This paper explores areas in which marketing can help sales identify and manage deals in their sales pipeline through technologies and business processes that amplify existing CRM systems. Marketers need to recognize that determining lead criteria is only the first of many steps they can take to enable their sales teams. New enhancements to CRM systems are driving truly evolutionary changes in marketing’s relationship to sales.
With the advent of many new technologies, there are often two distinct phases to their impact on the way things are done. First, the technology is adopted, but it is used in a similar manner to the prior solution, although often with significant incremental improvements. Then, as a second wave of change, the new capabilities are thought about in entirely novel ways, and the original problem is framed in a fundamentally different manner, leading to sweeping innovations in business practice.
This first chapter of Steven Woods' book, Digital Body Language, gives an overview how the radical changes brought about by online commerce are leading to fundamental changes in the nature of marketing and the nature of marketing’s relationship with sales.
The first step in re-ordering one's thinking about a buyer's digital body language is observation. Without the ability to view and aggregate the telltale signs of digital body language, no marketer can use those signs to tailor their marketing messages and approaches. The marketer must understand the buyer along five key dimensions to leverage digital body language most effectively. They correspond to the key questions about a potential buyer that any sales professional would want to evaluate before initiating a sales cycle.
One of the persistent challenges in marketing: measuring and demonstrating its effectiveness in quantifiable ways. Although the value of marketing is generally accepted at a high level (few would accept the risks of under-investing in marketing, for instance), most business executives are unable to definitively articulate the precise contribution that marketing brings.
That becomes problematic in today’s business climate, where the pressure for accountability increases public and investor scrutiny. Simultaneously, the rapid proliferation of new media in which to invest has marketers struggling to understand which options can deliver the greatest return.
Hugh Macfarlane, along with MarketProfs.com, surveyed industry pros around the world to find out how the best companies align B-to-B Sales and Marketing teams for maximum success. One result of those efforts is the eBook: Give Marketing a sales quota. The findings in this engaging eBook may surprise you, but ignore them at your own risk. After all, these "unorthodox" organizations are doing much better in the real-world than their "conventional" competitors.
The strategies outlined in Jill Konraths’s eBook, How Marketing Can Radically Impact Sales, are having a major impact on companies just like yours when it comes to critical problems that can seem intractable: New sales reps are slow to get up to speed, sales reps fail to read prospect buying signals or pursue the wrong leads and forecasts are based on hunches instead of data... to name a few. According to CSO Insights, firms who have invested in demand-creating marketing automation systems have achieved impressive results, most notably with sales win rates. This eBook is a must-read for any marketer tasked with lead generation.
Does marketing lack influence and stature in your organization? Is marketing misunderstood and underappreciated? Do members of your company’s executive team, along with your peers throughout the organization, fail to see the connection between marketing and the cash flowing into your company’s coffers? If you are like most marketers, key players in your organization don't view marketing as a true strategic partner. Result? They underutilize you, preventing you from delivering maximum value for your firm. In Roy Young's ebook, Ten Mistakes Marketers Make you are given 10 actionable strategies to turn this situation around and correct misperceptions of marketing’s role in generating revenue and value for your organization. cash. How? For starters, understand and avoid the 10 biggest mistakes marketers make.
Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies, is a recognized expert on selling to large corporations. Her e-newsletter is read by subscribers from more than 85 countries around the world. Most recently she's been featured in Selling Power, Entrepreneur, The Business Journal, Sales & Marketing Management, WSJ's Start-Up Journal, Sales & Marketing Excellence, Journal of Marketing, Business Advisor and countless online publications. In this eBook, Jill Konrath, renowned author, blogger and sales strategist, shares 7 key ways for marketers to become more relevant to their sales team and top line revenues.
Brian J. Carroll is the founder and CEO of InTouch Inc., an expert on lead generation solutions and author of a new book "Lead Generation for the Complex Sale". In this free eBook, Carroll shares key factors on how to tailor and adopt lead generation programs that will increase the odds of creating better sales leads, ultimately.
