The end of the year is a time of reflection both personally and professionally. Most companies work with their sales reps to nail this time period and make a strong plan to achieve quota going into the next year, while other companies fail. In this episode, Annie Matthews VP of Sales at TechTarget, talks about her strategies for the end of the year and the lessons she's learned over her sales career.

53% of sales reps don’t hit quota and most sales leaders don’t know what to do about that. At the end of the year there is a conversation between a manager and a rep and that conversation is summed up usually as “do better.” That doesn’t work and sales leaders know it but what can they do differently? Some leaders turn to their CRM and try to determine why some reps achieve quota while others don’t but the exercise typically brings minimal benefits. To solve this challenge, sales leaders need REAL visibility into what their reps are doing and not doing to build pipeline and close deals and that’s where we come in. InsideSales.com has recently created an assessment called the Sales Effectiveness Quadrant™ (SEQ). The SEQ is a prescriptive assessment that turns your bottom performers into top performers by analyzing and segmenting your sellers on characteristics that lead to pipeline creation and more closed deals.

Sales development is a tough role but it's an important role and one of the most innovative roles to emerge from sales in the last decade. The problem is, the research has been weak and so has the best practices. That ends today. InsideSales.com in partnership with a half-dozen companies have produced the largest study ever on sales development. The study focuses on Structure, Systems, People, and Pipeline.

Inbound leads are what they are. The question is, what should you do with them? In a rebuttal to an article questioning if companies should respond to inbound leads, yours truly, lays out a handful of reasons you might want to think about responding quickly to inbound leads at your company.

What good is hiring great people if you don't train them? Sales onboarding is still broken and many companies think they can solve the problem simply by having one rep shadow another. That's not going to work and it doesn't work. In this episode, Ryan Reisert, Lead Instructor at Sales Bootcamp, talks about what he's learned about onboarding sales reps and shares his secrets to success.

You can't forget the customer. The customer experience should trump everything but for some reason it doesn't and it is often the reason that companies fail. Companies get focused on themselves and why and how they are winning and they lose sight of their customers. B2C has an advantage sometimes because they can map the user experience and see the data but that's not a good enough excuse for B2B leaders. In this episode, Chad Sanderson, Managing Partner at Value Prime Solutions talks about the importance of the customer experience and why companies need to focus on it to win.

It's never easy to find the right leader. What complicates it even more is where companies are at in their revenue journey. Different types of leaders excel at different times. Sometimes you need tactical leaders other times you need leaders who can close big deals or operationally get things in order. In this episode, Doug Landis, Growth Partner at Emergence Capital shares his secrets of hiring and discusses how start-ups must find the right leader at the right time in order to succeed.

AI is the thing but InsideSales.com knows a thing or two about it. What do I mean by that, well we've been doing AI for the past ten years and we have the world's largest database of sales interactions with over 110 billion. That's a lot of data. So, yes we know a thing or two about data but most people don't. In this episode, we talk AI, what the definition is and three ways you can start thinking about using it to be successful in your business.

We go to trade shows and we are constantly asked, "what do you do?" Sadly, the answer to that questions turns out to be a 5-35 min rant by most people instead of a clear and concise one-liner. An elevator pitch needs to be short, clear, and direct to the point. In this episode, we talk about why one-liners are important and how you can begin crafting your own.

Great companies realize that to be successful, generating inbound inquires is key. Great companies also realize that to get big fish, they need to have a targeted outbound or account-based strategy. In this episode, Fes Askari talks about his work as a strategic consultant helping organizations set up and optimize full funnel strategic sales.