Sales Prospecting Perspective Weekly Recap - Week of October 29, 2023
There were a lot of great pieces of content worthy of sharing this week, but unfortunately I can only choose one. With that said, I wanted to share a great piece written by Adi Gaskell entitled Why are senior managers not getting social media? In his post, Adi discusses some new research done at Stanford University suggesting that, while senior managers may be particpating more in social networking, they still fail to see the benefits. The research was conducted by surveying over 180 CEO's and senior management "in an attempt to find out what they know about social media and how it’s currently used in their business." Some of the key findings of the research are highlighted below.
- Less than 25% of senior managers, and just 8% of directors receive reports detailing how social media is performing for them. Almost half don’t collect any ROI information at all!
- Whilst 90% of managers believe they understand the risks involved in using social media, less than 1/3 actually monitor the social web for negative mentions, and just 14% use metrics from social media to measure corporate performance.
- 59% of companies use social media to interact with customers, 49% to advertise and 35% to research customers. 30% use it to research competitors and new products/services, or to communicate better with employees.
It still astonishes me that Social Media is continually having to proove it's benefits to organizations, and especially to those that lead these organizations. There are some other great points in the article and I highly recommend taking a few minutes to give it a read.
Now, on to our recap.
Monday, October 29, 2023
We started the week with a great post from our Director of Business Development, Maegan Kopka, discussing a recent AA-ISP event she attended here in Boston. In her post Are You In The 90:9:1 When It Comes To Content? Maegan talks about using content in the sales process to advise potential customers. Cliff Pollen of Postwire and Visible Gains gave the statistic of 90:9:1 in regards to 90% of people read content, 9% share content and only 1% actually write content. Some of the key points from the meeting were: Know your content and how to use it, use your content to ask the right questions in order to clarify your buyer’s vision, provide insight as to how your product will help the potential customer, not information on how you may be able to do this or that, and use content in the right Context to bring on Conversation that provides Clarity and motivates Change.
Wednesday, October 31, 2023
On Halloween, we had a scary post from Craig Ferrara, Director of Client Operations. Recently Craig was involved with the Inbound Marketing Summit held in Boston and in his post How Does Your Organization Follow Up On Marketing Qualified Leads? Craig reviews his session regarding optimizing your lead qualification process. He also discussing the power of having a nurturing process in place since not all leads are ready to buy now. Just because you've been told no once during the sales process, doesn't necessarily mean no forever...it just means "no" for now. Having a proper qualification and nurturing process in place allows organizations to truly maximize their ROI on marketing campaigns by having more leads progress to a next step in the sales process.
Thursday, November 1, 2023
We closed out the blogs with another great one from our best storyteller, CEO Paul Alves. In his post Total Team Focus: The Ultimate Multiplier Paul discusses a recent workshop he and upper management attended centered on team accountability and the power of having the whole team focused on achieving the same goal. Paul uses the AG story to discuss the impact of having an entire team driving for the same result and uses the analogy of having an entire team of 60+ people pushing the cart vs. the management team of 12, pulling the cart.
Thanks for reading this weeks recap and we look forward to sharing more great posts next week.