Whether you’re a millennial or not, we’re simply more comfortable texting, emailing, social selling, and more in today’s day and age. While those methods are very effective, there’s no method more effective than looking someone in the eyes and building a relationship.

Tom Alaimo, Sales Manager at TechTarget, is our guest today. He figured out early on in his career that he needed to learn more about his customers if he was going to get serious about meeting more of them in person. He needed to know what they read, what they think about, and their lingo in order to build stronger in-person interactions.

On today’s episode, Tom walks us through why face time is worth the time, he gives us five tips for nailing your next sales meeting and shares his advice on ending a sales presentation strong.

Imagine an organization with an average performing sequence that gets a 66% open rate and 25% reply rate. And one where their best performing sequence actually gets them a 76% open rate.

Pick your jaw off the ground, these are real numbers from David Hershenson, the Director of Sales Development and Productivity at tray.io. We were so honored to host him on the Sales Engagement podcast where he shared some of the secrets that have led to this extraordinary success.

David’s team has six specific outbound sequences they use and track today based on the certain buyers they’re going after. The majority of the time, they’re using emails, voicemails and social media touches. He says it’s really important to have a predefined pattern over a set number of days to maximize the SDR’s chance of getting a response.

Tune in to hear David’s three steps to creating a successful sequence.

As data has gotten cheaper, companies have started buying it. All of it.

But that’s actually the worst thing we can do. Just ask your sales team.

Instead, we should should focus on what attributes matter the most and dig deep on those, said Michael Pollack, our latest guest on The Sales Engagement podcast. He is the Co-Founder at Intricately, a company dedicated to helping cloud vendors understand how businesses are investing in their digital infrastructure.

In this episode, Michael explained the 6 main types of data. He also talked about  optimizing your sales organization, outlining a great framework you can use to identify the data that matters most to you.

Here’s what he had to say.

Every single entrepreneur on the planet - past, present, & future, - have one thing in common: They have big, lofty, crazy goals. They have a vision for their company. A vision for what they want to do, the product they want to bring to market, and how they think that product could make the world a better place.

But how do you get there? How do you move from “I have this absolutely crazy idea,” to “this idea is coming to fruition and becoming a reality?”

Your emails aren’t working.

How much time and effort have you spent trying to craft what you thought was the perfect email campaign? You edit and re-edit, and finally, you are ready to put it out into the world, and you hit “send.”

And nothing happens.

Is your company that uninteresting? Not at all. Odds are, you’re just going about your email all wrong. And it’s not your fault, it’s probably just that nobody has ever taught you how to write emails well. After all, how many terribly written emails do you get every day? And what do you do with those emails?

Just try to imagine organizing 300+ events all over the world--every single year.

(You’re dying a little bit, right?)

For Andy Mowat and Dan Murphy at Culture Amp, that’s reality.

And they’re loving it.

And they want you to be able to explode your ability to offer and organize events, too, whether that’s an intimate 10-person dinner or a flagship event with 2,000 people.

“Events are a core part of our community offering,” Andy said.

Andy’s the Vice President of GTM Operations, and Dan’s the Director of Global Sales Development. They’re on fire with how they turned events, which was a big deal before they arrived, into an absolute machine.

That’s 12 different types of events.

With over 300 events per year.

Ranging from 10 to 2,000 people.

So, how do they do it?

There’s an old poem that says, “No man is an island.”

Nobody does it alone. Nobody gets to the place in their career where they want to be on their own, without others helping them get there. Ask anybody at the top of their field how they got there, and they’ll talk about the people that helped them get there.

The people who believed in them. The people who gave them chances. The people that helped them see something in themselves that they couldn’t see on their own.

Roderick Jefferson, CEO of Roderick Jefferson & Associates, was on the Sales Engagement podcast lately talking about mentors and sponsors. What they? Why do you need them? And what is the difference?

We spoke with Cara Felleman, Director of Sales Development and Inside Sales at Resy, a restaurant reservation platform.

Felleman believes that learning from failure gives you the grit, the willingness to go the extra mile to put yourself in the best position to succeed. Previous failures prepared her to start her current job.

In this episode we unpack:

• Why missing her first sales goal was a good thing.
• Questions to ask the top salespeople.
• Trust the numbers.
• Failure Academy.
• A successful sales manager’s role.
• Develop your own brain trust.
• Another sweet success for Felleman?

Are you speaking the same language as your customer? Are you sure?

To truly understand a prospect’s language, you need to understand their context according to Whitney Sales, General Partner at Acceleprise Ventures and creator of The Sales Method.

You’ll learn:

• What does speaking your customer’s language mean?
• What are the three things you need to look for in a customer?
• How to use their objection language to make the sale.
• Have your customers teach you their language.
• Why pitching 50 times a day is the best way to improve.
• Some final advice.

We have a big announcement to make! We are so pumped to finally release the Sales Engagement book.

To celebrate, Mark Kosoglow, VP of Sales at Outreach, co-hosted today’s podcast episode to tell us all about the new book. Mark has been at Outreach since the very beginning. He joined the team because he saw an opportunity to change the way sales is done. He is passionate about helping salespeople be more successful in this important profession.

Mark considers himself a sales philosopher. And we love that! Because like most philosophers, he desired to put his learnings into a book. But he didn’t do it on his own. One of his colleagues had the idea of getting the best minds in sales engagement together to create a cloud of ideas that they could put into a book.

It comes down to: We think is better than Me think. And because of that, we’re celebrating the introduction of the Sales Engagement book!