HubSpot’s blog featured a guest entry yesterday from Sales 2.0 CEO Nigel Edelshain, entitled “What the Heck is Sales 2.0 (& Why Should I Care)?”  Nigel, as I found out in the article, is the man who coined the term “Sales 2.0:”

Sales 2.0 is about sales people using Web 2.0 tools and social media to sell more effectively

In the entry, Nigel goes on to make the analogy that inbound marketing and Sales 2.0 are like children who size each other up before playing together; slow to get along at first, but when playtime is over, nobody wants to leave one another.  The article is great, but of particular interest to me was this, when talking about businesses that sell something very expensive and have a small prospecting pool from which to generate leads from:

“I always imagine a sales rep in this scenario whose boss comes to him and says ‘how are we getting on penetrating GE’ and the rep who loves inbound marketing too much says ‘we’re waiting for them to hit our website and download a white paper.’”

Inbound marketing certainly makes it easier for an organization to be found, but I believe there is still a need for teleprospecting teams to find qualified sales opportunities.  As marketing and sales teams become more synchronous, I think that teleprospecting can play a great part in helping to bridge the current gap, and then be a part of the grease that makes the unified team run smoother.  Go and check it out, then let me know what you think!

*Photo Credit:  ralphbijker via Flickr

“Sales can’t close anything we send over to them!”

“Marketing just throws anything with a name over the wall and expects us to close it!”

We’ve all heard the same story, time and again.  Marketing and sales can’t get along and become unified like they should because they’re constantly playing the blame game.  Marketing blames sales because they don’t close the leads they generate, and Sales blames marketing for sending them nothing worth closing.  The gap that exists between marketing and sales can be bridged, and it can be done so by teleprospecting. 

There’s often confusion surrounding where teleprospecting sits.  Is it a marketing function?  Is it a sales function?  There are great answers to each of those questions.  Teleprospecting is really more of a marketing function because they’re taking what falls into the top of the funnel, qualifying it to pass over to sales.  Sales may say that teleprospecting is more of their responsibility because of the fact that they are qualifying prospects to purchase something, and that once they engage a prospect in a buying discussion, that it naturally falls under the sales umbrella.  I think the answer lies somewhere right in the middle.

Teleprospecting actually holds the key to making a unified sales and marketing team!  What is one of marketing’s key functions?  To get leads over to sales for them to follow up on (elementary, I know, but bear with me).  Sales, then, has the responsibility of closing the leads that marketing sends over (duh).  How do we make the best use of the money spent by marketing to bring in leads and the best use of sales’ time to close them?  Teleprospecting!  Look, marketing spends a lot of time (and money) on filling the funnel and your sales team is too valuable to spend their time wading through the thousands of names that marketing has brought in.  Even if you’re lucky enough to have a marketing team that brings in marketing qualified leads, with a highly skilled team of lead development, lead nurturing, business development reps sifting through those MQL’s, qualifying them into sales qualified leads, you’re really making the most of your both your marketing dollars and sales time spent.  Teleprospecting, then, is the natural bridge between marketing and sales. 

Teleprospecting bridges the gap between marketing and sales for three reasons: 

1.  An effective lead development/nurturing team allows marketing to see a return on their efforts:  As BDR’s qualify leads in and out of the sales cycle, marketing gets a real time view into what programs are and are not effective, allowing for future campaigns to have a greater focus.

2.  A highly skilled team of teleprospectors allows your sales team to focus on what they do best:  As BDR’s send over qualified leads to sales, sales reps are better using their time because they’re doing what they do best, selling.  Who better to sell to than prospects that’ve been qualified by your BDR’s?

3.  A high performing team of business development reps unifies marketing and sales into one bottom line effecting team:  No longer will marketing complain about sales nor sales about marketing, because teleprospecting will function as the grease to the machine.  Teleprospecting qualifies everything that comes in and passes over everything that has merit.

If there is one way to bring marketing and sales together, it’s through a teleprospecting team.  A good lead generation/nurturing group is going to make the difference between a great marketing return on investment and an even greater amount of closed business because teleprospecting allows both departments to do what they do best.

Yesterday, Rebel Brown, Strategist for People Who Know, had a great blog entry in her blog Phoenix Rising.  She makes the point that “Three adjectives and a noun are not a value proposition.”  In other words, “create compelling value propositions.”  I completely agree with her.  I think she’s spot on and I think it speaks to teleprospecting. Rebel talks about using words that matter to customers, keeping the message simple, and applying value.  I couldn’t agree more.  Relating it to teleprospecting, if you’ve got an inside lead generation team, or maybe you’ve outsourced your sales prospecting, you’ve got to make sure that your BDR’s are speaking to prospects on their level.  Our BDR’s have such precious little time when a prospect actually picks up their phone, that we can’t waste that time with (pardon the pun) crap. 

On top of that, the message that BDR’s bring to the market have got to be simple.  Those of us that are writing scripts and creating messaging that BDR’s use on the phones have got to make sure that we’re keeping them simple – to a point.  Simple enough to be understood by the BDR saying it, and simple enough that the prospect on the other end understands and, better yet, knows that we understand that message so well that we’ve simplified it.  This can be tough when talking tech.  Tech can only be simplified so much, but we’ve got to try. 

Lastly, and I think this one is the most important, we’ve got to apply our value.  If our BDR’s are not leading with value, we’re sunk before a telephone receiver is even picked up.  Having a value forward message, one that delivers an impact to an audience that desperately needs to be impacted, is a must.  Rebel makes the point to say, “Asking our audiences to extract the value from generic, buzz-ridden claims is risky at best.”  Need I say more?  Yours, mine, OUR prospects cannot be expected to “get” our value on their own.  It’s our job to make sure they get it, and the only way to do that is lead with value.  What sets you apart from everybody else?  What pains do you solve?  What problems do you fix?  How can you accelerate “blank”?  For me, I owe it to my clients to make sure that their messages are value forward.  For you, whether you do it in-house or outsource, make sure your teleprospecting teams are doing it the same way.

You know, one of my all time favorite movies is “Sixteen Candles.”  And easily, one of my favorite all time movie characters is the Long Duk Dong, played by Gedde Watanabe.  Long Duk Dong (seriously, his real name in the movie), is a foreign exchange student who comes to the U.S. and stays with the main character’s (Samantha, played by Molly Ringwald) grandparents.  The grandparents are in town for the wedding of their oldest daughter.  Throughout the movie, Long gets himself acquainted with American culture, including high school parties.  Long story short, Jake, Samantha’s crush, comes to the door looking for Samantha.  Long answers the door, nursing quite a hangover.  Jake tries asking Long where Samantha is, and although his English isn’t that great, Long tells Jake that Samantha is getting married.  The truth is that Samantha is at her sister’s wedding, not getting married.  You see, sometimes people can speak the same language, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they understand each other.  That is true in sales prospecting, too.

Whether you have your own B2B lead generation team, or your using someone else to find qualified sales opportunities for your sales team, make sure that the Business Development Rep’s who are calling on your behalf have a good understanding of what your technology does.  You see, just as Long thought he was answering Jake’s query as to Samantha’s whereabouts, he really didn’t.  You don’t want your BDR’s doing the same thing to prospects asking questions about your (or your client’s) technology.

I’ve always felt like a good rule of thumb in terms of preparing BDR’s to be better sales-ready qualifiers is to make sure that they get some form of training on the technology that they’re calling on from a sales rep.  I think this is a good idea because (my hope is) a sales rep is constantly fielding questions during product demonstrations and conference calls that are asked by the very same people that BDR’s speak with – prospects.  Who better to prepare a BDR for questions on technology than your sales folks (or sometimes sales engineers)?  I’ve worked on several projects where the Marketing team has been the one to train BDR’s on software and services, and that is great, but I’ve always felt that the sales reps have been “that” much more effective for the BDR’s.

I think sometimes there is a difference in the way that Marketing and Sales describe the same product or service offering, and again, I’m really only speaking from experience.  I want my BDR’s to answer questions from the decision makers that their talking with on the phone with the same product knowledge that the next person in the sales process has, and typically, that’s a sales rep.  Now what are the implications of that?  I guess it means that Marketing and Sales needs be better allied, but we’ve known that for a while now, haven’t we?

I think, in terms of communicating and speaking the same “language,” it is important that you make sure your BDR’s have a solid foundation in the technology that they’re calling on.  They should be able to answer, to use an onion as an analogy, the first few layers of the peel.  They should have those answers given to them from a Marketing and Sales team that has their language aligned…Let me know what you think?