Sales Prospecting Perspectives

The (kinda) recent trend that I was encouraged by a couple of years ago was sales and marketing teams talking about coming together to form one team and work towards a common goal. Sales and marketing as one unit, (aptly dubbed smarketing) working hand in hand, maybe even in the same office space and putting their differences aside to benefit the greater good. There would be a lot of work for both groups to achieve this, but if the Sharks and Jets can finally come together, so can sales and marketing. While this utopian idea has been great in theory, I still feel like there are major obstacles to overcome.

By now, the overwhelmingly majority of us use some sort of Marketing Automation tool to get our message out to the masses. The value of these solutions, when used properly, is immeasurable.  However, many of the Marketers that we work with only use their Eloqua, Marketo, ACTOn etc. to get their broad based message out to a very large scale audience. 

Analyzing the funnel is like getting your physical. You dread the Doctor’s lecture about getting too much sun, not exercising enough and drinking too much wine. In addition the check up is getting more and more…well ”invasive” as time goes on. Your risks and their potential outcomes are exposed and it scares the hell out of you. Now that we’re coming to the midway point of the year, you need to be the doctor and run a thorough analysis of your funnel to see what tweaks need to be made. Here is what to look for. (Now turn your head and cough).

Hello, everyone! Welcome to another weekly recap!

Memorial Day Weekend is finally here! The unofficial start of all things summer. We had some great entries this week but as always before I gush about what we've done, I'd like to highlight a blog I found that was very popular on the twitter feed this week. 

Mark McCarthy put together a great piece titled: An Open Letter From Your Headset. I couldn't help but giggle as I read along, but even with the lovey dovey humor, there are some great sales tips hidden inside as well. It can be hard to keep picking up the phone, especially once you've moved to an outside sales role. However, every good sales person knows that it's critical to maintaining your success.

One of the more common objections I hear while selling our services is, “We run marketing campaigns that produce leads that go directly to the sales team so we don’t really need a telesales team.” I agree that everyone should have a well thought out marketing plan that produces MQLs, but I do not agree with sending those leads directly to sales. For most companies, it is not the ideal way to develop new clients.

I was reading an interesting article in Fast Company regarding a conversation they had with the founder of Intuit, Scott Cook. The premise of the article was that every organization needs to find a way to unleash their employee’s potential. According to their current statistics, 70% of all US employees are not “actively engaged” in what they do every day and 20% of those folks are “actively disengaged”. While I’m not much of a mathematician, I wouldn’t say those are particularly uplifting numbers.

Happy Friday Everyone!

Welcome to another weekly recap! During this weeks recap you will be reading some tips on how to keep your inside sales reps on track, how to leverage your CRM solution efficiently, how to make the most out of a bad sales situation and also learn the benefits of conference calls over face to face meetings. -But first as always, I wanted to highlight a blog that I found this week that I found to be particularly on point with what we
preach here at AG. Scott Dodge had another great blog this week disucssing 5 Ways to Maximize Quality Leads From Telemarketing. Do your homework, Be Nimble and Be Connected are great ways to ensure your sending over as many qualified leads as you can. Another great blog Scott!

The lives of outside sales reps are changing. The outside sales rep is increasingly being asked to be…inside. At least for now it seems as though the days of 5 states in 3 days are slowing down. I’m not saying they are by any means gone (my brother in law called me 3 times yesterday from 3 different states with 2 out of 3 of them in different time zones) but it is becoming increasingly effective/acceptable to your prospect to run meetings while in the confines of your own office. Some of the old school sales reps I know hate this, but it offers so many benefits for companies that it must be looked at. Here is why:

Nowadays everyone in the sales and marketing game should be aware of the variety of tools we have at our disposal that allow us to be more effective at our craft. From marketing automation platforms to SEO solutions to better list resources. We have many ways to get in front of our ideal customer. So why is it that we tend to neglect our CRM? 

Most of us are familiar with the “ebbs and flows” of a sales position. It’s important for your sales reps to always understand the cycle and realize that even the best reps out there still have weeks in a slump. I have found that a healthy and optimistic mindset is what separates your average sales rep from your top performers. This means, it is important for your sales rep to know that even though they had a bad week, it's not something that they should dwell on and have it fill their day with excuses and complaints. Of course our top performers sound great on the phone, but that doesn’t carry them all the way to a fantastic month. To some extent, it’s a numbers game and our reps with the best mindset don’t take the time to dwell on bad weeks. They use that time effectively to put in more calls and spread their message out to a larger audience. As I always remind my reps, the hard work you put in this week or even this month will always come back to you the consecutive week or month. Here are some other tips to get your reps back on track: