Sales Prospecting Perspectives

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

In B2B marketing, sales and marketing emails play different but equally important roles in a successful communication strategy. Marketing emails lure the leads, and sales reels them in. But if nobody ever opens your messages, they won’t do your organization much good. Getting a prospect to open an email can be extremely challenging in today’s crowded marketplace. Many of us get hundreds of emails every day. Which ones make you click? Which ones make you hit delete?

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Amanda Maksymiw, Content Marketing Manager at Lattice Engines. 

Back in 2011, the Harvard Business Review educated us on exactly what timely manner meant. One hour. In fact, when companies reached out to prospects within an hour, they were seven times more like to qualify the lead. The Lead Management Study from InsideSales.com cites even more startling stats: “The odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times. The odds of qualifying a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 21 times.”

Simply put, whether prospecting a lead from an inbound program or from your website, sales needs to be proactive and follow up in a timely manner. Here are a few ideas to help sales reps get ahead of the clock.

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.  

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.

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.

There is a natural sequence to most of the activities we engage in on a daily basis.  Every day is a series of steps leading to an endless amount of completed projects that combine to create what is our life.  If you are hungry and need a meal, you find a recipe, shop for ingredients,  cook,  then eat.  If your kids need new clothes, you find their size, their desired style, you shop, they wear the clothes...  Job done.