One of the most common behaviors in sales is the period-ending push, in which reps are pressured to make extra efforts to reach quotas at the end of calendar cycles. Conventional wisdom dictates that the axiomatic jump in period-ending deal closures observed nearly universally is evidence of the effectiveness of these behaviors. Yet our analysis of over 151 anonymized companies and 9.8 million sales transactions demonstrates that this pattern may be costing the companies studied an estimated $98.02 million per year in missed revenue. This number represents a potential increase of 27.21% in revenue per company if properly addressed. Strategies executed at the end of calendar cycles often unnecessarily alienate potential clients with aggressive sales tactics and encourage sales reps to procrastinate activities or pull deals forward. These counterproductive and often unacknowledged practices can be overcome by behavioral coaching, sales skill enhancement, and improvements to pipeline management and forecast strategies.

Malcolm Gladwell is the man. He runs a podcast called the The Revisionist History. His 3rd episode talks about why smart people do dumb things and we thought, in sales, smart people do dumb things. The InsideSales Labs team recently released a research report called, " Time-Based Closing Strategies: The High Cost of Procrastination." The report quantifies the age old debate of sales reps closing deals on the last day of the month. In this episode, we discuss why people do dumb things and introduce some of the findings of our research report.

Every company wants to move up stream and catch bigger fish but not every company can. Selling to bigger companies requires a different strategy and mind-set than selling to small companies. In this episode, Leslie Venetz, VP of Sales at Carpathia talks about his experience of selling and winning in the enterprise.

Antiquated systems, processes, data structures, and ideologies plague sales and marketing. If we do not optimize our sales and marketing technology stack to empower a formulaic approach that seamlessly manifests itself as clearly defined business results, we will not create sustainable and predictable growth for our organizations. In this episode, Dan Murdoch Director of Demand Generation, talks about the Harmony Theory and how sales and marketing can work together to drive success.

Lindsey is a social selling guru. She a practitioner turned consultant because of the success she learned using social tools. Her mission is to now share her secrets and her best practices with the world. In this episode, Lindsey talks about her social selling master class and how she rose to the top mastering key social selling tips, tricks, and tactics.

Hiring is broken and if you're like most leaders you're not sure how to fix it. Great resumes, well-dressed candidates, and firm handshakes just don't cut it but what does? In this episode, Ross Rich, Managing Principal, Selection Strategies, Inc. shares with us the secrets of his life's work - discovering and using a data-driven approach to hiring sales superstars.

Sales and marketing have always been known as the odd couple but that doesn't mean it's okay. How can you bring two things together that often don't naturally go together? In this episode, Gavin Harris, VP of Sales of SalesFusion, breaks down the relationship of sales and marketing and discusses how these two functional areas can effectively work together to achieve success.

This guy is the real deal. Aaron Ross made his fame and fortune at Salesforce.com where he helped Salesforce scale to 100million dollars. For years his book, Predictable Revenue," was called the bible of "Silicon Valley" and it has helped many companies achieve top success. In this episode, Aaron shares with us some of the genius of his latest writings about how CEOs can break revenue plateaus.

When you think of the marketing cloud you think of full automation. Lead routing, lead scoring, lead research, lead nurturing. The list goes on and on. In the world of hiring it's different. There is little to no technology and the concept of predictive analytics is non-existent. It's not right but it is the way it is and it's time we recognize it and change it. In this episode, Gabe Larsen, the Director of InsideSales Labs discusses a data-driven approach to hiring using lessons from the movie MoneyBall.

We all talk about coaching but not many organizations know how to do it and almost nobody knows how to scale it. Coaching is easy with five sales reps but with 50 or 100 reps, it becomes a different game. In this episode, VP of Sales Kevin Dorsey, gives a three stop process to scale an incredible coaching program. in your sales organization.