Sales Prospecting Perspectives

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.

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?

The other day someone said to me, “When it comes to cold calling, it’s really just a numbers game. By reaching out to 100 people per day, there’s bound to be someone who says yes.” The comment took me by surprise and I thought to myself, "Wow, do people really think that’s all there is to cold calling? Do they really think of it as 'mindless' dials that will eventually lead to someone who says yes?"

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 +!

I cut my teeth in the B2B marketing world at a company that generates leads entirely through events and inbound marketing. With the naiveté of an English major who could recite every scene from Jane Eyre quicker than she could describe a lead list, I believed that inbound marketing was going to completely eclipse outbound marketing in a matter of years. Who would ever buy a list of leads when they could just wait for their customers to come to them? I thought.

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.

Happy Friday, blog readers! Here are some of our favorite sales and marketing posts that we shared on our Twitter feed this week.

Happy Friday Sales Prospecting Perspectives readers! It’s been a busy week on the blog: we’ve been guest posting at several other blogs and a few of our BDRs have expressed interest in blogging for us. We’ve also started our social media team, here, allowing several BDRs the flexibility to expand their contribution to the team beyond their job description. Follow us on Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, StumbleUpon and Youtube. You’ll be seeing a variety of updates about sales prospecting, our company culture, and more!

You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows…
Well, You Might in Marketing and Sales
 

One of the famous Bob Dylan lyrics from "Subterranean Homesick Blues" implies that we should be reliant on our instincts, that we are capable of knowing which way the wind is blowing.  In theory, we are capable of determining which way the wind blows, but can we know when it’s going to rain, and furthermore be prepared for when it does?  Let’s not write off the weatherman just yet.