Signals from the Field

B2B salespeople have many opportunities to shoot themselves in the foot, and this article describes 6 things salespeople should not load into their six-shooter.  

Inbound marketing takes months, even years, to start producing meaningful results. That’s the truth.

And you can take it from us. Our firm has been blogging since 2009, we generate more site traffic than many successful ecommerce sites, and we have thousands of people download our eBooks per year.

In other words, we generate the attention most businesses can only dream of, and that alone is not enough to say we're wildly successful at inbound marketing. 

The skills that helped you start your own business are not the ones that will make you successful in the long term.  Inc. Magazine states that 96% of new businesses fail within the first 10 years.   

The salesperson's role is to acquire new clients and/or generate more revenue from existing clients.  After a deal closes, it's often passed off to an account manager of a fulfillment team.  The on boarding process and the ongoing customer experience are vital to customer retention.  Moreover, in a traditional sales model, the original salesperson may be unaware of any problems or issues until it is too late.

At a recent speaking event, I posed a question to the audience. I asked, “who here watches TV on their own time, like on Hulu or Netflix, as opposed to watching live TV on cable.”

Some salespeople chase bad leads.  It’s one of the most frequent problems I see.  They invest lots of time and resources only to find out it’s a poor quality lead and no sale is made.  

If you asked me the most common reason why marketing fails, I’d say two things: 1) not knowing the customer well enough, and 2) failing to deliver on what the customer wants.

A few months ago, we embarked on a mission to better understand how users in central Virginia used the internet.

To do this, we surveyed users throughout central Virginia, then broke down that information by age, gender, and income.

Lack of sales activity, lead generation, is the leading cause of B2B salespeople not meeting their quotas.    This article describes four strategies for developing and executing a sustainable lead generation machine - never suffering from a lack of sales activity. 

The right marketing plan requires knowing your audience deeply. Marketing to younger, less affluent males is different than marketing to affluent, older females.