Looking for some inspiration from great leaders, salespeople, and business titans? Then you have come to the right place.
Let’s dive into 25 motivational quotes for your B2B sales team—along with some actionable tips you can use to follow the advice of the greats!
“A goal is a dream with a deadline.” (Napoleon Hill)
In sales, the best way to reach your highest possible level of achievement is by defining exactly what you want to achieve and determining the date by which it must be achieved.
Whether the target is revenue or meetings booked, the number will act as your guiding star.
With the goal defined, you have built your own intrinsic motivation system in the form of the deadline you have created for yourself.
It creates urgency — a motivator salespeople know a lot about.
On a macro scale, this is why it’s so critical for sales managers to build a sales plan for their teams.
Your plan states the revenue target your team wants to achieve and lays out the exact monthly, weekly, and daily numbers you need to hit to reach it.
You slowly move toward it, and with each step forward, you get a little boost of achievement that feels so good you want it again.
“You are what you repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” (Will Durant)
Once actions become habits, they become a part of you. You can’t help but do them. It’s automatic.
So, when you build positive habits that help you reach your goals, you become quite unstoppable.
Here are some useful habits salespeople can incorporate into their days.
- Make 15 cold calls ASAP. Wake your courage up with up to 20 cold calls first thing in the morning. Perhaps even win some new leads as an added benefit.
- Schedule your day. Each morning, map out what you will be doing during each hour of the day. This will ensure you are more productive and motivated.
- Study for 20 minutes. Dedicate time each day to learning about your market, product, or customer.
Many top performers are known for their almost religious devotion to their daily habits. Find the ones that work for you and stick to them.
The book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear can help you.
“Ninety percent of selling is conviction and 10 percent is persuasion.” (Shiv Khera)
We tend to believe confident salespeople. A confident voice proclaiming, “This will change your life!” is a lot more convincing than a meek one saying, “This might change your life.”
However, it’s difficult to fake confidence, especially throughout a longer sales cycle like that of SaaS or agency sales.
This is why it’s so important to sell a product you believe in. There’s no need to fake.
You know for certain that it can help the prospect, and this belief furnishes you with motivation to keep on trying to convince them.
Then, you just keep sending emails, making calls, and articulating the value of your solution until, finally, they believe in it too.
Of course, never make false promises even if you love the product. Sometimes things just aren’t a good fit.
“Start working with your prospects as if they’ve already hired you.“ (Jill Konrath)
During the sale, give your prospects a taste of what it is like to have you on their team.
Think of your sales conversations as a trial run for the buyer. Advise them, dig into their problems and pain points, and share your insights.
The solutions you offer don’t always have to be your product or service’s value proposition—it could be a best practice that you have seen other clients use to succeed.
It could even be hidden in a book that you recommend to them.
Throughout this process, your prospect will come to trust you as an advisor and begin to hate the thought of losing your insight and support.
When they develop that attitude, the sale is essentially complete.
“Sometimes the most influential thing we can do is listen.“ (Bob Burg)
Active listening is by far the most important skill for any salesperson.
Hidden in your prospect’s words are their pain points, struggles, and wishes, all of which you must be able to pick out.
Once you identify their need, you can attach your solution to it in creative ways. So, listening preludes selling.
To be a good listener, follow the two-second rule. When you think your prospect has finished talking, pause and count to two seconds in your head.
Often, that moment of silence will encourage them to continue.
They will reveal wishes and needs tucked away in their afterthoughts. This technique can feel awkward at first, but it pays off.
Not only do you learn more about the prospect, but you help them believe that you are truly focused on what they are saying.
They will know that you actually care about their specific situation and aren’t just waiting for your chance to pitch.
“High-level buyers want to talk to people who know more than they do. They hunger not for information but insight.” (Barbara Weaver Smith)
Prospects want an expert in their corner. They want someone with deep industry knowledge to whom they ask questions and receive thoughtful and informed answers.
To establish your authority as an expert in the field and communicate your knowledge effectively to prospects, follow these tips:
Read industry books and articles. Read widely and learn about your industry.
Throughout your conversations, the anecdotes, information, and the facts you gather through study will arise naturally and present you as a knowledgeable salesperson.
Study past clients. Learn about and share techniques your past clients used to overcome certain challenges that your new prospects now face.
Ask for status updates. Show your expertise and care for the clients by asking for status updates at the beginning of conversations.
You can say something like: “So tell me about your progress on {initiative A}. I remember you were struggling with {roadblock}.”
Share articles with them. Send prospects articles, blog posts, or podcasts that are relevant to their current situation.
This will help establish your credibility and expertise, while also deepening your bond with them.
“You can’t propose a mutually beneficial business relationship if you can’t understand their business.” (Craig Rosenberg)
Before proposing your solution to a prospect, learn as much as you can about what their company does and its processes, clients, and struggles.
To aid you in this discovery phase, consult your ideal customer profile, which thoroughly describes the businesses that often come to you for help.
If you want to gain more insight into the person you will be speaking with, check their LinkedIn and search for groups they belong to. Hop onto Twitter and read through their mentions, shares, and tweets.
This gives you a better sense of their interests.
Lastly, search for any relevant news about the company on Google.
Look out for “trigger events” that signal a need for your solution. These include investment announcements or other signs of growth like hiring sprees or new office openings.
Google News is a great resource to find this information. Or, if you are selling to startups, try AngelList or Crunchbase.
“Your job is not to tell the client what their return-on-investment is, your job is to ask the right questions and have the client tell you.”
(Kim Orlesky)
When you ask your prospects questions, you are guiding them through the process of realization.
While they think over the answer, they slowly start to see how beneficial your product could be for them.
Open-ended questions are the best type for helping them see their need for your solution and the value it brings.
Here are some brain-greasing questions you can ask to get their gears cranking in the right direction.
- Tell me more about your daily routine. How would this solution impact it?
- What are the main obstacles preventing your team from hitting their targets?
- How much time do you think this solution would save you?
- What are your priorities this quarter?
All on their own, they come to the conclusion that your solution is a good fit. This is great for you, for people are much more likely to believe their own logic than a salesperson’s promise.
“To build a long-term, successful enterprise, when you don’t close a sale, open a relationship.” (Patricia Fripp)
As much as it hurts sometimes, disqualifying a prospect isn’t such a bad thing. It shows the prospect that you and your business can be trusted.
You gave up potential income because you felt the solution was not right for the buyer.
They will appreciate your honesty, and who knows, down the line, they might become a better fit.
Perhaps they come into some money or need another product you sell. Or, even better, they have a lot of industry friends who are great fits.
Focusing on building trusting relationships over closed deals will help you in the long run. You win referrals, long-term relationships, and return clients.
What is more, word spreads around the industry that you are a reputable company that can be trusted—and this reputation can be a lead-generating machine.
“Treat objections as requests for further information.” (Brian Tracy)
Sales objections are signs that the prospect needs more information about the product or service before they are comfortable making a purchase. They simply don’t trust it enough.
So, take these objections in stride, and solve them by asking questions in return. When you hear any objection, you need to dig deep.
Often the objection they state is not really the true objection. “I’m not ready to buy” could mean “I don’t see the ROI.”
Probe into what they’re saying until you get to the main reason.
Once you see it clearly, you can try to overcome it. This question-asking approach can help you overcome any argument, no matter how random.
There are more case-specific approaches for overcoming some of the more regular objections like “the price is too high” or “I need to talk to my partners”.
Fortunately, we have written about them in how to overcome the most common objections.
“Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don’t recognize them.”
(Ann Landers)
Prospecting success is often about casting a wide net. You have to put in the work to find the opportunities.
Yes, along the way, you might come across people who sound uninterested or even angry that you called or emailed. But that doesn’t mean you stop.
Persistence is key. Some of those people who weren’t interested in a meeting on the first call or email might be interested later on.
To follow up without being too pushy, follow these tips.
- Send Value. As we’ve said before, if you heard a podcast that you think someone in their position might enjoy, send it their way.
- Look out for company news. Be on the lookout for events that might trigger a need for your product or service, such as a hiring spree or a big layoff.
- Connect on social media and consistently interact with them there. Like their posts. Reply to their comments. Give your insights and answers to their questions.
These tactics will help you build a relationship with your potential prospects, making them more likely to accept a meeting down the line.
“Before LinkedIn and other social networks, in the sales world, ABC stood for Always Be Closing. Now it means Always Be Connecting.”
(Jill Rowley)
In B2B sales, relationship-selling rules the roost. People are far more likely to accept meetings from people they have spoken with in the past, or at least interacted with on a social platform.
Familiarity leads to liking.
So, it’s crucial to start ramping up your social selling activities, primarily on LinkedIn.
Here are some tips for adding this strategy into your day.
Join relevant LinkedIn groups to mine for leads. Look at groups that house professionals from your industry.
Comment on their posts and frequently interact with potential decision-makers.
Send 5 connection requests a day. Make sure they are personalized and that they explain why you want to connect.
Also, use social media to build your reputation as an authority.
Write and post on the newsfeed. Build your brand by posting routinely on the newsfeed, so you get noticed.
You can write insightful posts about your industry or share articles written by other experts or your company.
Over time these efforts will pay off. Your personal and brand awareness will grow.
Your network will expand, and your pipeline will contain more high-quality leads who actually know and respect you as an expert in the field.
“If you harness the power of innovation, you’ll convert sales complexity into a brutal competitive advantage.” (Tim Sanders)
Using technology and innovation to make a complex purchasing decision easy for your prospects is a great competitive advantage.
For instance, a real estate agent is going to have a much easier time generating leads when they offer virtual tours.
On the other side of the deal, sellers will have access to more data, technology, and AI that can help them sell more effectively.
For example, in the next decade, artificial intelligence could manage our CRMs, analyzing thousands of pieces of prospect and lead data.
It could offer ways of revealing opportunities to send a specific piece of content, use a specific cold email, or employ another sales tactic.
Armed with this intel, salespeople can spend more time taking action and less time searching for opportunities.
“There is no magic to closing. There are no magic phrases. Closing the deal is completely dependent on the situation.” (Alice Heiman)
Different sales situations call for different closing techniques. Let’s go over some common ones.
The Assumptive Close
Sometimes your product or service solves the prospect’s problem perfectly. The ROI is there and things are looking good.
If this is the case, try assuming the close will happen and regularly mention the final steps. Often, this rightful confidence can be contagious.
The Columbo Close
If you feel like your prospect is holding back on sharing a final concern, uncover it with this close. Ask one final question meant to get them talking.
For example, after a presentation, you might say: “Just one more question. Why didn’t you ask about the implementation process?” Hopefully, this will give you their final concern that you can overcome.
The Summary Close
In longer sales cycles, it can be hard for prospects to remember all of the wonderful benefits your business offers them. You want this clear in their minds before you ask for the close.
So, begin your final pitch with a summary of their problems, how you plan to solve them, and all the other features and benefits they were so excited about in the moment.
“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” (Edward Deming)
Establishing an effective sales process gives your team a testable and replicable set of steps for turning leads into sales. Here are some tips for creating a sales process you can trust.
Start by reviewing your current process.
Talk with each sales rep to learn about the way they face their daily challenges.
Figure out which actions the higher-performing reps are taking and consider making them a part of your new sales process.
Next, create one your customers will enjoy. Your sales process should reflect how your customers like to evaluate products.
If your ideal leads are usually well-informed before reaching out, consider jumping right into discovery questions.
When all is said and done, analyze each step. Find the parts of the sales process where the most deal stalls or losses occur.
Then, drill down to see why that’s happening. Are presentations poor? Are we struggling to overcome certain pricing objections?
A sales process is the seller’s roadmap to success. They know where they are in the sale and what actions to take to move the prospect forward. It’s critical to get this right.
“Sales success comes from the right balance of quality human interaction and appropriate use of supplemental tools.” (Deb Calvert)
Human interaction and mutual trust close the opportunity, but technology is often one of the best ways to open one up.
Let’s look at some of the best tools for generating high-quality leads.
- Soleadify: If you participate in B2B outreach, consider using a B2B database like Soleadify, which finds your ideal customers using data science and provides you with need-to-know information like their email addresses, job title, and technology used.
- Salesloft: Salesloft helps you send out more personalized emails and track opens, replies, and clicks. It’s a great way to automate part of the outreach process, as long as you still personalize each email template.
- Freshworks CRM: Freshworks CRM comes with lead scoring functionality that helps you measure the value of inbound leads in your sales funnel so you can spend time reaching out to the best.
Such tools will empower your team to make the most of their skills.
“The customer doesn’t care about features—they care about solving their problems.” (Trish Bertuzzi)
In customer-centric selling, it’s more about the prospect’s needs than the product’s shiny features.
Learn as much as you can about the customer’s goals, pain points, problems, and challenges.
Gather the information you need to create a customized pitch and presentation for them later on.
It will also help you build a relationship with them.
They will start to see you as a knowledgeable and trustworthy advisor, who wouldn’t sell them a product if it would be of no use to them.
Often, it can be effective to spend the majority of a discovery call discussing their problem and the implications of not solving it.
“If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doing anything.“ (John Wooden)
Some salespeople are scared to make that cold call or talk about that feature because they fear messing up. Nevertheless, that’s part of the human journey.
Mistakes are bound to happen. You have to jump in and try either way.
Of course, it still helps to look at common sales mistakes and learn the best ways to avoid making them.
Here are two of the most problematic.
Selling Features Your Prospect Doesn’t Need
This is especially common in SaaS sales. Reps will follow a demo roadmap and go in-depth on every feature, regardless of its relevance to the customer, boring them to tears.
Instead, talk to the prospect directly to figure out what they really want to solve, then show them the features you know they will enjoy. You can always show them all of the other features later on.
Arguing With a Customer
Sometimes you will encounter a disagreement with a prospect. They might become hostile.
Instead of fighting back and crushing their argument with the knowledge you have accumulated over your many years in the industry, stay calm.
Engaging any further with the same level of energy just encourages them to build their walls of pride even higher.
In other words, if they are yelling, try staying silent. Sooner or later, they will wear themselves out and feel silly for how they reacted. Once their tone is back to normal, respond using friendly strength, saying something like this:
“I’m sorry our pricing seems like too much. But we can’t budge. Our team puts in a lot of work, and our clients see an ROI they are happy with. I can recommend some other companies, but I’m not sure the price will be that different.”
This will reinforce your authority over the situation and even the playing field.
“Success is 90% failure.” (Soichiro Honda)
A seller who can consistently fail, learn from it, and try again, will have the pleasure of watching their conversion rates slowly increase, along with their skill and knowledge, over many years.
A key to becoming a top-performing salesperson is learning to cope with failure.
The best way to safeguard your mood and motivation from the discouragements of failure is to adopt a learning mindset.
Consider each sales failure a lesson.
When you make a bad cold call, write a few things that went wrong and how you can address them next time.
If a presentation loses the attention of the prospect, think about why that occurred.
This attitude turns failures into net positives and gives them meaning. When you fail, you are improving.
“Numbers alone won’t fix anything. But they will help you identify where the problem is.” (Steli Efti)
Performance indicators and metrics can help you spot problems in your sales process or strategy.
What you spot, you can fix.
So, here are some important sales metrics to keep an eye on.
- Time in Each Stage: This calculates how much time a prospect spends in each stage of your sales process. Look out for common “waiting room” stages and think about how to increase sales velocity.
- Average Deal Size: This is (total dollar amount of closed deals over a specific duration) / (total number of deals). Some sales reps spend too much time selling to small deals.
- Sales Productivity Metrics: These are metrics like cold calls made, demos held, or emails sent. Tracking these alongside your quota attainment can help you see when you need to put in more work.
Tracking these metrics will also indicate which sales channels are most effective.
“The quality of a lead is most often in direct proportion to the quality of your sales skills.” (Rob Liano)
Continued self-education is a practice of the most successful people throughout history. The same goes for salespeople.
You must keep learning new skills and refining your current ones, while also accumulating industry, product, and business knowledge.
Here are three game-changing skills sellers can acquire and how to do so:
- Business Acumen: To fully see your solution from the eyes of the prospect, you must have a solid understanding of business, finance, etc. Consider speaking with your finance team or executives to learn more about crucial business processes.
- Storytelling: Engage your audience in presentations or cold calls with good storytelling. You can learn this skill by reading great case studies, long-form sales copy, or even by watching movies and noting the events that make the story.
- Social Selling: In this digital age, social selling is becoming more effective for selling. Consider using LinkedIn’s social selling course.
These skills will help you overcome the most common challenges of your day.
“Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.“ (John C. Maxwell)
Whether you are leading a team to their revenue goals or a prospect to purchase, you need solid leadership skills.
What are some traits of effective sales leaders?
They are target-focused. The best leaders block distractions from entering the attention of their team members and do everything they can to urge their reps forward toward their goals.
The best sales leaders are also influential.
They use their authority and expertise to influence their team to do well.
As a result, they create an environment where their reps want to consistently prove themselves to the manager they respect.
Great leaders know everyone learns differently, so they adapt their coaching and training styles to fit each individual personality. In short, they are coaching customizers.
To learn more about becoming an effective sales leader, read our post on 13 non-financial ways to motivate your sales team.
“We must take back control of our calendars, stop allowing others to put work on our desks, and selfishly guard our selling time.”
(Mark Weinberg)
Managerial and administrative work like attending meetings or updating CRMs can steal a seller away from their most valuable work: strategizing and talking with prospects.
It is therefore important to remove distractions and let others know that your time is precious.
A good start is to inform your colleagues that you are only available for calls or email correspondence during certain hours of the day.
That could be from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM and 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM.
If they try to communicate with you out of those blocks, you will simply not respond (unless it is an emergency).
Also, on your shared calendar, start blocking out time for strategizing and planning.
This will ensure people understand that while you might just be sitting at your desk and not on the phone with a prospect, you are still doing valuable work that requires focus—and silence.
“When a team takes ownership of its problem, the problem gets solved.” (Jocko Willink)
Sales teams encounter a string of problems along the way to their revenue target.
Luckily, there are always creative ways to solve them.
The first major problem a sales team might face is not standing out from the competition.
If that’s an issue for your team as well, try focusing on giving your customers the best experience instead.
Take on the role of advisors and help guide them toward making the right choice for them instead of merely pushing your solution.
However, if your problem is getting leads to respond to outreach in the first place, try ramping up the content production focus in your sales enablement plan.
That way, you can share relevant content with buyers during your prospecting and let them study your solution on their own—making them seek you out eventually.
Finally, whatever you do, the important thing is staying motivated.
Each of your sales team members is driven by different things. Some might love books, others fancy dinners.
Try to adapt your incentive plan to their specific interests. To figure out what those are, ask them straight up.
Don’t forget to work together and ask for help when a struggle arises. Two heads are better than one.
“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”
(Walt Disney)
Actions, not words, help you push past quota. Let’s end with some final best practices all B2B salespeople should follow to rise up and reach their sales goals.
Your guiding principle should be starting calls with an end in mind.
Before dialing, think about where you want the call to end. What action do you want your prospect to take? What meeting do you want scheduled on the calendar?
Visualize the end result you desire and work towards it.
However, keep in mind that it is uncommon for a lead to answer your first email or call. Keep at it, and be creative with your follow-ups.
Hit them from different channels, and don’t forget to share value throughout. Ask testing questions that make the prospect think deeply about what they currently believe about their business and industry. Don’t be afraid to challenge beliefs.
Still, never force the lead into your sales pipeline. If you see the relationship isn’t working, disqualify even when it hurts. When you disqualify leads, you free up time to talk with your highest potential buyers.
Scrupulous lead qualification is crucial for a healthy pipeline.
Go Tackle the Hard Task
Now that you have soaked in the wise words of great leaders and salespeople, it is time to put that motivation to work.
Go out there and finish whatever difficult task is pecking at the walls of your awareness. Even if it doesn’t go as planned, you will feel proud and energized for trying.
In B2B sales, trying, and trying again, is half the battle.
