Dan Swift is CEO of Numentum (formerly Empire Selling) a consultancy advising sales teams on how to up their game. I met Dan at the Ignite B2B conference conference in Chicago, and was eager to interview him about his take on improving the performance of sales teams.
Numentum’s mission is to help sales teams better understand the actual journey that B2B buyers go through. As he notes, few salespeople have actually made any corporate purchases, which hampers their performance. The good news is that with appropriate training, they can rapidly improve.
Dan is candid about the fact that most salespeople fail to fully leverage social media, in particular, LinkedIn, and conveys some very useful tips about making better use of social media channels. Our conversation then turns to ABM, and the mistakes that many sales pros make when they focus too much on acquiring new “fresh meat” leads at the expense of cultivating relationships with those who’ve already successfully dealt with the enterprise. We discuss the importance of salespeople using “micro moments” to stay top-of-mind, delve into the potential of AI to improve the selling experience, explore the “myth of the single decisionmaker” and chat about what salespeople should do should they discover that a “single disrupter” is opposing change that could benefit corporate well-being.
I enjoyed my conversation with Dan very much; if you do any kind of corporate selling, you’ll definitely benefit from listening to it.
