The hottest thing in sales today is sales engagement — the field that is shaking up revenue teams, upending legacy mindsets, and setting new performance highs. We launched The Sales Engagement Podcast in 2018 to explore sales engagement topics and help businesses reap the ground-breaking benefits.
The show features prominent business leaders, real-life horror stories, and tales of epic success delivered in a casual, talk-radio format. Each episode comes as a trove of insight, strategies, tactics, and hacks that can help your sales organization humanize sales and leverage technology to reach the next milestone.
To celebrate the podcast’s 100TH EPISODE (!!), here are the 10 most popular episodes of all time - look, listen, and ignite your revenue engine!
Rebecca Feiten, Senior Enterprise Account Executive at Outreach
You don’t have to start big to achieve big. Sometimes, all it takes is making small changes in your daily workflow that go a long way.
Take follow-ups for example. Being consistent in following up certainly makes a whole lot of difference. Consistency helps plug the holes in your pipeline where opportunities tend to leak out. And — as demonstrated by Senior AE Rebecca Feiten — you can turbo-charge your follow-ups just by adding a simple recap.
This episode shares other tweaks and tactics that will help you enhance the daily aspects of selling such as account planning and building relationships with internal teams. Remember: Get the day right and you’ll bag every quarter.
Josh Jordan, Founder of preHIRED
Beware of expert advice and popular slogans. They don’t always work.
So you think you’re doing awesome when you’re always closing? Not so much, says preHIRED founder Josh Jordan. The Always-Be-Closing mindset — popularized in the 1990s — sets the wrong tone because of its glaring selfishness. In this new era of buyer-centric sales, you can’t force-feed customers and feel happy selling them something that won’t improve their lives.
Listen to this episode and discover how the “ABC” of sales has evolved from “Always Be Closing” to “Always Be Clarifying.”
Jesus Requena, Director of Growth Marketing at Unity Technologies
Ahh, emails. You love them or hate them, but either way, you can’t live without them. As sellers, we use email to catch a prospect’s attention, schedule appointments, make our pitch, and keep in touch. It’s an all-around selling tool often ignored by recipients and abused by senders.
Fortunately, there’s a sweet spot between automation and the human touch that enables email to pull the right strings and trigger the right reactions.
Done the usual way, email elicits low response rates and even less conversions. But done right, email can help transform your revenue performance. This episode shows you how to personalize email communication at scale so your messages won’t always end up in the spam folder and your positive response rates can reach new heights.
Tom Castley, VP of Account Management at Apptio
You only think it’s impossible until it’s not. A five-point play on NBA. Free-climbing El Capitan. The four-minute mile. Going on company-paid five-star vacations year after year.
For sales professionals, joining the President’s Club is the most coveted achievement. It’s certainly doable, but can you keep at it over time? The answer — as six-time President Club member Tom Castley proves — is a resounding YES. In this episode, he’ll show you how to improve your win ratio, deal sizes, and efficiency to always beat your metrics and enjoy all the perks every top performer deserves.
David Hershenson, Director of Sales Development and Productivity at tray.io
The right sequence can unlock the vault, take a dance to the point of perfection, or transform a sales process into a humming revenue engine.
In this episode, you’ll learn how to pace and prioritize customer engagement channels (email, phone call, social media messaging, etc.) to build the best sequence based on your sales cycle, touch points, and target buyers. Plus, you’ll get tips on how to create messages that compel customers to respond favorably.
By the way, the tactics outlined in this episode come from a sales leader whose process generates 66% to 76% open rates and an average reply rate of 25%.
Kyle Bastien, Director of Sales Enablement at Drift
Despite the widespread adoption of sophisticated sales technologies, human talent remains the key driving force behind successful selling. And with humans, habits are not far behind.
Unfortunately, not all habits are good. Some — like addiction — have dire consequences. In this episode, a sales executive who leads a high-performing sales team demonstrates how extreme ownership, better conversations, and healthy habits can transform business outcomes. Sober for three-years running, Kyle Bastien, now Director of Sales Enablement, has overcome alcohol addiction and has applied the painful lessons he learned to lift his team’s mindset and metrics at Drift.
Gary Smyth, Senior Director of Sales at Informatica
Behind every phenomenal performance — whether in sports, art, or business — is a coach who made a difference.
The trouble is, even though everybody recognizes the importance of coaching to sales success, not everyone is doing it right. Many sales leaders realize that coaching might tip the balance but only a few find the time or the right techniques to do so.
In this episode, Senior Director of Sales at Informatica, Gary Smyth, talk about how to start small and simple to build a successful coaching program for your team. You’ll also learn how to use technology to automate coaching at exactly the right moments where it really matters.
Josh Braun, Founder at SalesDNA
Hardly anyone loves making or taking cold calls. But having conversations over the phone helps sellers establish trust, discover pain points, and set meetings. And sometimes, it’s the only channel that works for certain situations. With cold calling remaining a solid staple in your workflow, it’s far better to be great at it than be grumpy about it.
This episode showcases a 5-step formula for making successful cold calls. Moreover, you’ll learn how to use cold calls as a key differentiator and a platform for lead qualification.
Patricia McLaren, Co-founder and Head of Customer Operations at CopyShoppe
If you generate dismal email open and reply rates, then this episode might be the remedy for you. Featuring CopyShoppe Co-founder and Head of Customer Operations, Patricia McLaren, this episode gives practical insights on how to leverage expertise, personalization, and A/B-testing to drive better and better email campaigns.
Sales emails are meant for customers. So listen to the podcast and learn how to stop talking about yourself, start focusing on the specific recipient, and drive more business to your company.
And the most popular episode of all time is...
Lauren Bailey, President of Factor8 and Founder of The Sales Bar
Most sales voicemails go unreturned, making people wonder whether leaving one is even necessary. But as Lauren Bailey shows in this episode, small successes from voicemail (such as a simple callback) can aggregate into huge benefits over time.
The idea is not to sell anything but to just motivate customers to keep in touch. And the best way to do that is to avoid common pitfalls while making your voicemail more memorable — both of which are discussed in the episode.
Final Takeaway
With more than 100 mind-opening episodes in the Sales Engagement Podcast, you’re sure to find many that resonate with you and help you in your sales engagement journey. Each of the episodes features topics and leaders who are setting new standards and best practices in the world of sales. Be the first in your sector to learn, adapt, and benefit from this metric-beating resource.
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