S is for superhero. And, S is for smarketing. The alignment of sales and marketing teams around common goals is a talent of a more earthly nature than spider-like abilities, and yet, it has the potential of radically transforming the way B2B organizations market and sell their products. The best of it? You don't need to be born on the planet Krypton to unleash its potential. In this blog, we cover five practical ways of running a smarketing program that works.
Information has become our most valuable commodity. Skimming the top five results of a Google search makes us feel like an expert in any field, with enough knowledge to make an informed decision about our purchases, our health, the books we need to read, our whole life, or simply, our next dinner menu. Similarly, informed decisions drive the already long and sophisticated B2B sales process.
Everybody knows the importance of data in B2B sales. Salespeople need to use information to find the best prospects, the ideal moment to reach out, and craft a perfect pitch. In this day and age, all the information is out there, so the question is, how do we get people to use data? That's why we're releasing a new version of Vainu. We call it Vainu for CRM.
Traditional sales prospecting is incomplete in the fast-paced modern era. It ought to be backed up with technologically equipped sales tools that are innovative and futuristic in their orientation.
Sales professionals who rely on sales technology outperform their peers. There's a vast ocean of tools available today that all promise to help salespeople skyrocket their numbers. There are ten sales tools categories that sales professionals should be acquainted with. One of these, sales intelligence, empowers salespeople to organize relevant searches for companies with a specific set of updated data-points.
It quickly became a canonical sequence in film history. In it, Mel Gibson, on a horse and with his face painted blue for battle, delivers a heartfelt, motivational speech before sending his troops into a fight for freedom. It’s a powerful scene, and one that teams of any size and field can relate to.
Every so often, a team needs some inspirational words to boost morale, build trust and rapport, and get everyone re-invigorated to hit their goals. In other words, everybody can use a movie speech from time to time. That’s why sales kickoff meetings exist.
Sell. More. Faster. That’s the ultimate goal of any sales organization. In practice, this means round-the-clock pressure for salespeople to hit their quota, close more deals, and increase revenue. Salespeople are no strangers to stress.
But if stress starts to escalate out of control, and sales targets seem as challenging as climbing an eight-thousander without supplemental oxygen, you need to re-examine your sales process and figure out the stages you can tweak to boost productivity.
With the end of the year approaching, we’re continuing tradition and predicting the coming year’s most important trends affecting B2B sales.
The past decade has treated B2B sales well. Nowadays, sales leadership is commonly a part of the company’s management team and a focus area in the company’s strategy. Universities have introduced sales courses in their curriculum, and talented salespeople are entering the job market more than ever before. It seems sales is doing better and taken more seriously than ever before.
This is the starting point in which we’re predicting next year’s trends—and here they are:
Sometimes, in our endless hustle and our striving to succeed, we get lost. We focus on the things we think matter for our short-term results, and make compromises on the things that really do matter in the long run.
Across industries, salespeople lose between 60 and 90 percent of their potential deals after the first contact. The reason for the big drop-off after the prospecting stage is that many companies still reach out to anyone who loosely sounds like they’d be interested in their offering. It’s far more efficient to only reach out to prospects who fit your solution and have a need for it.
Ensuring that you focus your sales and marketing efforts on the right companies, and the right people within these businesses is never easy. However, one thing is for certain: it’s even harder if you haven’t defined your ideal customer profile and buyer persona—the peanut butter and jelly of your sales process.
A common cause of death among salespeople and marketing professionals is death by quicksand. Figuratively speaking, of course. And by quicksand, I mean being buried by an ever-growing, uncontrollable, gigantic pile of irrelevant, erroneous and outdated customer data. To dig yourself out of trouble before it’s too late, you want to make data cleaning (aka data cleansing) a habit that sticks.