Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Brian Hansford, Director of Client Services and Marketing Automation Practice at Heinz Marketing.

Demand generation has dramatically evolved from activity-based contact marketing to a core strategic function in organizations.  Marketing Automation is a leading force in this evolution, and B2B marketers are rapidly increasing their acumen to provide a direct impact to revenue generation.  But ROI results don’t come quickly, and they’re often hard to measure.    

Heinz Marketing and OnTarget Consulting completed the 2014 Marketing Automation Effectiveness and Performance Survey and we developed this infographic to share the results.  Survey data is on SlideShare.  

There is nothing better than a sales manager who can speak from real experience when providing advice. It can be very difficult to relate to a boss who seems like they need to refer to a sales instruction manual.  It was always encouraging to know that my boss, at one point, had walked in my shoes and understood how to do the job. 

Man, time goes by fast.  I know this phenomenon is talked about, written about and perhaps thought about ad nauseum, but I feel compelled every year around this time to mention it.  Mostly because as I get older (I turned 50 in November), I realize how limited our time is and I have always been a “live life to the fullest” kind of guy.  Now, as I am a bit older and have the great fortune of a beautiful family, my health, and a thriving company, I feel very thankful.  I am focused on enjoying my life, and doing the right thing both in business and in my personal life.

Have you heard the news lately?  You know, the story about the parent filing a “bullying” complaint against a rival town because his son’s high school football team got beat badly?  The final tally was 91-0.

I'll preface this blog by letting you know that I'm not an avid runner. I've never run a marathon in my life, but I can say that I understand the saying, “It’s a marathon; not a sprint.” I’ve used this tidbit of advice on many occasions: big dinners, binging on TV shows, days spent shopping, etc. Now I can add teleprospecting to the list of things this saying has shown me to be true. 

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

Last week our company took part in a great consultative inside sales training. I love these trainings because although some of the topics may seem obvious at first, we sometimes tend to put these fundamental topics on the back burner at work because other priorities end up taking up our time instead. The training from last week really helped to reinforce the topic of Knowing your Competition. Seems simple, right? It may seem straightforward, but ask yourself these questions. When was the last time you sat down and really thought about who your competition is? Do you ever think about competition in a different light other than during the actual sell? This training really emphasized the idea of not only knowing your competition when bringing on new customers, but more importantly, really being aware of your competition when it comes to retaining your existing customers. 

Happy Friday, Sales Prospecting Perspectives readers. Here in the office at AG, we can tell that prospects are returning from vacation: there are more conversations, and less sales reps blocked by an away-from-the-office message. Fall is just around the corner!

This week, we’d like to share two articles.

Last week during a family dinner, I tried to explain to my parents what Linkedin was and how, as an inside sales rep, I utilize it for prospecting. Despite the fact that every time my father wants to text a member of our family he replies to a mass text I sent him months ago, resulting in the entire family receiving it, and the fact that my mother asks questions like, “Did you hear about what that celebrity wrote on their Tweeter-bird page?”, they seemed understand what I was saying.  

Recently, it seems that everywhere I look I come across more and more instances of customer service, and it makes me realize how crucial customer experience is when it comes to retaining business. Unfortunately, customer success sometimes gets overlooked because time seems better spent on the obvious – running the operational day-to-day tasks of an organization. Just recently I took on the responsibility of customer success at our organization, and I have been thinking a lot about what the key components are to driving customer care for inside sales.