Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Our job is to find highly qualified sales leads for our customers that will lead to qualified opportunities. Our clients come to us with a need to fill their pipeline and want us to do so as quickly and effectively as possible. One of the first questions usually asked when speaking with potential or brand new customers is what we ­recommend for a call strategy for the campaign. To be more clear, customers who are either outsourcing or supplementing their teleprospecting efforts to us want to know if calling efforts should be focused on cold calls, follow ups on warm leads from marketing events, or target accounts identified by their own outside sales reps.

In my opinion, the answer to this question is fairly straightforward: calling efforts should be focused on all three areas because the potential of uncovering great leads can come from any of these sources. Sure, there are caveats, like the amount of resources and time you are able to allocate to each, but in general, I think the best route is to mix things up and call into a few different sources at any given time.

Halloween! Thanksgiving! Christmas and Hanukkah! All of these events are great in Q4… but in sales and teleprospecting, it seems like Q4 is everyone’s least favorite time of year. Everyone is focused on closing business rather than building new business. But once the holidays are over and it’s back to work in 2014… Uh oh! Where’s the pipeline?

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Lisa Fugere, Content Marketing Strategist at Radius Intelligence a company that offers sales prospecting software powered by big data. You can find her on Google +!

As a neighbor to the Radius sales team, I overhear a lot of phone calls. I was recently going about my business when a sales rep halfway through his first week of his first sales job slammed down his phone in such frustration that a few rogue papers flew off his desk.

There is more to teleprospecting and B2B cold calling than a lot of people might think. There is a method to the madness; you don’t just sit down at a desk one day, pick up a phone, and make some dials. There are multiple campaigns to work on simultaneously, and in order to stay organized, we have to use lead statuses.

Reading the title of this blog you might think, “Why would I not want to be comfortable with my client?” Or, “I have a great relationship with my client.” These are great responses, as you should want to have a good relationship and be comfortable in terms of communicating. But I am talking about getting to that point in your relationship where you might be getting lazy. For example, you could relate this to the point in a relationship with your significant other where you start to leave your clothes on the floor, or wear sweatpants to the movies. YIKES. This should never be the case with your client.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Adam Becker, Director of Sales at Tinderbox.

As a sales manager, I spend a great deal of time creating and implementing effective work practices in the sales process to make sure my team knows how to get organized, develop a call plan, and use tools to keep track of their notes and appointments. You can’t cater to the laggards in this business; as a colleague of mine from AG, Craig Ferrara, once said, “Bad oysters equate to lost time and money.” That’s why creating processes for the high performers to accentuate and try to replicate success is so important.

This is a sales blog, so if you are reading this, you’re most likely already a Linkedin pro. If not, you should check out our guide to resourcefulness, which includes basic information about how to get started on LinkedIn. This post is for a more intermediate audience, so after reading that, come right back!

It’s Friday, Friday, gotta pass some leads on Friday! Welcome back to our Weekly Recap. Here at AG, we’re excited for the weekend, just like Rebecca Black, so we can rejuvenate before coming back on Monday. Most people love the work environment here and coworkers have become friends, so even though it’s Friday, we never truly dread Mondays.

Both marketers and inside sales reps are familiar with the oft-referenced BANT acronym, whether in identifying qualified leads or handling objections: Budget, Authority, Need and Timeframe. However, over the years, the acronym has become outdated, overused and obsolete. Is the criteria even working for marketers looking for qualified leads? How well? Prospects may still be hiding behind these objections, but now that they know prospectors can immediately refute them, how much longer will they continue to use them?