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Author Archives: Steve Watts
Want to Generate More Leads? Stop Making Excuses and Get Back on the Phone
It’s been on their Web site since September 2010, but I loved this blog from lead generation company Green Leads revealing some “superstar” tips for doing outbound prospecting over the phone.
It spoke to me because when push comes to shove, when the rubber hits the road, when its put-up-or-shut-up time (okay, you get the picture) outbound phone prospecting still happens.
A lot of people talk about the end of the cold call, that “inbound” is the new panacea. That “real” sales reps build pipeline through a steady stream of referral business. No more of those itchy-scratchy uncomfortable sales calls, no more angry prospects tired of our pitch, no more “dialing for dollars.”
To which we at InsideSales.com add, “Yeah right.” Don’t get me wrong, if you’re in the right vertical, with the right connections, with the right product at exactly the right time, maybe you can get away without doing outbound prospecting in B2B . . .
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Leave a comment Lead Generation Tip: Add a Tiny Bit of “Oomph” to Your Elevator Pitch
Something short and sweet today for teams doing lead generation:
We’ve all heard the concept of the “elevator pitch”–A concise, high-impact statement designed to convey the identity and value of your company/product/brand in the space of 30 seconds or less (some say as little as 10).
For example, “At InsideSales.com, we empower sales reps to take control of their prospecting and fill their pipelines faster, and give managers better insight into the process while it happens.”
The value of such a statement, obviously, isn’t that it’s actually going to be used to pitch a VC board member on an elevator (although if you’ve actually done this and gotten funding, that would be a great story and I’d love to hear it). The value is that an “elevator pitch” lets you boil down a core message into something easy to digest, but still demonstrates key touch points that communicate how you serve a prospect’s potential needs . . .
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High-Performance Sales is a State of Mind
On February 16, 2011, the Salt Lake Chapter of the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals (AA-ISP) had the distinct pleasure of hearing from renowned performance psychologist Dr. Craig Manning. Dr. Manning has been a key performance consultant for the
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Real Lead Generation Means Speed and Persistence—But Mostly It Means Doing It
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything on this blog, mostly because I’ve been knee-deep in doing research, and working with a couple of clients. But I’ve decided to post today to talk specifically about one particular experience talking to a client about how much the InsideSales.com system had made a difference in their sales performance.
SEO business optimization experts OrangeSoda improved individual sales rep performance 300%, and started seeing three times the monthly number of account closes.
But just as much as the productivity gains (which I was naturally gratified to hear about), something else stuck out to me, which was that even before they started using the InsideSales.com system, they were doing a lot of things right. They had a good system in place to acquire leads and close sales. They had a great management team that had developed a scalable, repeatable process.
The problem was they simply hadn’t fully learned yet that most sales are won and lost at the top of the sales funnel, not the bottom. It’s not that their pipeline was non-existent or stagnant. They simply weren’t getting the results they could have been because they hadn’t put enough focus on the lead qualification process . . . .
Utah Businesses — Apply Now for the Provo TechX Revenue Xelerator
Two years ago, Roger Andrus, head of the Business Development Corporation of Provo, Utah, ran a little experiment by bringing in a select group of applicants for an intensive, 12-week business mentoring program in conjunction with Griffin-Hill, a respected training
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Lead Nurturing and Lead Scoring – A Critical Link
On a recent guest post at the Bridge Group’s blog, author Henry Bruce brings up some research by Marketing Sherpa that states that 75% of all sales leads generated are going to buy at some point in the next 18-24 months.
Think about that for a minute.
A. Only 1 in 4 leads is ever totally non-productive. They may not convert now, or in the time frame the rep wants, but contrary to popular belief, it’s relatively rare for a sales lead to be total garbage. 75% of the active leads in our CRM systems RIGHT NOW are going to buy a product or service in our sector from somebody, somewhere in the next two years. So why not from you/me/us, if we’re the right fit?
B. It also seems to indicate that the need to intelligently score leads is now more critical than ever to prevent waste. 18-24 months is a long time, and no sales rep in their right mind is going to try and keep a prospect “on the hook” for a year-and-a-half. If they’re not buying now, stop wasting effort, the thought process goes, and use a long-term lead nurturing strategy . . . .
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Sales 2.0 and a Dead Canadian
“Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools and yesterday’s concepts.” -Marshall McLuhan
New Year’s Eve, 2010, will mark 30-year anniversary of the passing away of someone you’ve probably never heard of, a scholar by the name of Marshall McLuhan.
Many academics consider McLuhan, a Canadian who taught the majority of his life at the University of Toronto, to be one of the foremost pioneers in the study of media and communications, and the effects of media technologies on the social and cultural makeup of society.
The concept of “the global village”—an always-on, totally connected society, linked by electricity and wires to move information—was first posited by Marshall McLuhan in 1961, 30+ years before the public Internet and World Wide Web would make his vision a reality . . . .
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Sales and the “Definition of Done” — A Project Manager’s Perspective
It was a crazy week at Dreamforce. The PowerDialer for Salesforce 3.0 that we rolled out the first day of the conference was an incredible success. The number of inquiries, and the level of interest blew away our expectations.
Now back to the real world.
I have to admit, before Dreamforce, I was getting g little burnt out on the usual sales and marketing blog schtick.
How many different ways can you say, “Align marketing and sales,” or “Create a measurable sales process” before you’re repeating yourself (endlessly….repeating….yourself)?
So today we’re doing something different.
I don’t know anything about Pawel Brodzinski other than he’s a software developer, and he’s Polish . . .
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“Sorry About the Rant” — Lead Generation and Lead Response
If by some serendipitous circumstance you were allowed to hang out at the InsideSales.com offices for day, you’d discover pretty quickly that we are passionate about the power of immediate lead response. We help businesses get better sales intelligence, and
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The Prospect’s Process is in Charge – A Sales Pop Quiz
If you’re not on a call with a prospect or client RIGHT NOW, put down the phone, and stop what you’re doing. And get off Facebook and quit fiddling with your iPhone too. Pop Quiz, hotshot. Here’s the rules: Without
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