Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Do you wish more of your qualified opportunities would move farther down the sales pipeline?

I would assume the answer is yes.  

Part of the sales process for most technology companies is to conduct a web demonstration to a prospect or a group of prospects.  In my experience, this demo usually happens very early in the relationship building stage, at a critical time when the two companies are still rather unfamiliar with each other.

How fast summer goes by.  Now we’re back to autumn-scented Yankee Candles and Halloween costumes. I wonder how many Miley Cyrus bear costumes and Robin Thicke “Beetlejuice” outfits will be out trick-or-treating?  

Too many sales reps rely on their customers to coach them through the sales cycle. 

However, we need to learn to be the coach. A book that’s bringing sales strategies to the next level is The Challenger Sale.  Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson suggestively describe how salespeople can fit into 5 different categories: the Relationship Builder, the Reactive Problem Solver, the Hard Worker, the Lone Wolf and the Challenger. 

You get them in your inbox. I get them in my inbox. Sometimes our email has the intuition to deflect them to our spam folder.  In many cases, they’re from people you don’t know or from a company you’ve never heard of, and they’re long – unnecessarily long.  They are trying to market and sell something, but do you really care to even read a word of it?  These are the so-called “canned emails,” “spam mail” or “junk mail” – however you define it.

Sales professionals obviously prefer face-to-face meetings with their prospects but sometimes, given their territories, that just can’t happen on a regular basis.  The alternative has mostly been to set up a conference bridge, email over a slide deck or Powerpoint presentation or get on the phone to sell.  Maybe they’ll toss over some whitepapers so their prospects can read up before the call and prepare some questions.

Too often business development reps do themselves a disservice by masking their personalities, and consequently becoming someone who sounds boring or disinterested.  And why should prospects on the other end of the phone show interest or enthusiasm if sales reps haven’t done that themselves?

Few would argue that many accounts and prospects that need to be nurtured can often be overlooked.  In the stream of advice and information discussing the inside sales process, I feel that lead nurturing is neglected.  These nurtured accounts could very well be your future customers. 

I’m a big fan of the blogs and articles that are published on Forbes.com and this morning our COO, Pete Gracey, coincidentally shared an article with the team written by Carmine Gallo, a contributor to Forbes, regarding how to pitch anything in 15 seconds.  At first glance the title set my expectations toward some cheesy, outdated methodology, but what I discovered really resonated with the process our company has been working to put in play.

Businesses consciously take great measures to create and sustain a positive online identity.  They want to be found, and once they are, they want to exude a good, lasting impression.  In the B2B world, the human behavior that precedes the act of evaluating and buying has changed drastically with the rise of social media and the availability of endless online intelligence. 

The amount of data we are presented with on a daily basis can be overwhelming. We are inundated with endless streams of data, much of which is frankly of little use and tends to obstruct our need for clarity and fair analysis.  As a starting point to cut through the clutter, I’ve listed 3 key areas that marketing and sales professionals can utilize as a way to land in the eye of the storm of big data with respect to effective B2B sales prospecting.