The 8 Most Common Sales Mistakes
I often talk here about the need for better alignment between marketing and sales. In fact, it is often cited as the biggest challenge for B2B marketers. It is because of this that I like to reach out to some of my friends in B2B Sales AND Marketing to provide their perspective.
Recently we ran a guest post from Kenny Madden on how the line between Marketing and Sales is starting to blur and we are looking at a new partnership he called “SMarketing.”
Additionally, my colleague in Inside Sales, Robert Krekstein contributed this post recently on Lead Nurturing.
You have seen my posts on Marketing Mistakes. Well here is another post from Rob on the 8 Most Common Mistakes Sales Makes…
When Sales and Marketing Collide – SMarketing
One of the major problems at technology start up’s today is the lack of understanding of how much sales and marketing principles have changed. “If I need to double revenue growth, I need to double my sales force to drive it” or “I need to generate 1,000 leads to generate one sale. Therefore 2,000 leads will generate two sales.”
This doesn’t make sense and management teams are confusing correlation and causality. A vendor who believes in this may as well claim, “Christmas trees cause Christmas.”
Top Tips For Driving Marketing And Sales Alignment
What is the biggest issue facing Marketers today? Tons of recent reports, the latest coverage of major industry conferences, threads on Twitter and also my own site analytics point to the same issue as the biggest challenge for marketers: Marketing and Sales alignment.
I have spoken and written on this subject a number of times so here I will include all my notes on the subject in one overview post…
Are You In The Top 1% Of Sales People?
This is a guest post from sales professional Kenny Madden.
In today’s environment, it is absolutely critical to approach prospects in a new way. The days of cold calling “put me through to the decision maker please” calls are well and truly over. ( Good riddance.)
The traditional numbers-focused sales and marketing model has fallen apart. Especially when selling or marketing technology products to savvy, tech folks. They don’t care about our products and services, they care about what those things can do for the businesses they run. The old school strategy of hiring more “feet on the street” or hiring 100’s of inside sales people to cold call 100’s of times a day looking for sales growth or generating volumes of leads is proving wildly inefficient.
Here are 4 easy tips to help you get above the clutter and noise in less time than it takes to make a cup of coffee…
Sales Enablement: Focus On Customers To Lower The Cost Of Sales
B2B Marketing teams are often asked to help drive revenue while at the same time lowering the cost of sales. And when both of those things don’t happen, there is plenty of blame to go around. I have often discussed the need for B2B Marketing to focus on driving real results. I support the notion of sales as the customer of marketing. But exactly how can marketing teams help manage the costs associated with sales support?
At 2pm ET today I will be participating in a Focus roundtable discussion on Sales Enablement: Boosting Sales Performance while Reducing Sales Support Costs. They have asked me to bring the Marketing perspective on how to improve sales and marketing alignment, how to improve adoption of CRM systems and ultimately how to improve sales performance. In preparation for the discussion and for those of you who cannot make it, I would like to outline my thoughts here.
7 Steps To Sales And Marketing Alignment
Ask any practitioner in B2B Marketing what their greatest challenge is and chances are they will say ”how to align sales and marketing.” Why is this so difficult? I mean we are all after the same goals for our companies: revenue, profit, happy customers. And we all want to keep our job, get a raise or make a bonus.
But something always gets in the way. Is it because our departmental goals are different? Or is it the way we measure those outcomes? Is it something bigger and ethereal like our business perspective or is it the time horizons we work in?
5 Sales Closing Techniques
With all of the discussion on marketing and sales, I thought it made sense to bring in a sales perspective and guidance to the site. The following excerpt is certainly important to sales and comes from my colleague, Rob Krekstein. This post also appeared recently in B2C Marketing Insider.
I have been a student of selling and sales management for more than twenty years, and I have used a grand total of five “closes” during that time. You must always remember that at some point in every sales discussion, you must “ASK” for the business. Here are brief descriptions of these five closes:
How To Align Marketing With Sales
This is arguably the single most important topic for marketing: how to align with sales. If you are asking if we need to align with sales, go find a new profession. If you think marketing is much more important than sales, update your resume. If you think marketing objectives are about something other than sales, then it’s time to start networking.
Five years into my early sales career, I realized that I was a mildly successful sales person mainly because I focused on relationships, not selling. And…Marketing needed lots of help. So I followed my frustration into a marketing career and have never looked back. In this post I will provide some of the latest thinking along with my own thoughts on how to better align marketing with sales.
Marketing Leads: Quality Vs. Quantity
Last night I had the pleasure of dining with one of our media partners. We discussed the great lead quality vs. lead quantity debate. And the conversation went way later than the restaurant manager and our wonderful server wanted it to.
While we all want to be considered purveyors of nothing but the highest quality stuff, sometimes higher volume is the way to go. And when quality is required, you need to be able to deliver leads that convert.
