Sales Prospecting Perspectives

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?

Last week I attended my first Boston Chapter AAISP meeting.  The topic was on content and how we can use content to help our sales process and become advisors to our prospects.  Through a show of hands at the meeting, when asked how many people are currently using content to drive business, I was very surprised that the overwhelming majority kept their hands folded on the table before them.  Cliff Pollen of Postwire and Visible Gains gave the statistic of 90:9:1 in regards to 90% of people read content, 9% share content and only 1% actually write content.  Amazing!  Here are some key points from the meeting and some reminders of how we can help our buyers.

It’s almost 2013 and innovation has sky rocketed to an all time high.  Think of all the technology companies that exist now, solely because of the existence of the “Cloud”.  The number of B2B technology companies that have been created just from that one phenomenon is mind blowing.  But with so much freshness and unfamiliarity within the marketplace comes a very common issue:  “We have this awesome new product, but we’re not really sure which industry or which executives to target.” 

I recently had the privilege of attending a marketing breakfast roundtable hosted by NetProspex, where 25 bright marketing minds from the Boston area, including Ann Handley of MarketingProfs, gathered to discuss various marketing topics.  When registering, each participant was asked to submit a question they wanted an answer to or a topic that they wanted to discuss.  The conversation was flowing, the insights were remarkable and we were able to cover all of one question; who should be in control of content?