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Networking events and groups are necessary and vital to grow your business. Whether you are looking for new clients, building your brand, or thinking about a career change, networking is essential to developing and nurturing your business relationships, and to increasing your sales. In today’s digital age, we can get lost in emails and social media posts, but face to face interaction remains the top value driver. Successful entrepreneurs and savvy business developers have networking plans that are multidimensional and meet a variety of goals. Here are 10 effective strategies for expanding your network:

Following are 10 fun and interesting facts about sales and selling performance. If you feel a little twinge when you read some of them because they might be a development opportunity for you, I’ve included some recommendations about how to improve. Going one step further, I've included links to previous articles/posts related to some of the topics.

Charles Darwin said, “It is not the strongest nor the most intelligent of the species that survives, but the ones most responsive to change”. How this applies to you is determined by many factors. But with the marketplace becoming ever more competitive and buyers’ attitudes influenced by so many new and changing factors, successful salespeople and businesses need to focus on three important factors to ensure they adapt and survive.

Various studies report that only about 4-7% of B2B buyers are in the buying mode for a particular product or service at any given time.Other studies report that anywhere from 55-70% of a B2B buyer’s purchasing journey is done anonymously – activities of which sellers aren’t aware.While these stats vary based on a variety of issues and conditions, they are indicative of the typical B2B purchase journey.If B2B buyers aren’t always in the buying mode and so much of the buyer’s journey is done without us sellers even knowing what’s going on, how can B2B sales professionals operate in order to seize sales opportunities?

This article is about you getting in front of prospective buyers. It outlines 3 efficient, straightforward steps that give you the best chance to get in front of the right people.

You will likely see many different kinds of buyers in your journey to become an elite salesperson; and many of these buyers will be different, value different things, think differently, and respond differently to various behaviors.Consequently, no matter how good you are, you’ll have to deal with buyer objections when trying to sell your product or service.This article describes 4 important tools to have in your “sales bag” that will help you overcome buyer objections.

Need to generate sales leads?Get on the phone and start cold calling.Contrary to what you might hear, cold calling works – if you do it right.This article lists the 4 main elements of effective cold calling, and offers some insights and examples about how to do it right.

I just finished reading a book about negotiating skills. Negotiating is a topic that fascinates me because of the human behavioral elements that influence how people negotiate and respond in negotiating situations. B2B salespeople are often put in situations when they have to negotiate the terms of a sale. So, negotiating and selling skills are intertwined.

No doubt you face lots of competition. So how can you stand out from the competition and communicate to your marketplace that you have the “chops” to get past first base – to get the attention of your target market and be viewed as a firm that should be considered seriously? In other words, how can you get past "1st base" when presenting your firm to qualified buyers?

Social media is sales game-changer. In B2B selling, LinkedIn (LI) has emerged as a must-have. Several books have been written about using LI in your sales efforts, and it wouldn’t be difficult to write another one here. Instead, this article focuses specifically on LI and 5 things you can use that will improve your sales.