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We hear so much these days about the customer-driven buyer’s journey and that more than half of the sales cycle occurs without prospective customers contacting a sales representative. The new buyer’s journey puts ever-increasing pressure on marketing departments to handle the pre-sales process.

Although marketing technology, with its lead scoring, data integration, and automated content delivery tools, can help marketers respond quickly to inquiries online and deliver targeted content, it’s often not enough. That’s why the best marketers still match high tech with the human touch—especially when their product line is complex, and the sales cycle is long.

It’s not enough to capture a lead, follow up, pass the lead to sales, and hope for the business. You need to turn requests into qualified leads and ideally sales-enabled leads. Marketing’s job is to get salespeople in front of prospective customers. And one of the best ways to do that is to work with a professional telemarketing service that specializes in B2B sales and develop a proven appointment-setting strategy. 

What’s Causing the B2B Inside Sales Training Problem?

Last September, the AA-ISP, an international association dedicated exclusively to advancing the profession of Inside Sales, released their 2014 Inside Sales Top Challenges. And they discovered that the number one challenge sales leaders are facing today is training inside sales people to perform well. In fact, many sales organizations complain about a high turnover of inside sales representatives as they don’t manage to bring them to the performance levels they expect in the calculated timeframes. 

Why is training such a hot issue?

A 2013 study by InsideSales.com reports inside sales is growing 300% faster than field sales. This trend is expected to continue. That’s because inside sales:

·         cuts costs

·         is accepted by customers who have become comfortable learning about companies remotely via websites, social media, content downloads such as e-books and white papers, email and phone calls

In fact, many customers prefer the flexibility of phone calls to face-to-face meetings.

Due to the benefits of inside sales, the B2B sales model is changing. Inside sales representatives are taking over more sales duties, sometimes handling the complete sale by themselves rather than working hand in hand with a field sales person. Even if they are working with a field sales executive, they may be doing more up front to transform leads into qualified sales opportunities before passing the baton to the field sales person.

The growth in demand for inside sales people has resulted in a shortage of qualified reps on the market. That means companies now need to hire and train people who may not have a proven track record in inside sales.

Here are a few B2B lead generation New Year’s resolutions that will get you off on the right foot for 2015.

How to rock sales lead development? The quick answer…put a sales lead management team to work.

That of course, begs the question, “what is a sales lead management team?” It is, unfortunately, often the missing link between sales and marketing. It’s that gap between the two disciplines where leads are lost either because marketing doesn’t qualify them or sales doesn’t follow up on them. Conveniently, marketing points the finger at sales and sales points the finger at marketing.

If only there was a group in between marketing and sales that could take marketing leads and transform them into qualified sales opportunities.

That’s what a sales lead management team does via the phone, email, and more. And a Forrester Research study says that businesses which put a priority on lead qualification and nurturing have 50 percent more sales-ready prospects and reduce their cost-per-lead by 33%.

It seems like this missing link is made of gold. What are these sales lead management teams doing that is multiplying the number of ready-to-buy prospects while cutting marketing costs?

You've decided it's time to use the power of the human touch and connect one-on-one with your prospects and customers. You're ready to nurture and qualify leads more effectively and maximize the use of your sales team's time.

Ad Hoc Internal In-House Telemarketing Proves Ineffective

Perhaps you've previously done some informal telemarketing. You've asked a few administrative assistants to make calls on an as-needed basis. However, this option may not have worked for you because you were not able to put the correct systems, training, people and processes in place. It ended up being expensive, time-consuming and ineffective.

The Inside Sales vs. Outsourced Telemarketing Question

So, now you're making a choice between setting up an inside sales function or outsourcing the task to a professional B2B telemarketing organization. Intuitively, it may seem like it would cost less to tackle telemarketing tasks at your company. However, you want to see the numbers in black and white.

Do you want to increase your conversion rates by 355%? Of course you do.

What’s the secret? Well, according to a study by Jupiter Research, companies that segment their databases increase their conversion rates on average by 355%.

It makes sense.

Since your prospects and clients don’t all have the same problems and needs, you can’t expect a broad message to appeal to your entire database. To create a robust, successful marketing campaign you need to provide content and messaging that’s relevant. You need to segment your list so you can, for example, send targeted emails and structure tailored telemarketing programs.

Getting Over the Initial Hurdle

You’d think all business managers would be clamoring to slice and dice their list into micro-segments for marketing campaigns. But they’re not doing this! The same Jupiter Research study found that only 11% of companies are using a segmentation strategy. Why are 89% of businesses missing the boat? 

Get ready for the holidays with the 12 days of B2B lead generation. Give yourself the gift of qualified leads and more sales.

On the First Day of Lead Gen

Marketing Made for Sales

A Database of Suspects

Start the season with a database of suspects, people who meet your basic criteria to become clients, but are not yet qualified. Clean it up—eliminate duplicate names and update and append the data.

On the Second Day of Lead Gen

Marketing Made for Sales

Two B2B Segments

Look at your historical activities and decide how to group suspects so you can approach them with a set of tailored marketing tactics. Segment by industry, geography, company size, role, department or any other easily defined criterion…whatever is most likely to yield results.

The Third Day of Lead Gen

Marketing Made for Sales

Three Engaging Pieces

Provide content that engages and educates your suspects who are doing a lot of research before talking with your sales people. Whether it’s a blog post, e-book, video, webinar or infographic, the content needs to answer the questions that suspects ask as they move through the buying cycle.

The Fourth Day of Lead Gen

Marketing Made for Sales

Four Convincing Studies

As your suspects move through the buying cycle they become prospects and want to understand how your product or service has worked for other clients. Case studies are compelling because your prospects can relate to other clients’ problems and how you helped to solve them.

The Fifth Day of Lead Gen

Marketing Made for Sales

Five Days of Calling

Once you have a clean, segmented list and content to answer questions, it’s time to get on the phone. Ask questions one-to-one that help you understand each prospect better so you can customize their journey from awareness to decision making. It’s all about personalizing your marketing and adding a human touch.

The Sixth Day of Lead Gen

Marketing Made for Sales

Six-Pages of Prospects

The prospects are those who fit your qualifications as a potential customer and have shown interest. Through tele-prospecting, you can determine who is interested in receiving more information…perhaps one of those engaging pieces.

The Seventh Day of Lead Gen

Marketing Made for Sales

Seven Nurturing Emails

You need to nurture prospects to help transform them into Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and getting them ready to send on to your sales team. To nurture, send emails that answer prospects’ questions and provide insight. Also, add some tele-nurturing into the sequence to warm up leads even faster.

Research shows that to generate a response in the B2B world, you need an average of nine touches in order to gain a response.

The Eighth Day of Lead Gen

Marketing Made for Sales

Eight Scoring Rules

Obviously, you can’t contact everyone at once. So, you need lead-scoring rules. These rules will help you to prioritize the prospects and determine which are more likely to become MQLs, and eventually sales qualified leads (SQLs). 

Base lead scoring on demographics (company, industry, revenues, etc.), their level of engagement with your company as well as what you learn from conversations with them. The key is to keep lead scoring simple.

The Ninth Day of Lead Gen

Marketing Made for Sales

Nine MQLs

As you nurture the inquiries, some will respond. They will click on links in emails, visit your website, ask for more information and take actions that show they may be interested. When they reach a certain pre-determined score, they cross the threshold and become MQLs.

The Tenth Day of Lead Gen

Marketing Made for Sales

Ten More MQLs

Once you have the process down, the leads will continue to flow. After all, you have to feed your sales team continuously.

On the Eleventh Day of Lead Gen

Marketing Made for Sales

Eleven SQLs

Now business developers talk with the MQLs on the phone to determine if they are sales qualified leads (SQLs). The initial lead scoring can help you to estimate interest based on the level of a person’s engagement. It cannot, however, determine why they are taking action. The only way to answer this is to have a human-to-human conversation that uncovers the intent that led to their activity.

On the Twelfth Day of Lead Gen

Sales Made from Marketing

Twelve Closed Sales

In the end, if you follow a well-defined lead management process, the results will convert to sales. Although it may start slowly, it will snowball over time. And that’s the biggest gift of all.

For a free consultation on B2B lead qualification, call us now at +1 718-709-0900 (Americas) /+39 06-978446-20(EMEA).

Even in a world where people are able to conduct much of their business virtually, face-to-face meetings still play an important role. In fact, Meetings Professionals International conducted research that shows 40% of prospects convert during in-person meetings.

So, how do you get more live appointments?

Follow this step-by-step process to fill your salespeople’s calendars with well-qualified sales appointments:

You need to ensure you understand clearly your targeted customers’ profile—who they are, the markets they participate in and the issues they are likely to be facing. Why?

To accelerate growth, you may want to expand your business geographically. For example, because emerging markets are less mature, they are likely to be on longer growth cycles. While these regions may be attractive, there are risks. These include lack of understanding of:

• Local competition and pricing
• The legal environment
• Delivery channels
• Culture

With a do-it-yourself approach, you’ll have to spend money on overhead items such as new regional offices. To mitigate these risks and move into new markets more rapidly, you can use channel partners.