I wrote this article having attended a sales kick-off and sales enablement event for a major technology company.
This event, while similar in many aspects to a traditional kick-off, varied greatly in the take-aways for each individual sales attendee.
Dear prospective customer,
Apologies for the many times we salespeople have sat in front of you - selectively (not) listening, interrupting you and telling you what you needed, before you had finished your sentence.
Image by Aoki Tetsuo
I read with great irritation this morning of the Experian T-Mobile hack
I just bought a new iPhone from T-Mobile and as part of the lease process, they ran credit with Experian
Immediate thoughts were of unauthorized credit card transactions, canceled cards. Identity theft. Inconvenience and the sense of violation from a “trusted” 3rd. party, Experian.
The Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on Monday and Tuesday this week was well attended, had excellent speakers and a new crop of hot sales effectiveness and incentive applications. This post provides highlights of topics presented as well as links to some of the coolest apps.
Inbound marketing, email marketing, social selling, cold calling, referral based selling; - you name it, any way
that you can reliably generate quality leads that works for your business is goodness.
If you subscribe to current research, buyers are contacting vendors at somewhere between 60-70% of the way through their buying process. What this research fails to mention is this only applies to mainstream technology that is in established markets and where there is an identified and known set of competitors.
Buyers enter the buying process depending on technology maturity and buyer risk tolerance. I like to use the IMPACT mnemonic to describe buying cycles because I think it more accurately reflects what is actually going on in the buying organization
IMPACT The six phases of the buying process are easy to remember as they will have an enormous IMPACT on your company’s performance:
There are the Early Adopters (EA) who are happy buying innovative solutions. There are the Early Majority (EM) who want to buy the market leader. And there are the Late Majority (LM) who want to buy a commodity at the cheapest price. Here is where the buyer starts to engage in terms of the IMPACT process.
Early adopters will enter the buying process at 10-20% of the way through a buying process and laggards will wait till they are 90% of the way - and all they care about is price or the service discount.
Successful entrepreneurs, marketers and salespeople selling disruptive technology must learn to recognize early adopters, understand how early adopters engage with innovative technology vendors and how they manage a buying process.
This is the subject of a new eBook from authors of “Why Killer Products Don’t Sell”, Ian Gotts and Dominic Rowsell, and Adrian King, entitled “IMPACT - the technology executive’s guide for selling B2B disruptive and innovative solutions”.
Yesterday I published an article on the WittyParrot website about our experience and learnings from the 30 day HubSpot Blogging Challenge in January 2014. Below is an excerpt.
I joined WittyParrot as VP Marketing in July 2013 and recommended that WittyParrot use HubSpot for Inbound Marketing.
There were no other candidates in our evaluation as I have been working with HubSpot for 5 years and have implemented it in a number of technology companies.
I did not need convincing of the underlying, technology, methodology or ROI on effort and investment… it works as advertised.
We installed the software in July and began work on the new Website for the company launch in October.
We chose the HubSpot Enterprise system because we expect WittyParrot to scale rapidly and need the full functionality of the enterprise system from the start, even though we were starting from scratch.
When HubSpot announced the 30 day blogging challenge, we accepted the challenge as we were beginning to see the fruits of our early blogging effort with the direct correlation between a great blog and leads that followed.
Read the article in full ...http://www.wittyparrot.com/blog/30-lessons-from-the-hubspot-30-day-blogging-challenge
