Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Two weeks ago, I entered the Boston Exhibition and Conference Center in awe. It was my first time at HubSpot’s INBOUND Conference, and as a content marketer just starting my career in marketing, there was certainly a lot to take in. I watched Simon Sinek give an inspiring keynote on leadership and learned about how different neuro signals can affect your work. I talked to Boston businesses about how they’re using inbound methodology. I raced from session to session with my laptop and iPod to jot down notes in Google Drive and tweet my top takeaways.

AG Salesworks is pleased to bring you a guest post from Jeff Shore, an in-demand sales expert, author, speaker and executive coach. 

A client of mine presented a difficult but common challenge this week:

“We’re seeing the same numbers of prospects as we have over the past several months; we’re just not converting the sales.”

Been there?

Sales enablement is a hot topic for sales and marketing agencies in 2014. DemandMetric and SAVO Group recently hosted sales enablement summits. Sirius Decisions produced a sales enablement framework and model. HubSpot is hiring “Sales Enablement Stars.”

Alongside these companies, AG Salesworks is encouraging sales and marketing agencies to seriously consider their sales enablement process. Before now, sales and marketing may have had different understandings of the elusive term “sales enablement.” Our newest guide, “Sales Enablement Explained,” includes worksheets, tips, and advice for organizations to agree on what a successful sales enablement plan means to them, including its definition, role, and effectiveness.  

Happy Friday, Sales Prospecting Perspectives readers! This week was a busy one for us. As it was the last week of February, our inside sales reps strived to meet their month's goals while continuously increasing their pipelines. In the marketing world, we worked hard to produce a new eBook. Social Selling: How to Use Social Media for B2B Sales is available now for free. Social selling can complement your pre-existing sales efforts and result in more contacts, leads, and even closed sales. Let us know what you think!

Over the past year, social selling has become one of the hottest topics. When combined with outbound prospecting, social selling can be a powerful selling method.  However, don't be fooled by the phrase "social selling." It is not a vehicle to get your sales pitch out into the world; that would completely shut you down.  It's a method of selling through listening and thought leadership.  We are in an era where prospects choose most of their buying path, as they have so much information (on products and services) readily available to them without having to consult sales professionals.  Understand that social networks are not to be used as sales megaphones, but rather a means of listening and offering consultative advice to help others. Here are a few pointers when it comes to social selling.

Editor's Note: This blog post is an excerpt from the eBook Marketers Making a Difference: Volume 3 about creating a comprehensive B2B marketing strategy. It was written by AG Salesworks' Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales Richard April. 

Having a detailed understanding of your ideal customer is a key starting point for a truly comprehensive marketing strategy. To gain this insight, initiate a buyer persona exercise with all the key stakeholders from sales, marketing, support, product management, operations, development, etc. Broader input will yield more detailed insight into these personas. It is important to the success of this exercise to have senior executive buy in and participation.

Happy Friday, Sales Prospecting Perspectives readers! We hope you had a productive week; we sure did, and this afternoon we'll be having a contest between inside sales reps who passed leads this week. Despite the consistent snow storms in the Northeast (and there seems to be another on the way), we've continued calling across the country for leads. It's important to stay vigorous even through equally vigorous weather conditions.

Editor's Note: This blog post is an excerpt from the eBook Marketers Making a Difference: Volume 3 about creating a comprehensive B2B marketing strategy. It was written by AG Salesworks' Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales Richard April. 

It's time to dive into developing a comprehensive marketing strategy. I stress “comprehensive” because I think it is important to consider every avenue that may be relevant to and most importantly get you in front of your target audience. Determine the ideal mix of every element that will yield the best results and tie as many aspects as possible together to compound the impact of each campaign or element. To achieve this you will need to not only test, measure and repeat, but pay close attention to what you learned from buyer persona exercises and how they go about making purchasing decisions.