A recent Harvard Business Review article forwarded to me titled, “How to Sell New Products,” is packed full of powerful lessons for anyone wanting to launch any new B2B product. The article was based on research including one-on-one conversations and surveys of B2B sales people and early on reveals this gem of a quote:
B2b marketers, when you get sales leadership (or better yet, even just a few of the truly good sales people) in a room, what information should you get from them to create more success for both marketing and sales in your organization? What are the most important questions to ask sales?
There are two key topic areas where your questions will serve you best — value propositions and lead quality/quantity.
Value Proposition
What is your sales team pitching: When your sales team sends an email to a prospect to pitch a product, what do they say? It’s very likely that many of you have no idea. You make an assumption that if you have given sales leadership or the sales team the right product/service brochures or other collatoral, or you have given them an approved presentation, or they have sat in a meeting where they were given […]
For a smaller marketing department, it is even more crucial to create and implement a plan quickly to inspire confidence, expand your budget, and grow your marketing investments and success for the company. You can’t hide behind much when it’s just you. Amazingly, I have discovered that in marketing groups of all sizes, one of the fundamental weaknesses has been clearly defining what success will look like for […]
So far, we have examined two possible barriers that limit or even prevent timely lead follow-up – lead bottlenecks (How Organizations Waste Perfectly Good Leads – Part 1) and the failure to deliver leads to the right person (How Organizations Waste Perfectly Good Leads – Part 2). In this final article, ‘How Organizations Waste Perfectly Good Leads – Part 3’, we’ll look at the remaining two barriers, which are the failure to deliver […]
In the first post on this topic, “Marketing in the new world – the cheese is moved,” I covered the first marketing new world order (my term) that states: that technology has completely and radically changed the way your potential and existing customers engage with and purchase from your company.
Your prospects don’t have to rely on sales personnel to gain the information they need early in the buying process to […]
In the first article in this series, How Organizations Waste Perfectly Good Leads (Part 1), I introduced you to possible lead bottlenecks that may be preventing or limiting timely follow-up on the great leads you are generating for your sales team. In ‘How Organizations Waste Perfectly Good Leads – Part 2’, I want to focus on another possible barrier to timely follow-up – the failure to […]
How Organizations Waste Perfectly Good Leads
So you’ve just finished an amazing campaign that generated a ton of interest and, more important, qualified leads! You expect sales to be closing left and right, but that is not happening. Why not? Why are these fantastic qualified leads not producing the sales results you expect?
Well, you are not alone.
How organizations waste perfectly good leads is simply by failing to follow up with prospects immediately.
Research clearly […]