Don't Pour Garbage Down Your Sales Funnel

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Since Dataclip, at its core, is a lead or demand generation company for B2B marketers, I have been trying to familiarize myself with all of the excellent Sales 2.0 and B2B marketing blogs.  In so doing, today, I ran across a post at the MarketingExperiments blog by a gentleman named David Green entitled B2B Marketing: Do you know how much your CEO really invests in demand generation?  I have never met or spoken to David but was very interested in his article.  Towards the end, he concludes with: 

Given all the cool developments for marketers in the last few years, marketing departments should be on the march. Instead, there are a lot of marketing departments that have low lead-to-sale conversion rates. Of those with good conversion rates, few are really delivering a pipeline volume that makes a huge difference to the CSO.

It doesn't have to be this way. Not anymore.

There really are better returns on investment dollars than sales cold calling, which is a financial baseline that every marker needs to understand. So for this year’s planning process, step one should be to estimate the current cost of sales prospecting and what the revenue capacity of that sales force might be if each sales person spent more time selling and less time looking for leads.

Having spent many years selling software and technology solutions, I often wished that I could spend more time selling and less time trying to identify people that truly are interested in buying a product like mine. Throwing more bodies in a sales organization is not usually the right answer. As David points out, what is needed, is a more efficient sales team that is armed with the right type of leads so that a sales person can spend the vast majority of his/her time closing deals and not looking for leads.

At Dataclip, we believe that the solution to this problem is to arm sales and marketing teams with leads that have demonstrated that they have and will buy products and services like the ones that you are selling. We are providing sales teams with lead lists that are extremely qualified because the leads on the list have used your competitor's technology. More simply put, we are helping you start with the best possible prospects. If you pour more true prospects down the top of the funnel, you are going to get more true customers down at the bottom. If you pour garbage in, you are going to get garbage out.

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010 at 4:00pm

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