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RAIN Group Sales Blog

Your source for sales advice, tips, research, and insights to unleash sales potential.

What Is Business Development? Business development is the process of growing an organization, fostering opportunities, and expanding revenue. For professionals, business development often means bringing in new business, developing relationships, uncovering needs and opportunities, communicating value, demonstrating impact, and expanding accounts. When it comes to business development for professional services, one of the biggest challenges professionals face is finding time to do it all. After all, you don't sell full-time. Your work, whether it's consulting, accounting, IT, financial services, or engineering, is what you do full-time. It can be very difficult to find time to create and nurture the relationships necessary to bring in new business.

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If you want to connect with B2B buyers, you must contend with numerous obstacles to break through the noise and set meetings. Deciphering buyer decision roles, navigating purchasing processes, and standing out in a sea of content, emails, and social media messages is a challenge.

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Unless you’ve been on an extended media break, you’re aware that artificial Intelligence (AI) is making a splash across all industries of business. I’ve seen this as a practitioner. I work closely with client organizations and collaborate with senior executives, and I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about AI. What’s RAIN Group’s position on AI? What’s working for sales teams in terms of applying AI? How do we make AI work for us?

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Many people want to believe that cold calling doesn't work because they don't want to have to get on the phone. Indeed, there are many ways to do it wrong and fail. Many cold callers use deceptive tactics to get through and leave a bad taste in buyers' mouths.

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Do you know what it’s going to take to reach your sales target? It’s not enough to have a quota or even set goals for yourself—you need to know exactly what to do daily to accomplish your goals.

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66% of respondents agree that people in their organization don’t dedicate enough time or energy to prospecting, according to our Top Performance in Sales Prospecting research. Beyond that:

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Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: “Put me in front of ten buyers and I'll close seven of them. All I need is more meetings.” I hear this from sellers all the time. They're convinced they'll get the hits if they just get more at-bats. But where are those at-bats going to come from? No salesperson ever hit home runs by sitting back and waiting for the phone to ring or their email to ding. To succeed in sales, you need to proactively generate a consistent stream of new leads to fill the front end of the pipeline.

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Wouldn’t it be great if every single new prospect trusted you and your organization? Referrals are among the top ways sellers get leads and new business, but many struggle with generating them consistently. Often, this is because they haven’t thought about why buyers should refer them. They don’t have a system in place for generating referrals. If you’re providing a quality experience for your buyers, you’re already halfway there. Word of mouth is bound to generate new business, but a deliberate referral marketing plan will drastically improve the frequency and quality of the referrals you receive.

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know social media, especially LinkedIn, plays an important role in sales. But you may be surprised by just how big that role is. According to LinkedIn research, 89% of top sales professionals find social networking platforms such as LinkedIn important to closing deals. Indeed, our own research reveals the majority of buyers—82%—will review your LinkedIn profile, and, yes, judge you, before accepting a meeting or otherwise connecting with you.

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TL;DR? Download the PDF and save it for later. Many sellers assume buyers don't want or need to talk to them early in the buying process. This simply isn't the case. In fact, our prospecting research reveals buyers want to hear from sellers early. When Do Buyers Want to Hear from Sellers in the Buying Process?

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