Posts Tagged ‘Lead Generation’
New Inside Sales Research: Lead Generation Metrics & Sales Compensation
Research specifically reflecting the behavior and trends within inside sales organizations is a rare commodity. One organization that has been conducting focused research on our industry since 2007 is The Bridge Group, based in Hudson, Mass. This consulting firm has been helping B2B technology companies build, expand and optimize their inside sales strategies since 1988.…
Read MoreTips for Inside Sales: If Interest is the Counterfeit of Need, When is a Lead a Lead?
Having been with XANT for a few months now, I’ve gained some insight into the sales and lead generation industry. That being said, something I constantly hear around the office is the pleasant reminder that interest is not need. Interest is, in fact, the counterfeit of need. (I can’t even count the number of times…
Read MoreTop 25 Digital Marketers Announced by BtoB Magazine
If you don’t know who these people are, you should. BtoB Magazine recently published their second annual Top Digital Marketers 2012 list. Congratulations to these industry leaders who have contributed heavily to the growth of the digital marketing and lead generation space. Top Digital Marketers Scott Anderson – VP—Customer Communications, enterprise group at Hewlett-Packard Co.
Read MoreLead 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 XANT, 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 . . .
Read MoreOptimal Metrics for Lead Generation
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 XANT 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…
Read MoreDemand Generation, Tactics and Strategy, and Business Intelligence
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…
Read More“Sorry About the Rant” — Lead Generation and Lead Response
If by some serendipitous circumstance you were allowed to hang out at the XANT 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…
Read MoreLead Generation is Part of the Sales Department, Not Marketing
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…
Read MoreSales Process Tip: Split Your Sales Team Into Specialists
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 . . . .
Read MoreB2B Sales and Marketing “Cultural Alignment” Part 3
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…
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