I am one of the Managing Partners here at The Center for Sales Strategy. I shift back and forth between working in the business and working on the business. I am working in the business when I am interacting with my team members while we all strive to serve clients well. But every week, I also carve out time to step back and think about the ways to improve the business. Like any small business, one of the key things we are continually trying to do is improve sales. This is more interesting for us in some ways because our business is sales. We get hired by B2B companies and non-profits to help them improve sales. We work with some of the smartest people around because it takes a smart person to know that they will be better with outside perspective, outside help. That’s where we come in.
When it comes to improving sales, you need to think marketing as well as sales. From a marketing standpoint, we need to have clarity on the problems we solve and be good at articulating that on our website and other branding materials. If we do that well, it will lead to sales opportunities.
Like most smart companies these days, we pursue both outbound and inbound strategies. We have been aggressively pursuing our inbound strategy the last several years. It’s no coincidence that our best years for new business in the history of the company have been the last several years—starting with the first year we added inbound marketing to the mix.
There are windows of time that go by where we don’t see much new business that we can tie to inbound marketing, and there are other times when it seems to be bubbling up as fast as we can respond to it. This last week was one of those times when some really interesting leads emerged from our inbound efforts. What struck me about the two best leads is what inspired the title of this blog. Both of the leads are the exact type of companies we are targeting. Both came from our blog. Both were CEOs of their respective companies. Both are healthy and growing and know they need help. They read something we wrote and reached out for more information. They raised their hands to ask us to sell them.
There are thousands of companies out there like these two—that are perfect for us. It made me think: what are the odds? What are the odds of us finding two ideal prospects like this if we had merely done an email campaign or a phone blitz? REALLY SMALL. In fact, both prospects were busy starting the buying process on their own, reading insights, and deciding who to talk to next. Glad they found us.
