Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Lauren Weatherall, Senior Marketing Manager at TinderBox. 

For the first time, people accessed the internet on their mobile devices more than on their desktop computers in 2013 – OK, we all knew that was coming. What does this mean? It means that online, cloud-based, and internet solutions are taking over not just consumer markets, but business-to-business marketplaces. Especially when it comes to sales technology.

I use Facebook.  So do you.  Your dog, or one of your friend’s dogs, probably has its own account.  I don’t really know why I keep using it.  Does anyone really know, though?  I guess I find some misanthropic entertainment in scrolling through the daily newsfeed to uncover anecdotal blips of ridiculous behavior.  My favorites are the self-pity posts.  These are the victimized, in which their mood has been terribly slain by the harsh reality that the newfound goal of the universe is to suppress just one individual’s complete sense of happiness and ambition.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Michael Powers, Buzz Coordinator at NetProspex.

There are not many people in sales who would say they absolutely love cold calling. However, cold calling should be a part of every effective salesperson’s arsenal. Quality conversations are necessary to qualify leads at the top of the sales funnel. The cold call is and will continue to be a necessary step in the sales cycle, so why not master it.

I’ve been in sales a long time.  More years than I care to count.  It’s been eleven years since my business partner and I founded AG Salesworks with the goal of helping sales and marketing teams succeed through identifying and delivering their ‘ideal’ prospect.  

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a post from Tom Diamond, IT Support Assistant and Business Development Representative at AG Salesworks. This is his blogging debut. 

Contrary to popular belief, the Information Technology (IT) Department is much more than the tech people you go to when something is broken. One of the first things I learned during my IT education is that IT’s purpose is to bridge the gap between the needs of a business and the available technology.

Happy November 1, Sales Prospecting Perspectives readers! How was your Halloween? At AG Salesworks, we celebrated by dressing up on Tuesday and having a potluck party. You can see pictures of the fun that we had on our Instagram, and look forward to a blog post on Monday about how to plan these types of events so everyone stays productive. As most of us are Boston Red Sox fans, we also celebrated their win of the 2013 World Series! It was an excellent last week of the month for us here at AG Salesworks, and we hope it was for you, too. Here are some of our favorite posts about marketing and sales from our favorite blogs. Some of them even decided to get into the Halloween spirit!

Everyone talks about asking the right questions on the phone and getting quality information… but what topics should you touch upon?

Having a script makes teleprospecting easier than winging it, but you can’t write out what the prospects are going to say every time. You can make educated guesses, but it is impossible to map out every direction the conversation can go. Having a few core questions in your arsenal can help fill gaps in conversations or guide prospects in a more focused direction if they do not seem to be clicking with your introduction.

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.

I have been meeting with my team recently to better understand what they like, don’t like, what they would like to see more of, less of, why they joined the AG team, why they stay, and whatever else I might learn that can help improve the AG employment experience. Each and every person I have met with told me they were attracted to AG for a number of reasons, but the most important one was our training. They wanted to be at a company where they could learn. We are very proud of our internal training program and continue to invest and improve it. The conversations I am having validate that we are on the right track.

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.