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Monthly Archives: August 2010
Inside Sales Best Practices – The Web Marketing “Mass Disconnect” Continues
Sales industry researchers CSOInsights stated recently that after a “flat” budget year in 2009, marketing budgets are increasing in 2010 and beyond, and that the top three items for additional budget allocations were: Web site design/content (65% stated they were
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Leave a comment Want to Make Good Sales Hires? Go to Your Local Gym and Start Looking
The worst mistake any sales or marketing team can have is obvious—don’t have a realistic, viable working strategy to begin with.
But the second-worst mistake was brought up today on a great blog article from The New Sales Economy about 9 Reasons Why 50% of Sales Reps Aren’t Hitting Quota.
The first item on their list? Hiring based on “gut” rather than repeatable success.
Ken Krogue mentions in his 15 Time Wasters of Inside Sales and Marketing that bad hiring practices is the #2 reason why sales and outbound marketing teams fail to get the results they want . . .
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Ingenuity Wins Again
Every once in a while, it’s nice to see that the spirit of ingenuity, vision, and invention hasn’t completely died in America. Internationally, we’re commonly seen as part buffoon, part overbearing “uncle,” part drain on society. And when you live
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4 Sales Tips for Making Contact and Avoiding “Prospect Badgering”
One of sales reps’ most common questions is, “How many dials does it really take to make contact with a decision-maker, and how do I know when I’ve reached my limit of “pleasant persistence” and am now merely angering the prospect?”
By the numbers, every piece of sales research we’ve ever done indicates that it takes between 6 and 8 call attempts to reach a decision-maker (though this number generally goes down if you’re mixing in other media like email and voice messaging at the same time).
However, our research also shows that most sales reps only make 1.7 call attempts to reach a new prospect (far below the statistical mean to actually make contact), that they overestimate the total number of calls they’ve made (most reps think they’ve made far more call attempts than they really have), and that they rarely combine all three of the major “contactable” media—phone, voice message, and email—to produce the best results . . . .
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Sales 2.0 – The “Thin Line” Between Sales and Marketing Grows Even Thinner
An outstanding article by Propelling Brands’ Adam Needles discussed the fact that according to SirusDecisions, less than 10 percent of B2B businesses have successfully redefined the necessary role of high-impact lead generation and lead nurturing that will be required in
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Sales 2.0, Hollywood, and the Death of the (Outside) Salesman
Yesterday I talked a little bit about the coming Inside Sales revolution, and the impact it will ultimately have on sales organizations, sales culture, and the companies that rely on them.
And I realized that there’s a much larger comparison that can be made between Hollywood and the current sales industry.
Like many sales managers, Hollywood likes to think of itself as “innovative,” “pushing boundaries” and “creating something” where there wasn’t something there before.
And like many “old guard” sales managers, Hollywood is deluding itself . . . .
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Random Musings – The Inside Sales Revolution, SaaS, and Self-Service
The Harvard Business Review says our customers don’t want to talk to us. While a sobering thought, I’m also wondering if this doesn’t in part explain the move to “cloud computing” and SaaS over the last ten years. SaaS takes
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Gung Ho and the Coming Inside Sales Revolution
“If all a sales person can do is talk about the product, then for sure their job is at risk to technology . . . . The role of sales is going to have to evolve to [provide] a value-add, or otherwise they may well not be needed in the process.”
—Jim Dickie, CSO Insights.
A fascinating article by Selling Power’s Gerhard Gschwandtner recently explored the growing tension between technology and sales performance.
“We have entered the ‘displacement economy,’” he states, “where new technology drives out the old ways of doing business . . . The reality is that some companies are already leveraging technology, not to save time, but to save the high expense of keeping salespeople on the payroll.”
In other words, “Old guard” sales has a problem on its hands . . . .
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The #1 Priority of B2B SEO Content
Lots of great resources have addressed the question,”What, if any differences exist between the style and content of an SEO versus a PPC landing page?”
SEO.com states that a typical SEO and PPC landing page should serve the appropriate purpose, contain the right mix between content and call-to-action, and provide links to outside information and to the main home page of your Web site.
SEOBook.com says the only major difference between an SEO and PPC page is that the call to action should come early, and much more often on a PPC page— but that otherwise the concept is the same.
But how does this formula change from a B2C site, where the goal is typically an instant transaction, to a B2B company site, where a prospect’s buying decision may still be weeks or months away?
An outstanding article by Proteus B2B states that B2B decisions are “driven by risk and the avoidance thereof.” As a result, a B2B landing page must be more complete, holistically-oriented, and must present a clear, competitive, consistent message through content, style, and feel . . . .
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Being Real on a Sales Call Doesn’t Require “Foot-in-Mouth”
Take a look at this list of anecdotes of people making egregious blunders on sales phone calls (thanks to Trish Bertuzzi at The Bridge Group for the link).
Aside from the sheer hilarity of some of these ingenious ways to screw up a sales call, I noticed a surprising trend:
Even in this incredibly small sample, the caller often still closed the sale, in many cases because of the “screw up,” rather than in spite of it.
Why? Because the blunder showed the prospect that the caller was human.
Now obviously I’m not suggesting that sales reps make a social faux pas on every call to increase sales. But it does demonstrate that all of us, in every profession and vocation, respond to something real, something relatable.
We don’t like talking to automatons. We don’t like getting “pitched.” Insincerity is about as valuable as a useless management meeting . . . .
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