Sales Prospecting Perspectives

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.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Mark Roberge, SVP of Sales and Services at HubSpot.

Let’s get this straight: teleprospecting does not exclusively refer to cold calling. It is the process salespeople use in order to prospect a lead on the phone.  Whereas cold calling can be impersonal and yield poor results, properly teleprospecting can humanize the interaction between a salesperson and a prospect through the use of helpful dialogue centered around prospect’s pain points, not the salesperson’s products. When you combine this process with an inbound sales methodology, you have a potent mix for success.

Niti Shah is the Head of Sales Content and editor of the new Inbound Sales section of HubSpot’s media hub. You can follow her at @nitifromboston

You’ve just hired a new rock star salesperson for your organization – she’s had a few years of experience in complex sales and knows her way around the block. She’s a prospecting guru, great at building rapport, and can negotiate like a pro. There’s one problem – she’s never heard of inbound sales, and that’s going to affect your sales and marketing alignment unless you teach her these three lessons during training. 

Back in 1995, I got to know a Professor of Anthropology from Rhode Island College.  Richard was a great guy. He always had a smile on his face, and he seemed like a very happy person.  

As I got to know him better, I learned that he was in fact a very happy person.  His happiness came from several areas in his life. He had a wonderful family with whom he was able to spend lots of time, he was healthy, and one last thing: He loved his job.  He told me that he thought he was getting away with something each day as he woke up, got dressed and went off to work.  The fact that he was being paid to do something he loved so much was something he was very grateful for.  

From a marketing and a sales point of view, this week has been extremely busy. The chatter around the office has expounded as more and more people are returning from vacation. Marketing is gearing into the fall months as well, as we just released an eBook we've been working on all summer. Team leaders are working one-on-one with sales reps, and new employees are coming in every week, eager to get their hands dirty in sales. For the first week of September, we're doing great, and it can only go up from here.

I don't know about you, but I know my life revolves around technology: my laptops, my iPhone, my iPad, my GPS...  I could sit here for an hour and type about how much I rely on technology, but you get the point.  Most people use technology as a means of communication, using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, email, text messaging, FaceTime, you name it. We all rely on technology for communication because it's so convenient.  As a marketer, communication is very important, so I always try to stay on top of the advancing trends, learning how to grab prospects' attention, and overall how to make the best impression and delight both prospects and clients.  

In efforts to keep on trend, my boss and I attended Inbound 2013, a marketing conference that is held in Boston every year, to learn new marketing methods, hear from the best marketing and sales professionals and figure out how to ramp up our marketing efforts and take our company to the next level.  While there I met a handful of great new contacts and when I wasn't networking, my head was buried in my iPad jotting down notes and ideas.