Sales Prospecting Perspectives

I just wrapped up my first fall Sunday Funday. We watched the Pats, had some friends over, cooked some fall-inspired food, and may have had one or two pumpkin beers. This is my absolute favorite time of year. It's a fresh new start as we close out the summer and get ready to start the last quarter of the year. An influx of new customers goes hand in hand with that, and it’s always exciting to kick off new client engagements.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest blog from Gareth Goh, Content Marketing Manager at InsightSquared. 

If you have a team of outbound prospecting reps, spare a minute to give them some love, attention and empathy. After all, they have perhaps the toughest job in your organization: making cold calls to hit aggressive dial targets day after day can be a grueling experience that weighs on even the most motivated and productive prospecting reps.

At the same time, both you and them know how important their role to the organization is. Without them, your sales pipeline - and subsequently, your bookings results - would be substantially smaller. What can you, as their manager, do to ease the painful monotony of their day-to-day job responsibilities?

Provide them with the structure they need to really do their jobs well.

Imagine you’re the CEO of a B2B high tech company. Your company has survived the most difficult start-up stages, and you’re ready to start successfully selling your product or service. At times, your solution is difficult to explain, but your engineers know its features like the back of their hand. You decide to insource your inside sales team.

You hire new inside sales reps, many just out of college. Your marketing team works on qualifying leads, but your sales team leaves many unqualified leads untouched. According to Marketo, 80% of leads generated by marketing are ignored by sales.

AG Salesworks is pleased to present you with a guest blog post from Brian Serino, SVP of Sales and Business Development at NetProspex. 

We’re all familiar with the deep-rooted battle between sales and marketing. It goes something like this: sales blames marketing for their inability to produce quality leads, while marketers fault sales for their lack of lead management skills. In this battle, however, there is no winner, because when sales and marketing teams work individually, poor lead management results on both sides.

I have the opportunity to join calls with our inside sales team during the sales process frequently. It is exciting to speak with executives at companies who are in the beginning stages of creating an inside sales team themselves or are entertaining the idea of outsourcing. Choosing to outsource the function is often the result of these conversations, usually because these companies haven’t quite mastered best practices yet and need support. I really enjoy the task of taking on engagements to help develop the inside sales function, whether we continue our efforts after the first few months once up to altitude, or whether we hand off the inside sales processes to them once they’re running at full capacity.

I have always been a firm believer that there are two types of people in this world: those who have children and those who don’t. The reason I differentiate between them is that those who don’t have children tend to think they are the best parents in the world, and some insist on telling you how to raise your kids.

Now, a bit about me: I am a father of three with a boy and two girls.  I have had my share of experiences with people saying things like, “I would never do that with my kids,” or, “You’re doing that?”  I have to admit, there was a time, before I had children, that I remember saying, “Oh my, I would never feed my kids french fries.”  Friends and family fall into one of these two groups. But when or if they have children, their opinions about parenting usually change, and they start to understand how difficult a task it is and stop judging others for their choices. The same can be said regarding outsourcing lead generation for sales and marketing.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Brian Hansford, Director of Client Services and Marketing Automation Practice at Heinz Marketing.

Demand generation has dramatically evolved from activity-based contact marketing to a core strategic function in organizations.  Marketing Automation is a leading force in this evolution, and B2B marketers are rapidly increasing their acumen to provide a direct impact to revenue generation.  But ROI results don’t come quickly, and they’re often hard to measure.    

Heinz Marketing and OnTarget Consulting completed the 2014 Marketing Automation Effectiveness and Performance Survey and we developed this infographic to share the results.  Survey data is on SlideShare.  

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Beth Cohen King, Director of Marketing at Ve Interactive.

In a recent companywide meeting at Ve Interactive US HQ, we discussed Steve Job’s secrets to great presentations.  At the top of the list was: “Answer the one question that matters most, and that is, ‘Why should I care?'"  As sales and marketing professionals, this should always be our number one concern.  It doesn’t matter if we work in B2B sales and marketing or provide sales and marketing for B2C clients.  Why should our prospects/leads/customers care about what we do? And why should they continue to care? And the biggest question, what value do we provide?  As Albert Einstein said, “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” Therefore, value should be at the core of all our sales and marketing efforts.

AG Salesworks is pleased to bring you a guest post from Kevin Thornton, Executive Vice President - Sales & Marketing for VanillaSoft. 

Here is a statistic that may give you a jolt: “only 25% of leads are legitimate and should advance to sales.” (Source: HubSpot). This raises some questions:

• Are sales and marketing in alignment on what constitutes a qualified or sales-accepted lead?
• Am I purchasing the right lists & working with the right list providers?
• How are leads being reviewed and passed along to my sales reps?

A lot has already been written about sales & marketing alignment and list providers.  Today I want to talk about a third point:  how is your team’s next lead reviewed and passed along to a rep?

AG Salesworks is pleased to bring you a guest post from Janelle Johnson, Director of Demand Generation at Act-On Software. 

For sales and marketing teams, reaching across the aisle can be a foreign concept. In some cases, that’s putting it mildly.

To be sure, there are salespeople and marketers who comfortably co-exist. Sometimes they even eat lunch together.

But the prevailing opinion is firmly entrenched: Sales and marketing just don’t get along. Don’t understand each other. Don’t cooperate. Aren’t aligned. And, as a consequence, campaign ROI often suffers.