The Best Sales Blog Posts of 2021

As sales teams close their last deals of 2021, we’re looking back on a year of chaotic innovation. Sales teams nestled into their digital environment for the long haul, and, in response, we offered the best sales blog posts and sales insights to tackle digitally selling to the modern buyer.

From new tactics for outbound to perfecting the sales processes for growing companies, we explored the trends behind sales excellence for today’s sellers. Fortunately, sales will be taking a lot from 2021 into the new year, and we’d like to share the posts that made a big impact on our clients, prospects, and partners.

Here are the best sales blog posts from 2021.

Modern Outbound Strategy

Modern outbound and digital selling were the main focus for many sales teams this year. There are very few buyers left in the office and few decision-makers that count emails as their preferred mode of communication for sales. Our modern outbound blogs looked at the habits of modern quota-crushers: how they leverage multi-channel, multimedia, concise messaging, and their constant evolution.

1. The Top Five Modern Outbound Plays for Next-Level Sales

The modern buyer is numbed to cold calls and emails, irrelevant canned messages, and rehearsed demos without applicability. Read how top sales teams build sales sequences that provide as much value to the customer as they do results for the seller.

2. Creative Digital Selling Practices for Outbound Sales

Retiring older prospecting methods and introducing new ones is paramount to creating value-driven sales tactics. Here are tips for introducing and optimizing tactical sales plays for direct sending, LinkedIn engagement, and video messaging into your outbound.

3. Four Ways to Set More Meetings Like A Top Performer

The activity-focused approach to outbound sales has met its maker. As you read this blog, the old modes of selling are shuttering away, and top-performing sales teams across products and verticals are realigning to what the buyer wants: value. 

LinkedIn Sales Strategy 

With the largest community of business professionals globally, the right LinkedIn sales strategy is an exceptional medium for prospect engagement (and provides an overflowing influx of qualified leads). 

These blogs aimed to give sellers the confidence to create content for a LinkedIn sales strategy and engage with their ICP and persona-matching prospects on LinkedIn.

1. The LinkedIn Strategy Playbook

Harnessing the power of LinkedIn means creating opportunities for yourself and your business. Depending on your goals – maybe you’re looking for leads, building your career/network, or trying to position yourself as a thought leader – our tips for aspirational LinkedIn users will help you reach and engage with a new, professional audience.

2. Sell More with LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Sales Navigator brings lead qualification to digital sales networking. We’re sharing our best practices on how you can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to pinpoint people in line with your ICP and match your personas to maximize your prospects and close more deals.

3. Using LinkedIn for Sales Teams – Five Tips to Empower Sales

What’s their secret to building an active community around a company page on LinkedIn? We get this question a lot. In this blog, we talk about how companies on LinkedIn flip the “share our company post” convention on its head and share the voice of their people instead.

Sales Transformation

Regular transformation drives our teams to build stronger, more versatile sellers. We went through a sales transformation as an industry with the digital transformation, whether your team was ready for it or not. These are our top three posts covering some of the trends influencing change in 2021 and on.

1. The Future of B2B Sales in and the Trends Shaping It

The future of sales in 2021 is all about the “new” buyer and the way sellers engage with them. As millennials and tech-savvy buyers take over the market, consumer behavior has fundamentally changed in B2B.

2. How to Build Customer Rapport in Virtual/Remote Environments

After interviewing sales leaders, we found that the process of selling over Zoom was a chaotic transition for many and still an everyday challenge. Fortunately, there’s a solution. Read this blog for creative ways to bring excitement into your home office and gain more traction with remote buyers.

3. Making an Impact With a New Model of Sales Consulting

Today, we’re heading up the future of sales consulting by providing as much theoretical understanding of initiatives and change as we do practical implementation. This article looks at the tangible impact, lasting results, and qualitative direction a new model of consulting can deliver.

Sales Operations & Technology

The market for sales technology is in a space of seemingly endless growth, and there is infinite value in streamlining your sales operations. While giving sellers 15% of their time back for selling, optimized sales ops also allow the team to give their buyers the time, resources, and communication they deserve. 

For an extra edge in 2022, our sales ops and tech blog posts outline the best path toward efficiency and how operations affect the entire team’s output.

1. Six Sales KPI Metrics to Empower Your Sales Team in 2022

When you have 20 KPIs you’re tracking for each sales rep, you’re actually tracking zero. To navigate the convoluted road to meaningful KPIs, we’re sharing the six KPIs that deliver actual impact for sales teams.

2. B2B Sales Tech to Eliminate Constraints and Influence Growth

Business technology is the animating force driving innovation and efficiency for the modern sales org. Learn what the ideal tech stack looks like and the best practices for growing your stack from some of the most influential minds in sales.

3. Top 10 Zoom Apps for Sales That Just Might Change Your Life

After Zoom started taking over the virtual salesroom, companies launched their applications to make digital meetings even more effective. Here’s a list of the top 10 Zoom apps for everything sales, from conversation intelligence and sales training to scheduling and productivity.

Sales Leadership

In this year’s sales leadership insights, we focused on empowerment, from the first conversation to deal closed, and the skills needed to impact every buyer, regardless of industry. 

1. The Road from $0 to $20 Million: What Breaks Along The Way & What to Do About It

Growing pains are familiar characters for every business making the next step in their growth. This article taps into the most common bottlenecks that endanger a company’s overall health in the critical stages between $0-5 million, $5-10 million, and $10-20 million.

2. 5 Ways to Motivate Your Remote Sales Team

Slacking motivation quickly revealed itself as one of the challenges remote salespeople face. In this guest post, Mike Austin from Adrack.com shares how sales leaders can build strong, professional relationships with their employees to help keep them motivated.

3. How do Management Consulting Firms Accelerate Growth?

When people ask management consulting firms, “what do you do?” The simple answer is that we solve problems. This blog dives into the actual results of management consulting to show what management consulting is and what a management consulting firm does.

Sales Enablement

The right sales enablement and sales content can enrich the experience for your sellers and improve engagement with your buyers. With every new engagement, we stress the value of having sales content to parallel the buyer’s journey. 

1. Creating Buyer Personas That Give Your Sales Team Superpowers

The right buyer personas will have your buyers thinking you can read minds. Our tips for creating accurate buyer personas will invigorate your sellers to optimize their approach to new and existing clients. 

2. How to Be a Resource & Give Value to Buyers

The modern seller doesn’t just try to close every deal to hit their monthly and quarterly quotas. They’re problem solvers first. This article explores how to embody the role of problem-solver by becoming a partner and trusted resource for your buyers.

Sales Process

The change in modern buyer behavior rippled into an overarching evolution of sales processes – who and how you prospect, how you move them through stages, monitoring the sales cycle, and what works for your sales practice. Excellence in the sales process brings new clients on board and keeps a retainer of satisfied customers.

1. Three Tips to Build a Sales Excellence Framework

Most B2B buyers (80% of them) have changed to new suppliers in the past year or say they plan to do so within the next year because most sellers go for contracts, not power users. Our experts share the best way to reignite quality relationships via stringent sales frameworks, qualitative sales processes, and the decay of information gates.

2. What is Sales Process Management? How Top Sales Managers Lead Winning Sales Teams

In collaboration with InsightSquared (a leader in revenue operations and analytics), we developed a guide to the 12 best practices for sales process management. This article explains how to implement the four principles of sales process management: build, coach, drive, and exceed. 

3. The Road from $0 to $20 Million: Refining the Sales Process

How is the sales process defined for companies on the verge of the next stage of growth? What parts of the sales process should they keep and should they drop? This post answers those questions and shares the ideal path toward growth in early-stage companies.

Organizational Alignment

In the wise words of James Cash Penney Jr., “Growth is never by mere chance; it is the result of forces working together.” Organizational alignment in sales can mean a few things, but what’s most important is aligning your process to your goals and your people to the process. 

1. How to Hire Salespeople and Build an Impactful Sales Org

Expanding a sales team from 0 to 5 or 5 to 15 is a significant milestone in business growth. Regardless of whom you’re hiring, you’ll need well-defined expectations and a coherent approach to recruiting and onboarding; this blog covers the five ways to help you do that.

2. Best Sales Compensation Plan for SaaS & Professional Services

Effective sales compensation plans not only reward high flyers and motivate others, but they also ensure sales is doing the right thing for their customers. We’ve created the best simple sales compensation plan for modern SaaS and professional services sales teams.

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Looking for more resources to improve your sales strategy in 2022? We’ve curated an incredible collection of Skaled’s best resources to guide the trends driving innovation in 2022. 

Access Skaled’s 2021 Best of the Best and kickoff 2022 with everything you need for a quota-crushing year.