Account planning is hard. Once you master it, however, the outcomes are extraordinary. A wise soul once said, “If something seems too hard to do, then it’s probably worth doing.” This is a sentiment I often hear echoed by companies undertaking strategic account planning. Let me repeat: Account ... → Read more
Certain parts of BANT are still valuable to lead qualification. One of the most common phrases I hear sales executives in complex B2B environments say is “We want to be way out ahead of the next RFP.” Translation: They want to be engaging with potential buyers well before the buyer has written ... → Read more
I was cleaning up an over-stuffed bookmarks folder in my Internet browser and came across a prescient blog post from 2014 that featured a bunch of marketing automation stats from diverse sources. The stats themselves, taken individually, aren’t particularly eye opening, but taken collectively, ... → Read more
The reasons salespeople don’t follow up on leads that marketing gives them has long been the bane of existence for marketers and salespeople alike. Getting sales and marketing to agree on what a good lead looks like can be challenging at best—and painful at worst. This is especially the case in ... → Read more
Many organizations rely on inside sales departments and/or third party firms to generate leads for their outside sales teams. Investments in marketing automation systems, such as Marketo, Hubspot, Eloqua, and others, along with increased inside sales headcount and program budgets, have set ... → Read more
The most common decision we’ve seen clients struggle with when considering deployment of an inside sales organization is “Do we let the inside sales teams close deals on their own, or do we have them engage a field sales rep to close the deal?” We have a simple and straightforward view on the ... → Read more
The Open Sales Pipeline Report is the simplest and most effective tool for a sales organization, top to bottom, to manage sales performance and ensure that the sales strategy is being executed. The trouble is that for many organizations, the Open Sales Pipeline Report does not contain the right ... → Read more
If you’ve invested significant time, effort, resources, and money to launch and deploy your CRM yet the ROI appears elusive or lower than you expect, it’s time to reboot your CRM. What are some of the common causes of low ROI that we encounter? The Lead, Account, and Contact data are polluted. ... → Read more
If your organization’s frontline sales manager can view in your CRM the amount of time an Opportunity dwells in its current sales stage, you’ve taken the first step to unleashing the power of the Stage Duration metric. We’ve worked with a cross-section of clients in technology hardware, ... → Read more
Who doesn’t need an additional acronym? So let us introduce…Pragmatic Account Planning (PAP). So what’s so special about the word Pragmatic in the context of Account Planning? In our view, many organizations struggle with Account Planning because they’ve established ambitious Account Plan ... → Read more