Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Happy Friday, Sales Prospecting Perspectives readers! This week was a busy one for us. As it was the last week of February, our inside sales reps strived to meet their month's goals while continuously increasing their pipelines. In the marketing world, we worked hard to produce a new eBook. Social Selling: How to Use Social Media for B2B Sales is available now for free. Social selling can complement your pre-existing sales efforts and result in more contacts, leads, and even closed sales. Let us know what you think!

Over the past year, social selling has become one of the hottest topics. When combined with outbound prospecting, social selling can be a powerful selling method.  However, don't be fooled by the phrase "social selling." It is not a vehicle to get your sales pitch out into the world; that would completely shut you down.  It's a method of selling through listening and thought leadership.  We are in an era where prospects choose most of their buying path, as they have so much information (on products and services) readily available to them without having to consult sales professionals.  Understand that social networks are not to be used as sales megaphones, but rather a means of listening and offering consultative advice to help others. Here are a few pointers when it comes to social selling.

Editor's Note: This blog post is an excerpt from the eBook Marketers Making a Difference: Volume 3 about creating a comprehensive B2B marketing strategy. It was written by AG Salesworks' Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales Richard April. 

Having a detailed understanding of your ideal customer is a key starting point for a truly comprehensive marketing strategy. To gain this insight, initiate a buyer persona exercise with all the key stakeholders from sales, marketing, support, product management, operations, development, etc. Broader input will yield more detailed insight into these personas. It is important to the success of this exercise to have senior executive buy in and participation.

Happy Friday, Sales Prospecting Perspectives readers! We hope you had a productive week; we sure did, and this afternoon we'll be having a contest between inside sales reps who passed leads this week. Despite the consistent snow storms in the Northeast (and there seems to be another on the way), we've continued calling across the country for leads. It's important to stay vigorous even through equally vigorous weather conditions.

Happy Valentine's Day, Sales Prospecting Perspectives readers! We hope you're doing something special with that someone special or treating yourself to something that makes you happy today. On Valentine's Day, some people may feel down if they don't have a Valentine, just like in inside sales when people can feel slighted if they don't have a prospect. Therefore, we've compiled some helpful content about how to better market and teleprospect to these potential clients. Check out our favorite articles we shared on Twitter this week: 

AG Salesworks is pleased to bring you a guest post from Anum Hussain, Inbound Marketing Manager for HubSpot. 

When I see a post on Facebook with an incredibly long, UTM riddled link ... I cringe. It only takes an extra minute to turn that into a shortened bit.ly link!

I get it. Updating and maintaining your business’ various social media accounts is a time suck. The fact that you’re even using Facebook is a blessing. But if you just invested a mere extra two minutes per update to optimize that post for success, over time you’ll see your Facebook metrics improve.

Happy Friday, Sales Prospecting Perspectives readers! It's finally the weekend. After a snow-laden week here at AG, with icy roads and cold winds, we're ready to go home, sit by the fire, and watch the Sochi Winter Olympics. We'll be cheering on America while also taking a close look at how the event is marketed. We'll also be brainstorming some inside sales enablement contests inspired by the Olympics' team spirit.

Editor's Note: This blog post is an excerpt from the eBook Marketers Making a Difference: Volume 3 about creating a comprehensive B2B marketing strategy. It was written by AG Salesworks' Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales Richard April. 

The successful execution of a marketing strategy will require some specific set of skills to produce the content, a process to manage and monitor the appropriate social communities, and a strong set of tools to keep all the moving parts together.

Having the know-how to find the right contact could be one of the most underrated functions of the prospecting process. This ability separates someone who is average and someone who excels. It sounds easy enough until you actually sit down and try calling into a company like Microsoft or IBM to see who handles some niche area of technology operations.

It's officially the end of the first month of 2014. Was the new year all you thought it would be? Are you still keeping your New Year's resolutions? Are your sales and marketing teams surpassing the goals they set at the end of Q4? Now is a great time for some reflection on your sales and marketing plans. Look back on the statistics from this month compared to other years, and see how your teams are doing. We hope they're succeeding!