Marketing and Sales

You work really hard. In fact, you might not be able to work any harder. But you can still work smarter. Here are five ways anyone can work smarter from Belle Beth Cooper, content crafter at Buffer, the social media management tool that lets you schedule, automate and analyze social-media updates.

If you're convinced cold calling is still a worthwhile sales tactic, don't look to Google for affirmation. A search for "cold calling statistics" turns up a whole bunch of numbers, most of them overwhelmingly negative.

Time is a concept many people struggle with. I often hear people say that they're slammed, buried, drowning, in the weeds, swamped, running ragged—the list goes on.

The NBA may be stating that they're no closer to on-uniform ads than they were in 2011, but that doesn't mean they won't show up eventually.

If you're an entrepreneur, you will fail. I don't mean your business is going to fail and you'll go bankrupt. I mean that sometime, somewhere, to some degree, you will fall short. You will forget to follow through on a commitment to an employee, partner or customer. You'll be late to a meeting. You'll make a bad choice. You'll exercise poor judgment. You will make a mistake.

How you react when you fail will say a lot about who you are as a person, and will be a critical factor in determining how successful you are in business.

Whenever I ask salespeople to rate themselves on their competence in the different parts of the sales process, they invariably rate themselves low at closing the sale.

Any seasoned sales professional knows the old adage “fake it ’til you make it” is nothing more than a one-way ticket to the unemployment line. Sure, it comes in handy during those early years when product knowledge is a work-in-progress, but as Kelly Mallozzi explained, that simply means recognizing your own humility.

If you're responsible for marketing your company and guiding your branding efforts, you have almost certainly considered your need for a logo. It's tempting to avoid the costs of a professional custom design, but it can also be very dangerous. You might consider ignoring the process entirely and using a simple text logo that you made up in your spare time. Ignoring the importance of your logo can be risky business.

Sales is all about thinking big. Bigger clients lead to bigger profits which lead to bigger vacations, or so the logic goes, and a lot of the time that's true.

Some cold calling experts suggest that you leave a message when you receive a prospect's voice mail. Unfortunately, many salespeople feel that this is an exercise in futility, because most of the time their prospect does not call them back. If that sounds familiar, here are six reasons why your prospects might not return your calls.