Blog Cover Image 1

B2B Sales Development Breakthrough: Smarketing & Prospecting Tools

Posted by Carole Mahoney on 11/23/11 7:00 AM

Can the Right Prospecting Tool Expedite Your B2B Sales Process?

Previously, a sales person's best prospecting tools were:

 
  • Yellow pages (click image to watch video)

  • Chamber of Commerce listings

  • Hoover's or D&B subscriptions

  • Family, friends, neighbors, connections, old co-workers, golf buddies...

Then came the internet. Finally! A faster way to find the companies that are a perfect match for you, right?

How much time have you, or your sales and marketing teams, spent digging into your web analytics and painstakingly looked up IP addresses or stared blankly at location reports? And just to get some usable information about who specifically is visiting your site? Are you left feeling perplexed that you have a great list of target companies, a whole bunch of traffic (hits) on your website, but you still can't figure out if you are attracting the ones you want until (and if) they fill out a form?

Have you asked your internet marketing company or department;

  • "Who is visiting our website?" 
  • "How do we know if they are the right people?"
  • "How do we know if the right people are reading the information we want them to on our website?"

Was the frustrating answer, "It's hard to know much about the specific people or companies who visit your site, or what they do, unless they fill out a form." (WTH?!)

Smarketing Tip: What your marketing department or company might not tell you, or know, is that if marketing doesn't know much about the potential visitors (sales prospects) to begin with, it's hard to know how to attract the right ones, or how to get them to fill out a form at all.

Do you feel like you are missing a major piece of the 'inbound marketing' and 'Sales 2.0' puzzle and it is staring you right in the face?


Sales and Dating- Always Trying to Find the Perfect Match

After all, doesn't every one want to know more about the person who is checking them out in a crowded bar? Maybe they are the one...

Or maybe they just got parol from the local state pen. But...you won't find that out until you've spend half the night talking with them. Meanwhile your soul mate just walked out the door with someone else.

SEO Challenge: With Google's new "key-word" privacy rules, knowing what keywords people are using and finding you with just got more difficult. Your marketing team's job to find the perfect match for your sales team just got harder.

A Smarketing Process and Hubspot's Prospecting Tool to the Rescue

Smarketing applies in any situation where someone is selling and someone else is buying. Whether that is in a business to consumer business model (B2C) , or a business to business model (B2B).

The smarketing process is an integration of sales and marketing strategies, techniques and tactics. At various steps in the buyer-seller dance, sales and marketing work together to deliver the right message, at the right time, to the right prospect.

The goal of a smarketing process implementation should be to match the way a company markets and sells to align with the way customers want to buy. Smarketing helps companies increase profitability by creating a delightful customer experience from day 1.

Helping Marketing Find the Perfect Match for Sales

Do you know if you are you creating long-term valuable marketing assets (content) that are attracting the right prospects (visitors) to your website and enabling sales to find new accounts and close them faster?

Helping Sales to Ask the Right Questions at the Right Time

Or are you guessing at what content to create and wasting valuable sales time chasing after the less-then ideal prospects that will never close because it is just not a good match?

Penetrate New Accounts and Reduce Your Sales Cycle

Imagine a prospecting tool that could tell you;

  • names of the companies visiting your website, the pages they visited, when they visited them and for how long
  • how many people from the company have visited
  • how they found your website
  • what location they were in when they visited you
  • possible profiles of those people, and how you are connected to them

hubspot Web Prospecting Tool  screen shot resized 600

How would you use this information in your sales process?

The Sales Development Breakthrough

(that could increase your sales THIS YEAR)

Can you know if the right people are visiting your site in the first place? Yes.

Can you use that information to impact a sale or develop a new market? Yes.

Can one tool really help you do it in less than 40 selling days? YES.

Is your business going to close out this year up, down, or no different from where you thought you would be at the beginning of this year?

Do you want to do something about it?

Topics: smarketing, sales development, b2b, prospecting tools