Sales Prospecting Perspectives

At AG Salesworks, we talk about aligning sales and marketing departments quite a bit. By now, most people know that in a successful business, B2B sales and marketing need to work together.

However, many people still harbor a misguided notion about what sales and marketing alignment really is. It's not just a mindset. It's a merging of actionable business processes.

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

Whether you’re managing sales for a large enterprise organization, or are trying to build business for your own one-man-shop, these tips should help guide your thinking, strategy and action when building and managing a bigger sales pipeline.

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?

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

An online presence is essential in today’s competitive sales environment. From real estate to accounting to marketing, businesses are finding out that more and more sales leads are coming from the Internet. Still, it is not just a matter of “putting yourself out there” and launching just any site. To stand out from the competition, you need to have a site that follows best usability practices. If your site requires your visitors to use a 15-page instruction manual, then the number of people bouncing out of it will be high.

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.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Adam Becker, Director of Sales at Tinderbox.

As a sales manager, I spend a great deal of time creating and implementing effective work practices in the sales process to make sure my team knows how to get organized, develop a call plan, and use tools to keep track of their notes and appointments. You can’t cater to the laggards in this business; as a colleague of mine from AG, Craig Ferrara, once said, “Bad oysters equate to lost time and money.” That’s why creating processes for the high performers to accentuate and try to replicate success is so important.