Don’t want to waste your time on unqualified leads? You’re not alone. One of the hardest parts of B2B sales is filtering out prospects who aren’t right for your products or services – and focusing your sales efforts on truly qualified leads.
But with the right B2B offers, you can make your products and services more appealing, reduce the impact of unqualified leads, and target companies that can truly benefit from what you’ve got to offer. How? We will explain throughout this blog.
Are you a small business owner hiring your first salesperson? A sales manager looking to add more staff to your existing sales department? Whatever the case may be, there are some key things you need to look for when recruiting and hiring salespeople.
We’re experts in B2B sales – and there are five character key traits we look for whenever we’re growing our team. Throughout this blog we’ll give you the inside scoop on what you should be looking for when it’s time to add more sales members to your team.
You finish up your weekend at a trade show or conference and you’re feeling great. You’ve had tons of great interactions with potential customers. But then the next work week rolls around. You reach out to your hottest leads – and get nothing.
What gives? Why are you having trouble connecting with leads, and what can you do about it? Let’s take a look at seven simple steps you can implement to improve post-conference lead engagement and your overall follow-up process.
There’s no doubt that COVID-19 changed a lot of things. From supply chain shortages to stock market crashes, the pandemic had a big impact on the entire world. And it continues to do so, despite vaccines and public health policymakers helping to keep it under control.
Businesses were also deeply affected by COVID-19, particularly the world of B2B sales. If you sell B2B products or services, it’s important to understand the changes caused by COVID-19 and how your sales team can adapt. In this blog, we’ll take a look at a few of the top post-pandemic changes that have affected both buyers and sellers.
If you’ve got more than a few years of sales experience under your belt, you may have noticed that it’s harder and harder to get through to a real person when you’re making a sales call. Many people send calls right to voicemail, or completely ignore them without a second thought.
It’s definitely still possible to reach potential prospects by phone. But it’s important to understand why pickup rates are dropping, how you can maximize your success rates, and the other channels you can use to augment a phone-based marketing strategy. In this blog, we’ll discuss all of this and more!
I recently published a post called Cold calling sucks.
As I was surfing LinkedIn and other sites today, I stumbled upon Hubspot's take on the same topic, titled, "6 Data-Driven Reasons Why Cold Calling Flat Out Sucks."
I’ve spoken with a number of Directors of Member Relations at various associations. One of them was one of an eight-member staff. Another works with 17 other people, and a third works with more than forty staff members in the corporate headquarters of an international organization. Their member engagement goals for 2016 vary, and their strategic marketing initiatives are vastly different, but the one thread that connects them all together is the need for a more focused member retention strategy. The ways they’ve done it before – sharing responsibilities between staff with already-full plates, sending out email reminders that may or may not get opened, or bringing on part-time temps or interns for targeted, short-term campaigns – are simply not as fruitful as they need to be. The result is associations bleeding members at a faster rate than they can recruit, which means annual revenue falls, budgets get squeezed, and strategic initiatives get bottle-necked, sending them on a year-after-year downward spiral.
When a leader has made the decision to add inside sales resources, there’s an adrenaline factor. The pent-up demand in the market that is about to bust out. The flood gates are going to open and your rainmakers (closers, best salespeople) are going to be drowning in buyers.
Then someone in the process has to translate that to an execution plan. Buhm Buhm Buuhhhhhhm. This post is designed to be a pre-think teaser to a critical point in the plan, internal vs. co-sourced inside sales resources.
Picture your short-tenured, high-potential sales person working on a close. He’s at the critical end of a challenging sales process with a big prospect. This prospect has great strategic value and a revenue potential to match. Now listen to your stomach. Are you nervous that your experienced closer isn’t having that conversation? Or are you excited at the opportunity the new guy is getting at this moment? Yes, you obviously want to win the business, but if you’re not also thinking about the value of the experience for their development, win or lose, then this post is dedicated to you… and your education on why those big at-bats are absolutely critical to their future success.
This installment seems pretty intuitive at the surface, so stick with me as I go a little deeper on the concept of why taking less value-adding activities away from your rainmakers makes sense. Also, we’ll spend a little time on the collateral benefits to the organization of freeing up your best closers’ time.
There are essentially two paths where this initiative can go once things start moving and your rainmakers have more time:
Hopefully your sales team is made up of one of two types of people, or both:
If you have lingering mediocrity in your sales team, or even worse, you don’t have one or aren’t sure, let me know and I can point you to some great books or consultants to help you get the right people on your sales bus.
This piece is about execution and results, so we will assume you have already scouted and selected your team. We’re going to talk about a critical step yielding the sales growth you’re after.
There is absolutely an aspect of art in the execution of a successful sales process. But there is also absolutely a needed aspect of science to sales in order for your business to be as successful as it should be.
This post, and a series of posts to follow, are intended to be at least thought-provoking, if not instructional, on how to approach your own sales funnel and client acquisition planning. In later posts, I will share thoughts and processes on how to make decisions on execution plans related specifically to inside sales activity and early-funnel movement.
