Sales Prospecting Perspective Weekly Recap - Week of March 18, 2024
March Madness has descended upon us and my bracket has already been busted! Let's hope your sales pipeline isn't experiencing the same thing!
We usually reserve this portion of the recap to share an interesting article from the week. Today, I wanted to help our friends at Insidesales.com and Software Advice in promoting their 2013 Inside Sales Market Size Study. In 2010, Insidesales.com discovered that inside sales jobs were growing at a rate 15 times greater than outside sales jobs. They attributed the disproportionate growth to three key factors: The Great Recession made the lower average cost of employing an inside rep more enticing, Cloud-based CRM and online lead generation tools made remote selling more feasible, and a younger generation is increasingly comfortable doing business over the Web and phone. Today, they need our help in determining where the inside sales industry stands in 2013 and if growth is still outpacing the outside sales role. These questions and more will be answered with the help of your participation in the 15 minute survey. Any one who participates will be entered into a drawing to win an iPad and receive a free copy of the report. Please take a few minutes to help us in gauging where the inside sales industry stands in 2013.
Now, on to this week's recap.
Monday, March 18, 2024
I started off our week of blogs discussing social prospecting and how you can use Twitter to produce a list of prospects who may be attending and industry trade show or conference. By monitoring the hashtag associated with the event, sales professionals are able to identify their target prospects that may be attending the event, as well as other prospects who would be a fit for the solution/service they represent. If you have a booth stop at the event, Twitter can be used to drive more traffic to your booth. Again, by monitoring the hashtag of the event reply to those prospects who are actively tweeting about the event and invite them to stop by the booth. Most events also have after hours networking events and this is an opportunity to identify where your prospects will be grabbing a beer after the conference so that you can make yourself available and get some face to face time with a prospect.
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Craig provided our next post of the week in which he discusses who should own teleprospecting: sales, marketing, or neither? It's a popular debate and ongoing discussion as every organization looks to bridge the gap that exists between sales and marketing. If we call the department Demand Generation, that resonates with marketing professionals and provides a different message and tone. If we call if Opportunity Generation, sales professionals and managers have a better understanding of what is attempting to be accomplished but we lose out on the marketing influence. Lead Generation seems to fit nicely between the two departments but leads (bad pun intended!) us back to the original argument of who should own teleprospecting? What are your thoughts?
Wednesday, March 20, 2024
Our CEO, Paul Alves, provided our middle of the week post when he discussed the importance of CEO's working themselves out of a job in The Power Of Empowering Your Team. The goal of any business owner should be to surround themselves with the right people who's goals align with that of the company. Paul has built an organization that has become less and less dependent on him. He views his role now more as a coach than CEO; providing guidance and a sounding board for his management team, but ultimately allowing them the freedom to make the decisions. By empowering your team to make decisions and carry out corporate goals, the CEO should find that the best position for themselves is out of the way.
Thursday, March 21, 2024
We capped off our week with a great post from Elizabeth Guerra discussing resourcefulness, entitled Finding The Path To The Perfect World Of Prospecting. It is rare that an inside sales rep will begin working a project and have a list of contacts that is 100% accurate. The good reps know how to find the contact information for their targeted prospect. Elizabeth provides some great insight for inside sales reps on how to be resourceful in finding proper contact data or the appropriate contact within an organization. Starting within the target organization is always the best way to start. If no one is offering to refer you, Google Searches or online databases like NetProspex or Data.com could provide the contact information you require. We offer more insight and provide inside sales tools to help with B2B prospecting in our recently released Inside Sales Managers Guide to Resourcefulness.
That's it for this week's recap, thanks for coming along for the ride and we'll fire up the blog posts again after our Bracket's have gone up in flames on Monday!