Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing.

Many sales organizations often struggle with how to predict which sales will close. Their sales forecasts are weak, or non-existent, and that fact affects their bottom line.

Your sales forecast influences numerous decisions in your company’s sales process. A weak sales forecast not only affects commission checks, but also the success of your entire organization. It’s tricky to predict which sales will close or which prospects will be qualified. However, when it’s done right, an accurate forecast will keep a business on course, using past figures to predict short- or long-term performance.

I had the opportunity last week to participate in a webinar AG hosted with Hootsuite and Salesloft about setting up an effective work process. The recording can be downloaded here. We covered the secrets to sales prospecting success, how social selling can enhance the sales process and what tools should be used to support your prospecting efforts. My portion of the presentation had more to do with setting up an effective inside sales team, but I did field some interesting questions at the end of the webinar. 

The AG Salesworks marketing team had a busy but extremely illuminating week at HubSpot's Inbound 2013. The conference provided some excellent content, motivation, and ideas.  We heard from distinguished speakers like Seth Godin, Arianna Huffington (@ariannahuff), Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) , Ann Handley (@marketingprofs), Rand Fishkin (@randfish) and of course Dharmesh Shah (@dharmesh) and Brian Halligan (@bhalligan), all very unique and motivational. Mike Volpe (@mvolpe) and his team at Hubspot did a wonderful job putting on this informative conference that taught so many marketers how to think more innovatively! These conferences remind us to do a marketing and sales tune-up: are you really reaching your ideal target audience, are you closing the loop with sales, or are you efficiently nurturing leads down your sales funnel? Of course these types of questions shouldn't be brought up only as a result of attending an event or meeting, we should always be fine-tuning our processes and finding what works best, but events like this certainly spark a flood of ideas.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Damian Davila, Content Marketing Consultant at idaconcpts.com.

Back in May 2010, the Aberdeen Group released an important report on how to shrink the sales cycle and focus closers on sealing more deals. "We don't convert enough leads to sales," said 59% of respondents in the report. 27% claimed they had insufficient knowledge of prospects already in their sales funnel, and 26% indicated they lost efficiency when they recreated proposals or contracts.

While converting leads into sales is a skill that I could write a book about, I would like to take this opportunity to focus on taking 4 specific steps to shorten your sales cycle. You still have to convince your clients to close on the deal, but these 4 strategies will bring you to that point faster.