While most of my blogging is published here, I also write commissioned blogs where I own the editorial. This provides me with additional channels for discussing sales intelligence, sales engagement, and B2B DaaS.

One of these channels is ConnectLeader, a sales engagement vendor based in Salem, NH. Their TruCadence platform supports three softphone dialer services: Click Dialer, Personal Dialer (power dialer), and Team Dialer (agent assisted). Other features include email templates, cadence management, analytics, gamification, Data Genie (data enrichment), and TrueInbound (inbound call management).

Here are my ConnectLeader blogs with their opening paragraphs:

• Marketing Approved Templates and Scripts, “For at least a decade, there have been discussions about sales and marketing alignment and the inability of sales and marketing teams to provide a unified go-to-market strategy.  Marketing is concerned that sales reps fail to use their leads, share their copy, or conform to the company’s positioning.”
• Drive Sales Productivity with Integrated Sales Engagement, “At their recent Dreamforce show, Salesforce rolled out a Sales Cloud upgrade called High Velocity Sales which helps “identify the best leads, eliminate busy work and boost pipeline.”  High Velocity Sales adds customized sequences for sales teams which incorporate best practice sales cadences within Salesforce.  Features include email and phone sequences, templates, and call scripts.”
• Closing the Loop on Inbound Leads, “My career began as a tele-support rep for an insurance agency automation system.  Our role was to quickly return calls from customers and help resolve their system problems.  Speed was paramount with emergency calls placed at the top of the queue.  Because inbound calls were categorized with brief descriptions and codes, we also gave priority to problems that could be quickly resolved (while it was good for our quotas, there was also no reason to make customers wait an hour for a two-minute fix).”
• How to Improve Your Sales Productivity Using a Sales Engagement Platform, “As soon as I submitted my last blog on Sales Productivity, CSO Insights published an update to their quota attainment research.  The good news is global sales rep quota attainment rose from 53.0% to 54.3%.  The bad news is that it falls within the range of error, so we probably won’t know if sales productivity is truly improving for another year. Even at 54.3%, sales reps remain well below the 63.0% quota attainment level of 2012.  When CSO Insights Research Fellow Jim Dickie looked at the underlying metrics, 22 of the 23 operational metrics declined over the past five years.”
• How to Think about Sales Productivity, “Research performed by CSO Insights found that sales reps are failing to meet quota at alarmingly high rates. Global B2B quota attainment was a mere 53% in 2016, dropping ten percent over five years. That means that only one in two sales reps is likely to meet quota this year with only a small percentage entering Q4 confident that they will reach quota.”
• What GDPR Means to American Firms?, “Back in May, there was a good deal of news coverage around the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).  Unfortunately, most of the coverage was hyperbolic with a focus on penalties and how few companies had complied.  While the GDPR fear mongering has died down, there is still a need to understand GDPR and comply with the law, even if you have no operations in Europe.”
• Local Presence: Handle with Care, “Sometimes, the most effective sales approach may be the wrong strategy.  One of these techniques is local presence.  For generalized telemarketing, it can lift call connection rates and revenue, but for strategic selling it may result in a negative return on investment”