I thought it would be helpful to provide a resources page for all your needs related to sales and account management.

Please bookmark this page for your convenience.

If you have any questions about how to use the resources here, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Lead Generation.

Lead Generation Goals Worksheet (everything opens in new window)

Want to demolish your long-term sales targets? Start with this worksheet. Plug in some basic details and figure out how many cold leads you must contact each day in order to achieve your goals. For more details on using this tool, check out our Lead Generation Forecasting Crash Course.

Target List
This is a simple and straightforward way to keep track of your cold leads. Also, it contains a template for your prospect profiles. You should create profiles so you can identify and familiarize yourself with your target buyers.

Email Permutator (courtesy of Distilled.net)
A big thanks to Rob Ousbey of Distiled.net for this one. The permutator will help you find almost any email address. First, you plug in your target’s name and domain to get common permutations (ie. “dan@salesschema.com, dan.englander@saleschema.com, denglander@salesschema.com”). From there, load up Rapportive–>In your email, put each permutation into your “To” field–>Scroll over each name. The address that populates an identity in Rapportive is your winner.

VoilaNorbert
This is a new email research tool. I like it because it’s stripped down and simple, which is a refreshing break from the usual junked up research products. After all, you probably just need an email, not a TS background check!

YesWare for Email Tracking
There are lots of tracking services out there, and YesWare is winning for a reason. It links up seamlessly with Gmail and now Outlook. It’s clean, it has a great structure for storing and A/B testing templates, and most importantly, it will let you connect with context. It’s time to stop sending emails when your prospects are swamped or driving home from work. Send follow-ups that resonate by re-connecting when your prospect is on your site or reading your emails.

Lead Gen. Freelancer Blueprint
Do you want to replicate and multiply your lead generation results? Then it’s time to get some help! The Lead Gen. Freelancer Blueprint is a 5-week framework for getting everything off your plate. It’s a set of directions that you can give directly to your outsourced freelancers. Simply fill in the highlighted areas, give the document to your team, and use it to guide your lead gen. outsourcing process.

B2B Sales.

Conversation Blueprint
The Convo. Blueprint is a script and more…

The highest sales performers are planned and organized. Their most important tool is their script. When you “hear” script, you might cringe, and think of an overly-rehearsed, fake-sounding sales presentation. On the contrary, your script will increase your flexibility. It will make sure you achieve all your goals during each and every call or meeting. This means winning more follow-up appointments and closing more deals.

To get started with the Blueprint, fill in each area in the first half of the document. For inspiration, check out the sample version in the second half.

Competitive Assessment Chart
You’ll provide this tool to your prospects and/or customers. You’ll use it to be a helpful consultant. It will aid your prospect in their decision-making process by letting them plug in a rating for different aspects of you and your competitors’ offerings, producing a definitive score for each player.

But there’s a hidden benefit for you: you’ll set the chart up strategically to accentuate your strengths and take your weaknesses out of the conversation. By doing this, you can introduce new considerations and sway the decision in your favor. Are you a quality provider with a high price? Then make the chart all about quality and take money out of the equation. Are you a value provider? Then do the opposite.

Misc. apps, tools, and books.

Disclosure: some affiliate links below.

Asana: my favorite project management app. Brought to you by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, Asana is intuitive, fast, and very responsive. It allows you assign tasks to your team members and monitor completion. It’s free.

Charlie
This is a great app for automating meeting preparation. I like tools like this, where all you have to do is set them up and forget about them. Charlie syncs your contacts, and before a calendar appointment it shoots you a simple one-page email about whomever your meeting. I might be mistaken, but I think it’s using AI to produce a textual story about your peer, which is pretty cool.

Newsle
When your prospects and customers win a new round of funding, acquire a company, release a product, or drop a big press release, you should probably find out right, right? Newsle gives you this knowledge by telling you whenever your contacts are in the news. When big things happen, extending a simple “congrats” usually works wonders.

Tom’s Planner: my favorite timeline creation tool. Tom’s Planner is great because it strips out all the unnecessary bells and whistles that often accompany timeline creator programs. It makes timeline changes quick and easy, which is important because they happen all too often.

YesWare: my favorite app for tracking emails. Yesware hooks up to your gmail and notifies you when recipients open and click on links in your messages. The app lets you create easily and A/B test templates, showing your performance over time. The only downside to Yesware is that it requires you to use Gmail.

Standing Desk (By Safco Products) I bought a standing desk because I learned that sitting all day was killing me (big surprise there). Using the desk made me feel healthier and more energetic. Less predictably, the simple act of standing had a major positive impact on my sales game: I began to speak more clearly and effortlessly because of an expanded diaphragm – this is why you never see professional singers sitting on their rumps.

Also, the standing position gave me an authoritative edge on tough prospect calls, situations where I wasn’t holding the cards. After all, your posture and stance is tied to your confidence and the way others perceive you. With all that in mind, I highly recommend using a standing desk, in conjunction with a cushy corrective mat to support your feet (this one feels like you’re walking on a cloud).

If you don’t do it for your health alone, do it for all the other benefits. I used this Safco model for three years and I’ve been very happy with it – it’s sturdy and relatively light. Please know that although they list it as adjustable, it’s difficult to move up and down in realtime (you need to take out a few screws).

Rapportive: this app by Linkedin shows you everything you need to know about your email contacts. After you hook it up to Gmail, your contact’s details, including photo and social accounts, pop up in a righthand column when you hover over their name. This one is helpful for verifying email addresses when you’re on the hunt.

Books

The Art of Client Service By Robert Solomon: a great little book of practical lessons that teach you how to make your clients happy. Solomon, with his stories from the advertising trenches, is great at articulating things you know intuitively but might not apply consciously, or in a disciplined way. Although his lessons are accumulated from the ad world, the book is applicable to any client service situation.

The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon & Brent Adamson
Dixon and Adamson, in collaboration with The Corporate Executive Board, assessed thousands of sales reps all over the world. They discovered that the sales elite are “challengers”. They question their prospects’ assumptions, and they’re self-confident. They don’t have a repetitive pitch. Instead they fit their product to their customers’ needs. This is an excellent book for the data-driven salesperson.

Rework By Jason Fried & David Heinemeir Hansson: this one, by the founders of 37signals, focuses on rethinking the usual assumptions about running a successful business. This might sound like it’s beyond the pale of sales and account management, but I think it’s a helpful text for a wide range of professionals. Although we use raw data to learn how to directly apply skills, we also learn a lot from metaphors in fictional stories. Then there’s a middle ground: non-fiction books that fall outside our vocation and/or usual interests. Lessons from this middle ground are particularly effective because they let us re-contextualize things that work.