin

Posted on August 15, 2022August 15, 2022 by Tom Tonkin

About the Episode: In his 25 years of business and technology experience, Tom has served as an executive in both Professional Services and Software Sales. He currently holds the position Senior Principal at Change Management & Transformation where he provides thought leadership for companies on how to improve their sales processes while also serving as CEO/Co-Founder at The Sales Conservatory (TSC), which helps leaders increase revenue through sales enablement efforts like efficient or effective strategies; all this is done with a focus towards helping clients become more mindful about changing landscape changes that will soon come upon them due not only economic turmoil but population aging too! Listen to the full The Bo & Luke Show™ Podcast here: #101 – S4E11 – How To Get […]

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Analyst Insight: UKG’s Winning of DAC Group’s Business Proves That Client Success Begins Well Before the Sale

Posted on July 18, 2022August 31, 2022 by Brent Skinner and Natalie Harrington

What You Need to Know There is a certain level at which it can become very challenging to distinguish between reputable offerings. Consumers in some fields often find that any company that has managed to build a positive reputation will have a base level of capability that meets their needs and puts it on even footing with competitors. How in this circumstance is a shopper to decide between providers of software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers for the enterprise? “Eenie meenie minie moe” can stay on the playground; savvy SaaS vendors have learned to distinguish themselves through their service arms. This is surely true when it comes to vendors of full-suite human capital management (HCM) systems. There may be those that stand out as falling short compared to […]

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Analytics Dog Fight

Why Use Analytics to Manage Your Sales Process?

Posted on July 13, 2022July 13, 2022 by Tom Tonkin

Ask John Boyd. It was the early 50s, in the midst of the Korean War, John “40 second Boyd” arrived on the scene as an F-86 pilot. John Boyd was given this nickname because he was able to defeat any opposing pilot in an aerial dogfight in less than 40 seconds. At face value, one would attribute his success to excellent piloting skills. However, his favorite fighter jet was the F-16. In layman’s terms, the F-16 is a modest machine compared to other fighter jets such as the F-15. Specifically comparing it to the F-15, the F-16 lagged. You would think that John Boyd would be more successful utilizing a giant, faster fighter jet. This was not the case. The F-16 had a few intangibles […]

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The Golden Rule

Treat Others the Way You Want to be Treated… No, Thank You!

Posted on June 29, 2022June 29, 2022 by Tom Tonkin

Treat others the way you want to be treated—the Golden Rule. Sounds good, wholesome, and righteous; yet I have concluded that this is not the best advice. That’s right, I said it. Look, I’m not trying to be contrarian or provocative here. I have spent years trying to understand how to build better relationships. This is key to having a better, more fulfilling life at home and work. I even went down the authenticity route. I was learning how to be authentic and speak my mind, “being real,” as the kids might say. Nope, that will not help you as it did not help me. Authenticity in building relationships is, shall I say, not very useful. Where did I land? For starters and brevity, I […]

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Driving B2B Sales Revenue Guest Podcast: Sales Enablement Like You’ve Never Known It (But Should)

Posted on June 15, 2022June 15, 2022 by Tom Tonkin

About the Episode: There are not enough really smart, bold, experienced, and downright radical people in sales enablement. Luckily, there is one who made a guest appearance on this very podcast, this very episode. Dr. Tom Tonkin PhD isn’t a sales enablement practitioner like you’ve ever known. Razor sharp, a mind built for critical thinking, and the presumption that salespeople need to experience things in their inner world to be able to internalize any kind of meaningful learnings as a result of sales training. As for his methods – sorry kids, you’ll have to check out the episode to get a taste of that, but I assure you – you’ll be glad you did. So brace yourself for sales enablement like you’ve never known it […]

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Case Study: isolved Re-Brand Transforms Culture and Enables Company to Weather the Pandemic Successfully

Posted on August 11, 2021November 9, 2021 by Nicholas Biron and Brent Skinner

Many organizations struggle with internal strife due to siloed teams or positions. Marketing and sales are frequent combatants, a situation that is particularly unfortunate as sales enablement works best when it’s the responsibility and purview of both teams. Although sales enablement is often perceived as marketing-led, the fact is that while the sales team needs the resources marketing provides, the marketing team also needs feedback and context from sales in order to source the most effective and useful leads. The two roles certainly do depend on one another, but if the communication is lacking, this interdependence can breed frustration for both divisions. Without proper synergy, the sales team will be uninformed about the company’s marketing campaigns, and the marketing team won’t know what actually helps […]

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Research Note: Exploring the Necessity of Modern Customer Success in the Cloud

Posted on February 22, 2021June 23, 2022 by Brent Skinner

When did customer success become a department, a division, a role, at vendors of business software for the enterprise? It was when their leaders first feared that customers’ dissatisfaction with, or ambivalence over, the product would begin to affect the bottom line in uncomfortable ways. When and where was this? According to The Customer Success Association, it was in 1996 at Vantive, a company that produced software for customer relationship management. This surprised me. My guess was a cloud company as the first. But the rationale at that CRM company, Vantive, was similar. And, once it becomes relatively easy for customers to discard with one vendor’s product in favor of another product to address the same need, vendors are more apt to sense the urgency […]

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Understanding Perception and How Perception Is Reality

Posted on December 1, 2020June 28, 2023 by Nicholas Biron

Today, I wanted to write something that is a little off topic from our typical research. We can all agree that this past year has been one of unprecedented events, forever imprinted in history. And for many, it has been an outright difficult year. What hasn’t made things any better is the extreme bifurcation of the world on many of today’s issues. With this in mind, in today’s article, we wanted to take a different approach and focus on the power of perception. As someone once told me a long time ago, perception is reality. It has true power over how we as humans interact with each other, both from a personal and professional standpoint. As an example, psychology research shows that humans make a […]

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How to Properly Prepare and Host a Virtual Meeting

Posted on May 5, 2020June 23, 2022 by Nicholas Biron

Before mandated separation was in place, we all spent an incredible amount of time in virtual meetings. It was an essential part of how we all worked, but now that we are all stuck working from home, virtual meetings are a way of life. As a result, people have somewhat forgotten some of the essential rules for hosting and taking part of conference calls and online meetings. The purpose of this article is to share some quick tips to ensure you hold better and more efficient virtual meetings. Start with the invite itself – Remember, everyone’s calendar is stuffed with various agenda items. With people jumping from call to call, it is easy for your meeting to get lost in the mix of all the […]

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The Importance of the Ding Email

Posted on April 11, 2020June 23, 2022 by Nicholas Biron

As leaders, one of the toughest jobs we have is keeping a team motivated… When you break it down, we all spend on average 7.9 hours at work, and it is difficult for anyone to stay motivated 100% of that time. We are all human after all, and it’s natural to have cycles of intensity on the job. As leaders, we all have our tactics and secrets to team motivation… One that I wanted to share with you today is the concept of the “Ding Email”, which is something that not only can help motivate a team, but something that can help a team perform more efficiently as well. So, what is a Ding Email? Well, a common practice within many sales cultures is to […]

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Management: It’s Time to Get Down in the Trenches

Posted on April 2, 2020October 5, 2022 by Nicholas Biron

Times are about to get difficult—there is no sugar coating it. Personally, this is the fourth time in my career I’ve seen the impact of a crashing market on the economy, and difficult times will continue into the foreseeable future. As a result, we as leaders all have a challenging time ahead of us; businesses will struggle, and with struggling business, comes very difficult decisions to make. As leaders, there is a lot on our shoulders… But, let’s not forget the engines that makes our businesses possible: our employees. Let’s face it, more often than not, our employees make significantly less than us and many could be living paycheck to paycheck. When tough economic times arise, it puts unimaginable pressures on them both professionally and […]

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The 10 Reasons Your Sales Team May Be on the Hunt

Posted on June 10, 2019August 4, 2022 by Nicholas Biron

We recently came across an interesting LinkedIn post questioning how to keep sales team members from leaving an organization… This is an interesting question, as Sales overall tends to have some of the highest turnover rates over any other department within an organization. Each time an organization loses another sales team member, it is not just the employee loss that hurts the organization. There are many downstream issues that affect the organization from associated revenue loss, recruitment cost, on-boarding cost, and potential loss of client trust. This makes sense as to why organizations should be finding ways to ensure good sales team members stick around longer. Engaged reps are no longer spending entire careers within one organization but hop job to job every few years […]

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CRM the Equivalent of a Paperweight in Small Businesses

Posted on January 30, 2019June 30, 2022 by Nicholas Biron

Let’s first start with a few reasons your team might not be using the system: Lack of Management Use – That’s right: they learned it from watching you. At times, we do see various teams making an honest effort to use the CRM tools in the way they are meant to be used. However, over time, the team has begun to notice the management team’s lack of use. The question of, “Why bother?” then comes into play. As an example, a core use of CRM is around sales pipeline management, but what is the point of keeping a CRM updated when sales leadership continues to run around asking reps for pipeline updates via email, scratch sheets, or Excel spreadsheets instead of running reports with the […]

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The Small Business Sales Quota Dilemma

Posted on January 7, 2019June 23, 2022 by Nicholas Biron

Earlier today, I read “Why are Half of All Sales Reps Still Missing Quota in a Booming US Economy?” and found the article itself, and the comments within LinkedIn around the article, a little disturbing. Almost all the points were towards the reps themselves and not the businesses… Let’s face it: if any business is having more than 50% of their reps miss their sales quota, something is very wrong! No business should ever have 50% or more of their reps missing numbers, and if they are, that is a failure on the business’s part—period. As many businesses gear up for their yearly planning sessions, now is the time to really look in the mirror before developing new quotas and truly understand the business itself. […]

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The Fundamental Change in Today’s Buying Process

Posted on July 30, 2018August 2, 2023 by Nicholas Biron

The way people buy and sell in today’s B2B market segment is significantly different than the way things were done 10+ years ago. Even though it has been that long, both buyers and sellers continue to struggle with the change… If you’ve been part of the process for longer than 10 years, then you remember the times when someone would commit to a signature, and later that day, a signature would show up on the fax machine. Setting the stage, ten years ago, budgets were assigned to business units and there really was no scrutinization on the way those funds were spent. Meaning, if a CIO wanted to authorize a purchase for new software or hardware, they had the authorization to make that purchase as […]

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Take a Sales Loss Gracefully

Posted on June 20, 2018June 23, 2022 by Nicholas Biron

You’ve worked tirelessly for weeks or months on end regarding an opportunity—an opportunity that could make or break your bookings number for the month, quarter, or year. Then, when everything is all said and done, they decide to hold off, or worse, to go with another vendor. Unfortunately, if you are in anyway connected to sales, it is something you’ll hear all too often. Even when you put your best foot forward and execute the proposal absolutely flawlessly, there are going to be times when you get a no, no matter the situation. However, all is not lost… how you react during this time will have direct ramifications for future business down the road. When it comes to a deciding factor for whether someone moves […]

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Following The “Sales Taught” Process Isn’t Always A Good Thing

Posted on April 3, 2018June 23, 2022 by Nicholas Biron

Sales processes are fantastic guidelines to ensure that you are doing the proper things to be successful in your sales career. However, it is important to pay attention to the customer and make on-the-fly modifications to your process as the situation changes. As an example, the other day we had a consultation for some work to be completed around our house, and it was a very uncomfortable process. The sales rep was a 30-year industry professional that at some point in time made the switch to sales… It was clear during this consultation that this rep was using the Sandler Sales Process, taking me down the Sandler Pain Funnel. He was following the process to a tee, which wasn’t the problem. The problem was that […]

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