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Your goals for new customer acquisition in 2014 are set. You want to get off to a running start and achieve them. Your first stop should be to check out what's in your sales funnel.

Find the Facts in the Funnel

A sales funnel report should enable you to answer the following questions:

• How many untapped leads are stalled in the funnel—not ready to buy or not yet qualified?
• How many qualified customer acquisition opportunities are ready to emerge in the next month?
• What's the potential value of these emerging opportunities?
• What's our average conversion rate?
• Are there any areas in the funnel where leads tend to get stuck and not convert to the next stage? For example, are lead conversion rates from leads to demonstrations meeting your objectives?
• How long is your sales cycle?
• Based on history, is your sales funnel growing or shrinking?

The answers to these questions give you a crystal ball for predicting sales, enable you to prioritize the sales opportunities to focus on, and provide clues for funnel optimization.

As the New Year dawns, many are resolving to shed a few pounds, become more familiar with the local gym, quit smoking, or climb out of debt. But those of us who strive for business growth need to find more effective ways to put our sales people in front of buyers. And that means developing some New Year's resolutions that will make us more successful at setting B2B appointments with prospects.
Use these New Year's resolutions to boost your success with B2B appointment setting or to lead your telemarketing team.

Dear Marketing:

Because the holiday season is all about giving, the sales team thought you’d like to know what we want this year. We all agreed that we don’t want fruitcake, chocolates, bottles of booze, ties, or scarves, or even Starbucks gift cards. We want gifts that keep on giving—the kind that can make us money year round. What we really want is business-to-business telemarketing.

And we know that it’s better to give than receive. So we’re planning something special for you, too. We’re so excited about it that we’re breaking the news now. If you give us all the tools on our Holiday list, we’re going to work with you to achieve revenues beyond your wildest dreams.

Interested? Good, because here are the details on what we want.

In my last blog post, I discussed how to get past the gatekeeper. Let’s assume that you’ve broken through the gate and now you’re faced with new challenges in your quest for business-to-business lead generation. You either reach voicemail, or are put through to the decision maker and need to engage them in conversation.

Cracking the Voicemail Conundrum

More often than not, you end up battling with voicemail. What does it take to break through?

The Rational B2B Buyer

Business buyers are different from consumers in several ways. We tend to think of them as being more rational. While it’s true that no one buys a complex computer solution on impulse, that doesn’t mean that emotions don’t enter into the equation.

When a business buyer decides on a product or vendor, they’re putting their reputation and, potentially, their job on the line. On the other hand, if the solution results in significant cost savings, they could end up with a boost up the corporate ladder. That means that there’s a lot on the line, and since we’re dealing with human beings, not businesses, emotions factor in. 

Marketing automation software captivates us with its promise to personalize communication between our business and our prospects. By keeping an eye on the content a prospect engages in, it’s able to serve up the right messages to them at the right time, practically putting lead generation and nurturing programs on autopilot.

Marketing automation also empowers marketers to dig into data, understand what’s working and what’s not, and quickly adjust the dials of the marketing automation machine to optimize results.

Given this, it’s no wonder marketing automation solutions are selling like chilled lemonade at a mid-summer marathon. The Raab Report reports that revenues for B2B marketing automation systems will grow 50% to reach $750 million in 2013.

The Internal Review

You may believe a win-loss analysis, analyzing why one sales effort won the business and another did not, could be a powerful tool to help you build a stronger business, but how do you get started? First, talk with your salespeople to gather background information. For example, make sure you understand:

Do you struggle to generate qualified leads? Most companies do. While we all would love to have 100% of our leads red hot and ready to turn into sales immediately, most need a little thawing out. Thus, we often find that spending more time lead nurturing is the key to lead qualification.

In fact, if your company is like most, 50% of your leads will need additional nurture. That doesn’t mean that they are bad leads—just a little cold. Research has shown that on average, 70% of these not-ready-yet leads will eventually buy from you…or your competitor.

That brings me to the “Leads Left on the Table Equation”:

Who would you prefer them to buy from…your company or your competition? The truth is that most companies cannot afford to risk losing this much sales potential.

Have you seen what’s on your sales people’s holiday wish list? What do they really want from marketing? I took a peek. In big bold letters it said: LEAD QUALIFICATION.

You don’t want to be a marketing Grinch, but you can’t take a quick trip to the department store and buy your sales people what they want. So what should you do?

A powerful strategy for growth in business-to-business telemarketing is to leverage channel partners to sell your goods and services. It works best when channel partners have connections with the companies you want to sell to; the marketing resources and know-how to reach them; or the ability to add value to your offering. For example, companies such as Oracle, IBM and SAP have created successful channel partner programs with geographically dispersed industry leaders that have solutions’ expertise to reach clients across the globe. Their secrets to success include using business-to-business telemarketing for channel partner profiling, recruiting, support and more.  Discover 7 best practices for success.