Sales Prospecting Perspectives

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.  

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Beth Cohen King, Director of Marketing at Ve Interactive.

In a recent companywide meeting at Ve Interactive US HQ, we discussed Steve Job’s secrets to great presentations.  At the top of the list was: “Answer the one question that matters most, and that is, ‘Why should I care?'"  As sales and marketing professionals, this should always be our number one concern.  It doesn’t matter if we work in B2B sales and marketing or provide sales and marketing for B2C clients.  Why should our prospects/leads/customers care about what we do? And why should they continue to care? And the biggest question, what value do we provide?  As Albert Einstein said, “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” Therefore, value should be at the core of all our sales and marketing efforts.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Cari Zoch, Marketing Manager at Avention, a company that offers real-time, actionable B2B data to deliver 21st century business info, solutions for sales, marketing and research. 

It’s no secret that the buyer’s journey has changed.  Whether you’re looking at Google’s ZMOT theory or some other evaluation of the change in the process, it’s clear that customers are doing more research and talking to sales people later and later in the process.  There have been countless articles written in attempts to coach organizations on how to get into the decision-making process earlier and earlier.  There have probably been equally as many articles written on getting to the right buyer at the right time.   But once you get to that buyer, are you presenting the right message and offering true solutions to their business problems, or are you pushing a set of product features trying to fit their needs into your product specs?

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Jonathan Catley, Online Sales & Marketing Manager at MD Connect.

Peter Drucker, business genius, once said, “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” That concept essentially defines marketing as early stage selling, but since Drucker’s time, many companies have divided marketing and selling into separate disciplines, rather than realizing that they are essentially just different points on the continuum of bringing the customer to the business.

(and how to stop failure from happening)

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Lisa Fugere, Content Marketing Strategist at Radius Intelligence a company that offers sales prospecting software powered by big data. You can find her on Google +!

Radius offers a marketing platform built on top of a database that sorts through billions of data about U.S. businesses each day. Because our platform uses big data to help marketers unlock key customer segments, we’ve thrown our hat into the overcrowded online world of marketing about big data solutions. Online search traffic for big data has surged in the last couple of years.  

Happy Friday, Sales Prospecting Perspectives readers! It's the first week of March, which means readers are anxiously awaiting spring weather. The past few days have been bright, so they may start getting warmer soon! This week was a good one for those in the office, as a few inside sales reps passed leads that translated into large transactions. To get your sales team prospecting effectively and your marketing team supporting sales effectively, here are some of our favorite sales and marketing articles from this week: 

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

For sales and marketing teams, reaching across the aisle can be a foreign concept. In some cases, that’s putting it mildly.

To be sure, there are salespeople and marketers who comfortably co-exist. Sometimes they even eat lunch together.

But the prevailing opinion is firmly entrenched: Sales and marketing just don’t get along. Don’t understand each other. Don’t cooperate. Aren’t aligned. And, as a consequence, campaign ROI often suffers.

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!

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from David Hazeltine, Director, Campaign Strategy at Fiserv.

Sales and Marketing integration. It’s such a nice theory, but yet in so many companies, the Sales team isn’t happy with the amount or quality of leads being generated by Marketing. Marketing is frustrated that salespeople won’t give them the time of day, never mind appreciate that Marketing exists for one reason: to support Sales. If sales are down, fingers point to Marketing for not providing enough leads. If there are no marketing campaigns in the works, fingers point to Sales for not clearly stating what they need.

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.