10 Aug |
Teleprospecting: An Effective Lead Generation and Qualification Vehicle |
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Teleprospecting qualifies hot leads to help you take action before your competitors do Phone hang-ups and door slams are the most dreaded situations for sales people anywhere. Ever considered teleprospecting to help your team? While many haven’t heard of teleprospecting and some confuse it with telemarketing, there are a few forward-thinking businesses that taken advantage of its ability to qualify hot leads and jump ahead of their competitors. Is it for you? B2B teleprospecting is an effective lead generation and qualification vehicle that helps companies cut to the chase and get down to the business of selling. Rather than have a large database of potential customers that may or may not pan out, teleprospecting sniffs out the clients who are really interested and increases your chances of success. Good teleprospectors are trained and qualified. They have experience dealing with high-level company executives and are skilled at drawing out pain-points to identify clients who are seriously considering using your product or services. It’s far more cost-effective to let a teleprospecting company sift out genuine prospects than have your sales people spend time and effort on
Read more...03 Aug |
Connecting the dots between lead generation, sales and CRM |
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Integrate lead generation, sales and CRM to gain higher returns For certain, I’m not a crystal gazer; but looking into the past? Sure, I’ve done that. Don’t we all from time to time? Actually, in business, everyone stands to gain from a periodic retrospective – review, analyze and soldier on! From a collective business world standpoint, a review of B2B sales and marketing in the past decade reveals a shift in business strategy. An interesting observation is the conscious effort to align sales and marketing objectives and functions for better results. Even if you have a Strategic Marketing Services company that’s taking care of B2B lead generation and management, your sales team should work closely with them in lead follow-up, functional visibility and performance analysis. Business effectiveness and success depends on open communication and collective efforts towards common goals. If organizations are committed to increasing momentum they must be willing to restructure and reorganize. Lead generation, sales and CRM can no longer work in isolation. It would be like having your fingers trying to accomplish tasks individually. So how do lead generation, sales and CRM all
Read more...19 Jul |
Connecting the Dots Between Lead Generation, Sales and CRM |
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Integrate lead generation, sales and CRM to gain higher returns For certain, I’m not a crystal gazer; but looking into the past? Sure, I’ve done that. Don’t we all from time to time? Actually, in business, everyone stands to gain from a periodic retrospective – review, analyze and soldier on! From a collective business world standpoint, a review of B2B sales and marketing in the past decade reveals a shift in business strategy. An interesting observation is the conscious effort to align sales and marketing objectives and functions for better results. Even if you have a Strategic Marketing Services company that’s taking care of B2B lead generation and management, your sales team should work closely with them in lead follow-up, functional visibility and performance analysis. Business effectiveness and success depends on open communication and collective efforts towards common goals. If organizations are committed to increasing momentum they must be willing to restructure and reorganize. Lead generation, sales and CRM can no longer work in isolation. It would be like having your fingers trying to accomplish tasks individually. So how do lead generation, sales and CRM all
Read more...12 Jul |
Uniting Sales and Marketing Under One Umbrella |
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Sales and marketing must work together to convert lead generation activities into a loyal customer base Almost everyone’s complaining that business is tough. But a closer analysis of the low sales volume experienced by many businesses today shows a strong disconnect between their sales and marketing initiatives. The gap between B2B lead generation, conversion and CRM occurs because sales and marketing departments function as independent units (often at odds with each other). Instead, they should be working together to close the deal and cement the relationship. Companies that have aligned marketing and sales goals are the ones that get results. There is no definite point at which marketing stops and sales begins. Simply stated, sales and marketing must work hand-in-hand from end-to-end! How do you get sales and marketing to join forces? Integrated marketing: This involves integrating all marketing and sales tools, activities and resources to convert leads into customers. Online or offline marketing and sales efforts must convey the same message and level of intensity in order to be effective. In other words, lead generation, sales promotion and lead management must share
Read more...08 Jul |
Strategic Planning for Inbound Marketing |
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Inbound marketing must be integrated into the overall strategic plan In some of my recent blog posts I wrote about how planting a seed, turning it into a lead, nurturing it and helping the lead progress towards purchase are all important steps in the B2B lead generation process. When organizations take on inbound marketing, it requires an integrated marketing approach to ensure that every initiative is part of a strategic plan. In order to deliver the overall marketing and CRM goals, inbound marketing can be broken down into distinct programs, each with a specific objective. Not only does this makes monitoring and measurement easier, it offers clear insights to help change what’s not working and leverage what is bringing results. How can your business develop a strategy for planning and implementation of inbound marketing? Reputation Management: This is the stage where your B2B lead generation efforts are geared towards planting the seed. It’s all about creating awareness, branding and giving a boost to customer loyalty. Social media is very useful at this stage. Demand Generation: Once the grounds are “fertile” you set to work on creating a demand for your goods by
Read more...05 Jul |
Following inbound marketing trends enables adoption of best practices for lead generation |
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Inbound marketing is the strategic use of tools and techniques that draw the attention of a qualified target audience through relevant content and interactive engagement. That’s a simple definition of Inbound Marketing. The keyword here is “qualified audience” which means potential buyers who are closer to the buying decision. Well, at least in expressing their need for the type of product or service you offer. A prospect starts to look for you when they are getting ready to buy, and begin the process of searching for the best solution. Inbound marketing helps your business be found easily, both online and offline. Drawing people in to your CRM goes beyond B2B lead generation and takes on a multi-pronged approach to integrated marketing. Your deliverables become: (a) relevant content and (b) interactive engagement. Let’s look at some leading trends in inbound marketing to understand how organizations are adopting best practices: Ratio of Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing: Market trends show a shift in budget spending from outbound to inbound marketing. However, smart B2B marketers focus on leveraging the inbound spend rather than increasing it. What this means is
Read more...28 Jun |
Social Media Fuels the B2B Lead Lifecycle – CRM Update is Critical! |
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Social media plays an important role in the sales cycle, but keeping your CRM database is key No matter how many budget cuts your organization introduces to cope with challenging times, you somehow make room for B2B lead generation expenses. It is after all, the lifeline of your sales performance, right? The only change to this ongoing situation is the dire need to measure and quantify results, so not a penny goes to waste. The results of B2B lead generation are best measured by the end goal, i.e. a customer conversion. For a B2B interaction to progress from seed to lead to sale, it must traverse through the phase of opportunity nurturing — the time when a prospective customer actually begins direct interaction with a company’s sales representative. It is typically the time when a lead is comparison shopping, checking out references and testimonials, conducting due diligence about the sellers’ products and services, and, engaging in social media conversations to find out more! Close coordination between your marketing and sales team, via the CRM and other formal / informal internal communications methods is paramount to nurturing sales opportunities. Being in the
Read more...21 Jun |
Social Media and CRM working together for better lead generation |
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At the recently concluded Internet Week in New York, the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) hosted a panel discussion on social media and its impact on CRM. The resounding message from the expert panellists, all big names in the advertising and marketing industry, was that sales and online conversations (a.k.a. social media) are now inseparable and must go hand in hand. The essence of B2B lead generation has always been to help a brand find entry into the minds of customers. Planned or unplanned, orchestrated or inadvertently, brands are entering the customer mindset via social media channels. Businesses that recognize this and make efforts to take control of this process will emerge as the biggest winners in CRM profitability. Today’s quick tip on how to use social media to improve your CRM for lead generation: Make your social media channels fertile ground for finding leads. On your company website, your B2B lead generation efforts are ideally tied to a specific call to action and information gathering process that feeds your CRM database. In an online social community, however, there are potential B2B leads that you may not be aware of; yet these can become your biggest
Read more...08 Jun |
Make Sales Leads a Privilege, Not a Right |
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Want to significantly increase your B2B lead conversion rates and get your salespeople to provide near 100 percent feedback on lead status? Then stop sending them sales leads— seriously! Instead, set up an online lead distribution system that requires them to request each and every lead. This simple change can have a profound effect on your conversion rates. Why? It starts with human nature: all of us value something more if we have to pay for it or request it. When something is given to us for free or without consideration, we tend to value it less. Similarly, sales leads that are “pushed” out to the field tend to receive less attention by salespeople. Second, leads that are requested are more likely to be followed up immediately. And, as everybody knows, the faster a lead receives follow-up, the more likely it is to convert. Independent research has shown that, on average, the likelihood of a lead converting to a sale decreases by as much as two percent each day that it languishes. Third, sales people are much more likely to provide feedback on lead quality and status since they requested it in the first place. This will enable you to fine-tune your lead generation
Read more...02 Jun |
Overcoming Lengthening B2B Sales Cycles |
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Recent research from a number of sources confirms what all of us in demand generation have suspected for some time now: (1) In spite of the proliferation of new marketing communications tools like social media, companies report that generating qualified sales leads continues to be their biggest challenge and (2) The sales cycle, especially for technology marketers, is getting longer. What significance do these findings have for B2B marketers? Companies (and especially their field sales forces, dealers, and resellers) have always wanted more qualified leads, not more leads, so this isn’t a big surprise. However, the lengthening sales cycle is a relatively new trend that is increasingly frustrating salespeople. Organizations need an effective way to deal with this phenomenon. Lead nurturing now as critical as lead qualifying In this environment, more and more prospects will score as “B” level leads— meaning that they may be qualified to buy your product but are not yet ready to make a purchase decision. Turning these prospects into “A” leads requires a systematic lead nurturing system that: Makes regular recontact— to continually reassess prospect status and keep
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