Inside Sales and Tele-selling

Don’t let the ‘cold calling is dead’ crew drag you down: Madlibs with @srichardv

May 20, 2013 by Craig Rosenberg 1 Comment

I say it time and time again: The best people to pick up prospecting tips from are the appointment setting guys. Steve Richard from Vorsight is one of those guys. I personally learn a lot from the tips and tactics they are willing to share. If you are in the business, you should too. Here are his Madlibs:

The b2b buyer is overwhelmed and, as a result, more unaware of their needs than ever. How do you help someone realize they have a need that they didn’t know they had five minutes ago?

The biggest innovation in sales is a deeper understanding of the buyer’s journey and how to align selling activities to it. [Read more...]

Filed Under: b2b Marketing, b2b Sales, Demand Generation, Inside Sales and Tele-selling, Lead Development, Lead management, Lead Qualification, Madlibs with the Funnelholic, sales, Uncategorized

Social Prospecting and Don Draper: A story about getting that hard-to-reach client

May 17, 2013 by Craig Rosenberg 2 Comments

I have a very simple rule for prospecting: If you want to know tactics and best practices for getting to hard-to-reach prospects, then listen to the guys who run appointment setting organizations or outbound call centers. They do this for a living at scale.

I was putting together a preso for Sirius Decisions with Mike Damphousse from GreenLeads. He is the master at prospecting. He explained to me how they have changed their approach and then provided an A-MAZING example.

The game is changing, even for the outbound masters

Buyers just don’t pick up their phones very much anymore. I talked about this problem in one of my earlier posts on cold calling. If you walked into an outbound call center two years ago, you would see reps staring at a list of people to call and making hundreds of dials. They would hang up on voicemails and wouldn’t dare spend the time to write emails. [Read more...]

Filed Under: b2b Marketing, b2b Sales, Demand Generation, Email Marketing, Inside Sales and Tele-selling, Lead Development, Lead Qualification, Lead/Inquiry Generation, sales, Social Selling

Prospecting into big companies: Tips from @damphoux

May 14, 2013 by Craig Rosenberg Leave a Comment

More prospecting tips from Mike Damphousse from Green Leads. The days of giving outbound sales reps a list and a phone are over. You have to be smarter and more creative than ever. In this short clip, Mike provides his best tips.

We are hosting a Demand Generation Summit with Greenleads, join here:

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter

Filed Under: b2b Marketing, Demand Generation, Inside Sales and Tele-selling, Lead/Inquiry Generation

How to reach prospects via their cellphones feat @damphoux

May 12, 2013 by Craig Rosenberg 3 Comments

If you want to figure out how to reach prospects who don’t know you, listen to the outbound appointment setting gurus. They do it for a living and have tried everything thousands of times. In this segment, Mike Damphousse from GreenLeads provides best practices on what to do with a prospect’s cell phone number. And yes, the answer is to call it and text it.

We are hosting a Demand Generation Summit with Greenleads, join here:

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter

Filed Under: b2b Marketing, b2b Sales, Demand Generation, Inside Sales and Tele-selling, sales

Seven steps for successful rollouts of sales technology

April 11, 2013 by Craig Rosenberg 2 Comments

My inspiration for this post: This week’s Sales 2.0 conference, my presentation this week at the Marketo Summit on the Automated Sales Organization, and just an overall affection for the incredible transformation technology is driving in sales. There are amazing things happening right now in the Sales 2.0 space — Sales leaders are accepting technology as part of their keys to success and looking to spend more. Step one in the tranformation is complete: Agree that technology can help. Step Two is implementation and roll-out. As we have learned from CRM, the hard part is getting sales people to use new tools aka adoption. Sales people are inherently efficient people. They develop patterns and habits over time that they rely on. When you introduce something that takes them out of the pattern, they will push back.

There is a process for successfully rolling out Sales 2.0/Sales technology. I have chronicled here in this post.

There are four keys to success:

1. Show them how to use it - Start with a simple, easy to understand process and show them how to do it.

2. Use peer pressure to get buy-in. Build an internal success story and roll from there. WIIFM (What’s-in-it-for-me) is critical for

sales adoption)

3. Keep them “in-app”. What this means: If they have to click through tabs or applications, they won’t like it and you shouldn’t either. [Read more...]

Filed Under: b2b Sales, Inside Sales and Tele-selling, sales, SocialCRM, Uncategorized

Cold Call, revisited: Best practices for getting in the door

April 3, 2013 by Craig Rosenberg 19 Comments

Cold call versus not cold calling ….blah, blah, blah

The purpose of this post is to talk about the art and science of reaching out to someone who doesn’t know you. Call it what you want.

First, let me start with a couple important notes:

Inbound marketing works. It does. It creates great, cost effective leads. Who doesn’t want someone to walk into their store? I did not write this to say “you shouldn’t commit to inbound marketing”. Stay tuned, there are more considerations on the topic but I will recommend inbound marketing til the cows come home.
I don’t believe quota-carrying sales reps should spend their time reaching out to people they don’t know. Organizations should invest in either an internal inside sales function in charge of reaching out to and qualifying leads for the direct reps or hire an appointment setting organization or an out-sourced tele-organization to do it instead. It just takes too long. Should sales reps prospect? Yes…but if you have sales reps filling their own pipeline all day you are taking away valuable selling time.

Below are the reasons and scenarios that re-inforce the need to outbound prospect:

To grow your business, you have to reach out to people you don’t know and don’t know you. If they aren’t downloading content, then you have to try something else. Welcome to reality.
Inbound leads are the best, but if you are sitting around waiting, you will go out of business. Inbound marketing takes time and only the best in the business have reached the kind of scale you need to eliminate outbound prospecting.
If marketing is happy giving you 30-50% of your pipeline, do the math. You have to generate the rest.
Here is the big one. If you are selling to a specific type of customer, then you will have to knock on their door. [Read more...]

Filed Under: b2b Marketing, b2b Sales, Inside Sales and Tele-selling, Lead Development, Lead/Inquiry Generation, sales, Social Selling, Uncategorized

The sales technology revolution is being driven from the ground up

December 10, 2012 by Craig Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Warning: I am breaking my own rules and “pontification” blogging. I love breaking my own rules especially when I am contradicting my last post…

Sales technology is hot as “all-get-up” right now. I outlined a number of reasons why I believe this is true in a post for SocialSellingU. The point I’d like to pontificate on is the “consumerization of sales technology” and it’s role in the rise of sales technology. Bottom line: You can buy most sales technology solutions with a credit card.

1. The BYOD revolution has hit sales and marketing technology — I got this quote from my buddy Miles Austin who can talk for hours on the topic: “Years ago, CIOs said there was no way they would support IPhones and IPads and now look. It’s the same thing in sales, smart sales people don’t ask – If they think a sales tool help them sell better, they plop down their credit card and buy it.” In other words, this is a true revolution by the people and for the people. Executives can’t hope to stop it, they can only jump on board. My buddy and business partner Lars Nilsson implemented tons of sales technology solutions at ArcSight which was bought by HP. It seems like he would have to spend his time researching technology to keep up, but he always talks about how the majority of solutions they implemented were initially brought to him by individuals in his organization.

2. Sales people are officially technologically self-empowered –. If you are a sales rep who still says: “My organization gives us no support, we don’t even have…”, then fix it because you can. An individual rep can buy their own CRM, create email and nurturing programs, buy their own lists, gather their own sales intelligence, automate contracts and quotes, etc, etc. Today’s products are so easy to use, you can get up and running yourself. Per-user costs are so reasonable, you aren’t breaking the bank.

As a marketer in the sales technology space, you have a real opportunity to triangulate on your target accounts. When you sell and market to sales, anyone on the team is an influencer. Your new lead definition is: “they are in sales”. If you can get a couple people in the organization using and getting value from your product, then you can take that use-case and success metrics to decision makers for a bigger deal. And that ladies and gentleman, is a good thing for everyone.

Oh and I forget to add, sales technology is fun. There are so many amazing things happening in the space. I have just been having a ball preparing for my webinar Thursday with Koka Sexton, Matt Heinz, Miles Austin, Nancy Nardin, and Brian Vellmure entitled: 31 Must-Have Sales Tools in 2013. When you start to look into all the different options, you want to start going on them immediately.

XOXO

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter

Filed Under: b2b Sales, Business Musings, CRM, Inside Sales and Tele-selling, sales, Social Selling, SocialCRM

“This Week in Sales”– Video interview with Kevin Gaither

July 11, 2012 by Craig Rosenberg Leave a Comment

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8hG4-fATfw&w=560&h=315]

This is my interview with Kevin Gaither on This Week in Sales. It was awhile back but I haven’t had a blog in awhile. I had fun in the interview and I am just getting back into getting the Funnelholic up and running.

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter

Filed Under: b2b Sales, Inside Sales and Tele-selling, Lead Development, Lead Qualification, sales, Thought Leadership, Uncategorized, Video

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