Be A Hero: Choose Appointment Setting for Your Next Campaign
With all of the discussion on marketing and sales alignment, I thought it made sense to bring in a sales perspective and guidance to the site. The following guest post is another important topic for sales and comes from my colleague, Rob Krekstein.
Telemarketing services are continuing to grow in popularity, due to the low cost and high ROI; however, the difficulty lies in which telemarketing tactic to utilize. In my 20 years of sales and telemarketing experience I have implemented all different types of telemarketing tactics and found that appointment setting provides high value for multiple reasons.
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:
The New Marketing Accountability
The most popular posts on B2B Marketing Insider over the last few weeks have a common theme: accountability and The Role of B2B Marketing . You can review both How To Align Marketing With Sales and Marketing Leads: Quality Vs. Quantity for more detail on the emerging need for marketing to drive real sales and to quantify efforts.
Late last week, I responded to a post by my new friend Adam Needles, VP Marketing of Left Brain Marketing. In “Revising Our Demand Generation Definition as B2B Marketers” Adam does an excellent job of thoroughly putting a call to action out to all marketers that demand generation needs to be end-to-end. He also asks us to be accountable to results. I told him that I almost stood up and clapped. I was so excited, I thought I should recount my response here.
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.
The Role of B2B Marketing
What Is Marketing Acceleration?
What is marketing acceleration and why is it even worth discussing? In the larger context, acceleration refers to the increasing pace of change. In B2B Marketing, we are experiencing an unprecedented amount of upheaval in what defines our success. We not only need to be fast, we need to get faster. We need to be speed racers.
While we are being impacted by the rapid rise of social networks and the use of mobile technologies to connect business professionals, we are also being asked to produce more with less. More leads. More sales. Greater awareness. Less money. Less People. Fewer tools.
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.
How to Nurture The Great Unknown Leads
In a previous post on Paid Search, I reviewed a study by TechTarget and Google that highlighted one of the main challenges in demand generation for the B2B Marketer: inaccurate contact details. But there is tremendous value in these contacts as they are telling you exactly what you need to know, when you need to know it – if only you will listen.
In this post, I will explain how you can use your best content to nurture these early stage leads to the point where they are ready to take the next step in their buying journey – and to take it with your company.
7 Tips For Successful Lead Follow-up
A Guest Post By: Robert Krekstein
Telemarketing services are continuing to grow in popularity given the low cost and high return, and for most companies Tele resources are fully utilized in an outbound calling capacity. The companies that are able to create a sustainable responder generation program will see higher conversions and sales.
However, it is difficult for companies to gain inbound responders in large volumes, and too many companies do not have an optimal responder program in place to drive whatever responders they receive to an eventual sale. In my 20 years of marketing, sales and Telemarketing experience I have created many “Tele Web” programs, and here are the top reasons they succeed.
11 Reasons Why Outbound Telemarketing Programs Fail
My colleague Robert Krekstein is the Telemarketing Program Director for SAP North America. Rob and I support and have adopted what we call the “Tele-Web” concept of driving the most efficient leads for sales through pull-based inbound programs. The leads with the highest conversion rate and the lowest costs typically come from inbound activities like search and are then followed up and qualified by our telemarketing professionals.
