Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a post from Taylor Lacey, a Business Development Representative at AG Salesworks.

What do you picture when you hear the word "nurture?"

Many people may think of a plant "nurtured" to full health. In inside sales, potential customers can also be nurtured. If they aren't a good fit now, does that mean they will always be unqualified for your product or service? Or can they slowly become a lead by means of a strong lead nurturing campaign? 

We’ve all seen the contact who doesn’t quite fit the qualifying criteria and is automatically added to the nurture bucket. These are three important tips to remember when nurturing prospects.

AG Salesworks is pleased to present you with a guest blog post from Brian Serino, SVP of Sales and Business Development at NetProspex. 

We’re all familiar with the deep-rooted battle between sales and marketing. It goes something like this: sales blames marketing for their inability to produce quality leads, while marketers fault sales for their lack of lead management skills. In this battle, however, there is no winner, because when sales and marketing teams work individually, poor lead management results on both sides.

I have the opportunity to join calls with our inside sales team during the sales process frequently. It is exciting to speak with executives at companies who are in the beginning stages of creating an inside sales team themselves or are entertaining the idea of outsourcing. Choosing to outsource the function is often the result of these conversations, usually because these companies haven’t quite mastered best practices yet and need support. I really enjoy the task of taking on engagements to help develop the inside sales function, whether we continue our efforts after the first few months once up to altitude, or whether we hand off the inside sales processes to them once they’re running at full capacity.

During the initial discussions with sales and marketing executives, there are always common themes in the questions that are asked. As AG Salesworks is a top consideration for many companies out there, I thought it would make sense to address the questions that I hear the most:

1. How many opportunities should I expect to see per month, after the team is fully ramped?

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.

If you partner with a teleprospecting firm or have an in house inside sales team, they may have some sort of scoring system in place to evaluate the quality of the opportunities they are throwing over the fence to sales.  I applaud the idea in theory, but I can't help but equate it to letting a 6th grader fill out their own report card.  ALL A'S BABY!!  I'm not accusing your vendor or in house inside sales team of dishonesty; I'm merely stating that they are biased as they generated the opp.  If you really want to find out if your fully qualified leads are living up to that name, ask your customer...the salesperson receiving it.  You can easily ascertain the quality of an opportunity by asking your sales people these three basic questions. 

Accepting a ‘disconnect’ between marketing and sales is unacceptable.  When working in conjunction with each other as a team, both groups have the ability to create a finely tuned machine that drives revenue. With the appropriate and consistent communication between marketing and sales, this does not have to be overly complicated to achieve.  The lead qualification process is a necessary and obviously important bridge to cross in order to translate the marketing team’s work into revenue dollars.  Most importantly, constantly generating the right amount of pipeline will keep the sales team cranking. 

Happy Friday Everyone!

I hope everyone had a great week! Great news for all you Droid users! Due to the success of our iPhone/iPod app we also came out with an Adroid app! Both of these apps provide great inside sales content including direct feeds to our blogs!

Have you ever failed miserably at completing a task because you tried to do it in a manner you wished it to be done, rather than doing what has been proven to actually work? I’ve put “dry clean only” in the wash; I’ve “jerry rigged” the Christmas tree to the car rather than fully wrapping and tying it down. I’ve used duck tape to fix my grill. The results: new tiny sweaters for my nephew, a 2 mile “There’s a damn Christmas tree in the middle road” back-up on interstate 93 and  the infamous atomic grill incident of 2002.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you another guest entry from one of our BDRs, Jill Ryan.