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.  

We are halfway through the month of March and hopefully you or most of your sales team is on pace for quota. If not, then you may find some advice or tools that could help in getting over that hump to finish the month strong right here. I'll recap this week's posts shortly, but first I wanted to share a great new tool from our friends over at NetProspex. In the past, I blogged about their State of Marketing Data 2013 benchmark report and this week they announced a new tool for marketers. Yesterday, NetProspex announced the release of their new Workbench, an instant, online data managment platform for B2B Marketers. Workbench is a cloud based service that puts marketers in direct control to help improve data quality used in their marketing and sales outreach. Some of the features include: a free Data HealthScan, the ability to assess hundreds of thousands of contacts, view the results of your HealthScan online or in a PDF format, organize and store files and assessments within Workbench and take actions to clean, enrich and grow your B2B marketing database. It is a great tool for marketers and the first of its kind available online.  

If there is ever a slow month where you might be struggling to hit your numbers or have quality conversations with prospects, getting a warm list consisting of trade show/conference prospects, webinar registrants and inbound prospects can help create some momentum. It is always helpful when engaging prospects in conversations to have prospects that are familiar with your organization. The three above categories mentioned can add value to a campaign, but the leads may not always be hot and there needs to be an optimized telequalification process in place to maximize your ROI and sales opportunity development on these campaigns.

Yesterday we had the privilege of presenting with a few experts in the field of lead generation on how to build the ultimate lead generation machine. Our COO, Pete Gracey, was joined by Jamie Shanks, Scott Miller and Mike Puglia. For those who were unable to attend, you missed some great insights from the above mentioned experts. I have included the link to the recording should there be an interest in viewing the webinar at a later date/time. 

When you look at your sales pipeline (either as an individual or from a team perspective), how do you evaluate it?  Do you look at the quality of the leads and the probability of those moving to a next step?  Do you see a lot of activity and a healthy number of leads and believe that as long as there are prospects being called on, that will eventually bring in the revenue? The value of your pipeline is very subjective.  I say this because it is filled with prospects, leads, and opportunities, but the definition of what constitutes each stage varies from company to company and sometimes from management to sales person.   Since the criteria is subjective, we need to make sure we have objective metrics

Something I find clients ask pretty regularly is, “Would you guys call into this list to help drive attendance to an event of ours?” We are always happy to do it because we are typically able to drive additional attendance to their events, on top of what they were able to drive from their own marketing efforts. The last two events we worked on were very last minute and we only had two weeks to call on the list of prospects – with that said, we were still able to drive 6 new prospects to each, so who knows how many additional attendees we could have sent if we started calling efforts earlier.

A few weeks back I wrote a post titled - Are You Providing 'Big Data' For Your Inside Sales Team? - and explored the concept of “informationalization” after reading Thomas Redman’s post on the Harvard Business Review’s blog.  I discussed its relationship to the importance of managing a successful inside sales team by providing them with big data.

Anything "successful" is directed by a process.  Look at the human body and the process of blood circulation or look at installing an underground sprinkler system.  These are two things that work very efficiently and successfully when every step in the process is connected and working together for the end goal they are aimed at achieving.

In my recent webcast, Perspectives in Teleprospecting - A Closed Loop Strategy, I talked about the importance of having a closed loop feedback process in place to track all of the qualified leads that your telesales team is uncovering.  When you are investing time and money in a lead generation program you want to be able to prove the effectiveness of your campaign and make sure that all of the qualified opportunities that your team is passing over to sales are being nurtured appropriately.

Have you ever dined at a restaurant where the gratuity is automatically added at the end of every bill?  If you haven’t, I can tell you that it certainly does not compare to the dining experience where the server is accountable to fulfilling the satisfaction of their clientele in order to earn “positive feedback” – the tip.  After my server forgot about my meal, then brought fish when I wanted a burger, it all made sense as to his service, when I received my bill with 20% gratuity automatically added.  I can assure you I never revisited that restaurant.