Latest from the Intellegentia Blog

What do all growing companies have in common? They all need to add new members to their sales teams in order to achieve their revenue goals and objectives. Onboarding new sales staff, is usually time-consuming, expensive, and not especially easy, and it could take a while before they are achieving quota. Once proficient your experienced sales team know your corporate culture, brand identity, and product lines inside and out, and are capable of using tools like CRM to their full potential.

Onboarding, however usually means an experienced sales person or sales management has to sacrifice time and productivity to help bring the new hire up to speed. But with robust sales enablement program in place, you can reduce time and productivity losses, getting the new personnel up to speed faster and more effectively. 

So what is Sales Enablement? 

I am not going to take the credit for coming up with the title of this blog. Bob Apollo , who I have great respect for, used this term in a really great piece of content about Proactive Pipeline Management. The points raised by Bob regarding the state of sales pipelines which I would like to expand upon I believe will resonate with Sales and Marketing leaders within technology companies.

It's an uncomfortable fact that sometimes when you take off the rose tinted glasses, you discover your pipeline may not look that great.

In this blog we look at what we mean by "flabby" and what can be done about it.

Is "Inbound Sales" just another alternative to Sandler, Holden, Miller-Heiman, SPIN, Value Selling, the Challenger Sale and other sales methodologies?  Or is it a new way of thinking?

Or both?

All the aforementioned sales methodologies teach us valuable lessons.  They teach how to seek out the "fox" (Holden), to "go for the no" (Sandler) and other techniques for qualifying out time wasters, getting control over the deal and progressing the sale faster than your competitors.  

Have you considered how you’re going to nurture leads that are/will be coming through your inbound marketing efforts onto your website, or how to target accounts through Account Based Marketing that you want to engage over a period of time. How do you move contacts further down the sales funnel? How do you deal with hot leads that need to be acted on by sales immediately. The best way is by setting up workflows with a marketing automation platform.

According to Forrester, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads and according to Marketing2Lead, prospects nurtured in automated workflows have a 23% shorter sales cycle.

Workflows are such an important tool in the marketers toolbox, it's vital that you set them up correctly, and keep them updated ... so is the effort worth the return? You better believe it. Here are some reasons to get it right.