Sales Prospecting Perspectives

AG Salesworks is pleased to bring you a guest post from Janelle Johnson, Director of Demand Generation at Act-On Software. 

In B2B marketing, sales and marketing emails play different but equally important roles in a successful communication strategy. Marketing emails lure the leads, and sales reels them in. But if nobody ever opens your messages, they won’t do your organization much good. Getting a prospect to open an email can be extremely challenging in today’s crowded marketplace. Many of us get hundreds of emails every day. Which ones make you click? Which ones make you hit delete?

Nothing can kill an inside sales opportunity quite like time. Even the most enthusiastic customers and prospects can turn away from a deal if something else catches their eye. The longer a deal sits and does not move through the pipeline, the more apt a prospect will be to lose interest. Below are a few ways to ensure that you’re not losing opportunities due to bad timing or poor follow up.

Summer weather is finally starting to blossom. Spring has sprung, Memorial Day has passed, and the dog days of summer are on their way! Many of us have already begun to daydream of summer travel plans. I’ve been hearing buzz around my office lately regarding my colleagues’ upcoming vacations for the summer months. I’m sure my coworkers and I aren’t the only ones with trips in store. I was quickly reminded that a majority of my prospects will be taking time off during the summer as well. Before I know it, I’ll be running into hundreds of out-of-office messages.

It’s new hire season (at least over here at AG)! We’ve seen several new faces this week, and with college graduations just around the corner, we’ll be seeing even more! Jumping into a new lead generation or inside sales career can be intimidating, but everyone has to start somewhere. I really enjoy working with AG’s new hires, and I’ve come up with the following pieces of advice to help new inside sales reps start off on the right foot.

With a family background in sales, it’s no wonder I love competition, organization, and numbers. I like that every month your slate is wiped clean and you have another 30 days to crush your numbers. But not only is sales a month-to-month game; it's also quarterly and yearly. The cycle in which we work in inside sales is organized and allows you to plan your time accordingly.

Happy Friday, Sales Prospecting Perspectives readers! We've had a busy week, with clients arriving and inside sales reps ramping up for a successful Q1. Without further ado, here are our favorite articles from the sales and marketing world this week! 

You wake up in the morning and check your email on your phone, tablet, or laptop. You get to work and you check your work email. You delete some emails, save some for reading later, and reply to others right away. But what makes you stop and read some emails versus saving them and forgetting to come back to them until a week later? There are a few things you can do to help your emails get noticed by prospects.

Happy holidays, Sales Prospecting Perspectives readers. It's back to work at AG, as inside sales reps and managers plan for Quarter 1. Sales and marketing professionals should start off the New Year on a high note. Our advice? In these last few days, inside sales reps should continue to call, but should also review the year's progress. How much have you changed as a sales professional? What about your messaging is different now, and why? Inside sales managers, have you come up with ideas to motivate your team this past year, and what are the results? Does gamification influence your leadership style? It's important to reflect on 2013 before we move in to 2014, and then adapt our sales strategies accordingly. Below, Sam gives some good advice for how to end the year strong as well. 

... or if you're me, cut it up, douse it with glitter and make a star instead

Everyone suffers from groggy redundancy within their job.  Whether you've written the same email 10 times already that day, you've said the same exact thing on every single phone call, or you're at the point where you're just staring at your computer screen, you need a break, a breather, and some inspiration.

This blog post is part three of a series of video blogs about the impact of technology on sales. See part one here and part two here. 

A few weeks ago I was putting together an email campaign to send out as a follow up to my client’s sales initiative, but I was having some difficulty setting up an integration tool on my computer. However, I knew that a sales rep on my client’s team was fairly tech savvy and had done some troubleshooting before, so I reached out to him asking for help. As I sat on the web conference using a program I had downloaded for free, I wasn’t dazed in the least when my colleague took control of my screen and walked me through each step. Within 5 minutes he had shown me how to set up everything perfectly!

After our conversation, I realized how much  of the technology we were using I had taken for granted. Not only was I about to greatly improve the amount of activity I could produce within a day, but I was working with a colleague who was half way across the country as if he were sitting next to me in my cube. That got me wondering: What other changes in technology have had the biggest impact on how we communicate and operate in sales? I’ve interviewed a few of our sales veterans to see what changes in sales technology they feel have made the biggest impact within the past decade.