Having a lot of deals is great, but accelerating them can be a problem for many sales teams. But hey, that’s why we have sales enablement – check out these 10 tips for accelerating opportunities and driving the bottom line.
Sales enablement technology has been making big waves in the B2B space recently. But do you know how to get the most ROI from your investment? Learn 10 ways that sales enablement can add value to sales and marketing processes and impact the bottom line!
Modern marketers aren’t content to just create leads. They play a critical role in driving sales. Not just in the top of the funnel, but the middle and below. Learn the 4 secrets that leading marketing teams — and KnowledgeTree customers — have learned to help drive revenue to close.
Marketing Content that Drives Sales: Getting More Content Used to Drive RevenueKnowledgeTree Inc.
Do you know what marketing content actually drives revenue? More than 80% of marketing content goes unused by sales teams. Discover how to get more marketing content used by sales and see what the data tells you about content performance, including which content types win in different sales situations and stages of the sales funnel. Learn how to measure marketing content ROI, and triple the content usage in your sales organization.
The Power of Sales-Marketing Alignment to Enable Sales & Improve Business Per...Veelo
This presentation explains how to streamline, automate and support sales enablement so effectively that you’ll feel like you have an army of marketers in the field. Hear from the VP of Demand Generation, Meagen Eisenberg, DocuSign and Robert Moreau, CEO of Zyphias Group.
Our Shopper Marketing Methodology is a planning methodology that highlights our premium tool-kit of tools & templates to help you develop and implement a shopper marketing strategy that increases sales, builds shopper insights, and grows brand awareness.
Demand Metric methodologies are step-by-step guides that help you build strategic processes using "Best Practices" and other Demand Metric tools & templates. For background info on Demand Metric methodologies, read our blog post: Much Ado About Methodologies.
Stages of this methodology include:
Learn About Shopper
Analyze Opportunities
Strategic Planning
Technology Selection
Campaign Execution
Measure Results
Pull marketing is the science of demand generation—of attracting interest in products and services that leads to sales. It means getting customers to seek out your product or service through an active, exploratory process. Pull marketing allows us to harness the power of influence, attraction and engineered serendipity. It enables us to achieve sales goals in less time, for fewer dollars, and with greater impact than ever before possible.
Sales enablement technology has been making big waves in the B2B space recently. But do you know how to get the most ROI from your investment? Learn 10 ways that sales enablement can add value to sales and marketing processes and impact the bottom line!
Modern marketers aren’t content to just create leads. They play a critical role in driving sales. Not just in the top of the funnel, but the middle and below. Learn the 4 secrets that leading marketing teams — and KnowledgeTree customers — have learned to help drive revenue to close.
Marketing Content that Drives Sales: Getting More Content Used to Drive RevenueKnowledgeTree Inc.
Do you know what marketing content actually drives revenue? More than 80% of marketing content goes unused by sales teams. Discover how to get more marketing content used by sales and see what the data tells you about content performance, including which content types win in different sales situations and stages of the sales funnel. Learn how to measure marketing content ROI, and triple the content usage in your sales organization.
The Power of Sales-Marketing Alignment to Enable Sales & Improve Business Per...Veelo
This presentation explains how to streamline, automate and support sales enablement so effectively that you’ll feel like you have an army of marketers in the field. Hear from the VP of Demand Generation, Meagen Eisenberg, DocuSign and Robert Moreau, CEO of Zyphias Group.
Our Shopper Marketing Methodology is a planning methodology that highlights our premium tool-kit of tools & templates to help you develop and implement a shopper marketing strategy that increases sales, builds shopper insights, and grows brand awareness.
Demand Metric methodologies are step-by-step guides that help you build strategic processes using "Best Practices" and other Demand Metric tools & templates. For background info on Demand Metric methodologies, read our blog post: Much Ado About Methodologies.
Stages of this methodology include:
Learn About Shopper
Analyze Opportunities
Strategic Planning
Technology Selection
Campaign Execution
Measure Results
Pull marketing is the science of demand generation—of attracting interest in products and services that leads to sales. It means getting customers to seek out your product or service through an active, exploratory process. Pull marketing allows us to harness the power of influence, attraction and engineered serendipity. It enables us to achieve sales goals in less time, for fewer dollars, and with greater impact than ever before possible.
Michael Farrington - Staying Relevant in MarketingAMASanDiego
Our objective as marketers hasn’t changed despite the world changing around us. We remain in the business of changing human behavior — helping customers choose our companies, our products, and our brands (and NOT our competitors). The challenge? Our customers are engaging us later and later in the sales process, our customers know MORE about us than we know about our customers, and our marketing mix continues to get more and more complex. As marketing leaders, we will quickly become irrelevant if we don’t act now and understand how our customers are making decisions, why they’ve made those decisions, and where to place our limited marketing investments. Mike will share how he’s driving this shift within a $1 billion publicly-traded, medical technology company, including the process, tools, and insights to make that change happen at your organization.
Align, Aim, Perform and Grow with Shopper MarketingRick Abens
Shopper marketers are under more scrutiny than ever to accurately forecast and assess ROI.
Foresight ROI is proud to have analyzed over 18,000 shopper marketing events to help Clorox and other leading CPGs:
• Decide levels of investment across demand creation programs
• Better understand shopper marketing impact across the portfolio
• Gain visibility to which plan elements are “working harder” than others
Learn more in this presentation by Rick Abens, Founder and CEO at Foresight ROI, and David Cardona, Director, Shopper Marketing, Category Advisory & Multi-Cultural Capabilities at the Clorox Company, delivered at the Path to Purchase Expo in Rosemont, IL on September 22, 2016.
To learn more contact us at www.foresightroi.com or call us directly at 312-575-0024.
Meagen Eisenberg, VP of Demand Generation at Docusign and Robert J. Moreau, CEO, Zyphias Group discuss sales and marketing alignment, the customer journey and key best practices with Docusign client examples and tips. Moderated by Chanin Balance, CEO of Mobilepaks.
This Commerce for Insurance Marketing Solutions deck is meant to aid Insurance industry Chief Marketing Officers, and VPs of Marketing, eCommerce & Sales.
IBM Commerce has solutions that allow Insurance CMOs and Marketing VPs to engage customers with relevant and rewarding experiences in real-time.
This Mindmatrix presentation on sales enablement offers a step-by-step process for enabling your direct sales teams. Watch this presentation to learn-
-Why is sales enablement is so important?
-What does direct sales enablement involve?
-Why is it time to move beyond traditional marketing automation and CRMs?
-What are the 12 steps to holistic sales enablement
How to Create an Integrated Sales Enablement Strategy for Your Sales TeamSales Hacker
What You'll Learn:
- How to build and implement a powerful sales enablement strategy.
- What does, and does not, qualify as Sales Coaching Excellence.
- Which engagement data help improve the relevance and effectiveness of salespeople.
Rethinking Sales and Marketing alignment: [How Marketing will help close deals]CRMT Digital
Better Marketing and Sales alignment improves profits, customer services and internal relationships. Most organisations have already realised that traditional business unit divisions hinder more than they help and are now seeking to improve internal relationships between departments. For successful alignment between Marketing and Sales, employees need to be empowered by technology.
It’s well known among marketing professionals that customers go through a series of stages – a lifecycle – in their relationship with vendors. Despite differences in customers and the vendors with whom they do business, the lifecycle stages are pretty universal: Awareness (also known as Attraction), Consideration, Purchase, Retention and Advocacy. What differs is how long prospects remain in each stage, what kind of experience they have while they’re there, and what must happen to advance the relationship to the next stage.
Marketing is ideally the steward of the customer journey, and it faces several challenges in fulfilling this responsibility. One of the most formidable challenges is the self-directed nature of the journey. The norm is for prospective customers to start their journey in stealth mode, making significant progress on their own without marketing and sales aid, influence or assistance. Marketing has historically presided over the Awareness stage, and together with sales, the Consideration stage. But now, customers often pass through both of these stages undetected, and marketers understandably feel some anxiety over their diminished influence in these lifecycle stages.
While the stages of the customer journey are well known, from the customers’ perspective traversing them is sometimes a bumpy ride. Customers don’t view their relationship with vendors as a series of stages, each with a different conductor who may or may not know what transpired in a previous stage. Customers want a smooth journey and expect vendors to know the history of their relationships and the content already consumed; they don’t want to have to re-explain their needs and interests each time they transition to a new stage. They prefer seamless, consistent quality across all touch points and stages of the relationship, regardless of the device or channels through which interaction occurs. They value one-to-one, contextually relevant engagement that is sensitive to who they are, what they do and where they’re going.
Let customer insight guide your bank's content marketing strategySounds About Write
While many banks and financial institutions continue to turn to content marketing to engage their prospective buyers and customers, the reality is the overwhelming majority are struggling to achieve success.
8 Critical Success Factorsfor Lead GenerationGil.B
Until now, "lead generation" was associated with direct mail campaigns, sometimes supported by a flashy website, sporadic trade show appearances, intense email blasts or stabs at telemarketing, but with very little, if any, special attention brought to bear on the complex sale.
Meanwhile, marketers are constantly reminded that the company needs more sales leads NOW. Unfortunately, that immediacy often means sacrificing quality for sheer quantity.
A flood of ordinary, low-quality leads doesn\'t mean better sales - so why waste your time? The challenge is to adopt lead generation programs that will increase the odds of creating better sales leads, ultimately resulting in long-term, happy and profitable customers.
How content bridges the divide between sales and marketing by creating a unif...Varun Mittal
At LinkedIn, sales and marketing alignment is an important topic for us and for our customers. We
believe achieving alignment is crucial for sales and marketing to reach their full potential. Previous
global research from LinkedIn shows that 60% of respondents believed that misalignment between
sales and marketing could damage financial performance. From both the sales side and the marketing
side, there’s broad agreement that sales and marketing alignment can boost pipeline, improve
customer experience, and increase customer retention.
Industry 4.0: Technology Insights for Channel Program OptimizationSeth Jacobsen
The concept of Industry 4.0 – also known as the fourth industrial revolution – is mostly rooted in data, analytics, autonomous learning, and the Internet of Things. The impact of smart technology, however, is not limited to the supply chain and manufacturing operations. Opportunities to innovate exist in the sales and distribution channel as well. Of course, the ultimate goal is to reduce costs, increase productivity and market share, and drive revenue growth.
Michael Farrington - Staying Relevant in MarketingAMASanDiego
Our objective as marketers hasn’t changed despite the world changing around us. We remain in the business of changing human behavior — helping customers choose our companies, our products, and our brands (and NOT our competitors). The challenge? Our customers are engaging us later and later in the sales process, our customers know MORE about us than we know about our customers, and our marketing mix continues to get more and more complex. As marketing leaders, we will quickly become irrelevant if we don’t act now and understand how our customers are making decisions, why they’ve made those decisions, and where to place our limited marketing investments. Mike will share how he’s driving this shift within a $1 billion publicly-traded, medical technology company, including the process, tools, and insights to make that change happen at your organization.
Align, Aim, Perform and Grow with Shopper MarketingRick Abens
Shopper marketers are under more scrutiny than ever to accurately forecast and assess ROI.
Foresight ROI is proud to have analyzed over 18,000 shopper marketing events to help Clorox and other leading CPGs:
• Decide levels of investment across demand creation programs
• Better understand shopper marketing impact across the portfolio
• Gain visibility to which plan elements are “working harder” than others
Learn more in this presentation by Rick Abens, Founder and CEO at Foresight ROI, and David Cardona, Director, Shopper Marketing, Category Advisory & Multi-Cultural Capabilities at the Clorox Company, delivered at the Path to Purchase Expo in Rosemont, IL on September 22, 2016.
To learn more contact us at www.foresightroi.com or call us directly at 312-575-0024.
Meagen Eisenberg, VP of Demand Generation at Docusign and Robert J. Moreau, CEO, Zyphias Group discuss sales and marketing alignment, the customer journey and key best practices with Docusign client examples and tips. Moderated by Chanin Balance, CEO of Mobilepaks.
This Commerce for Insurance Marketing Solutions deck is meant to aid Insurance industry Chief Marketing Officers, and VPs of Marketing, eCommerce & Sales.
IBM Commerce has solutions that allow Insurance CMOs and Marketing VPs to engage customers with relevant and rewarding experiences in real-time.
This Mindmatrix presentation on sales enablement offers a step-by-step process for enabling your direct sales teams. Watch this presentation to learn-
-Why is sales enablement is so important?
-What does direct sales enablement involve?
-Why is it time to move beyond traditional marketing automation and CRMs?
-What are the 12 steps to holistic sales enablement
How to Create an Integrated Sales Enablement Strategy for Your Sales TeamSales Hacker
What You'll Learn:
- How to build and implement a powerful sales enablement strategy.
- What does, and does not, qualify as Sales Coaching Excellence.
- Which engagement data help improve the relevance and effectiveness of salespeople.
Rethinking Sales and Marketing alignment: [How Marketing will help close deals]CRMT Digital
Better Marketing and Sales alignment improves profits, customer services and internal relationships. Most organisations have already realised that traditional business unit divisions hinder more than they help and are now seeking to improve internal relationships between departments. For successful alignment between Marketing and Sales, employees need to be empowered by technology.
It’s well known among marketing professionals that customers go through a series of stages – a lifecycle – in their relationship with vendors. Despite differences in customers and the vendors with whom they do business, the lifecycle stages are pretty universal: Awareness (also known as Attraction), Consideration, Purchase, Retention and Advocacy. What differs is how long prospects remain in each stage, what kind of experience they have while they’re there, and what must happen to advance the relationship to the next stage.
Marketing is ideally the steward of the customer journey, and it faces several challenges in fulfilling this responsibility. One of the most formidable challenges is the self-directed nature of the journey. The norm is for prospective customers to start their journey in stealth mode, making significant progress on their own without marketing and sales aid, influence or assistance. Marketing has historically presided over the Awareness stage, and together with sales, the Consideration stage. But now, customers often pass through both of these stages undetected, and marketers understandably feel some anxiety over their diminished influence in these lifecycle stages.
While the stages of the customer journey are well known, from the customers’ perspective traversing them is sometimes a bumpy ride. Customers don’t view their relationship with vendors as a series of stages, each with a different conductor who may or may not know what transpired in a previous stage. Customers want a smooth journey and expect vendors to know the history of their relationships and the content already consumed; they don’t want to have to re-explain their needs and interests each time they transition to a new stage. They prefer seamless, consistent quality across all touch points and stages of the relationship, regardless of the device or channels through which interaction occurs. They value one-to-one, contextually relevant engagement that is sensitive to who they are, what they do and where they’re going.
Let customer insight guide your bank's content marketing strategySounds About Write
While many banks and financial institutions continue to turn to content marketing to engage their prospective buyers and customers, the reality is the overwhelming majority are struggling to achieve success.
8 Critical Success Factorsfor Lead GenerationGil.B
Until now, "lead generation" was associated with direct mail campaigns, sometimes supported by a flashy website, sporadic trade show appearances, intense email blasts or stabs at telemarketing, but with very little, if any, special attention brought to bear on the complex sale.
Meanwhile, marketers are constantly reminded that the company needs more sales leads NOW. Unfortunately, that immediacy often means sacrificing quality for sheer quantity.
A flood of ordinary, low-quality leads doesn\'t mean better sales - so why waste your time? The challenge is to adopt lead generation programs that will increase the odds of creating better sales leads, ultimately resulting in long-term, happy and profitable customers.
How content bridges the divide between sales and marketing by creating a unif...Varun Mittal
At LinkedIn, sales and marketing alignment is an important topic for us and for our customers. We
believe achieving alignment is crucial for sales and marketing to reach their full potential. Previous
global research from LinkedIn shows that 60% of respondents believed that misalignment between
sales and marketing could damage financial performance. From both the sales side and the marketing
side, there’s broad agreement that sales and marketing alignment can boost pipeline, improve
customer experience, and increase customer retention.
Industry 4.0: Technology Insights for Channel Program OptimizationSeth Jacobsen
The concept of Industry 4.0 – also known as the fourth industrial revolution – is mostly rooted in data, analytics, autonomous learning, and the Internet of Things. The impact of smart technology, however, is not limited to the supply chain and manufacturing operations. Opportunities to innovate exist in the sales and distribution channel as well. Of course, the ultimate goal is to reduce costs, increase productivity and market share, and drive revenue growth.
The presentation entitled, "Demand Generation Marketing: How to Successfully Create Demand through
Outsourcing" is presented by Larry Fleischman, Director of Marketing for Televerde, a leading B2B provider in sales pipeline development solutions. For more information on demand generation marketing, visit the
Televerde website at http://www.televerde.com/solutions/demand-generation-marketing.
7 marketing and sales tactics for a success in the post-COVID economyElena Badea
Despite the some dose of uncertaintanty, sales and marketing teams make forecasts, talk to current customers, recalibrate budgets and change the marketing mix. What is the objective for that? Increasing favorability, improving conversion rates, ensuring profitability. Therefore, in addition to the plans and scenarios prepared by managers, the essential elements for success are given by the ability to observe new trends and agility in adapting to them. Here are the tactics we recommend.
Improve Sales Productivity with Digital Sales CoverageMarketBridge
Customers now spend significantly more time doing on-line research, they expect to be served up content aligned to their buying process and on their time frames.
As a result, sales productivity is suffering, with an estimated 67% of sales reps not meeting their quotas, mainly due to a lack of digital sales coverage.
In this whitepaper we outline the 5 steps required to implement digital sales coverage
Buyers can now discover nearly everything about companies, products and
services from websites and other Web sources, including what customers are
saying on social media.
Digital media’s rise and constant evolution has reshaped the way we plan,
execute and manage marketing activities. Regardless of industry, product or
target audience, today’s B2B marketing mixes call for more ingredient diversity.
This white paper provides an outline of best practices and key ingredients that facilitate your ability to create a strategic marketing mix that satisfies your desire
for growth.
A Pinpoint Systems Corporation white paper discussing how companies must transform from being about them to being about the customer by:
-Committing to a philosophical and cultural shift
-Centralizing the 360° view of customer information
-Enabling intelligent outreach
-Enabling intelligent dialog
To support organizations in making the transformation from a product- and channel- focused organization to one focused on the customer, Pinpoint Systems has applied their expertise in the customer-centric space to create the Marketing System of Record solution, powered by the efficiency of the IBM Enterprise Marketing Management platform.
The tracking features of the solution allow analysts to complete these tasks:
• Attribute customer actions to specific campaigns and target cells.
• Use campaign and response history for audience selection and segmentation.
• Compute standard campaign performance metrics.
• Automatically report those metrics, as well as emerging sales trends, to product managers and other stakeholders.
Similar to The Sales Rep Checklist: 10 Tips for Accelerating Opportunities and Driving The Bottom Line (20)
Marketing has been asked to take a seat at the revenue table, but insufficient lead hand-off processes is causing sales to question this invitation. Eric Marcy explores this problem and provides insight into successful sales productivity and sales enablement best practices.
Driving Sales Effectiveness with Great ContentSAVO
In this session, you'll learn what world-class sales enablement teams are doing to drive seller effectiveness with great content that aligns to the sales motion.
Techniques of Social Selling: Just Do It! (Sales for Life)SAVO
In this presentation Jamie Shanks and Tim Keelan will provide you with TACTICAL Tips and Tricks that you can deploy within your sales team immediately to help them master Social Selling
Improving Sales Enablement -- Three Critical Conversations Your Sales Team Mu...SAVO
In this presentation, you will learn about three key value conversation “moments” that all salespeople must master, which include creating value, confirming value and capturing value.
Balancing Quality with Output: Increasing Proposal Productivity (Iron Mountain)SAVO
Learn how Iron Mountain sales reps create and manage hundreds of proactive (typo-free) proposals each week. The presentation, introduced by BJ Lownie, RFP and proposal industry-expert, also shares his vision of the perfect solution to support the proposals industry.
Engage Your Sellers. Inspire Your Customers (SAVO)SAVO
Looking for a bleeding-edge introduction to our product suite? Look no further. In this session, Chuck Dulde and Mary Konkol provide an overview of the latest updates to SAVO’s Sales Engagement Series of products which help sales reps create marketing-approved presentations, proposals, RFP responses and digital postcards tailored specifically to their clients' needs.
Greg Goodman and Scott Eidle highlight products in the SAVO Sales Enablement Suite, including the latest enhancements to Sales Content Pro and Sales Channel Pro. Also highlighted are new developments to CRM Opportunity Pro, including support for Microsoft Dynamics CRM and the ability to align CRM Opportunity Pro and Mobile Sales Pro in a Salesforce 1 environment to drive mobile selling to the next level.
Cracking the Sales Management Code – Improved Sales Performance through Bette...SAVO
In this session, you will learn how to create a Sales First Company by radically simplifying your sales managers’ jobs and how to unlock the investments you have made in your sales organization.
On the Other Side of Sales and Marketing Alignment (HUB International)SAVO
In this presentation you’ll get a clear picture of the business pains and strategies for mitigating them as you work to align sales and marketing. Learn tips to continually improve the synergy between sales and marketing, while ensuring sales pros are impactful and on-message.
SiriusDecisions Sales Enablement Market and Trends Survey RevealedSAVO
This presentation unveils SiriusDecisions’ recent sales enablement survey results, including trends and best practices to keep in mind as you look to improve sales productivity in 2014 and beyond.
Insight-Led Selling: Taking Theory and Making It Reality (Welch Allyn)SAVO
Nowadays, customers identify their own problems, solutions, and requirements before contacting a sales pro, leaving little else to the seller other than sourcing a price quote. Watch Paul Liberatore’s presentation and learn how a sales person can reframe the entire sales conversation using insight-led selling. See how Welch Allyn is using SAVO’s Sales Content Pro and Mobile Sales Pro to help their sales pros reframe the conversation.
Pursuit of World-Class Performance (Miller Heiman)SAVO
Watch this presentation for an analysis of the 2014 Miller Heiman Sales Best Practice Study and highlight the strategic issues facing sales leaders. Learn the three core behaviors and 12 sales activities that drive world-class sales performance.
Sustainment and Mobile Reinforcement Strategies Ensure Sales Training Deliver...SAVO
Watch this session to learn how you can sustain the impact of your salesforce development efforts through a combination of performance support, coaching, technology and mobile reinforcement tools. Learn the strategies that will help extend learning from weeks to years, leverage mobile and social gaming to drive adoption and motivation, and help maximize the return on your training investment.
The old sales playbooks no longer work – the actors in your sales processes aren’t as reliable as you once thought. Watch this presentation from CEB to understand how star sellers are navigating this new dynamic by selling to different people in very different ways than tradition prescribes.
Successful organizations line up the right people, process and technology to support sales reps, sales teams and/or channel teams; without this support, organizations cannot be successful. Watch this presentation to hear Rick’s continuing journey to align sales teams to productivity targets, and how Citrix came together to support these goals.
Lack of Sales Training is Killing Your PipelineSAVO
Most companies fail to provide reps with the tools they need to sell smarter. This infographic breaks down the percentage of companies that after onboarding, fail to provide their veteran sales reps with the training they need to reach their goals.
The Sales Rep Checklist: 10 Tips for Accelerating Opportunities and Driving The Bottom Line
1. CHECKLIST
10 TIPS FOR ACCELERATING OPPORTUNITIES
AND DRIVING THE BOTTOM LINE
Marketers have traditionally been charged with
generating high-quality leads for the sales team.
Modern marketing teams are now partnering with
sales to move as many opportunities through the
pipeline as possible.
Alignment between the marketing and sales teams
is crucial in ensuring that the investments made
in developing leads actually result in revenue. IDC
Event Flash reports that 10% of annual revenue is
lost to sales and marketing misalignment.
Many companies are dealing with new hires,
shifting territories and product launches, making
it difficult to quickly ramp up to meet revenue
initiatives. The average company deploys 2.6
different sales methodologies, according to IDC’s
Sales Barometer Survey. And, only 46% of forecast
opportunities end up in the win column, 30% go
to the competition and 24% result in no decision,
according to a CSO Insights survey.
with content and resources that address
their needs.
Marketing departments have to develop trustworthy
and unbiased content at all stages of the process.
In the B2B 2013 Content Preferences Survey, 61.6%
of survey respondents said that “sales heavy”
content is a problem.
The marketing department has to create content
to help salespeople converse with prospects
about industry trends and identify situational
selling opportunities.
3.
Make it easy to find the right resources.
With a central hub for all of the content,
subject matter experts, sales sheets and other
information, marketers can serve up the right
information to support the sales team’s efforts
to accelerate opportunities.
Here are 10 tips for sales teams to utilize
when accelerating the sales cycle:
In many organizations, salespeople rely on a
customer relationship management (CRM) system
for all of their daily activities.
1.
4.
Prioritize the right leads.
All leads are not created equal. According to
MarketingSherpa, 61% of B2B marketers send all
leads directly to sales, while only 27% of those
leads will be qualified. A lead scoring system jointly
developed by marketing and sales can improve
lead conversion and accelerate the sales cycle.
Meet buyers where they are in the
buying journey.
A buyer may have attended a webinar, visited
the web site and downloaded a white paper before
ever talking to a salesperson. Corporate Executive
Board estimates that 57% of the purchase decision
is complete before a customer even contacts
a supplier. Because buyers are coming to the
2.
Bring intelligence — not just product
conversation more educated than ever, marketers
information — to the table.
need to prep the sales team to be ready to
The sales and marketing teams need to collaborate connect with buyers at whatever point they
so that the salesperson is presenting the buyer
are in the process.
1
2. 5.
Develop processes that can be applied
in multiple situations.
Flesh out scenarios for different types of buyers
and different industries to address key concerns
and objections. Groups of buyers and buyers at
similar points in the buying journey often behave in
similar, predictable ways.
SiriusDecisions calls these “observable outcomes,”
and defines them as measurable, verifiable actions
or responses from a buyer. For example: Has the
buyer identified a budget is available? Has the
buyer provided decision criteria? Did the buyer
schedule a follow-up meeting for a demonstration?
6.
Adapt to different selling situations.
While being adaptable seems to contradict point
No. 5, people still buy from people and every
purchase has its own set of requirements.
7.
Foster a collaborative relationship
between sales and marketing.
Communicate efficiently and effectively.
The salesperson has just one shot on that first
call to capture the attention of the buyer. Marketing
and sales have to work together on the right
materials to ensure that the first call, and future
calls, are productive.
Speed of response is also essential. According
to research conducted by Dr. James Oldroyd,
Ph.D., the chances of entering the lead into the
sales cycle increase 21 times if called within five
minutes of the sales rep receiving a message from
the buyer compared to 30 minutes.
10.
Don’t end the interaction once the deal
is signed.
Check in with current customers to see how their
needs have changed and what challenges they
are facing.
As marketing looks to improve the lead conversion
process and sales looks to accelerate the sales
cycle, responsibilities are blurring. The goal is more
closed deals.
8.
9.
When a company’s sales processes, sales tools
and sales training are in sync when and where the
sales team needs them most, they can accelerate
opportunities and drive greater revenue. To learn
more about accelerating the sales cycle, visit
www.savogroup.com.
Become a trusted advisor.
Buyers don’t need sales reps to spout the features
of their product, as they have already done as
much as 70% of their research online before
engaging with a salesperson. Buyers are looking
for partners who understand their industry and its
particular challenges. Vendors who support buyers
by providing subject matter experts and other
resources will have an edge.
Corporate Headquarters
155 N. Wacker Drive
Suite 1000
Chicago, IL 60606
312.506.1700
877.542.7266
2