Modern B2B Sales
Improve efficiency and effectiveness by building shared sales and marketing machines.
Lead lifecycle refers to how we manage the life of a lead (or contact or prospect depending on your terminology) from the moment it shows up in the system to deal close. The lead lifecycle defines where a lead can live, how a lead moves along, and what we do with a lead at each stage.
Companies typically use a lead lifecycle model for two primary reasons:
1) Preventing sales leads (and potential sales leads) from falling through the cracks
2) Reporting on conversion rates through each…
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We welcome Leslie Griffey, Marketing Content Manager at Xactly Corporation, as a guest blogger.
Finding new leads, leads that haven’t yet found you, and preparing them for sales is tough work. Rewarding people to do it well is even trickier business. A good lead generation team keeps your sales team fed and focused on closing deals. It fills your pipeline, creating a steady revenue stream. The lead generation team members develop unique skills and learn how to carefully track leads to…
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It’s 10 o’clock in the morning…do you know where your leads are?
On March 6th, Brian Carroll, author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale, shared his marketing wisdom as part of our Revenue Masters Webinar Series. Brian’s been investigating the relationship between Sales and Marketing departments around the globe for some time. Some of the statistics he’s uncovered about lead generation and lead nurturing may shock and awe you – and could lead to fisticuffs between you and your sales…
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Marketing automation solutions bring significant benefits in terms of demand generation to a wide range of companies. It’s very clear that marketers can now generate, score and nurture leads to a level that was not possible just a few years ago. However many companies fail to convert this breakthrough into success as measured in terms of pipeline created. The reason that many companies fail to exploit their demand generation success is that they fail to implement strong structures and…
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Repeated pipeline reviews are often a source of great stress between sales managers and sales people. As you’d expect, there are the usual suspects when it comes to questions at a typical pipeline review:
- What deals will close this month?
- What cover does the sales person have to meet their quota?
- How much of the pipeline is new business versus add-on?
- How does the pipeline feel relative to other months?
- Are marketing delivering on their demand gen targets?
- What are the next steps in…
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Your B2B marketing department has done its job. They’ve filled the funnel with sales leads. The sales department followed through on the leads provided but somehow your close-ratios are dropping. What happened?
This scenario isn’t unusual, sometimes leads fall through cracks or systems fail, but the important thing is to identify the weak links in your lead generation chain and avoid the blame game between opposite ends of the office.
If you are finding issues in your lead…
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Recently our Senior Vice President of Sales, Bill Binch, was interviewed by Gerhard Gschwandtner, Publisher of Selling Power, on Selling Power TV. Below you can check out all 3 clips, which encircle all that is B2B sales success.
Sales Success with the Changing B2B Buyer
In this first clip, Bill reviews why it is important to know who your buyer is. Combine that buyer profile with a good product, strategic timing and a smooth cadence of team plus execution, and you’re well on your way…
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As a sales manager who’s involved in our hiring process, I’m trapped in a dilemma. I want job candidates to do well in their interview – I wouldn’t take the meeting unless I was optimistic the applicant could succeed. But I’m often left disappointed. The disappointment is by things I think are basic to the interviewing cycle – understanding my background (heard of LinkedIn?), knowing what the company does and a little about our market, even basic things like closing for the offer…
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Is cold calling dead? Patrick Donnelly said cold calling was in a blog post recently, but only if it has not evolved from the smile and dial of years past. Even as social media and web applications become mainstream B2B marketing platforms, cold calling remains one of the most effective ways to make contact with decision makers, but only if done right. Cold calling can increase the number of prospects, appointments and sales. So how can a business realize tangible results from this…
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The best time to start discussing quota and pipeline with a salesperson is at the interview stage, not after the salesperson has started in the company. It’s also a good way to find out if the interview candidate really knows their business and their territory.
The quota should be related to the on-target-earnings (OTE) of the salesperson. A quota can be somewhere between five times and ten times OTE. In smaller companies it tends to be higher, but in larger companies it may be lower…
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