In the intricate world of lead generation, timing is everything. It's not just about finding potential customers; it's about engaging them at the right moment to maximize success. The decision of when to bring in a lead generation partner is pivotal, often best done during the strategy and design phase. This allows for crucial adjustments to be made to the value proposition, guarantees, or offers, optimizing outreach effectiveness. While it may seem counterintuitive to involve a partner early on, even if immediate deployment isn't planned, the long-term benefits are undeniable.
Determining the "best" CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system for a sales team depends on various factors, including the specific needs and preferences of the team, the size of the organization, and the industry it operates in. Different CRMs offer unique features and functionalities. Here are some popular and highly regarded CRM systems that cater to the needs of sales teams:
Ensuring new sales representatives hit the ground running is essential for maximizing productivity and contribution. Employing effective strategies can expedite the onboarding process for your sales reps. In this blog we will dive into the sales rep onboarding process and discuss how to make sure your new hires are efficient right from the start.
Effective sales training is essential for equipping sales representatives with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in today's competitive business landscape. How do you know which may be the best for your team? Here are a few along with their Focus Areas and Features.
Learning how and why your customers make buying decisions can teach you a lot about the industry your serve. If this information is recorded, analyzed, and leveraged appropriately, it can lead to a sizable lift in revenue and set you up for sustainable growth going forward. Here's a breakdown of things to keep in mind when conducting your initial customer segmentation campaign.
Flight is an annual event presented by Launch League that gathers more than 200 founders, investors, and startup enthusiasts in Akron. Local start-ups are invited to showcase their work, connect with investors & co-founders, and boost their success rate through educational speaker tracks.
Will you be there?
In my last post, I talked about how Fitbit inspired our sales team to launch a new badge program. It's helped motivate our Account Growth Specialist team and to create competition on a daily basis, thus improving our team comradery, competition, culture, and results!
Since that post, we've received a few questions about what the program looks like and specifically, what types of badges we use. Below you'll find an image of each badge and a description of how it's earned.
I love my Fitbit. The live movement tracking on my wrist, the competition with my friends, and the ability to earn badges along the way keep me motivated to move more and pursue a healthier lifestyle. In fact, adding a Fitbit to my life helped me lose 25 pounds last year!
We took that idea and translated it to our Account Growth Specialist team. First, what kinds badges would help intrinsically motivate them or create competition within the team on a daily basis? Second, what kinds of badges will our clients care about?
The last several years have given way to a monumental movement in the sales and marketing world called "Inbound Marketing." In short, this movement circles around creating excellent digital content, position yourself as thought-leaders in your industry, and establishing a broad enough internet presence that your prospective buyers find your name first when they're looking to buy, and then reach out to you.
There are a lot of articles about getting past gatekeepers on sites like SalesBuzz.com, InsideSales.com, and others. Sometimes, though, these articles start by saying that cold-calling is dead and if you're even getting to gatekeepers instead of direct dials, you're doing something wrong.
While inbound marketing and sales enablement is the best way to get warm, qualified leads with decision-maker name and number, if you're not having people raise their hand, you still have to go find sales somehow, and in order to do that, you'll need to pull a list, write a script, and make some phone calls.
Cold-calling isn't dead when it's the only way you have to get in front of potential buyers quickly, and in order to help you do that, here are some hacks to get around gatekeepers, or at least to leverage your conversation with them to help with future marketing.
The story of the rust belt in Ohio is resonant of the manufacturing industry across the country these days: Succession plans have happened, are happening, or will happen soon, and with that comes a flux in sales and marketing that could make or break the company.
As you plan out your growth goals, here are some steps we recommend to make sure you exceed those goals in the most efficient, strategic manner.
When you sign up for InceptGrows, you subscribe to a fractional inside sales representative or, Account Growth Specialist, as we call them here. This means we dedicated one high-caliber sales rep to your account who is responsible for conducting sales-related tasks for you every day for a specified portion of their day.
In his book The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon does a great job of describing the personality of the all-star sales representative and providing tips on how to scale that out to the entire team. It's a good read for building a strong overall sales cadence, but what about strictly phone-based sales? On a team of 10 inside sales representatives, what does the top performer consistently do differently than the rest of the team?
After spending a combined 40+ years in the call center, telemarketing, and sales development space, our team got together to discuss ways to increase productivity and results while reducing employee churn. The solution clearly comes down to one simple thing: You have to hire the right people to begin with.
Here's a breakdown of the 5 most important things to look for when hiring for an inside sales position, especially one that revolves primarily around phone-based sales:
Did you know that 71% of leads are never followed up with? And worse yet, the typical lead is touched by a salesperson on average only 1.3 times. The marketplace is spending massive amounts of money on marketing to generate leads that are never even get spoken to.
This is why ACCEL Schools came to us in 2016 and asked for help.
Motivation is a key to coaching a sales team to success. After plugging away at endless dials, dealing wth angry gatekeepers and constant rejection, it can be hard to stay motivated.
We found that supplying our team with a motivational quote each morning really helps to set the stage for a positive day. Here are 8 of our favorite motivational sales quotes to inspire your sales team:
An Account Growth Specialist (AGS) is an individual responsible for revenue growth contribution through business development and inside sales activities. Top performing AGS's are critical thinkers, creative problem solvers, and driven individuals.
InceptGrows has a team of 20 Account Growth Specialists that business owners and sales leaders can subscribe to on a fractional basis in order to assist in growing their business.
Sales huddles are short and frequent meetings that allow every person involved with the inside sales team get an understanding of what went well, what needs improvement, and any action items that must be completed by the next sales huddle. Each step of this meeting is very intentional and allows for all individuals involved to voice their excitements, disspointments, and needs moving forward.
Customers use our on-demand inside sales division both to address short-term needs or really as a resource for their long-term marketing strategy. We absolutely see the best results when our services are designed to complement a long-term project. Short-term relationships can generate attendance for an event or try to generate leads for a sales blitz, but finding a solution to handle the top of the funnel long-term should be a priority for your business.
You've cold-called your way through a list and talked to people who were either ready to buy, interested but not ready to buy, or not interested. So often, the ready-to-buy group becomes the focus of inside sales representatives, and the rest of the list is forgotten. What you really need to do is keep your brand in front of those interested-but-not-ready-to-buy folks so that when they run into a problem your organization can fix, you're the first company that comes to mind.
