Posts under ‘Sales Effectiveness’

Like all technologies, spamming and spam filtering have evolved and have become more sophisticated. As spammers constantly find workarounds to fool filters, ISPs (Internet Service Providers) work on developing more sophisticated methods to block spam. Using only content filters to block what is likely spam (e.g. if the subject line contains the word “Viagra”) is […]

Today’s Marketing Automation technologies give us unprecedented visibility into who are visiting our websites and what they are looking at, all in real-time. Marketers and Salespeople leveraging these new demand generation technologies face an interesting new question though: To pounce or not to pounce?

How often do you see your clients face-to-face? Do you have a good sense of their location and geography in relation to their supply chain, to you or to your competitors? Could there be other potential opportunities to grow your business near by?

Do you sometimes feel that your nightly news coverage is no different from one station to the next?  You could flip through and hear the same sound bytes over and over again: “global warming,” “economic downturn,” “swine flu”; the message gets buried under the buzz.

The Internet has increased everyone’s opportunities. Everyone, arguably, except for those in sales. Separated by bits and bytes, and potentially thousands of miles, a prospect is too often an unknown entity to the salesperson. The salesperson has no way of knowing if the person is a troll or a truly hot sales lead. They deal […]

If personas have traditionally been the domain of software developers, why are they becoming so well liked and used by sales teams? What are some of the ways in which organizations are benefiting from personas? How do “buyer personas” need to be different than “design personas”? If buyer personas deal with the goals of buyers and influencers who might be relevant in a sales interaction, then to build them do we need original research on a topic that’s been broadly researched already, or can one set of personas be equally useful for numerous organizations?

To reach your business goals, your company requires a steady stream of strong leads linked to an effective sales force. New technologies and techniques are changing the game, so how does your organization compare to other firms?

As a guideline, marketing should allocate 65% of its resources to demand generation and 35% to lead nurturing and management.1
83% of […]

Assess how you currently define your target market and explore how new best practice techniques such as “persona development” could help you improve your market insight and segmentation – to create more attractive offers and messages for lead development.
Review your current lead development programs and score them on a customer-centricity scale.
Calculate your cost per lead and scrutinize […]