Sales Prospecting Perspectives

A lot has been written lately on the AG Salesworks Blog about different approaches to inside sales/teleprospecting and specifically about having “business conversations” with the right people within our target audiences.  Recently, I was reading a number of articles from various sources on the web, and I stumbled upon an article posted on Inc. by Tom Searcy titled, “What a 9-Year-Old Can Teach you about selling”.

If you have read my blogs in the past, you know I that follow the Harvard Business Review on Twitter and enjoy reading the many articles, blogs, and “management tips” they post online. Well I am going to reference another one today!

A recent blog in the Harvard Business Review written by Tony Schwartz, entitled, “The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time caught my eye as I began thinking about my upcoming day and the tasks I had on my “to-do” list. 

This is a question that I have had to answer/strategize on for every teleprospecting program that I have been a part of here at AG Salesworks.   Over the 8+ years I have run a number of programs for organizations that provide a solution focused on Security, from email encryption, SSO and IAM solutions, to Network Security solutions.  Reflecting on this experience I have found that this question is one that is extremely important when running a program that is focused on finding actionable sales opportunities for a Security solution.   

I have recently started to leverage Twitter as an outlet to stay current and explore various authors/sources of business best practices and business topics.  Believe me, I know I am late to the party – but if you know me well, you know this is a huge step.

We have been having a lot of internal discussions about incenting behavior and different tactics to create an environment that drives a team’s actions to a desired result and ultimately achieving success for our clients, for the individual (inside sales reps), and the organization.  These discussions have included everything from tweaks in the compensation plans, adjustments to the goals, to changing the performance metric targets.  So needless to say, I have been thinking a lot about how I try to get this type of response in different areas of life, my kids, with my team, really across the board.  

In my experience there are a number of factors that go into setting and allocating money for marketing programs over the course of a quarter/year.  (I am by no means an expert on this subject). 

I came across an entry on B2B Ideas@Work Blog, shared by Craig Lindberg.  Craig is Partner and Executive VP with B2B Marketing experts MLT Creative out of Atlanta GA.  Craig's entry, entitled, "In BtoB Sales, There's No Time for Monkey Business,"  really made me laugh, but made me think, too.

Over the past few weeks I have been asked a number of times by my boss - "so what is the story with ABC client and renewal?" 

On Friday night I was out having dinner with some friends and as the night went on we ran into a group of folks that I had not met before but who knew the people I was having dinner with.  We ended up inviting them to join us, and as the story goes in most settings with folks you are just meeting, inevitably the question arose, "Matt, what do you do?"