Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Amanda Maksymiw, Content Marketing Manager at Lattice Engines. 

Back in 2011, the Harvard Business Review educated us on exactly what timely manner meant. One hour. In fact, when companies reached out to prospects within an hour, they were seven times more like to qualify the lead. The Lead Management Study from InsideSales.com cites even more startling stats: “The odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times. The odds of qualifying a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 21 times.”

Simply put, whether prospecting a lead from an inbound program or from your website, sales needs to be proactive and follow up in a timely manner. Here are a few ideas to help sales reps get ahead of the clock.

I have always been a firm believer that there are two types of people in this world: those who have children and those who don’t. The reason I differentiate between them is that those who don’t have children tend to think they are the best parents in the world, and some insist on telling you how to raise your kids.

Now, a bit about me: I am a father of three with a boy and two girls.  I have had my share of experiences with people saying things like, “I would never do that with my kids,” or, “You’re doing that?”  I have to admit, there was a time, before I had children, that I remember saying, “Oh my, I would never feed my kids french fries.”  Friends and family fall into one of these two groups. But when or if they have children, their opinions about parenting usually change, and they start to understand how difficult a task it is and stop judging others for their choices. The same can be said regarding outsourcing lead generation for sales and marketing.

AG Salesworks is pleased to bring you a guest post from Jeff Shore, an in-demand sales expert, author, speaker and executive coach. 

A client of mine presented a difficult but common challenge this week:

“We’re seeing the same numbers of prospects as we have over the past several months; we’re just not converting the sales.”

Been there?

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Brian Hansford, Director of Client Services and Marketing Automation Practice at Heinz Marketing.

Demand generation has dramatically evolved from activity-based contact marketing to a core strategic function in organizations.  Marketing Automation is a leading force in this evolution, and B2B marketers are rapidly increasing their acumen to provide a direct impact to revenue generation.  But ROI results don’t come quickly, and they’re often hard to measure.    

Heinz Marketing and OnTarget Consulting completed the 2014 Marketing Automation Effectiveness and Performance Survey and we developed this infographic to share the results.  Survey data is on SlideShare.  

There is nothing better than a sales manager who can speak from real experience when providing advice. It can be very difficult to relate to a boss who seems like they need to refer to a sales instruction manual.  It was always encouraging to know that my boss, at one point, had walked in my shoes and understood how to do the job. 

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Amar Sheth, Principal at Sales for Life.

If there is anything that the NYPD and US Airways social media disasters have taught us in the world of sales (and business for that matter), it’s that you’ve got to do a far better job of organizing messaging than ever before.

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?