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Articles by Sabrina Ferraioli
The Long-Term Risks of Insourcing Your Inside Sales
If you’re considering insourcing your inside sales to save money, you may want to think twice. Why? Because any short-term gains could cost you more in the long run. We’re all familiar with outsourcing — the practice of hiring an established third-party workforce to perform specific tasks on the company’s behalf. Many B2B companies have outsourced their inside sales. In the past, the only competition in the industry has been from other firms and agencies providing similar services.
The Pros and Cons of In-Office and Remote Work Environments for Inside Sales Reps
While technology, comprising everything from laptops and software to bandwidth and the Internet, make remote working easier and more feasible than ever before, it’s taken the COVID-19 pandemic to bring the virtual office into reality. For almost a year, to control the virus, many inside sales reps made home their base of operations. And it turns out, at least 60% of all employees prefer working virtually from a home office.
The Digital Sales Revolution Has Happened. Is Your Team Keeping Pace?
As pandemic fears and lockdown inconveniences wane, there is pent-up demand and an expectation of revenue growth. According to a Chief Executive Group survey, 73% of CEOs across the United States anticipate a rise in revenues, and 65% of them also say profits will increase. So, if you believe that your sales model needs rethinking and your technology requires retooling, now is the time to act.
The 8 Elements Of A Successful Inside Sales Team
With 2020 in the rearview mirror, we can breathe a collective sigh of relief — and look at one of the big winners for the year: Inside sales. With its possibilities for selling virtually and potential for cutting overhead, inside sales was a clear winner and a prospective leader for 2021 and beyond. But organizations can't simply turn their sales over to the inside sales teams and kick back; they need good, raw material, teamwork, leadership and tools. 1.
How to Build an Inside Sales Culture that Rocks Your Revenues
What makes a great company? Its products? Its customer service? Its sales expertise? The management team? While each component is essential, we need to look beyond individual elements to something all-encompassing that drives a company to achieve. It's the culture. A good company culture guides, supports and encourages a workforce to excel. Of course, it takes leadership to drive a company's culture. But it can only blossom with employee participation and buy-in.
5 steps to designing and implementing a client win-back program
Comment Marketing November 17, 2020 Sabrina Ferraioli is cofounder and vice president of global sales for 3D2B By Sabrina Ferraioli To read the entire article, please subscribe or sign in...
7 ways to use AI to boost your sales
Comment Marketing April 23, 2020 Companies that adopt AI in the next five to seven years could see their cash flow increase 122 percent by 2030. Those that fail to act risk falling behind and watching their cash flow drop 23 percent over the same period.
5 Reasons to Consider Account-Based Selling
What if you could stop chasing leads and focus on selling only to your best, most viable opportunities? It’s possible when you integrate account-based strategies into your marketing and sales efforts. Account-based selling (ABS) could potentially shorten your sales cycles, increase deal size and even boost your customer retention rates. So what makes ABS so different? At one level, it’s not that different. You can think of it as enterprise selling with a few twists.
11 Creative Ways to Make Better B2B Sales Calls
How many times have you heard that sales is a numbers game? And if you want to boost your B2B sales results, you need to commit to making more calls? But what happens when you’ve reached your maximum call volume and your results are still below quota? Consider this: According to Salesforce research, 92% of customer interaction occurs by phone, but as many as 85% of customers say they are unhappy with their phone experience. The answer is not quantity but quality.
What’s Happening in Inside Sales in 2020
As we settle into the deepest part of winter and even temperate climates are feeling a drop in the mercury, let’s heat things up with a look into what we can expect in inside sales in 2020 and beyond. First, expect companies to continue to embrace the role of inside sales. As the traditional sales force of field reps contracts, inside sales hires are growing at a rate of around 15% annually.
How to Increase the Efficiency of Your B2B Inside Sales Team
In 2020, inside sales and professional telesales teams are more than just a nice-to-have component of a sales strategy. They are one of the hottest trends in B2B sales. B2B telesales and inside sales are a force to be reckoned with and are increasingly becoming companies’ go-to sales strategy. Inside sales and B2B telesales are cost-effective, easily scaled and the preferred sales channel with Millennials and younger generation buyers.
9 Reasons Why Inside Sales Will Continue to Grow
The handwriting has been on the wall for several years. Inside sales teams are expanding in size and growing in importance, and they aren’t showing any signs of slowing down. The reason is simple. Inside sales can transform your sales through digital technology, cost savings and the ability to meet the changing preferences of younger buyers. That’s why the number of inside sales reps is growing three times faster than traditional outside reps.
The Benefits of B2B Inside Sales During the Holiday Season
The holidays are upon us. People are scheduling company parties and trying to spend more time with their families and less in the office. With so much other activity going on, are you planning to follow suit and shutter your inside sales efforts until after the holidays? If so, maybe you should reconsider. There’s business to be had — business that the competition is probably not pursuing as aggressively as at other times of the year.
The Dummies’ Guide to Artificial Intelligence for Marketing
Self-driving cars … Siri personal assistant … chess master IBM Watson. These are just a few of the things that come to mind when we think about artificial intelligence (AI). AI is the buzzword that seems to be on everyone’s lips. There’s virtually no business or industry, or consumer for that matter, that isn’t confronting the impact of AI today. To some, AI signals a utopian future, while others foresee a dystopian nightmare coming to control us all.
5 Signs that You Should Outsource Your B2B Appointment Setting
When the InsideSales.com research lab surveyed sales leaders about their top challenges, one of their questions caught our attention. InsideSales.com asked, which is more challenging, building a pipeline or closing a sale? More than six in ten respondents (63.48%) identified building the pipeline as a more significant challenge. It stands to reason.
The Alphabet Soup of B2B Lead Qualification: Understanding MQLs, SALs and SQLs
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). Sales Accepted Lead (SAL). Sales Qualified Lead (SQL). Why should you care, as long as the leads are qualified? Right? It matters more than you think. Of all the leads in your sales funnel, only 3% are active buyers at any given time. Another 7% may be intending to buy shortly. The other 90% are either not yet ready to buy, do not have a need or are not interested in buying from you. But who falls into what category? Lead qualification can help you make that determination.
How to Pair AI with Inside Sales to Grow Your Business
Inside sales has always been a high-touch and highly professional strategy for reaching out to business buyers with a targeted message. And today inside sales reps are often a company’s first line of communication with existing customers and prospects alike. To make your reps as productive as possible, you want them focused on building relationships with high-value accounts…not dialing for dollars.
How to Evaluate a B2B Telemarketing Vendor
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.
Outsourcing Your B2B Call Center: The Benefits and Concerns
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.
7 Ways to Increase Your B2B Field Salespeople’s Productivity and Success
In the US, the annual full cost of a B2B technology sales rep is around $380,000. That includes everything — base salary, variable compensation, overhead, travel and entertainment. With that level of investment, you need to ensure your field reps are as productive as possible. It’s not merely a matter of hiring the best people and coaching them to succeed. It’s also important to support them in every way possible. Here are seven ways you can empower your reps to be as productive as possible. 1.
5 Noteworthy Books for Improving Inside Sales and B2B Telemarketing Results
The lay of the land for inside sales and B2B telemarketing is continually shifting, so you have to keep up with it. While you can learn much by surfing the web and reading up on the question of the minute, there’s something to be said for the holistic approach of sitting down and reading a book. So, where do you start? Here are some of my top book selections from the last year or so. What is combo prospecting? It’s the union of new and old sales strategies.
3 Ways to Achieve ABM Success Based on Research
In reviewing the latest research on account-based marketing (ABM) best practices, it struck me that they mirror what sales and marketing leaders have tried to follow for decades. There is, of course, a modern twist to them. It reflects today’s technological capabilities as well as marketing’s new focus on accounts. So, what are companies that succeed at ABM doing that sets them apart? The new spin here is that instead of focusing on qualifying leads, companies now qualify accounts.
9 Inside Sales Tips Proven to Achieve Revenue Growth
If you want to improve your inside sales team’s results, it’s best to try tactics proven by research or your internal metrics to guide your decisions. Here are some inside sales tips based on studies that could help you to crank up your sales machine. Employ Best Practices When Making Calls Getting the timing and frequency of calls correct is a significant contributor to sales success. 1. Respond Rapidly When it comes to lead qualification, procrastination is your enemy.
The Cost and Cures for Inside Sales Turnover
In my last post, The Causes and Ramifications of Your Inside Sales Turnover Problem, I outlined why so many companies are facing constant churn among their phone agents. The issue is driven by the challenging nature of the job, the rush to hire and fill positions quickly and the intense competition for qualified personnel. Given the lengthy time to hire a new rep and bring them up to speed (from nine months to well over a year), it’s a costly problem.
The Causes and Ramifications of Your Inside Sales Turnover Problem
You’re constantly battling with the revolving door of inside salespeople. You feel as if you’re always recruiting, hiring, training and then seeing the fruits of your labor walk out the door. It’s frustrating. It may make you feel better to know that with turnover rates for telephone agents at 20 percent, you have plenty of company. But that doesn’t solve it. Understanding what drives the flux in inside sales is the first step in finding the solution which, so far, has eluded you.
How to Boost Revenues with Inside Sales Enablement
Sometimes sales fluctuate a little from month to month. And at other times, sales gyrations feel more like a roller coaster. You just wish you had more control over the ups and downs, allowing you to forecast your future revenue with some degree of certainty. For this dream to become a reality, you need an inside sales team that fires on all cylinders all the time. How do you make that happen? Sales enablement. You want to make your sales team’s job as easy as possible and help them to win more deals.
3 B2B Sales and Marketing Strategies that Proved their Power in 2017
The term “account-based marketing” (ABM) was coined by ITSMA in 2004 and has been practiced for many years in one form or another. Instead of relying on generating a large number of leads and then sorting through them to qualify those you want to pursue, ABM flips the process around. First, you decide on the accounts you want to land and/or expand. Then design your marketing and sales processes to do just that.
How to Create Instant Rapport in B2B Phone Sales
They’re zoning out. The prospect’s not engaging with you. You fear this call is going to end before you accomplish anything. It’s not easy when you want to gain the attention of customers and prospects on the phone. They’re staring at seemingly endless to-do lists and don’t want to waste a minute. How can you grab their attention? Or if you’re in charge, how do you help your reps to engage prospects on the phone with ease?
5 Ways to Supercharge Your Results from B2B Email Marketing
Despite rumors of its demise, email marketing remains a workhorse for B2B marketing. In fact, 95 percent of B2B marketers use it. Marketers consider it to be the best channel for distributing content, and it also generates revenues. According to Fast Company, for every dollar invested in email marketing, there is a $43 return. That’s a staggering 4,300 percent ROI. If B2B email marketing is worth doing, it’s worth doing right.
13 Marketing Tactics to Boost Your Event ROI
Have you ever spent months designing and building your booth to showcase your incredible products and wow the trade show crowds? Perhaps you’ve devoted days to perfecting every word and graphic for your presentation at a conference. Then, despite nailing your booth or presentation, you’ve been disappointed in the results. The event did not produce the return on investment (ROI) you had anticipated. Leads trickled in and then wasted away. It’s an all too common problem.
The Conversation Patterns of Winning Sales Calls
It seems like you put endless amounts of time and energy into generating leads. But to what effect? Too many of them turn into dead ends. It’s not surprising that you’re frustrated. Your leads should be converting at higher rates. And while you’re upset that your company’s salespeople aren’t squeezing the most out of each lead, they’re complaining about quality. Perhaps your reps are working hard, but they simply don’t know enough about the science of sales conversations. What works? What fails?
The Real World: Marketing & Sales Alignment
This is the true story…of two organizational functions…picked to share an office (work together)…and produce results…to find out what happens…when marketing and sales stop pointing fingers…and start getting aligned…The Real World: Marketing & Sales Alignment As a marketing (and former sales) professional, I have had the not-so-privileged opportunity to play a starring role in marketing and sales misalignment.
3 Insights on the Impact and Future of Business, Marketing, and Sales Operations
Operations occur near constantly across your organization through processes and details that you may never even be aware of. As a marketer, you’re likely most familiar with marketing operations, and hopefully, sales operations because of your partnership with sales, but then maybe less familiar with business operations. But when it comes down to it, operations and the people that power those functions are absolutely critical to the work you do and the smooth functioning of your business.
How Inside Sales Enablement Can Help Increase Revenues
Are you tired of the ups and downs of sales? You likely want to be able to forecast future revenues predictably, but sometimes have a hard time getting a handle on what’s driving success and failure. Sales leaders’ lack of clarity around what drives sales performance is partially due to a large number of variables, both in their business and in the market, that affect conversion rates. How do you gain more control of them? That’s what sales enablement is all about.
How Account-Based Marketing Changes the Business Developer’s Role | Oracle Marketing Cloud
“It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.” — Charles Darwin After decades when there were few changes in marketing, in the 1990s, internet marketing was born. Then around the turn of the century, new technologies gave way to inbound marketing, putting the power in the buyer’s hands. The goal of inbound marketing was to attract prospects by providing information that helped them learn about solutions to their problems.
How to Gain Influence and Increase B2B Sales Close Rates
In his frustration, he seeks the advice of a successful mentor, Pindar, who immediately agrees to meet with him. Joe, of course, is somewhat surprised that such an important man would make time for him. It turns out, that’s part of the lesson: Help others, and you’ll end up better off yourself. Pindar explains to Joe that if he single-mindedly focuses on making money, he’s never going to achieve the wealth he desires. Instead, the secret to success is giving. He then shares what made him successful.
How to Use Business Developers to Execute Account Based Marketing Tactics Successfully
“If you want to go upmarket, which you absolutely must to grow, you have to go outbound. Winning large customers is much more about causing sale, not just catching one.”— Ken Krogue, President and Founder, InsideSales.com Account-based marketing is quickly gaining popularity. It’s a strategy that aligns sales, business development and marketing around the potential deals that can have the most impact on a company’s future revenues.
Scaling Inside Sales for New Product Introductions or Market Expansion
Challenges that are part and parcel of new market expansion and product introductions include executing in-depth market research, filling distribution gaps, honing marketing tactics and building internal resources to support the initiative. Given that leaders are juggling multiple priorities, it’s not surprising that they sometimes fall flat when attempting to scale inside sales to meet expansion goals.
Customer Centric Selling: The #1 B2B Sales and Marketing Trend in 2017
“The purpose of any business is to create and keep a customer”—Theodore Levitt Customer centricity started in the 60s with direct marketing. Since then, the omnipresence of the Internet has increased opportunities for companies and customers to interact. Customers became more connected and empowered and their expectations rose. At the same time, they turned into the main force driving the success (and failure) of businesses.
How to Turn Customer Support Calls into Revenue
If you ever call a company’s customer support department and then call their sales department, you’ll likely notice a difference in the level of service you receive in each situation. Frequently, it seems you are more liable to spend time on hold when you are seeking service than when you are calling to make a purchase. That’s a sad statement on how many companies perceive the value of existing versus new customers.
When Marketing to C-Level Executives, Content Is Not King
If you're a marketer who aspires to introduce your product or service to C-level executives, you're not alone. After all, they hold the purse strings. And they have the authority to make sweeping decisions. So it's no wonder that many B2B marketers aim to reach them through their marketing programs. Here's the problem. C-level execs are squeezing more than seems humanly possible out of their days. Also, the competition for their attention is stiff.
Is B2B Telemarketing Effective
What are the most effective B2B lead generation tactics? How about social media, content marketing and search engine optimization? These shiny new tactics have their place, but according to research depicted in the chart, they pale in comparison to some good old-fashioned tactics. Ranking in the first, second and third spots for B2B lead generation are inside sales, executive events and telemarketing.
B2B Lead Generation: Help Your Prospects Climb the Sales and Marketing Pyramid
We all love the sales funnel…at least in concept. Visually, it’s the perfect model: Our leads pour into the top of the funnel. As they move through the middle of the funnel, marketing and sales both qualify the leads. And buyers flow out the bottom. Or do they? With the increasing complexity of B2B purchases, sales cycles are becoming longer, and more decision makers and influencers are involved in the buying decision.
The Myth That’s Hurting Your Sales
“Myths which are believed in,” wrote George Orwell, “tend to become true.” And when that myth is based on a statistic that discourages companies from directly engaging and conversing with prospective customers early in the sales cycle, it hurts sales and, ultimately, business. The myth I’m referring to is the supposed trend toward delaying communication with sales reps until late in the buying cycle.
The Myth That’s Hurting Your Sales
“Myths which are believed in,” wrote George Orwell, “tend to become true.” And when that myth is based on a statistic that discourages companies from directly engaging and conversing with prospective customers early in the sales cycle, it hurts sales and, ultimately, business. The myth I’m referring to is the supposed trend toward delaying communication with sales reps until late in the buying cycle.
B2B Phone Sales Tips: Beating the Voicemail Gatekeeper
Sometimes it seems that for every technological advance, there is a counter-force at work. Take the telephone. It’s a strategic tool for B2B lead follow-up, telemarketing and telesales. But with the ascendancy of voicemail and its handy helper Caller ID, it has become increasingly difficult to get a live prospect on the line. For the sales rep, the question becomes: How do I break through the voicemail barrier, beat the technological gatekeeper and deliver my message?
B2B Sales Acceleration: How to Help Buyers Buy
B2B sales acceleration is all about closing more deals faster. When people think about speed, technology often comes to mind. There are, of course, many technologies that accelerate sales, but thereâs one that you may not have considered. According to an article in Forbes by Ken Krogue, one of the keys to sales acceleration is to pick up the phone. While new, shiny tools are exciting to marketing leaders, in the end, whatâs most important is increased sales.
Inbound Lead Conversion Tips You Need to Know
As a B2B marketer, it’s easy for you to get caught up in lead generation. After all, you often get measured on the number of leads you generate and even the cost-per-lead. But the truth is, none of that matters unless the leads convert. Inbound leads without a strategy for conversion are like kindling and logs without a match. One won’t ignite your sales. The other won’t start a fire. The leads, however, are the starting point. If you have them, that’s great.
The Essential Role of Telemarketing in Account-Based Marketing
“More than 60 percent of companies plan to invest in technology for ABM to better align sales and marketing over the next twelve months.” — Sirius Decisions, 2015 State of Account Based Marketing Account based marketing (ABM), a term coined by ITSMA in 2004, is not new. As shown by Sirius Decision’s research, however, it is gaining traction. Companies are voting with their wallets by investing in technology to support the strategy.
B2B Buyers Are Calling for a Change in How You Socially Sell to Them on LinkedIn
According to recent LinkedIn reports, B2B buyers seek insights and conversations with vendors on social media. In fact, 2 in 3 are open to connecting with a new vendor and 3 in 4 are ready to have a conversation with a new vendor on social media.
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