Steve Marx, on July 20, 2023
If you depend on email to grab a prospect’s attention and nail down that elusive first appointment, you should spend as much time honing the subject line of that email as you spend fine-tuning the entire body of the message.
Your competition is doing exactly that. Make no mistake: The big-time emailers out there may not be trying to make an appointment to sit down with your prospect but in the email inbox.
When a colleague conducted a "time spent selling audit" for one of her clients, the data showed the organization's best sellers spent slightly over 20% of their time actually selling. Keep in mind the audit included the best sellers in the organization!
Here are five reasons why this happens.
The Center for Sales Strategy, on July 27, 2022
Before choosing which prospects to target, it’s best to generate a long list of leads so you can narrow down to the best leads. Using the categories you’ve identified as a good fit your business, decide which sources on this list are right for you to generate your own list of leads.
One of the first signs that a sales organization of a small company is growing and maturing is that they no longer rely on the sales team to generate leads.
In the early stages of development, a new company requires that everyone “wear multiple hats”. Consequently, the salesperson usually plays the role of Chief Marketing Officer, Marketing Campaign Manager, and Business Development Specialist.
It’s quite simple really—if the salesperson doesn't generate leads, no one will. But as an organization matures, the various Sales and Marketing disciplines should be divided as soon as possible. Not doing so simply makes achieving growth objectives more challenging and makes your life tougher than it needs to be.
Matt Sunshine, on April 21, 2021
The Media Sales Report tells us that the hardest job in sales is getting an appointment with a new prospect.
As a sales manager, it's fairly easy to speak up in the sales meeting and tell your salespeople that they need to do a better job prospecting, or that they need to just commit more time and energy to getting appointments. But they already know those things, and they're facing huge hurdles that their counterparts of a few years ago didn't face.
Matt Sunshine, on April 6, 2021
This article was originally published on Entrepreneur.com.
What’s the worst thing that can happen if you buy weak leads from a questionable source? New York City real estate broker Nathan Horne almost found out.
Like the thousands of professionals in his industry who collectively spent $10.5 billion on advertising in 2017, his employer, The Corcoran Group, focused on branding instead of strategic lead generation. So, when Horne called someone he thought was a hot lead, he got the surprise of his life. Instead of a potential buyer, the police detective who answered the phone made a veiled threat about having a gun and being willing to use it.
Matt Sunshine, on August 27, 2020
There’s no doubt — lead generation that is clear-cut, clean, and specific is ideal. When we picture lead generation working at peak performance, most of us envision the salesperson being handed a lead that is pre-qualified and only a small step from closing. Smooth and easy!
But don’t fool yourself into thinking that every lead generated by inbound marketing will be so straightforward. That’s not reality, and if you allow tunnel vision to influence your ability to measure your inbound marketing ROI, you'll miss out on a lot of critical information.
Emily Estey, on July 29, 2020
Whether you call it cold calling, prospecting, or new business development, lead generation is critical piece for the sales success formula. In many current sales structures, the salesperson in charge of lead generation also oversees setting appointments, finding needs, selling solutions, and ensuring contracts are fulfilled.
Sales managers are great at tracking pending business and placing accountability on the average number of new accounts. While these are important metrics to track, they’re also narrowly focused on the middle and end of the sales process. What if we placed greater accountability at the beginning of the sales process as well? Imagine placing more focus on lead generation efforts, whether through a specialist role or an inbound marketing agency, where qualified leads are regularly handed off to Account Executives.
Dani Buckley, on October 17, 2019
When it comes to lead generation, when does the marketing department’s role end and the sales department’s role begin? Very specifically, when should a lead be passed from marketing to sales?
As with most marketing and sales best practices, it’s not always a black and white answer.
Every organization is different, and it’s important that your organization have it's own marketing and sales agreement plan that outlines in detail how you will qualify, distribute, track, and ultimately close your marketing leads.
Kurt Sima, on June 3, 2019
In the past media sales organizations employed a tried and true approach to solving dips in revenue. Here’s a summary of the approach:
When revenue is down, develop a product, service, or tactic, and sell more!
Unfortunately, these days this approach is more tired and untrue than tried and true.
Selling more is not the solution to the current challenges faced by media organizations because it’s a new day, and it is not filled with rainbows and unicorns. The declines faced by media sales organizations today are consistent enough to be called the new reality!
