Inside Sales: Ideas and Tips Part I
I have the privilege of interacting with many bright and very effective sales and marketing leaders who enjoy sharing their ideas and best practices with colleagues and peers - even outside of their organizations. In the first in a series of two posts, I will share a few new ideas, tips and techniques we've collected to help address one of sales and marketing's most difficult issues - Inside Sales.
Idea: Contact Discovery
Problem Addressed: Lack of accurate prospect information; inside sales role definition; outsourcing issues.
Detail: At a baseline level, generating quality leads is predicated on having a “clean” database of contacts, with accurate names, titles, phone numbers, email addresses and any other information that enables an organization to follow up with a prospect effectively. While critical, this is a data quality activity that can and should be fulfilled by an external telemarketer, not by teleprospectors or telesales. Too often, we continue to see higher-paid inside reps (or even expensive thirdparty teleprospecting vendors) acting as their own data cleansers; this is a waste of their skills, and resources.
Idea: Account Intelligence
Problem Addressed: Target market data collection; lead definition inconsistency; wasted marketing effort.
Detail: More organizations are using telemarketing in a strategic fashion by having the function call into the target market on a rolling basis. There are two goals here: To uncover individual opportunities, and to gather information about market forces, changes in buying patterns and general prospect attitudes. This role is often outsourced, but the further the distance away from marketing that the resource is, the less likely that usable feedback will be delivered in a consistent, organized manner.
Idea: Event Marketing
Problem Addressed: Falling registrations/attendance at marketing events; driving sufficient raw interest at the top of the sales funnel.
Detail: B-to-b marketing functions continue to sponsor a significant number of online and offline events each year, only to find “event fatigue” taking more of a toll on both registrations and attendance. To counteract this trend, some organizations are creating a group of telemarketers to focus exclusively on event support (both registrations and reminders) via outbound calling. These reps are tied extremely closely to the field marketing function, receiving specific training and scripting for each event they will support.
On a related topic, Rich Eldh, Co-Founder SiriusDecisions, will be speaking at the CMA B2B Conference on Thursday, March 1. His presentation will focus on Effective Sales and Marketing Integration. Hope to see many of you there!
