Sales Prospecting Perspectives

If you’re a content marketer, you know how important it is to produce interesting and relevant content.

If you’re a content marketer for the B2B space, you know how important it is to produce content that’s also fact-driven and referral-worthy.

Many of the potentials buyers we’re writing for don’t want to read fluff; they want clear initiatives and numbers in a format that’s easy to share. This is especially true for Directors of Sales and CIOs; they see numbers every day, and they are used to these numbers telling the truth. That’s why B2B content with statistics in headlines often perform better.

The problem? Many B2B companies producing content on a regular basis simply don’t have time to produce their own facts and figures. So, with attribution in mind, they hunt down the best reports from their peers.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest blog from Sharmin Kent, Marketing Content Specialist at TinderBox. 

Now that the average B2B buyer is more than halfway through her purchase decision before engaging with a sales rep, it's critical that the content propelling a prospect through the pipeline is informative and relevant. An organization's marketing team is usually responsible for creating sales content, and communication and collaboration between the two departments can be rare.

As social sellers, it is imperative that we constantly share valuable information and insights with our networks. This is essentially what separates us from the rest of the sales community. However, clearly there is not enough time in the day for us to be constantly creating brand new content from scratch, nor is it necessarily beneficial to do so.

A healthy content marketing mix involves a significant portion of 3^rd party content sharing in addition to original thought-leadership pieces. By sharing content from other sources, you are not only showing your network that you respect the opinions of others in your industry, you are also showing them that you’re well informed on topics that are important to them. For these reasons, it is important that you master some basic content curation skills to ensure you always have an ample amount of information to share with your community of prospective buyers.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Amar Sheth, Principal at Sales for Life.

If there is anything that the NYPD and US Airways social media disasters have taught us in the world of sales (and business for that matter), it’s that you’ve got to do a far better job of organizing messaging than ever before.

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.

AG Salesworks is pleased to bring you a guest post from Anum Hussain, Inbound Marketing Manager for HubSpot. 

When I see a post on Facebook with an incredibly long, UTM riddled link ... I cringe. It only takes an extra minute to turn that into a shortened bit.ly link!

I get it. Updating and maintaining your business’ various social media accounts is a time suck. The fact that you’re even using Facebook is a blessing. But if you just invested a mere extra two minutes per update to optimize that post for success, over time you’ll see your Facebook metrics improve.

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. 

The successful execution of a marketing strategy will require some specific set of skills to produce the content, a process to manage and monitor the appropriate social communities, and a strong set of tools to keep all the moving parts together.

Good morning, Sales Prospecting Perspectives readers! This week was an eventful one for us here in Norwood, Mass. On Monday, we celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and took a day off to remember his contributions to peace in this world. On Wednesday, there was a snowstorm, and we got hit with about 7 inches of snow! Needless to say, many did not make the trek to the office that day; instead, we stayed safe at home and did our prospecting from there. Who hasn't heard of telecommuting for a teleprospecting job? We hope readers in the New England area stayed safe when the snowstorm rode through their area. And readers in the West? We're just jealous. 

To start off our weekly recap, here are our favorite marketing and sales articles from this week. 

Technology companies create solutions that are complicated, have various levels of functionality as well as varying levels for usage.  Whether verbally or through content creation, marketers and sales professionals will run into a consistent issue: How do I explain this without rambling on and on?

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.