Latest from the Intellegentia Blog

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.

In their book ‘Inbound Marketing’, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah co-founders of Hubspot, outline that marketers in mid-size and large companies spend 80 percent of their time worrying about conversion rates and 20 percent of their time getting more visitors to their website.

The emphasis on lead conversion vs website visitors varies from industry to industry. In the IT technology sector, particularly in the IT Channel, there is still a dependency on traditional outbound marketing, because quite simply that is the way most channel partners have grown in the past. 

When thinking about todays modern buyer, consider this for one moment…how do you buy?

Are you stumped to find the information you need to make a considered decision, be that in your personal or professional life? Of course not, you consult and research that 'big library in the clouds'.

Are you dithering and need to phone a friend (or worst still a salesman), of course not, you get onto your social network and ask your peers and colleagues for recommendations.

So buyers have fundamentally changed, they are digitally driven, they have rapid access to information from multiple devices, they start their search on the web, the buyer has changed more in the past 10 years than in the past hundred.

There has been a lot in the press recently about the practice by some (not all) charities of using call centres to badger people into giving more money, made worst by reports of the effect this has on the elderly.  

One of the lead items on the BBC this week was about charities that could face a fund raising ban for breaking the rules.  Shooting themselves in the foot is phrase that comes to mind, almost as bad as Volkswagen rigging test results on their cars.