Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest blog from Dave Landry, professional business writer and personal finance advisor. 

Building strong client relationships is perhaps one of the most important things that any marketer can accomplish, especially given the increasing importance of having a popular and well-known brand in today’s cluttered B2B landscape.

Branding For Unity

A powerful brand can help lead to the development of a community that has a positive effect on customers and employees alike. Strong emotions regarding a company will affect purchasing decisions from potential clients, but will also promote pride in their work from employees. And even more importantly, customer support really is everyone’s job, particularly in high-end B2B markets where solutions are hardly a one-time purchase.

What does it mean to be a manager, director, SVP, VP, President, COO, CFO, or CEO, outside of the responsibilities listed in the job description?  It means upholding duties, meeting goals, and contributing to the company.  Sometimes, executives seem to forget the last portion: "contribute to the company."  Many people automatically think, “Well, I'm doing a great job fulfilling my duties, so of course I'm contributing to the company.” But that's not always the case.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Gareth Goh, Content Marketing Manager of InsightSquared.

Inbound, inbound, inbound.

Inbound sales, inbound marketing - it seems like that’s the only strategy that sales leaders depend on these days to generate leads and grow pipeline. And they should be focused on inbound! After all, the concept of inbound - aligning sales and marketing with the buyer’s intent and process, attracting them to you rather than pushing yourself on them - works. HubSpot pioneered the concept of Inbound Marketing and they have now built an entire industry around it. Buyers are becoming smarter and more sophisticated - they don’t need aggressive sales reps pushing products that they don’t want on them.

But wait! What about outbound prospecting?

Two weeks ago, I entered the Boston Exhibition and Conference Center in awe. It was my first time at HubSpot’s INBOUND Conference, and as a content marketer just starting my career in marketing, there was certainly a lot to take in. I watched Simon Sinek give an inspiring keynote on leadership and learned about how different neuro signals can affect your work. I talked to Boston businesses about how they’re using inbound methodology. I raced from session to session with my laptop and iPod to jot down notes in Google Drive and tweet my top takeaways.

It was an overwhelming experience, for sure. One factor I noticed across the board was the focus on the ever-elusive future - the future of CRM, the future of B2B marketing the future of storytelling. There was even an event called FutureM that coincided with INBOUND14. Why was everyone so preoccupied with the future of marketing?

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing.

We’re such an impatient lot.  The more we can measure, the more (irrationally) we expect what we're measuring to work immediately. 

This applies to many facets of life these days, but particularly for B2B sales and marketing professionals.

Despite a clearer understanding of the buyer’s journey and timeline, we still expect our leads to convert immediately.  We expect new/cold lists to generate results right away.  We expect social selling to drive warm pipeline quickly (apparently just because it’s social).