Your company has made a sizeable investment in the training, support, expenses, salaries and benefits of sales team members. You’ve also invested in a contact management or SFA application to track and forecast your sales cycle – but is the application actually making your sales team more effective?
As you evaluate sales effectiveness, if the answer is NO to any of these twelve questions, it’s probably time to complement your SFA application with a best-of-breed solution built from the ground up to optimize B2B lead generation and fill the pipeline – not just forecast it.
Sales Team Productivity
1. Are sales reps notified real-time when a high value prospect is visiting the website?
2. Can sales reps time their phone calls when a prospect is interacting with an email or direct mailer?
3. Can sales reps see a complete contact history of all outbound marketing and response activity on each prospect?
4. Can sales reps see real-time what content prospects are clicking on in the trackable HTML emails they are sending?
Lead / Data Management
5. Are lead notifications flexibly automated and rules-based?
6. Does the sales team receive a steady stream of leads that consistently improves in quality?
7. Are sales reps and channel partners effectively focused on the most responsive and best quality prospects?
8. Is a process in place that efficiently cleans the SFA application by eliminating duplicates, poor data quality, incomplete dispositions, and many untouched records?
9. Are sales reps sending emails through a system that leverages them to build a highly responsive opt-in list?
Sales Reporting
10. Can sales management easily see the real-time lead cultivation productivity of the inside or outsourced calling team?
11. Is a process in place enabling sales to systematically improve marketing’s effectiveness by objectively adjusting the custom lead quality grade on each new prospect?
12. Are sales forecasts easily compared to marketing and lead generation activity in each territory?
Before you evaluate potential best-of-breed solutions, identify the additional savings and revenue generated from solving each of these and other points that support your sales objectives. The sum of additional revenue generated will identify the optimal solutions – not brand names or promises to fix an application that is primarily designed to forecast.
Jeff Kostermans is CEO of LeadGenesys, the leading web-based solution designed specifically to optimize B2B marketing and sales effectiveness. A prolific writer on the topic of B2B marketing and sales, Mr. Kostermans consults Fortune 2000 companies on how to get the most ROI out of their investment in marketing and sales. Download free tips papers at: www.leadgenesys.com
