Marketo, a marketing automation platform (MAP) vendor, announced it has acquired Crowd Factory, a provider of social marketing campaign technology. With the ever-increasing amount of social activity happening at the top of the demand creation watefall, expanded functionality to attract and identify individuals through social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is a prime requirement for organizations.
Crowd Factory provides the ability to run social marketing tactics such as contests, referrals and polls through the popular social channels, as well as adding social sharing features into web pages, online ads and emails. However, such tactics are much more prevalent in the B2C world and their effectiveness from a B2B perspective is a question mark for many SiriusDecisions' customers. What's more certain is that any increased functionality on the MAP side that can assist in adding social data to contact records within a marketing database is a positive enhancement.
Marketo intends to continue to support the Crowd Factory product and customers, but all offerings will eventually be under the Marketo brand through an integrated solution. While the expanded functionality should benenfit customers of both companies, a full analysis isn't possible until the combined solution has been implemented and used by at least a handful of Marketo users.
In 1971 computer engineer Ray Tomlinson used the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) and a file transfer program called CPYNET to send what may have been the first email. Since then, email has evolved considerably — or has it? Tomlinson’s email was highly targeted, his message succinct and his audience receptive. Over 40 years later, how many b-to-b marketers can make the same claim for their emails?
In fairness, today’s b-to-b marketers face email challenges unknown back in 1971, such as multiple (and obviously far more tech savvy) audiences, changing buyer roles and buying stages, target audiences overwhelmed with campaigns, spam traps and filter mechanisms blocking messages. This begs the question: What are best-in-class companies doing to rise above these obstacles? Here are some of the approaches we see leading companies utilizing to improve response rates:
- Leveraging a multi-channel approach. Understanding that email is just one of many delivery mechanisms and knowing when it’s appropriate is critical to increasing its effectiveness. Best-in-class companies are leveraging technology such as marketing automation platforms (MAPs), Web analytics, business intelligence and other data sources to determine communication preferences. Some have augmented this approach by offering preference centers to enable buyers to indicate specific areas of interest as well as their preferred delivery methods. For instance, a buyer might choose email to receive newsletters, direct mail for special offers and social media for product updates.
- Using email to drive social engagement. To increase the use of social channels, many companies include “follow” and “like” icons in standard email templates. Leading companies are going even farther, integrating email into social campaigns to increase their ability to gain mindshare and share content.
- Designing for mobile. The ability to optimize for mobile has existed for several years; however, leading companies have gone a step farther to design email templates and formats from scratch, specifically for mobile devices. In addition, response mechanisms such as the ability to swipe vs. click are being utilized, as well as offers and content optimized for mobile devices to provide a seamless experience to increase conversions.
- Utilizing trigger-based email. As more companies adopt MAPs and/or Web content management systems capable of sending emails, leading companies are leveraging this ability to send trigger-based email offers based on buyer activity (e.g. trial offer or webcast invitation) or inactivity (e.g. content focused on where buyers left off in their journey).
- Evolving email nurture approaches. Leading companies are taking a more granular approach to address specific buying stages. These range from long-term nurture programs for those not yet ready to purchase, designed to encourage them to at least indicate areas of interest, to nurture campaigns that address specific reasons why leads were disqualified after being accepted by sales. These approaches take into account buyer activity, industry and buyer attributes and leverage email, telephone and even direct mail and social. Perhaps one of the biggest changes we will see in the near term is that nurturing will soon trump acquisition as the primary use case for email marketing.
Ultimately, to communicate more effectively with buyers, leading companies are focused on increasing their knowledge of buyer preferences to better determine the merits of using email vs. alternative means.
Here’s a tale of two benchmarks, both SiriusDecisions customers. We recently benchmarked their marketing and sales budgets; both have annual revenue of less than $50 million, are primarily software vendors, and have similar average selling prices and sales cycles.
The first customer reported average revenue growth and gross margins. Investment in marketing as a percentage of revenue was lower than average, as was the investment level in sales. The customer indicated a focus on large enterprise accounts and that the majority of revenue came from existing customers, so the sales organization had a noticeable named account structure (accounts are already known).
Our analysis of the first customer’s marketing budget revealed an almost 50/50 split between personnel and programs, with no investment in marketing systems and tools, and only slight investment in outside service providers. The marketing function’s primary focus was to support and enable the named account-based sales organization. We analyzed the marketing budget allocation and determined that the customer should:
- Establish stronger processes and agreements between marketing and sales
- Evaluate systems and tools to improve efficiency
- Emphasize sales enablement, retention and loyalty initiatives
- De-emphasize awareness and demand creation activities
However, we pointed out that if corporate strategy shifted to focus more on acquiring new customers, marketing investment would need to increase to afford the new initiatives required in awareness and demand creation.
A Very Different Picture
The marketing benchmark for the second customer revealed a very different picture, reporting much higher-than-average revenue growth and slightly lower-than-average margins. Investment in marketing and sales was above average. The customer focus was maintaining a healthy mix of revenue from large enterprise and small-to-midsize accounts; the majority of revenue was from new accounts.
Our analysis of the marketing budget revealed a higher percentage allocated to programs, a lower percentage to personnel, and investments in marketing systems and tools as well as outside service providers. The investments in marketing technologies and outside agencies resulted in better leverage of staff; however, marketing struggled with clear reporting metrics and key performance indicators for the full impact of marketing on sales. The marketing function’s goals and tactics allocation appeared to be split between lead creation and sales enablement, unusual for an organization of this size.
We analyzed the marketing budget allocation and determined that the customer needed to emphasize more awareness and demand creation programs to meet sales expectations that marketing would source a high percentage of the pipeline. We advised marketing to communicate with sales that it was more important to focus on improvements in one particular area (e.g. demand creation) and establish best practices and reportable metrics before trying to support lower-in-the funnel sales enablement activities.
Analyzing Benchmark Results
As so often is the case, you get what you pay for. One organization can be content with moderate growth and a marketing function that’s reactive to a strong sales organization, while the other can be designed/funded for much higher growth and a marketing organization that’s empowered to source considerably more than half of the sales pipeline. A cursory analysis might indicate that the two organizations are simply at opposite ends of the same benchmark peer set and that, when combined, they have a balanced impact on the average numbers for organizations of that size. However, the benchmark data and analysis actually reveal much more: These are organizations with different corporate goals and strategies that need to be supported by different levels of marketing/sales investment and budget allocations.
Posted by
Jay Gaines on Wed, Mar 14, 2012 @ 09:18 AM
SiriusDecisions spends considerable time working with great marketers who are creating tremendous value for their companies. These marketers are consistently doing things that were once unheard of, including:
- Measuring, reporting and becoming predictive about marketing’s contribution to sales pipeline and revenue
- Establishing rigorous processes, and benchmarking their own performance on many fronts to drive continuous improvement
- Making fact-based decisions about the roles marketing should play based on demand type, sales structure, sales cycle lengths and other key factors
- Measuring the impact their work has on sales efficiency and pipeline dynamics
In the majority of organizations that are smart or lucky enough to have these skilled marketers, the most significant challenge that marketers face is changing perceptions by business leaders and salespeople about marketing’s role. The problem is that most senior leaders and sales reps have spent most of their careers experiencing marketing contributions, especially in the area of lead generation, that have been questionable at best. However, in the past five to 10 years marketing technology, analytics and approaches have evolved significantly, and the function is more accountable and measurable than ever before.
With increasing frequency, sales leaders are finding that their marketing counterparts are able to report on the quality and volume of leads being delivered to sales, the propensity of those leads to get to sales pipeline and closure (when acted upon by sales), the real cost of creating each and every lead, and of course, exactly how many (and too often, few) of these leads are being acted upon by sales.
Note to sales leaders: If your counterparts in marketing are talking about contribution to pipeline and revenue, service-level agreements, end-to-end lead management and sales-accepted lead rates, it’s probably time to start thinking about marketing differently.
Note to marketing leaders: If you are still measuring marketing contribution based only on clicks, visits and views, and are sending sales every contact that completes a form, drops a business card in a fishbowl at an event, or registers for a webinar and calling it a lead, then it’s you who needs to catch up because you’re doing your fellow marketers a disservice.
Your marketing database is growing faster than ever. Your inbound programs are taking off. You’ve found the best ways to acquire the right additional names from your favorite providers. Additional contact discovery efforts are clicking. Good for you. Now, how much thought have you put into what you’re going to do with those names?
Don’t let a growing marketing database turn into a larger junk heap. B2B contact records go bad at a rate of nearly 30 percent per year as contacts change jobs, responsibilities and companies. You need a plan for what happens to each and every record from the moment it enters the database; otherwise, it will become worthless before you figure out what to do with it. Here’s what we recommend:
- Follow a forward-or-out principle. Records belong in a marketing database when they show value or potential – usually in a selling process. If marketing can move the contacts forward by making them more valuable through acquiring additional information or generating interaction, great. However, if the contact can’t possibly become more valuable to the organization (e.g. they represent an industry that you’ll never serve), don’t waste time or resources on them. Move them out of the active database.
- Pick a path. From the moment contacts enter the database, place every one of them on a defined path to improve their value to you. A pre-MQL nurture stream could be appropriate for contacts that have made an inquiry. Maybe the contact is better suited for data enhancement through a third-party vendor so you can learn enough about them to deliver more relevant content. Or it may require a phone call, or a series of low-obligation offers, so contacts can prove they’re still out there. The important thing is that there are defined paths in place and that each contact is assigned to one of them.
- Have a next step. Paths should all have defined next steps, even if that next step is simply be the start of another path. Next steps are easier to decide upon when you’re getting positive reactions; however, they’re also necessary when you’re getting no reaction whatsoever from a contact. Place time constraints around how long you’re willing to wait to receive a positive response before moving contacts to another path. Continuing to do the same ineffective thing over and over again may be a next step, but it’s certainly not a smart one.
- Know when to move on. Following the forward-or-out principle, you don’t want useless records in your active database. If you learn along the way that contacts can’t fit any profile you’ve defined as worthwhile, archive them, make them inactive, or do whatever you need to do to indicate that you won’t be wasting time on them. Do the same with contacts who have aged out of all other reasonable programs or have proven that they can’t be useful to you (e.g. opt-outs).
For many marketers, the larger the database, the larger the struggle. While we’ll never stop records from going bad, marketers can stop treating the database as a holding tank for records we can’t decide what to do with. Do not become a database hoarder! Place every record on a path to help the best contacts move forward and the worthless ones to move out. That will be a big stride toward getting more value out of your marketing database.
Posted by
Erin Estep on Thu, Mar 01, 2012 @ 10:56 AM
Pinterest is popping up in social media discussions everywhere, despite the fact that it’s still not available for widespread use (invitation or wait-list only). Why? And, perhaps even more importantly, why should the B2B marketing community care? Keep reading.
Pinterest is a rapidly growing visual bookmarking site, a la Tumblr or Delicious. Like both of those sites, it uses a bookmark to allow users to collect and post ("pin") things of interest as they surf the Web. Unlike the other two sites, Pinterest relies solely on image content — resulting in a collection of virtual pinboards that allow users to collect and showcase their interests and revisit sites at a later date. The site is an extension of users' social networks, and is becoming a browsing destination in and of itself. The visual appeal of the Pinterest site sets it apart from other bookmarking and referral sites, making it more popular as a destination and more powerful as a viral sharing channel on the Web. It's curation at its finest, literally a public pinboard, with little reminders to ourselves and signals of our great taste and interests to the outside world.
A glance at what's popular on Pinterest (the site actually has a Popular page) quickly reveals more about its demographics than you’d learn from Google Analytics: fashion (many concepts via Polyvore, a fashion "mood board" site), recipes, craft concepts, quotations, home décor wish lists, workouts, fun activities for kids and other hot topics…you get the picture. There are also, shall we say, an inordinate number of cupcake recipes. Once again, the business audience is not exactly on the bleeding edge of social uptake.
But the best answer for why B2B marketers should care about Pinterest, what truly makes it powerful and compelling, is its capacity to be a massively influential referral engine. During my first day of use, I posted several infographics that I wanted to keep track of, as well as a couple of possible updo's for my soon-to-be-married sister to consider. Both were repinned by at least five people I didn't know within the first 10 minutes. So, is this tool currently a no-brainer for establishing a brand presence and generating demand? Certainly not. But neither were blogs, communities and something called Twitter just five years ago; the gap between early adopters and social laggards is now readily apparent.
One caveat: Pinterest works only for pages with images, and pinners will only pin images that reveal exactly the concept they are seeking to either share or remember. How visual is your blog? As the visualization of content becomes increasingly imperative to its organic distribution, it will be interesting to see how Pinterest impacts Web and content development trends. In the meantime, as you strategize for your latest Web site revamp or new blog strategy, give more consideration to meaningful content visualization. Talk to your agency, shared service or creative team about ways to optimize assets and activities for this powerful new word-of-mouth engine. And take a look at the few B2B organizations such as GE who are out there doing interesting things on Pinterest, bringing new visual life and leverage to years of historical data and analytics through this emerging channel.
Product managers and marketers spend a lot of time obsessing about how to raise awareness and increase market acceptance. But you would be surprised how often one of the most effective tactics, briefing industry analysts, is an afterthought. For B2B organizations, especially in the high-tech market, analysts are the conduit to hundreds of client conversations every year. Yet analyst relations (AR) and PR teams wrestle with their product teams to get them to talk to the analysts. From the resistance, you’d think you were suggesting a scenario like that played out in the horror movie “Snakes on a Plane.”
Let’s take a look at the reluctance of some product managers. Here are highlights of the stories we’ve heard:
- “We don’t have a research subscription so they won’t talk to us.” This is a misunderstanding about the types of interaction with analyst firms. A client inquiry is a one-on-one conversation with an analyst to get advice or feedback. A vendor briefing is aimed at educating the analyst about a product or service. Analysts need briefings to understand what’s going on in the markets they cover — it’s part of their job responsibility. Just don’t expect much in the way of free advice. Recommendation: Keep the presentation short but meaty. If there’s interest, you can expect a lot of questions. You might not get all the way through your prepared material, but that’s a good reason to ask for a second opportunity. No questions? Hmm – better check your content again.
- “They didn’t cover us in their last report, so I’m not going to bother with them.” Also heard: “I didn’t like how they positioned us the last time.” This brings to mind a favorite adage from everyone’s grandmother: Are you cutting off your nose to spite your face? This is a relationship game; just like in dating, electing to ignore the other person is not a good plan. You need them, but do they really need you? Recommendation: Don’t make it a sales pitch. Analysts say that they hear hundreds of thinly disguised sales pitches every year, and as soon as it gets “salesy,” they tune out and check email. Distinguish yourself from the pack; offer something interesting, timely and truly informative to keep their attention.
- “I’m not talking to the analysts – they don’t know anything. Besides, they unhooked a deal we were working on.” This is a self-perpetuating story usually driven by a bad experience in sales. Most often, the unhooked deal happened because the analyst community doesn’t understand your offering and how compelling it is. The solution is not to keep silent but to change the relationship dynamic. Don’t let competitors make hay because your company’s collective attitude comes across as arrogant or indifferent. Recommendation: Analysts really do know their coverage areas. Unless you’re the prime mover in a completely new space, don’t waste time teaching them about it. What’s new and different? This is why they attend briefings – hoping to enjoy an Aha! moment.
- “I can’t tell them about our product; it’s not launched yet and I don’t have permission to talk about it.” In this case, a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) works wonders. Just make sure to reiterate at the briefing when the news embargo will be lifted. Too often, this excuse hides the fact that the product features or delivery dates are still moving targets. And that’s a much bigger problem, but not with the analysts. Recommendation: When the stars align and the product is ready, include information that analysts can’t get from your Web site. Avoid PR talking points — analysts are trained to quickly recognize when someone’s spinning the message.
- The most interesting display of reluctance is unspoken – it’s that “deer in the headlights” look that creeps across some faces because briefings are really outside their comfort zone. Sometimes they don’t know how to construct an effective briefing. (We can help with that.) And sometimes it’s because they fear that smart questions will uncover gaps in their product or knowledge. Recommendation: We suggest following the same advice that job coaches give professionals looking for a new job: Role-play and practice until you can handle any question that might come up. If it’s public-speaking anxiety, get a team member to lead. Just make sure the briefing happens. Also, because so many analysts are now active on social media platforms, don’t be shocked if your visit gets mentioned or a question is raised via Twitter. Have someone follow up with social mentions.
The briefing process may feel uncomfortable and seem like a lot of extra work, but the benefits make it well worth the effort. You’re already raising awareness with your sales team, channel partners and the media. Don’t neglect the one channel whose customers are paying them to learn about products and services just like the ones in your portfolio. You’ll find that mastering the art of the analyst briefing won’t be so scary after all.
Famous (and notorious) as a model of ruthless operational efficiency, Walmart is known for mastering just-in-time (JIT) delivery of goods – holding virtually no inventory – to extract from suppliers only what’s needed to sell. While we certainly don’t advocate that B2B marketing and sales adopt the type of adversarial vendor relationships Walmart is legendary for, its success does provide some valuable lessons.
While you may never have thought of it this way, to a certain extent marketing is a supplier to sales. Like a manufacturer supplying a retailer with goods, marketing supplies sales with leads. Sales, like a retailer, needs to convert those leads into closed business as efficiently and effectively as possible. But, like a retailer that depends on the help of a supplier to create demand and move product (through advertising, promotion and point-of-purchase strategies), sales needs the help of marketing (through branding, campaigns, content and tools) to create/accelerate demand and close business. Too often, we find that sales has a tough time asking for this help.
Tell the Supplier What You Want and Need
Walmart’s strategy is simple: Sell goods to the customer at the lowest possible cost. Its suppliers understand that Walmart wants them to drive as much of the cost out of their products as possible. Walmart employees can’t even accept a cup of coffee from a supplier – because it adds to the cost of merchandise. We recommend that sales get what it needs from marketing through a formal, structured and collaborative process to establish clear objectives, expectations, measurements and mutual respect. Service-level agreements (SLAs) are a highly effective vehicle for establishing this process, and we’ve seen firsthand their effectiveness in the work we do with clients.
The Job’s Not Over When the Goods Are Delivered
Too often, marketing views its job as simply creating demand, and considers the job done when a lead has been successfully accepted and qualified by sales. Wrong! Just as Walmart suppliers provide advertising, promotional and point-of-purchase assistance to help the retailer engage and convert shoppers, marketing should look for ways to enable sales by developing content and tools that help buyers through their decision process, using data to help determine where to target those efforts.
Data Is a Two-Way Street
Walmart’s competitive advantage is its use of data in driving operational excellence. The company collects, aggregates, analyzes and shares data with suppliers to ensure that the right products are delivered in the right quantity to the right location at the right time. Possible hurricane in Florida? Walmart alerts Kellogg’s to increase its shipments of strawberry Pop-Tarts to the Sunshine State because the data shows people buying them when power outages are likely.
In the B2B realm, sales can help direct marketing efforts to where they will be most helpful by sharing real-time data from sales force automation (SFA) systems. For example, if the SFA data identifies a “break point” where there’s high deal attrition in the sales pipeline, marketing can provide content (e.g. client success stories) and programs (e.g. executive briefings) to improve results.
Unfortunately, the typical B2B sales organization is no Walmart when it comes to data. With often minimal SFA compliance, the data shared by sales is typically not close to the amount and quality that marketing needs to drive these key decisions. By demonstrating how sales will benefit by entering this data, providing value to sales in using their SFA tools (e.g. integrating playbooks, comp management, game design techniques) and having sales managers coach their reps, compliance and data quality can be increased.
Can We Get to JIT Delivery of Leads?
As previously noted, Walmart is famous for holding as little inventory as possible. Using technology, it demands JIT delivery of goods based on what’s selling and what’s not. Now, imagine if Walmart demanded that its supplier provide four to five times the goods they could actually sell? Not likely to happen, yet it does when sales demands that a 4X or 5X pipeline be managed by its reps. Our research shows that an increase in pipeline-to-quota ratio often leads to a decrease in overall sales productivity and an increase in wasted resources (both in undeveloped leads and sales efforts that go nowhere). Marketing and sales should take a lesson from Walmart. Rather than hold inventory, sales should send it back to marketing for nurturing and development until it’s ready to close.
While Walmart has a reputation for being a demanding company to do business with, there are also many stories of the company collaborating with partners for the greater good. Case in point, Procter & Gamble (P&G) came to Walmart to share its thoughts on how to make cosmetic products greener. P&G worked with a cross-functional team to design products and packaging that were more sustainable, ultimately leading to greater sales. A great lesson on the benefits of working together for any B2B marketing and sales organization!
Posted by
Jason Hekl on Fri, Feb 03, 2012 @ 10:01 AM
In a previous post, I argued that empowered buyers and new technology are forcing today’s B2B teleprospectors to take on new personalities to meet the growing demands of the role. I showcased three teleprospecting ‘personalities’. The ‘First Responder’ is all about speed, recognizing the long understood advantage that comes with being first. The "[Social] Networker" still works the room, but in the digital realm. And the "Field Nurse" practices triage through inbound inquiry channels. Each represents a viable teleprospecting role, requiring very different skill sets. Today, we look at four more emerging teleprospecting personalities.
On their own, these new personalities seem like a logical evolution from traditional teleprospecting responsibilities, but when taken on in ad hoc fashion without the benefit of clear definition and supporting org structure, are they a harbinger of disorders to come? You be the judge.
- The Chatter. Hard to believe, but quite a few people are reluctant to speak with a salesperson. On the other hand, I love speaking with teleprospectors! (So much so that I invite you to call me at 415-754-3557 to participate in primary research I’m conducting for this year’s Summit). Some buyers find comfort in the relative anonymity of a click-to-chat session. More and more, companies are exposing a chat channel to prospective customers conducting research on their Web sites. Teleprospecting reps are answering those inquiries, leveraging both original and templated content to manage the conversations, often handling multiple threads at once.
- The Plumber. Some tech-savvy teleprospectors generate new demand by identifying and stopping leads from “falling through the cracks.” The value they provide (besides leads) is to identify and diagnose the leakage from the demand waterfall so that his/her counterparts in field marketing can adjust the scoring and routing mechanisms to plug the leaks wherever they may occur. The more expert teleprospectors become at interpreting activity, identifying missed opportunities for followup and feeding that insight back to field marketing, the more productive the integrated demand creation machine will become.
- The Lead Whisperer. This rep is expert at cultivating demand over time – a (pre-MQL) nurturing type who recognizes that each buyer has his or her own process to follow. The rep whispers encouragement as the buyer moves through the education phase and into the solution phase of the buyer’s journey. The rep understands that getting in early creates an opportunity to shape prospect thinking; when prospects are ready to move forward, they’ll turn first to the rep they already know.
- The Recycler. There’s at least one in every crowd. That special kind of rep who refuses to throw away what was once a good lead. This rep loves when leads are disqualified or reassigned back to the queue because too much time has lapsed without any movement. He/she knows that what may be an undesirable lead now could be very attractive by tomorrow, given the right conditions. The rep then utilizes the sales and marketing tools at his disposal to monitor for those conditions and re-engage when the time is right.
What do you think? Are these personality traits an early indicator of teleprospecting role specialization, or an omen of problems to come? Will disorders develop when reps take on too many personalities at once? Join the conversation and leave your comments below.
Posted by
Jason Hekl on Tue, Jan 31, 2012 @ 01:04 PM
When I began my career in B2B sales and marketing, I was hired by a Canadian company to sell software to insurance companies based in the United States. They set me up in a remote office and provided me with everything I needed to sell a lot of licenses: Solution Selling training, a Goldmine CD, a thick binder of product brochures and datasheets, and an experienced sales manager who used to sell paper forms to insurance companies (before computers made that business obsolete).
What I did not have, and cannot imagine selling without today, was the support of a teleprospecting organization to qualify leads before I called on them. I was hard-rock mining, cold calling from sunup to sundown. The only marketing leads I had came from the few industry events we sponsored each year.
We’ve come a long way. Today, teleprospecting is an essential part of B2B demand creation strategies. Teleprospecting professionals are an impressive group, constantly adapting to changes in how companies buy, and utilizing new technology to be smarter about what they do. They’ve taken on new personalities in an ongoing effort to meet the growing demands of the role.
Let’s look at three personalities that are a modern take on traditional teleprospecting roles, including:
- The First Responder. Field marketing teams promote several high-value offers at any given time through inbound channels like search marketing or content syndication. Any response to these offers (e.g. free trials, implementation best practices ebook targeting buyers in the later stages of the buying cycle) triggers a route around normal lead scoring and routing and is delivered directly to the inbound teleprospecting queue for immediate followup. The teleprospector knows that an inbound response to one of these offers is a great indicator of need or propensity to buy. More importantly, following up quickly, often within minutes, is the best way to establish a positive perception in the mind of a buyer, who may be in exploratory mode figuring out what to do next.
- The (Social) Networker. When I started my B2B sales and marketing career as a quota-carrying software sales rep nearly 15 years ago, I was handed a thick A.M. Best directory of all the insurance companies operating in North America, complete with a list of top executives. The prospecting tools available to sales reps today are a little more advanced. Teleprospecting reps in particular are very savvy at mining social networks to uncover new leads. The best ones are all over LinkedIn and other professional networks, keeping tabs on who moves where. They join special interest groups, monitor conversations in these communities and reach out through networking tools to make first contact with targeted prospects. It's a learned skill, and many teleprospecting reps are now quite expert at leveraging social channels to generate new demand.
- The Field Nurse. The field nurse excels in the high-stress environment of an inbound call center, where there’s no time to prepare and no two calls are alike. It’s fast-paced, and it’s reactive. All inbound calls, email requests and click-to-chat sessions are routed to inbound teleprospecting in real time and immediately prioritized over other prospecting activities. As might be expected, teleprospectors with exceptional verbal and written communication skills and the ability to think and act quickly will excel here. Each inbound conversation is different, so teleprospectors require broad knowledge and customer-service-like training to triage each request.
The practical question now is to see if companies start to formalize these personalities into distinct roles, giving even greater focus to the teleprospecting function. In another post, I’ll explore four more emerging teleprospecting personalities, and ask the question: ”are these teleprospecting personality traits the harbinger of role specialization, or an omen of problems to come?”