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In my four decades in sales leadership at both large enterprises and early-stage growth companies, and in my subsequent consulting & sales advisory practice, I have witnessed and resolved many poor sales practices.  If sales leaders do not diagnose and correct these Deadly Sins of Selling, then accelerated and predictable sales outcomes will be in jeopardy. I recount these sins with amusement since they also tell us something about human nature and how that factors into successful selling practices. Individual sellers, their sales managers, sales trainers, and sales coaches can all benefit from being on alert to these common sins.

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Why Marketing Qualified Leads?

Although many marketers focus on increasing the number of leads, quite often marketers should be in fact aiming to have fewer leads. The key is that this smaller number of leads are Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), who are genuine sales prospects, instead of people who are curious but have no intent to buy.

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It’s the middle of Q4 and the end of the year is fast-approaching. For many, it is a time to slow down from work and spend time with family. For sales people, it’s can be a frantic time, as many B2B companies must close sales opportunities to achieve revenue goals.

So, what can the marketing team do to help the sales team and ring in the New Year on a positive note? Here are a few tips to align marketing and sales and help ease the December frenzy and drive some upward momentum into the New Year.

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Corporations with complex, high-consideration sales are often accused of Complex Sales Campaign Designfocusing on the short-term, which is inevitably reflected in their demand generation or campaign strategy. This generally means that marketing and sales are not aligned and operating to some degree as silos.  With short-term horizons, the campaign communications focus tends to be on sales driven, tactical programs designed to seek out “hot leads”.

In the highly competitive, complex B2B sales world with longer sales cycles, this is not fully sustainable.  There is a typically a sales team or committees of savvy buyers A short term focus may eke out some leads, but what about the other leads who may with some nurturing turn out to be qualified opportunities — but not yet “sales-ready.” The modern buyer knows your product or service from what is readily available on the web and related sources and will be considering any number of options before making a decision.

Studies show that 50% of leads are qualified but aren’t immediately ready to buy something from you [Source: Gleanster Research]With lead nurturing however, you can bring those leads through your sales funnel and garner 4-10 times the response rate compared to a regular email blast while doing it [Source: SilverPop/DemandGen Report].

So where do you start?

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I received these statistics in a recent email and I thought they were worth sharing further with some comments. I am adding some implications as I see them below each one:

Eye-OpeningA whopping 68% of B2B organizations have not identified their funnel. (Source: MarketingSherpa)

  • Without a defined funnel, it is very difficult to develop a predictable forecasting capability.
  • Defining your funnel – with the buyer in mind – helps you develop the specific content you need to engage buyers at different stages.
  • In most of our B2B work we help define a collaborative qualification model between sales and marketing where sales teams have early insight into marketing leads. By taking a “decision support” approach, the organization is not leaving it up to marketing to determine the relative value of a lead – often the sales rep can help make the judgment supported by the behavioral data.

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Best Wishes for the New Year!

Consider adding these resolutions to YOUR list and increase your impact in 2013.

  1. Deepen Your Relationships… Use social media and filtering tools to deepen 1:1 relationships, retain and grow contacts.
  2. Earn Your Reach In addition to paid media, differentiate with quality content to drive reach with earned media.
  3. Hug Your Sales Team… Don’t let inbound marketing make you forget your valued selling professionals and partner channels.
  4. Enhance Your Revenue Systems… Use best practices in media management, marketing automation, CRM, and social media
  5. Innovate and Stand Out Dust off that strategy and use design thinking to create innovative digital experiences.

 

Team Revenue Architects
revenuearchitects.com
877.REV.EARN

 

By John Nielsen

Lead scoring is the process of evaluating and assigning points to prospects and leads using marketing automation tools. Points are distributed based on the attributes associated with a qualified lead.  It is important to understand whom you are marketing to when managing a campaign, sending irrelevant content to your followers is a quick way to lose.  To make sure this doesn’t happen to you, below are a few tips one can easily follow to update your contact lists and help identify priority focus using lead scoring.

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