Sales Prospecting Perspective Weekly Recap - Week of February 18, 2024
Before we head home to pick up our shovels again, we had to get in our recap of this week's blogs. But first I need to share with you an interesting article I found this week that discussed some statistics on Social Media in 2013. Econsultancy recently released some of the results to their 2013 Marketing Budget Survey conducted in accordance with Responsys. The results revealed that 38% of companies will be increasing their investment in SMMS (Social Media Management Systems) this year, and 62% will increase their overall social media investment. The industry is still experiencing rapid growth, with new start-ups sprouting up every week and has shown no signs of slowing down as long as there is sustained interest and investment. It's another sign that if your organization hasn't embraced Social Media and developed a Social Media strategy then you run the risk of being left in the dark by your competition. 
Now, on to this week's recap.
Monday, February 18, 2024
I led off the school vacation week with a President's Day post about the reliability and accuracy of your marketing database. Based on hundreds of millions of B2B contact data assessed over the past year, Netprospex provided a comprehensive assessment of the health of B2B marketing databases. According to their The State of Marketing Data 2013, the average overall score for organizations was only 2.7, which fell inbetween having "Unreliable" data and "Questionable". It was an interesting report that doesn't require a lot of your time to thumb through it. A couple of highlights include: more than 25% of data quality problems are caused by customer data entry errors, costing U.S. businesses more than $600 billion each year and companies that employ consistent data hygiene create 7x the number of inquiries and 4x the number of leads.
Tuesday, February 19, 2024
One of the many pain points we discover with VP's of Sales or Marketing is that they don't have the bandwith or proper rep to rep ratio regarding their inside sales teams. In our next post of the week, Samantha asked the question Is Your Teleprospecting Team Supporting Too Many Outside Sales Reps? Samantha has worked on multiple projects with clients and has found the most success when supporting 2-3 reps who she is in constant contact with on a weekly basis. There are some projects in which Samantha's direct contact is with a Marketing professional who then distributes the qualified opportunities Samantha uncovers to the appropriate sales rep. In this scenario, it is more difficult for the inside rep to get the feedback needed to close the loop on the opportunity properly. When working directly with the outside sales reps, it is much easier for the inside reps to discuss the opportunities being passed, gain the feedback they need and leverage the outside rep as valuable resource.
Wednesday, February 20, 2024
We celebrated the middle of the week with a great post from another one of our senior BDR's, Elizabeth Guerra, with her post Humanity Still Rules! And Why It Makes For Better Sales Prospecting Emails. Elizabeth provided some great guidelines to follow when constructing your emails to your prospects and trying to garner responses. Her tips include: know the purpose of your email, recognize the format of an email, ditch the pitch, write the way you talk and spelling and grammar matter. Great read with some informative information on how to construct your prospecting emails.
Thursday, February 21, 2024
Our last post of the week was a recap of our webinar with experts Jamie Shanks, Scott Miller of Social123 and Mike Puglia, VP of Marketing with TimeTrade. In our webinar How To Build The Ultimate Lead Generation Machine we discussed how you can use social intelligence from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to start filling the top of your funnel with potential prospects using Social123. Jamie Shanks then discussed how every marketing department needs a balance of Macro and Micro marketing strategies to build a lead generation machine. Pete Gracey then discussed what kind of process your organization should have in place for properly moving your prospects through the funnel and converting them into qualified sales opportunities. A link to the webinar recording is included in the post; should you have the desire to watch, it is approximately 32 mins in length.
Thanks to everyone who contributed this week and thanks for reading. Enjoy another wintry weekend for those in the Northeast! Stay toasty Boston!