Sales Prospecting Perspectives

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.

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.

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.

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!

Let's start off by saying that the B in "B2B" does not stand for boring. B2B companies often have a stigma of being boring and a bit drab compared to B2C businesses. Newsflash: it doesn't have to be that way! 

There are a many, many key reasons why I believe that B2B companies can greatly benefit from having a company Facebook page. I'll highlight just a few main points.

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. 

It's time to dive into developing a comprehensive marketing strategy. I stress “comprehensive” because I think it is important to consider every avenue that may be relevant to and most importantly get you in front of your target audience. Determine the ideal mix of every element that will yield the best results and tie as many aspects as possible together to compound the impact of each campaign or element. To achieve this you will need to not only test, measure and repeat, but pay close attention to what you learned from buyer persona exercises and how they go about making purchasing decisions.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a post from Tamara Graves, Senior Director of Demand Generation at NetProspex. 

The holidays have passed and marketers are focusing on what will make them more effective and successful in 2014. Through conversations around the office between sales and marketing, we created a list of the top five topics we believe will be on every marketer's priority list for this year.

So many sites and thought leaders are speaking abound inbound sales and marketing tactics and the importance of social media. It's been proven that the methodology works and increases your company's bottom line value. Yay, we can all go home now... Just kidding! Inbound methodology works, but let's face it - at some point you need to pick up the phone and have a quality conversation regarding a prospect's challenges and how your solution can help. Everyone talks about inbound sales and marketing and social selling, but please tell me how you can close sales and increase revenue by doing just inbound without effectively communicating on the phone?

Happy Friday, blog readers! Here at AG, we’ve been hard at work having meaningful conversations with clients and continuously calling new prospects. With two new hires on board, we’re poised to reach out to even more businesses. With a busy week behind us, we’re ready to celebrate Friday with some of our favorite articles shared on Twitter this week: