If you’ve followed my blog or my company for any length of time, it’s likely you’ve heard me say that immediate response to sales leads is one of the crucial factors for creating new sales prospects (and that a good sales automation tool is about the only way to do it consistently and effectively). But…

Read More

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 increasing budget allocation) Email marketing (54%) Web search optimization (51%) Great news, right? Good to…

Read More

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 . . . .

Read More

I’m going to share a little secret about a mistake we made about a year and a half ago when we redesigned our Web site.

On the surface it was a beautiful redesign. Oh, so very beautiful.

Slick, shiny, “the new hotness,” slick, and slick (did I mention it was slick?).

And it killed our Web site conversion rate.

After two months of awful performance, we finally bit the bullet and furiously rolled the old site back out, and started from scratch . . . .

Read More

I just finished a phone conversation with Trish Bertuzzi, the founder of The Bridge Group, one of the leading Inside Sales Consulting firms in the US. The topic of our original LRM Study with Dr. James Oldroyd came up and the fact that many people have thrown around a lot of numbers since that research…

Read More