Category: Sales
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You Ask, I Answer: Online Lead Generation for Solar Companies?
Megan asks, “My company recently had to layoff their canvassing department so now they are trying anything to get leads for virtual consultations for solar sales. Right now they’re aimlessly boosting Facebook posts, and I was hoping to get some insight to lead them in the right direction. Any suggestions?” The real question is, who…
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You Ask, I Answer: Marketing Data Science for Traditional Sales?
Jackie asks, “How does all this fancy data science kung fu hubbub help us, we’re a traditional sales company that only makes phone sales cold calls?” Data science is a methodology that can be applied to any data you happen to have. In the case of cold calling, as long as you have data about…
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You Ask, I Answer: What’s The Difference Between Marketing and Sales?
Mallory asks, “In your honest opinion, what is the difference in marketing and sales?” The short answer: creation of demand versus fulfillment of demand. We see this most in examples where demand exists – sales are effectively order-takers and marketing is minimal. On the other hand, if demand doesn’t exist (but the product is ultimately…
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You Ask, I Answer: ZIP Code Mapping for Sales Territories?
Maria asks, “I need to create a zip code territory map with each area represented by a different color (that I can pick). It will be exported as a graphic file. Are there any free/low cost options for this that are easy to use?” Download all the ZIP codes from the USPS/Data.gov and then code…
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Do Something With Your Marketing: Special Interview with Ian Altman
In this special edition of Do Something With Your Marketing, I interview sales expert Ian Altman about the second edition of his book, Same Side Selling. Same Side Selling teaches a different mindset for selling complex transactions: instead of thinking of the buyer as someone you have to win over, or someone you have to…
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You Ask, I Answer: Machine Learning in Sales and Retargeting
Denis asks, “How will AI help marketers with retargeting and sales conversion?” The greatest challenge most marketers face is too much data. At any given time, we could be looking at hundreds, thousands, or even millions of data points, from retweets to bounce rates. No human can compute these, and even if we could, it…
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Sneak Peek: How AI Helps Sales Professionals
According to Gartner, 30% of all B2B companies will employ AI to augment at least one of their primary sales processes by 2020. Don’t wait for the future – start implementing now, with today’s technologies. Driver Analysis Prospect and lead qualification Better sales analytics Time-Series Forecasting Sales enablement Sales forecasting Revenue forecasting Text Mining/Natural Language…
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You Ask, I Answer: The Future of Lead Scoring
Sangram Vajre asks, “I’m not sure there’s a future for lead scoring, are you?” Lead scoring as we currently know it isn’t great, but it is better than complete blindness. However, lead scoring today is overly dependent on demographics and firmographics. Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here. Listen to the audio here: Download…
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You Ask, I Answer: How Can Marketing Help Salespeople?
In today’s show, Sandie asks, “How can marketing and marketers help salespeople be more effective? What can marketing do to help sales (the department)?” Marketers and sales professionals should be – need to be – aligned in common objectives. To do this, marketers provide help in three ways: Analytics: visibility into what’s working Data Integration:…
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The Golden Rule of Sales
The secret to successful sales is found in the Jewish Midrash, circa 600 CE: “If speech is silvern, then silence is golden”. Your chances of winning a sale are directly proportional to how much the prospective customer speaks. The more they speak, the more likely you’ll win. The more you speak, the less likely you’ll…
