Sales Prospecting Perspectives Weekly Recap – Week of July 26, 2023
It's Friday, and that means it's time for a Weekly Recap! What did you do to motivate your sales team this week? At AG, we held Extreme BDR Bingo. Inside sales reps were distributed bingo sheets with squares such as: 30 dials before 10 a.m., 3 leads in a day, 700 activities in a week, arrive before 8:15 a.m., etc. The prize for completing five squares in a row was $50, and the contest was so successful that sales enablement was rewarded extra money to keep it going throughout the rest of the month (as more and more people kept winning bingo). It was a big success. Be creative in how you inspire your sales team!
The article we're featuring today is “The Most Effective B2B Lead Generation Methods” by Ayaz Nanji at Marketing Profs. According to a report by InsideSales.com, the most effective methods are outbound marketing (telemarketing, virtual or remote sales), event marketing (tradeshows, webinars and seminars) and online marketing (email newsletters, websites, and blogs). This reaffirms what AG knew all along: outbound marketing is not dying; it is, in fact, alive and well. At AG, we’ve learned to perfect the best of both worlds, complementing cold calling with inbound marketing. There are many other useful statistics in this report, so definitely take a look.
Monday: On Monday, Sam wrote about how to work with more than one client at a time successfully in her post, 4 Ways to Ramp Up on New Clients and Support Outside Sales Reps’ Processes. She recommends creating a sales card that keeps all relevant information about a client in one place, listening in on calls or roleplaying, learning how to manage time, and learning about the outside sales reps’ processes or the way they communicate. Ramping up on new projects, learning about new products and adapting to new outside reps can be a pain, but if you have these essentials, then the process should be easy.
Tuesday: There are many things that can make a campaign fail, and Craig outlines them in his post: 7 Factors That Can Kill an Inside Sales Team's Campaign, giving tips for how to avoid that nasty outcome. Among them are focusing on your list and quality data, handing out simple collateral, managing your time effectively and making sure there’s a clean process for closed loop feedback. Without doing these things, there’s a better chance that a campaign will fail. We could use the excuse that we’re in the doldrums of the summer months for a reason why our sales teams are struggling, but we all knew these months were coming. These factors can be used as a checklist to make sure you’re increasing your team’s summertime performance.
Wednesday: On Wednesday, Content Marketing guru Damian Davila wrote a blog post called Why Mad Men Marketing is Moot: Account Managing in the Digital Era. He talks about three trends he observed in the field of client project management, including market success versus client satisfaction, thinking like the client’s client, and "winging it” as a poor sales technique. Don Draper from Mad Men gives the impression of an AE who knows what he's doing, but in our day and age, he would be lost. Today's account executive needs to think like the client’s customers and develop the best sales techniques for them.
Thursday: Finally, Colleen wrote LinkedIn and SalesLoft: Your Ultimate Tools for Sales Prospecting on Thursday. Salesloft is a great tool that integrates well with LinkedIn, allowing you to build lists, giving you alerts and syncing with your CRM, while LinkedIn helps you by allowing you to export connections, use group statistics for better targeting and marketing, and connect with people even if you don't have shared connections through groups. Many people don’t use LinkedIn for these things, but it’s important as a sales rep to use all the resources you have.
That’s all for today. Have a fantastic weekend!
