Like sports, travel, and Justin Bieber, Anchorman provides a nearly unmatched wealth of metaphors applicable to the sales industry (and I’m only half-kidding about Bieber. Hate the music, but give the kid some props—he definitely understands his target audience and their needs).
With salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff making it the entire focus of Dreamforce 2011, “social selling” is, in the immortal words of Ron Burgundy, “kind of a big deal” these days. In a world where attention spans are short, having an edge in connecting with prospects makes every step of the sales process easier and faster. Professional sales reps–particularly inside sales reps who sell remotely–seemingly can’t afford NOT to be connected to the various social platforms.
Inside sales expert Ken Krogue notes that a LinkedIn invitation with the exact same content as a marketing-generated email is 8x more effective at getting responses than the email by itself. Hubspot reports that companies that blog get 55% more Web traffic, 70% more leads, and 57% of organizations have acquired a customer through an interaction on their blog. In addition, companies with an active Twitter account get 2x as many sales leads, and organizations with 1000+ followers get 6x more traffic.
Sales Time Waster #15: Failure Can Produce Longer-Lasting Lessons than Success
13 September 2010 — Steve Watts
0 Comments
Ken Krogue has been a force in the sales and sales management industries his entire career, having been president of inside sales at Franklin-Covey, founder of inbound call center service provider inContact (formerly UCN), and now President and CMO of InsideSales.com.
His “15 Time wasters of Inside Sales and Marketing” whitepaper presents outstanding advice for planning strategic sales initiatives, and today I wanted to focus some attention specifically on Time Waster #15—Not Knowing Your Wins and Losses.
We preach heavily to sales and marketing teams that understanding why a sale is lost can be just as valuable as knowing why you won—and a research study released August 24th by the Academy of Management Journal backs this up.
Quoting from the study, Science Daily states,
“While success is surely sweeter than failure, it seems failure is a far better teacher, and organizations that fail spectacularly often flourish more in the long run . . . . ”
Inside Sales Top Method for Lead Generation in 2009 according to Forrester and MarketingProfs
8 February 2010 — Ken Krogue
2 Comments
Laura Ramos is perhaps the most recognized expert in lead generation research for B2B. She is a Vice President and Principal Analyst for Forrester.
Laura has been studying what she calls the “Marketing Effectiveness Index” which are the most effective methods used by B2B businesses to generate leads since early in 2006.
She uses responses from surveys to give grades from 1 to 5, with 5 the highest, for different methods of lead generation. Click here to see a chart of her results for the last three years.
Another study for 2010 is coming out soon, but her most recent rankings in 2009 are as follows:
Inside Sales / Telemarketing
Executive Events
Trade Shows
Webinars
Email Marketing
Search Marketing
Direct Mail
Video, Podcasts, etc.
Blogs
Other Web 2.0
The big news in 2009 was that Inside Sales surpassed Executive Events and Email Marketing moved ahead of Search. Trade Shows hung strong even with significant cutbacks in corporate travel budgets.
The rankings for 2008 were:
Executive Events
Inside Sales
Search Marketing
Trade Shows
Webinars
Email Marketing
Direct Mail
Video, Podcasts, etc.
Blogs
Other Web 2.0
How do we get people to engage in a discussion, to write comments on our blog?
We honestly didn’t know.
So we asked our friends at SEO.com, the experts.
Welcome to The Insider.
I’m Ken Krogue, President and co-founder of InsideSales.com. Our customers and industry colleagues have asked us to post best practices, research, tips, and tricks for the inside sales industry for so long that we decided to pull the team together and start The Insider, the official blog of InsideSales.com. We hope that The Insider will become a valuable source for key information for remote sales professionals.
We will post articles, essays, executive summaries, and actual tested scripts, and campaign strategies from our internal sales and lead gen teams as well as those of our customers to help everyone in the inside sales space to improve and do better. You should see valuable new content almost daily on The Insider.
We will also be launching Insider Insights soon, an opt-in eNews service that will make you aware of any new research, best practices, tips and tricks and quickly summarize them, then guide you back to more in-depth information on The Insider, www.LeadResponseManagement.org, my personal blog at www.KenKrogue.com, and much more. Watch for Insider Insights on our home page soon.
The best place to browse the research that has been done by InsideSales.com in partnership with Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Sloan School of Management […]
