Sales Prospecting Perspectives

The AG Salesworks marketing team had a busy but extremely illuminating week at HubSpot's Inbound 2013. The conference provided some excellent content, motivation, and ideas.  We heard from distinguished speakers like Seth Godin, Arianna Huffington (@ariannahuff), Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) , Ann Handley (@marketingprofs), Rand Fishkin (@randfish) and of course Dharmesh Shah (@dharmesh) and Brian Halligan (@bhalligan), all very unique and motivational. Mike Volpe (@mvolpe) and his team at Hubspot did a wonderful job putting on this informative conference that taught so many marketers how to think more innovatively! These conferences remind us to do a marketing and sales tune-up: are you really reaching your ideal target audience, are you closing the loop with sales, or are you efficiently nurturing leads down your sales funnel? Of course these types of questions shouldn't be brought up only as a result of attending an event or meeting, we should always be fine-tuning our processes and finding what works best, but events like this certainly spark a flood of ideas.

“Most people meander in and out of lots of conversations. Don’t be most people. Be tighter than that. Be more influential.”

Craig Wortmann, who has written several guest posts for us including How to Optimize Your Sales Engine in 30 Days and 5 Things Salespeople Should Stop Doing Immediately, recently released a new eBook, How to Communicate With Influence for Sales Pros & Leaders. Wortmann, CEO of the tools and services firm Sales Engine and professor of professional selling, entrepreneurship and leadership at University of Chicago Booth School of Business, provided this eBook as a resource for sales professionals to learn how to become better influencers, better conversationalists and better sellers. As a reader who flew through the book in half an hour, I can confidently say that "How to Communicate with Influence" accomplished all of that and more.

Too often business development reps do themselves a disservice by masking their personalities, and consequently becoming someone who sounds boring or disinterested.  And why should prospects on the other end of the phone show interest or enthusiasm if sales reps haven’t done that themselves?

The office is teeming with people moving between desks, rushing to write information down or share something with a co-worker. Phone conversations can be heard from every corner of the office, and the voices mingle to produce one low drone, a din heard throughout. In one corner of the office, a man hangs up the phone and emits an exasperated sigh. In the other corner of the office, a woman jumps up for joy, pumping her fists in the air. There’s an air of excitement in the office: success could happen for anyone; anyone can make a difference. It’s a wild house of ambitious thrill-seekers; it’s a jungle in there.