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Imagine your company was suffering from a lack of sales appointments and your sales people were unproductive. It would be easy to overreact and look for a B2B telemarketing vendor that could solve the problem immediately.
However, you’re better off pausing to evaluate the situation holistically rather than rushing to find a one-time fix. That’s because your company may have several needs that a B2B telemarketing vendor can fulfill. So it pays to take the time to unearth a company that can take care of all your requirements and, thus, become your long-term sales and marketing partner. Here’s how to do that.

Business developers are like the farmers who plow the fields, then plant and nurture the seeds, thus creating opportunities for growth. When the time is right, the salespeople reap the harvest. Therefore, business development is essential to the future of your company. You want your team to perform at their full potential. Here are some tips to increase the success of your business development team. 

Is a lack of appointments putting your company’s growth on hold? Because B2B appointment setting is a challenging task, it’s an all-too-common problem. Here are some tips to help you increase your sales appointments.

Customer Acquisition or Retention?

When it comes to inside sales compensation plans, many companies fall into the trap of focusing squarely on customer acquisition. When they do so, however, customer retention may suffer. Because the cost of keeping a customer is one-fifth the cost of acquiring one, deciding whether to direct your efforts toward acquisition or retention is essential. In most cases, a business is more likely to shore up its long-term health by retaining and growing current customers. Thus, if their inside sales compensation plans prioritize customer retention, they are more likely to be successful. 

Let’s look at how two companies have addressed sales to existing customers in their compensation plans. 

It may feel like you have to run faster and faster to keep up on the treadmill of customer acquisition, growth and retention. To do so, you may need to establish a call center or expand an existing one. If so, should you go in-house or outsource your call center needs?
To help you with this decision, I compiled a list of the benefits of outsourcing your B2B call center as well as some concerns you need to address.

Do your reps faithfully follow up on the leads you generate? If you’re like most marketers, the sad answer is likely a “no.” Why do I say that? Because research shows that salespeople pass over 80% of marketing leads.
You can overcome this with a carrot, not a stick. In other words, you won’t get far by berating salespeople for their lack of follow-up. Instead, it’s better to provide leads they can’t wait to chase down.
Sounds good, you say, but how?
Well, you’ve heard it before, salespeople want leads that have the money and the authority to make a purchase, are looking for a solution to the problem that your product or service solves, and want to take action within the foreseeable future.
But how do you ferret out leads that meet these criteria? It’s not as simple as directly asking someone, for instance, “Do you have the budget to buy this product?”
Here’s a guide to questions you can ask that will help you find the leads your reps will love. 

Research shows that businesses that reach or surmount their revenue goals are more aligned on sales and marketing than those that fail to meet their objectives. And although we’ve heard the mantra about the importance of aligning sales and marketing for years, in many companies this vision remains elusive. Why? Because it’s easier said than done. Without purposeful intervention, sales and marketing teams will continue to march to a different beat. To ensure alignment, you have to put mechanisms in place to point the sales and marketing teams in the same direction.

To do so, you can implement some of these initiatives:

Since positive economic cycles like the one we’re in now don’t last forever, it’s time to make hay while the sun shines and plan for an awesome sales year in 2019. Planning and preparation, however, takes time. So you cannot afford to wait until the New Year rings in to create your sales and marketing strategy and devise your tactics. To make 2019 strong and as panic-free as possible, plan how you will generate sales and start building your pipeline NOW.

The experts estimate that integrating computer technology with telephone interactions can increase efficiency by 15 percent. For the average rep, that gives them an extra hour a day to sell.

With that in mind, here are some of the apps that can help your reps make more phone calls and achieve better results.

“ If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.” — Peter Drucker.

Thanks to online marketing and technology, we have more data than ever to use in measuring and managing marketing campaigns. There are so many potential reports and dashboards that it’s easy to be overwhelmed.
So in this article, I will boil down an ocean of possible marketing data into the essential drops of wisdom. These are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will give you the big picture. Plus, they allow you to drill deeper as necessary to manage your pipeline, refine your campaigns and maximize return on investment (ROI).