20+ years
Since positive economic cycles like the one we’re in now don’t last forever, it’s time to make hay while the sun shines and plan for an awesome sales year in 2019. Planning and preparation, however, takes time. So you cannot afford to wait until the New Year rings in to create your sales and marketing strategy and devise your tactics. To make 2019 strong and as panic-free as possible, plan how you will generate sales and start building your pipeline NOW.
The experts estimate that integrating computer technology with telephone interactions can increase efficiency by 15 percent. For the average rep, that gives them an extra hour a day to sell.
With that in mind, here are some of the apps that can help your reps make more phone calls and achieve better results.
“ If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.” — Peter Drucker.
Thanks to online marketing and technology, we have more data than ever to use in measuring and managing marketing campaigns. There are so many potential reports and dashboards that it’s easy to be overwhelmed.
So in this article, I will boil down an ocean of possible marketing data into the essential drops of wisdom. These are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will give you the big picture. Plus, they allow you to drill deeper as necessary to manage your pipeline, refine your campaigns and maximize return on investment (ROI).
According to research, “Companies using ABM generate 208% more revenue for their marketing effort.” It’s not surprising that an increasing number of companies are adopting account-based marketing (ABM) as their go-to strategy. Following in their wake are the technology companies that provide solutions that support it. So to get started or keep your competitive edge with ABM, it pays to understand the technology landscape.
There are several steps to the ABM process. Some solutions focus on one or two steps, and others offer an all-in-one package. Below is an outline of the ABM process along with products for which customers have given their seal of approval — as of the writing of this article, they all have four or more stars on the review site G2 Crowd.
Will AI Take Over?
As time goes by, artificial intelligence (AI) will play an increasingly vital role in sales. In fact, as some companies relegate some of the more straightforward selling tasks to AI, lower level sales jobs are beginning to dry up.
Just think about how thousands of retail salespeople have lost their jobs as Amazon and other e-commerce sites have taken over.
These websites are not just order-takers. Their complex algorithms enable them to cross-sell. For instance, when you search for a book, you’ll see a message saying “Customers who bought this item also bought [an array of other tempting items].” They also upsell by suggesting “Compare similar items.” Usually, you’ll see some items that are bigger and better.
A study of over 100 subscription businesses found that companies that had customer success teams experienced 24 percent less churn than those without them.
It makes sense. If your customers are achieving the desired results with your product or service, they are less likely to stray.
Whatever your business model, subscription or otherwise, customer loyalty is essential for producing a revenue stream that doesn’t dry up. That’s because research shows 71 percent of B2B customers are at risk of switching vendors.
How often do you call a prospect to present your company’s offering and hear them say, “You called at just the right time. I was looking for [what you offer].” Or even if they don’t state that explicitly, you know it’s true because of how receptive they are to your call. It probably doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it feels good.
Would you like to increase the frequency of reaching prospects at just the right time?
To elicit more positive responses from prospects, it’s helpful to do some sleuthing to detect sales trigger events. What is a trigger event? Most often, it’s a personal, organizational or environmental change. This disruption in the status quo spurs opportunities for new vendors.
Here are some examples of trigger events:
Recently, I received a call from a talented telemarketer. As a telemarketing professional, I love to challenge the agents who call me, asking tough questions and raising objections. At some point, the rep will usually hesitate or provide a less than perfect answer. However, in this case, every time I posed a question or raised an issue or rebutted a response, she had the textbook answer.
Also, there were no pauses. No ums. No unnecessary words. After a while, I wondered, “Am I talking to a real person or is this a robocall?” To find out, I repeated a question to which I had just received a perfect answer. The telemarketing rep then reiterated the same response word for word.
It was only then that I knew for sure that I had just spent twenty minutes talking to a robot.
Sometimes it’s hard to imagine what the world of B2B business development was like 15 years ago. Many may think telemarketing today is much the same as it’s always been.
It turns out, however, that the old dog of telemarketing can learn new tricks. While inside sales reps’ central communication device is still the phone, they increasingly rely on digital tools for a more holistic approach to lead qualification and B2B business development.
To understand how technology has empowered telemarketers, a little retrospective is in order.
Are you looking for a cookie-cutter inside sales process you can implement in your company without changes? If so, you’ll be disappointed. No such thing exists. That’s because you need to tailor your process to your market, target audience and product or solution.
Most importantly, how you approach the sale has to be in sync with your buyer’s journey. How do they make the buying decision? What questions do they ask along the way? How can you help them choose the right product or solution?
To illustrate an inside sales process, let’s take a fictitious example — a company, Zippy, Inc., which offers a marketing automation solution.
