We have arrived at the #5 thing I believe every CEO should know about marketing. In case you are new to the series, you can find #1 – #4 (The “Ante”, Not all marketing is the same, B2B buyer journey, and B2B website purpose) in our blog.
#5 is about alignment – specifically marketing and sales alignment around one specific definition. There are certainly many […]
This third blog post of the “7 things a CEO needs to know about marketing” series focuses on the B2B buyer journey. You may believe your company sells stuff to the market – like your products or services, however, that is your seller view and not a buyer view. You indeed have products and services, and you definitely engage in activities that lead to sales but the truth is people are buying what they need […]
Do stay-at-home B2B salespeople perform differently?
This week I had an interesting conversation with one of my clients. He manages a B2B sales team and pointed out an interesting statistic that has emerged regarding how his sales team is performing during this “stay-at-home” period. Basically, his sales team has improved by 70% in terms of the average time for first follow-up on leads. In other words, while his […]
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 […]
Solution Pitch, a cloud-based sales automation tool, is simply something that sales people dream of and likely don’t have. Now their dreams have come true – your salesperson can use their mobile device or any browser to quickly locate and send their prospect the perfect solution pitch every time.
Once a salesperson qualifies […]
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 […]