Sales Prospecting Perspectives

(and how to stop failure from happening)

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 +!

Radius offers a marketing platform built on top of a database that sorts through billions of data about U.S. businesses each day. Because our platform uses big data to help marketers unlock key customer segments, we’ve thrown our hat into the overcrowded online world of marketing about big data solutions. Online search traffic for big data has surged in the last couple of years.  

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

As an inside sales rep, the majority of my prospecting has been encompassed around cold calling. But as of recently, my client has been having my team follow up with warm, inbound leads. My role is to connect with recent trade show attendees, webinar attendees, prospects that have responded to email promotions, or downloaded whitepapers from my client’s website. Many of the "prospects" I communicate with are already my client’s customers. My goal is to follow up with them and find out what their current IT initiatives are and if they are evaluating my client’s additional solutions. When prospecting warm leads, the strategy and process is much different from the typical cold calling campaign. Therefore, here are few tips for prospecting inbound leads.

Happy Friday, Sales Prospecting Perspectives subscribers! We hope you had a terrific Thanksgiving, feasting with family and giving thanks. Today is Black Friday, but in between your online shopping for deals, you might want to check out some of our favorite sales and marketing articles this week!

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.

I'll preface this blog by letting you know that I'm not an avid runner. I've never run a marathon in my life, but I can say that I understand the saying, “It’s a marathon; not a sprint.” I’ve used this tidbit of advice on many occasions: big dinners, binging on TV shows, days spent shopping, etc. Now I can add teleprospecting to the list of things this saying has shown me to be true. 

Last week our company took part in a great consultative inside sales training. I love these trainings because although some of the topics may seem obvious at first, we sometimes tend to put these fundamental topics on the back burner at work because other priorities end up taking up our time instead. The training from last week really helped to reinforce the topic of Knowing your Competition. Seems simple, right? It may seem straightforward, but ask yourself these questions. When was the last time you sat down and really thought about who your competition is? Do you ever think about competition in a different light other than during the actual sell? This training really emphasized the idea of not only knowing your competition when bringing on new customers, but more importantly, really being aware of your competition when it comes to retaining your existing customers. 

Ask not what you can do for your company. Ask what your company can do for you.

In the past few years, discussions of company culture have multiplied across start-ups in Silicon Valley, trusted businesses in Boston, and several other areas around the world. Some people think company culture can be confused with perks in the office, creating confusion and toxicity in the workplace. Some people think cultures can’t be created, that they’re a product of how leaders inspire their customers and employees. Still others argue that company culture affects traditional business metrics positively, resulting in revenue growth, employment growth, net income growth, etc.

Happy Friday, Sales Prospecting Perspectives readers. Here in the office at AG, we can tell that prospects are returning from vacation: there are more conversations, and less sales reps blocked by an away-from-the-office message. Fall is just around the corner!

This week, we’d like to share two articles.

Ever have a poor customer experience at Starbucks? I haven’t. I am always extremely satisfied when I leave there. From the moment you walk in, every employee smiles from ear to ear, they have a ton of energy, and if they mess up your order or take longer than expected, they give you a free drink, no questions asked. The key is this: they make it about you, the customer, from the second you enter their front door. Every employee seems to possess a positive attitude at all times. They truly make me believe that they love going to work and that satisfying their customers is their top priority.

It’s finally August, the Sunday of summer. The scorching heat brings with it a bittersweet reminder that summer won’t last forever, and that fall is just around the corner. At AG, we’re celebrating the beginning of a new month with a company cruise in the Boston Harbor. We’re ready for a beautiful day on the water, filled with games, dancing and fun. I hope you’re embracing this month as well!