Lead Generation Tip: Add a Tiny Bit of “Oomph” to Your Elevator Pitch
21 March 2011 — Steve Watts
1 Comment
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 . . .
Driving performance requires accurate and focused measures of performance. This is especially the case for account development and lead generation teams. I have recently been interviewing both InsideSales.com customers and non-customers (predominantly from the B2B High Tech/Services/Telecom industries) to identify the optimal metric to use when measuring the success of account development reps. I found that these companies are actually using a wide array of criteria that include talk time, dials per day, appointments set, appointments held, and opportunities set.
The most successful teams, however, are all using some variation of opportunities set. Specifically, the most common metric I heard is called TQO, or Totally Qualified Opportunities. A TQO is an opportunity that actually contributes to the sales pipeline and has a close ratio that is within the same ratio as the existing sales process. This metric provided much greater visibility than any of the others I saw.
Then I dug into the number of TQOs that an account development rep can reasonably achieve in one month. This number ranges from 16 to 28, and seems to vary due to differences in industry, maturity of rep, list type and source, and company/product brand. The […]
Demand Generation, Tactics and Strategy, and Business Intelligence
10 December 2010 — Ken Krogue
10 Comments
Tuesday evening at Dreamforce, I got into an interesting Twitter conversation with Left Brain Marketing’s Adam Needles (@abneedles on Twitter) discussing marketing’s relationship with sales.
In Adam’s mind, he felt that the presenters of the Sales/Marketing alignment session were pushing marketing back into a sales support role, one that he felt didn’t align with the purpose of today’s Sales 2.0 demand generation strategies.
I’ve never met Adam in person, but having read some of his writing at Silverpop, Left Brain Marketing, and on his own personal blog Propelling Brands, he has always produced insightful, thought-provoking content related to B2B demand generation. Thus, I was intrigued by his conviction that marketing and demand gen were not “sales support,” but a holistic, integrated set of processes that speed and maximize business development.
In stark contrast to Adam’s ideas is an article I read several weeks ago from BNet’s “Sales Machine” blog. In it author Geoffrey James forcibly decries what he sees as one of the biggest failures of marketing departments — that they “turned from service functions into a ‘strategic leadership’ role.”
James goes on, “Marketing geeks started showing up in product design meetings, pretending that they understood the customer . . . […]
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 effectively manage their sales and lead generation processes in a lot of ways. But we focus a lot of our efforts on immediate lead response for one simple reason:
It’s the #1 way to increase Web-generated leads’ contact and qualifying rates–and thus lead to more productive sales pipelines.
And the other reason we’re so zealous about it is that 65-70% of the business world frankly, well, sucks at it. (see our research with Dr. James Oldroyd, SKKU, Dreamforce ’08, Omniture Summit, and AA-ISP for proof).
In summary:
The aggregate data between the Dreamforce ’08, Dreamforce ’10, Omniture Summit, and AA-ISP Boston research studies shows that approximately 40 percent of all companies NEVER RESPOND A SINGLE TIME to a Web generated lead of any kind. Not “Follows up slowly and ineffectively.” Simply doesn’t do it at all.
Average response time for a first contact attempt OF ANY KIND (phone or email) for a Web-generated lead: 43 hours (when the MIT research shows […]
B2B, Demand Generation, and “Getting Real” With Social Media
16 November 2010 — Ken Krogue
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Working for a strictly B2B sales company (caveat: many of our clients sell direct to consumers, but we ourselves really only target businesses), I’m constantly evaluating the differences between B2B and B2C selling — as well as the similarities as they arise.
Branding, connecting with the customer, sales approaches, creating demand, and so on, all have some crossover between the B2B and B2C worlds.
But I’ll admit I’ve had a hard time justifying investing lots of money into social media. In the B2B space, it just always seemed relatively unimportant in the scale of things, compared to other means of business development.
So I was interested to see a post on No More Cold Calling that affirmed my suspicions.
Author Joanne Black states,
“Social media is a powerful tool for three things and three things only:
Search engine optimization — use your key words and raise your presence on the web.
Find out who people are — learn about a person’s background and your connections.
Find out who people know — look for close connections that you can leverage.
Some salespeople tell me they actually get clients through social […]
Lead Generation is Part of the Sales Department, Not Marketing
18 October 2010 — Steve Watts
2 Comments
Occasionally we get asked by a new client implementing our sales management system, “So we’ve got our lead generation team set up and ready to go, but who should they be reporting to? The marketing people think it’s them, but the sales managers think they’ll get more out of it if they’re in charge. So who’s right?”
In our experience, the answer’s pretty simple: Sales is in charge of lead generation, not marketing.
I realize this is heresy in some marketing circles, but in B2B sales, it’s the truth.
There’s two primary reasons for this:
1. Marketing is passive and lead generation is proactive.
My boss Ken Krogue tells a funny story about this from a few years ago when they attended the Omniture Summit conference in 2008. They were in a group forum discussion, and the marketing people kept raising their hands and asking, “Aren’t you sales types being too pushy with your leads?”
The short answer is no. Branding, lead nurturing, media ad buying, and passive conversion from existing channels involve much different processes and mind sets than outbound lead generation. Lead gen is about active pursuit of new opportunities. The mind set of tip-toeing around prospects is counter-productive […]
Question: What do the names Eddie Johnson, JJ Redick, Trent Tucker, and Craig Hodges have in common?
Answer: They’re all NBA basketball players who were able to have successful careers primarily by being proficient at one thing (and not much else):
Making three-point shots.
These were players who realized that the highest value to their teams was to focus on what they did well—and develop as many “sub-skills” around that core value as they could.
JJ Redick will never win a dunk contest, or be considered anything more than a mediocre defender—but he has perfected the art of coming off screens, and has a lightning-quick shot release.
It’s not always the case, but in today’s Sales 2.0 World, a lot of the time it’s better to be fantastically good at one thing than to be average at half-a-dozen . . . .
In two previous posts, we’ve identified that:
Sales and marketing come from different “cultural” perspectives.
Sales is results-oriented, marketing is human-interest driven.
In B2B, the needs of sales—i.e., getting good sales leads—overrides marketing’s impetus for branding and market research.
The question I asked at the end of Part 2 was, “How can you align a marketing team to produce sales leads without hurting, or challenging marketers’ deeply held beliefs about the need to create an emotional connection between a buyer and a product, a person and a brand?”
While I don’t know all the answers, I can offer the following advice, based on our own experiences here at InsideSales.com:
1. Make an explicit, hierarchical list of priorities that align your marketing production to your sales.
One of the first things I did when I sat down with our marketing team earlier this year was draw up a “focus list” for each of our daily activities. Any time we sign off on an activity, the global priority is established with it. Our list is provided below, yours may differ:
Remove barriers that cause drops in incoming leads (i.e., refining split test Web content that doesn’t appear to be working, Google Ad words / […]
In my last blog post, I discussed the fact that sales and marketing teams largely come from a different set of internal “cultures,” cultures whose viewpoints and and attitudes are often at odds with each other.
In Part 2, I want to take a closer look at this concept, because as sales and marketing teams continue to evolve, and move ever closer in alignment, at some point the “culture war” between the two will spill over into the corporate workroom.
In review: Sales “culture” is business- and results-oriented; marketing “culture” is connection- and human-interest driven.
The question becomes, when push comes to shove, which viewpoint takes precedence?
BNet Business guru Geoffrey James gives us the answer—and it’s based on a belief I’ve long held myself:
“In business-to-business (B2B) firms, the legendary conflict between sales and marketing stems from a difference of opinion about what marketing should be doing. Most marketing professionals believe that they should primarily be concerned with market research, building brand equity and creating marketing materials. Most sales professionals believe that marketing should be generating qualified sales leads.”
Very true. But the next part is where the article gets interesting:
“This is part of the blog where I’m […]
Aligning Sales and Marketing – It’s Not Just About Metrics, It’s Culture
14 September 2010 — Ken Krogue
4 Comments
Having just re-read sales and marketing blogger Adam Needle’s 4 part series on the “Unspoken ‘Real State’ of Modern B2B Demand Generation,” I once again cannot commend enough the value of the data and analysis he presents. If you have any interest at all in B2B sales, marketing, branding, or sales management, this is a fantastic set of articles.
So go read them now, and then come back.
Welcome back.
One the biggest challenges of my current position with InsideSales.com is making the connections between sales and marketing more visible, repeatable, and cost effective.
And a key idea that kept pounding in my head while I reviewed Adam’s material was that aligning sales and marketing is difficult because employees on each side largely come from two different production “cultures.”
In a nutshell, sales are largely business types, marketing people are creatives—and getting the two to take a look through the other’s “lens” often sends them into foreign territory.
Most sales people are brought up through the ranks of business schools—or at least integrated into a business culture. Whether or not they actually finish a college degree, good sales pros typically show an interest in management, business, and corporate practices. Even […]
