Sales Prospecting Perspective Weekly Recap - Week of February 4, 2024
If you're located in the Northeast like we are then you're probably bunkered down in your home preparing for the storm of the century. The snow has started and lets hope you already have your milk, bread and eggs. Even 2ft (or maybe 3ft) of snow couldn't stop us from recapping some great posts from the week. First up, of course, is my weekly pick from the blogosphere to share with you. 
This week's post comes from Jeffrey Rohrs, VP of Marketing with ExactTarget, who wrote about last Sunday's Super Bowl and the marketing lessons learned from this year's ads. Jeffrey DVR'd the game and logged every commercial that was shown from 6pm EST through the commercial break after the final whistle. Some of his insights are surprising, especially the use of Call to Actions, Social Media, and Mobile marketing. Both national and local advertisements are included (Cleveland market) and the infographic at the end of the post illustrates some of these findings. Oreo was the biggest winner this year (in my mind) with their blackout tweet that received thousands of social shares and their "Whisper Fight" commercial that drove their Instagram followers up by almost 57,000. Hopefully more advertisers learned some lessons after this year's ad performances and we can get a return to when watching the Super Bowl commercials was almost as fun as watching the game (at least for us Cleveland fans).
Now on to this week's recap.
Monday, February 4, 2024
We started the week off with a post from one of our senior Business Development reps Samantha Goldman and her post 5 Email Strategies For Inside Sales Reps. We all know the value of emails in our prospecting efforts and Samantha shares five things that have helped her and may help your team. Samantha's recommendations are: Always send a thank you, make your emails personal, avoid product dumping and have a consistent signature. These are a few great tips and she elaborates further in her post.
Tuesday, February 5, 2024
Tuesday's post was one I really liked from Craig Ferrara, Director of Client Operations. In his post Your Inside Sales Team Shouldn't Be Survey Takers Craig discusses the value of having your teleprospecting team trying to engage in real conversations with their prospects and not just concern themselves with "BANT" questions. If your inside sales team maps out their conversational goals prior to speaking with their prospect and formulates quality questions to help achieve those goals, the answers they need revealed should do so through the natural flow of the conversation. Focusing on only asking "BANT" questions turns your team into survey takers and the opportunities produced from those conversations are less likely to progress down your sales pipeline.
Wednesday, February 6, 2024
Wednesdays I usually reserve for our guest posts and this week's brought a great one from Craig Wortmann, CEO and Founder of Sales Engine, a company that helps firms build and tune their sales engine(s). Craig provide a great post on 10 Ways To Optimize Your Sales Engine In 30 Days. I don't want to go in to too much detail on his post because I really think it deserves to be read in full. Some of the tips from Craig that I enjoyed were: stop confusing "Busyness" with Productivity, Sell what makes you different, Stop answering RFP's and his Lead, Manage and Get out of the Way insights. A big thanks to Craig for providing us with a great post and I highly recommend reading it when you get the chance.
Thursday, February 7, 2024
Our last post of the week came from me as I discussed Social Media lead generation and some of the ways you can use Twitter and Linkedin. I provided one resource for each social network, Jamie Shanks of Sales4Life for Linkedin resources and Social Selling University or InsideView for Twitter resources. I also introduced a company that is able to mine these social networks to begin comprising a marketing list. Social123 has the ability to pull names and emails from twitter handles and append that data with Linkedin to provide company names and job titles. If you want to know who your competitors are following, input their Twitter handle into the Social123 system and they'll produce you with a list. It's a great new tool for marketers to use in generating email lists at a fraction of the cost. A must have tool for 2013.
Thanks to everyone who read this week's recap and for those of you getting hit by Nemo, be safe and warm!