To reach new B2B Buyers and connect via email is a low probability game, but the marginal cost of sending email is close to zero, so don't expect volume to decline.
Email is a science, with every element from the senders name to the signature analyzed and dissected for optimal performance. If you want to read the current research, follow this link to directly read the 2014 report.
This article is about the opening sentence and will be of interest to sales and marketing professionals.
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
This article was publsihed in full, yesterday on Linkedin pulse, you can find it under "What not to do at Trade Shows".
In 2003 I was working in a Silicon Valley tech startup. Google was just 5 years old, the iPhone was a glint in Steve Jobs’ eye, and Blackberry was the king of the smart-phone market.
I’ll never forget one meeting at the disc drive manufacturer Maxtor; the buyers in the meeting knew nearly as much as we did about our product and they knew more about our competitors product (Google search) than we did.
Recently I attended a Sales Hacker forum and one of the questions from the group was “We have a very complex product, it takes 12-18 months for salespeople to become fully productive, how can we reduce the time it takes to get salespeople up to speed?”
The answer to this question takes more than a few minutes and it varies, depending on the complexity of the product and the learning culture of the organization.
But ramping new hires quickly in a SaaS business is key to accelerating business growth.
Part 1 of this two-part blog post examines the causes of the slow sales ramp and explores ways to reduce it.
The CSO insights 2015 Sales Performance Optimization survey of more than 1000 Chief Sales Officers in companies Worldwide was published last month and the findings are alarming.
Salespeople are struggling to hit their numbers and marketing is not contributing enough value!
This article contains links to resources to answer some of the "How can I improve sales performance?" questions
Article Length: 1960 words
Reading Time: 10 Minutes
Are you familiar with the Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux or Chauvet Caves in France? If you are not, please click on this link to the Chauvet Cave Paintings.
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”.
