The Funnelholic

CAVEAT: I know equating the most popular piece of news to your blog topic is pretty corny. Nonetheless, I think there is something we can learn from the Giants victory over the Patriots Sunday. (for those of you who don’t know, the New York “football” Giants beat the undefeated and seemingly unconquerable New England Patriots in the Super Bowl.

The point is that anybody can beat anybody on any given day. I am a big fan of unified lead definitions, but I am not a fan of ultra-tight lead definitions that leave no room for “upset”. Ill give you an example, I once did an lead generation implementation where the client wanted only Tier 1 manufacturers with X number of revenue, and x number of products, etc. One day, Yahoo came in. No one would take the call. Finally the Sales Development Rep got a Product Manager on the phone with them and came back with the realization this is a great target. 6 years later the company’s number one vertical is online media.

ESPECIALLY if you are an early company, don’t restrict yourself to too many “psychographic” traits. Your job is to bring in as many people who would be the Patriots (perfect targets) and could be the Giants (not entirely perfect on paper, but worth the Sales team’s time). Dont limit yourself to only Patriots, and find away to get the Giants in there because they may become your biggest customer yet. The one exception could be if the sales team’s pipelines are already and always full with near-term deals (dig deeper, this isn’t likely to be true but could happen at a mature company in a mature market).

The other caveat is that is you are still letting sales limit your lead definition to only deals that they can close tomorrow, you are screwed so I can’t help you. Sales has to be willing to sell and if not, you don’t have a true partnership.

If you can create leeway to find the next big “upset”, victory can be yours.

Written by Craig Rosenberg - The Funnelholic
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Look, I don’t want to have too many irrelevant posts on the funnelholic as this site is supposed to be a place to discuss B2B lead generation. On the other hand, we can have fun too. Joey Chestnut won the Philadelphia Wing Bowl by eating 241 chicken wings in 30 minutes. Read more here on Sportsline.com.

More importantly, check the dude out…he’s fit.

Written by Craig Rosenberg - The Funnelholic
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As you know, I write for Inside CRM…we have just launched into a webinar series in conjunction with Microsoft. I thought the first one was really good, I would check it out in archive form, ie, watch at home whenever. Click here and watch: It was a primer for CRM…really good stuff.

The second webinar is coming up on Sales reps not actually using the CRM at their companies. I love this topic…as a guy who used to run around the valley and build sfa process for VPs of Sales and watch him/her struggle to get their Field Reps information, I know this pain. I would call the Field Reps and they complained how it slowed them down, too many clicks, etc. Microsoft is trying to solve this and the guest speakers make the presentation very relevant.

Click here to sign up, make sure when you get your confirmation you put log an Outlook calendar item.

Convince your sales reps to use your CRM

Written by Craig Rosenberg - The Funnelholic
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Want to connect directly? Email me at craig AT funnelholic.com<