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Sales & Marketing Business Process Outsourcing(BPO) is a critical part of a successful company.  In today’s rapidly-developingtechnological world, it’s easier than ever to communicate and work with teams all across the world. The verticalfunctions that can be outsourced today span from digital services, such as customer support roles, call center operations, and social media communications to conventional back-office tasks, such as data processing, accounting, and payroll processing. Outsourcing the job to a company that specializes in it rather than having to support in-house resources lets your team focus more on your core functions rather than trying to learn new skills.…

Suzanne Harp

In recent years, as buyers have become more comfortable purchasing and collaborating remotely, inside sales has become one of the most popular sales models. In many ways, the evolution of technology has made this possible and has armed companies with the powerful ability to make sales without an expansive field team. Prospect identification Start by segmenting and analyzing your current customer base. Pull out your best customers. Use criteria that points to higher revenue, shorter sales cycle, etc. Then determine the characteristics these customers have or had in the sales process including factors such as need, buyer’s title, etc. Define…

Suzanne Harp

A lot of things tend to change as time marches on, including your marketing goals. That doesn’t mean you have to start over fresh - it means that you’ll have to approach objectives with a renewed mindset. In the marketing industry email marketing is leveraging more resources than ever before. Using new, nnovative tools and actionable insights are becoming normal operating procedure. put yourself on the track of success in 2020 with a renewed focus on marketing trends. Here are a few tips that’ll help you excel with an email marketing strategy in 2020. Use insights and not just data…

Prakash Natraj

Communication has a major role to play in any organization. It needs to be flawless and efficient for the smooth running of business operations. It helps circulate necessary information across all the disparate parts of an organization. Over the last several years, and especially in the last few months of 2020, businesses have moved to virtual spaces and are not tied to meetings that are face to face. For effective communication, every organization needs to think about what solution makes sense for them. Incorporating messages with virtual team communication tools help to maximize the effectiveness of communication during team meetings.…

Suzanne Harp

Who is an influencer and how do you select one that is apt for your brand? Influencers are social media personality or bloggers with a lot of influence in their vertical. If you have a good influencer by your side, you have a great opportunity of open up a whole new avenue of prospecting for your brand. It’s always important to have influencers with positive qualities so that you rest assured your brand is in good hands. It may seem obvious an influencer who takes time to build a positive reputation for themselves is more likely to take time to…

Arun Kumar

Marketers know how important it is that their potential and existing customers feel good about their brand. Customers expect a certain level of quality and value from your brand, and a sense of confidence while using your products. These expectations impact what your market buys. Your brand must tell a memorable story about who you are, what you stand for, and why your brand is important. Brand consistency sets and reinforces buyer expectations as it fosters clear, reliable, and strong touchpoints. Here’s a short checklist for effective branding: Websites The importance of the website extends to every corner of the…

Arun Kumar

A brand influences every customer interaction encompassing all aspects of a company. From interacting with customers to engaging in activities on social media, the value of a brand goes much deeper than just a logo. Your brand is the statement that tells the world who your company truly is, what it’s doing, and why. When customers seek solutions to their problems, no matter the channel, they should look to you and your company as the knowledge leader. Branding is vital as it not only makes a memorable impression on customers but also allows them to know what to expect from…

Arun Kumar

A website is often the customers’ first impression of a brand. It represents a company, sells the company’s products, promotes sales, attracts visitors, generates more business, and helps gain more ROI. For all of this to be successful, a company should have a brand message and website that cuts through the noise and builds trust with the customer. A strong brand has recognition. With recognition comes familiarity and with familiarity comes confidence and trust. Building this kind of trust takes time. Most customers need a lot of exposure to a brand before they become loyal to it. A consistent brand…

Arun Kumar

By keeping the preferences of your target audience at the forefront of your marketing strategy you can more effectively stay top-of-mind with your prospects, across all multitudes of available channels. With personalized messages you can also more successfullymake your customers feel heard andhave meaningful interactions with your brand, nudging them to convert. Here are 8 ways to amplify your personalized digital marketing: 1.  Compelling Headlines  Headlines speak louder than content. Be it a blog, social media ad, or an email, an attractive headline is the key to inviting your customers to read further. Even if you have content reaching multiple…

Arun Kumar

Gone are days where huge billboards and print ads dominated marketing. The new age is all about being digital. It’s the growth driver. If you want to market your brand today, it’s essential that you take your marketing online. Use all forms of digital media to attract, engage and convert your ideal prospects into buyers. The internet provides a wide variety of options to create and experiment with different marketing strategies that fit with your budget. Monitoring the success and ROI is made easy this way, unlike the traditional promotions. Know your target audience Your potential prospects may not yet be…

Arun Kumar

For a business, a website is everything. It determines your conversion rate and customer base. It's more like a business card that you hand out to the digital world. To achieve success in the digital marketplace, it’s important to have a competitive website. One way to achieve this is by creating an interactive website. They lead the charge when it comes to effective, powerful online marketing. Here are a few things that an interactive website can offer you: Interactive content Interactive websites allow the user to interact with the content in some or another. This may involve a form that…

Suzanne Harp

It’s a rule of thumb for marketers to generally gravitate to the channels that are the most effective for them. Interestingly, when it comes to perceptions of ROI among marketers, organic fairs a little better than social media overall. Many marketers are unaware of whether or not their activities on social media are generating ROI. The obvious way to improve upon ROI from social media is to “do social better”.  Content strategy There has been rapid growth in the use of interactive medium such as Social media networks to support multiple content formats. The availability of various formats such as…

Suzanne Harp

Working from home is the only means of productivity during this pandemic, with scores of employees around the world putting their home offices, kitchen tables, and reading nooks to use. However, most companies and employees are also raising the question: is the work from home arrangement actually productive? A survey by Airtasker says “yes”. Many business owners and employees alike have been working from home for many years using the technology that’s already been developed to make remote work possible. Researchers surveyed 1,004 full-time employees throughout the United States of America about their work productivity, their commutes, and other factors…

Suzanne Harp

The rapidly evolving threat around the COVID-19 virus is impacting investors and business communities around the world. The global and interconnected nature of businesses today poses a serious risk of disruption for global supply chains, which eventually results in a significant loss of revenue and adversely impacts global economies. Multiple cities across the world are under lockdown to prevent the spread of the virus and more than 50 million individuals are prevented from leaving their homes. In these conditions, social media serves as the only reliable way for people to communicate with the outside world. People are eager to share…

Suzanne Harp

Data has become the core corporate asset that determines the success of a business. Digital transformation is on the rise in every sector and every industry, but the only way to truly succeed in your digital transformation is by making sure you have a data governance framework in place. The data governance framework must control data standards that are needed for the buyer enablement and delegate the required roles and responsibilities within the organization. The importance of a data governance plan might seem like a rhetorical question, but the truth is, the power of data can drive business success –if the insights are data-driven. A data…

Gerald Valentine

With the immense competition within today’s industries, companies are looking for ways to enhance their business profitability. One potential solution is to reach out to call outsourcing services. By partnering with these types of services, businesses not only cut down on their expenses but also enhance profitability, and companies are increasingly opting to use these services in order to maintain high-profit margins. When discussing outbound calls, it’s important to note that most contacts are marked as cold to start with, and it takes immense skill to convert cold leads to warm leads to hot leads, but there are some simple things you can do…

Suzanne Harp

Who are the prospects that are the ‘right fit’ for your business? Your organization has probably spent a great deal of money and time to try to answer this question. In that effort, you have collected details and information involving job title, industry, and company size. Even with all that information, you are keenly aware that your sales rep can have a prospect that seemingly fits neatly into your buyer persona and still end up not being able to close a sale? Why is that? The answer is that there’s more that goes into lead scoring than just finding a ‘fit’. If…

Gerald Valentine

Anyone with a modicum of management skill knows the importance of managing one’s time. A sales rep’s time, especially, is very expensive but the bitter truth is sales reps spend about 65% of their time just doing research on their prospects.  Obviously, researching a prospect isn’t a waste of time in and of itself – sales reps should know something about their prospect before making a sales call. But one fact holds: every moment spent by a sales rep researching a prospect is a moment that they are not using to close a deal. In this sense, 65% of their…

Suzanne Harp

It’s one of the debates that organizations tend to want to avoid. Who, exactly, owns the CRM data? It’s an important question that deserves an answer – after all, poor prospect data quality affects a business’s ability to produce conversions and make sales. Prospect data entropy is a real concern that affects every business. Annual turnover, internal personnel changes, and generally inaccurate or incomplete data plagues not only the data that currently sits in a CRM system but any new data that’s being purchased from third parties as well. It’s therefore incumbent on the CRM data owner to keep a…

Arun Kumar

Every day, companies across the US are making calls to try to persuade prospects to buy their product or use their service but, in the day and age of caller ID, most of these calls are going unanswered. After all, who wants to waste their time listening to a sales pitch from a pushy sales rep? Over 229 million phone numbers are estimated to be listed on the national Do Not Call Registry, leaving 62% of salespeople feeling the pressure to build a more effective pipeline to close sales. Sales reps work tirelessly, making hundreds of phone calls a day, to…

Suzanne Harp

Most companies consider prospect data one of their most valuable assets, and it’s hard to argue that point when prospect data is the bedrock of effective outbound sales and marketing campaigns. Meanwhile, maintaining and cleansing that valuable data typically requires more time and resources than companies can handle in-house. As a result, many companies have never analyzed their prospect data integrity – let alone how bad data affects their actual sales and ROI. If they did, they would probably be shocked to find that outdated or incorrect data is costing them a serious amount of money. Between 30% and 40%…

Gerald Valentine

Email nurturing sounds easy enough. But the actual job of authoring amazing emails that grab attention, get opened, and earn clicks? That’s another story. The average email open rate is less than 15% across all industriesThe average click rate is just 2.5%Only 20-30% of subscribers who open an email will click a link In other words, in an email list with 100 subscribers, only about 15 will open the email. Of those 15, only 5 people will click one of the links – and that’s at maximum. It doesn’t help that the average office worker receives nearly 100 emails every day – it’s understandable that most…

Prakash Natraj

Accurate prospect data makes the job of an inside sales team much easier.. When it’s not up-to-date or correct, however, that same data can cost businesses drastically in both time and money. Research shows that sales reps spend roughly 65% of their day on non-revenue generating activities like digging for data, scoring leads, and managing technology. Put another way, those sales reps are only spending 35% of their time actually selling. Now, consider that when sales reps make calls: 30% are non-responsive30% include incorrect information30% involve connecting with the wrong person That means there’s only a 10% chance of connecting…

Suzanne Harp

Just because a prospect converts into a lead, it doesn’t mean they’re anywhere near completing a purchase. Email nurturing campaigns can help businesses stay at the top of their minds. According to Marketing Sherpa, the average SaaS or software conversion rate is 7% and, too many reading this might sound high. For e-commerce, the figure is even lower: 3%. WordStream estimates that the average PPC conversion rate is just over 2%, which probably sounds a lot more reasonable. The fact stands that over 90% of people who provide their email address through a lead magnet form aren’t ready to buy – they…

Prakash Natraj

Every marketer cringes after putting their time, effort, and heart into the perfect email campaign only to see the bounce notification appear. According to research from Acquia, 75% of marketers say email is their favorite personalization channel. That is not surprising: Email provides powerful segmentation, automation, and data-driven tools for personalizing every campaign. Unfortunately, a high bounce rate is a symptom of a much larger problem: bad intel. In fact, 65% of companies use inaccurate data to drive their strategies, including email. Yes, high bounces indicate that specific recipients did not receive an email. However, they can also negatively impact a business’s long-term…

Prakash Natraj

In today’s insight-driven environment, prospect data generation is considered the be-all-end-all for inside sales – but is it a safe idea to pay for it? In e-commerce, many businesses see paid prospect and lead data as the only viable solution. E-commerce vendors offer quick sales at unbeatable discounts and snatch up a huge percentage of potential prospects, leaving other businesses with only two options: Partner with their e-commerce competitors to make salesPurchase a database of prospect contact information from third-party sources It’s no surprise that the data-for-sale industry is booming and has grown into a massive market. U.S. firms spend…

Arun Kumar

Traditional lead generation looks like this: A prospect visits a landing page, fills out a lead magnet form, enters the scoring system, and receives follow-up content indefinitely based on the same old prospect data. Sadly, 65% of businesses do not realize that they are making marketing decisions from that outdated and inaccurate data. At any point in time, 25% of the information in a database is incorrect. That is exactly why 30% of all business objectives and 80% of all personalization strategies fail: Marketing and sales teams are relying on bad intel. Email addresses, company names, job roles – these are details that are…

Suzanne Harp

It’s become a trend lately for inside sales teams to blame industry challenges and market fluctuations for poor growth. The harsh reality is that internal strategies are primarily to blame – especially when it comes to prospect data. In this age of a global economy, corporations in developed countries regularly exceed profit growth expectations with trillions of dollars flowing limitlessly across borders. Despite this, many companies still believe the myth that major industry markets are constantly down and totally unsuited for sustainable business development. Successful corporations that consistently exceed sales growth projections s have learned the value of clean, accurate…

Gerald Valentine

Understanding the ever-changing dynamics of customer interaction is one of the major challenges facing marketers. 78% of marketers buy data from a third-party source without realizing that one-third of that prospect data is already obsolete. Companies that invest in bad data while trusting their existing prospect data strategy are putting their ROI at risk. What do you need to be successful? With sales growth being the major objective, many sales organizations focus on building a growth strategy while at the same time failing to provide their sales teams with the specific training tools, or resources they need to be successful.…

Arun Kumar

Email campaigns give marketers broadest to reach worldwide. It’s estimated that by the end of 2020 over half of the world’s population will have access to email, and 61% of customers prefer being contacted by brands through email.  Emails are 40 times more effective in earning new customers than Facebook or Twitter. And the number of emails sent every day is estimated to touch up 250 Billion by 2020. There is no denying the impact an email outreach and nurture strategy can have on your business – connecting to an audience in a personalized manner while staying on budget. The evidence is conclusive, emails are simply…

Prakash Natraj

With over a million new start-up businesses forming each year, competition between them is fierce, and they all face the challenge of figuring out successful marketing strategies to get them to peak sales performance. Unfortunately for most of those startups, 58% of them are destined to fail in the first year. Many businesses are playing with a losing hand, but don’t know it until it’s too late.   One of the areas that successful start-ups are focusing on is buyer enablement and there’s a simple reason why – it’s making the processes of buying easier and more intuitive and that’s resulting…

Suzanne Harp

The B2B buyers of today are not like they were even just a few years ago.  B2B buyers are increasingly becoming influenced by their online B2C buying experiences. They expect personalization, immediate fulfillment, and transparency from businesses that are looking to serve them. Many sellers, however, are under the mistaken impression that a b2b buyer does not need their involvement until the end of the buying journey when a buyer is ready to make a purchasing decision – this is decidedly a fallacious impression. An effective buyer enablementapproach depends on how businesses are heavily strategizing their customer engagement – an…

Barath Kumar

Social selling is a method for developing relationships to build up sales pipelines. It’s the art of using social media to research, connect, understand, and nurture sales prospects – a modern way to build a meaningful relationship with a potential customer. So that, whenever a prospect thinks of a brand when they’re ready to buy, it’s your brand that pops into their minds first. Social selling isn’t just about gaining access to contacts, but about building good relationships and keeping that relationship in your pocket until the right moment to present yourself as a solution to their problem. The sole aim is…

Suzanne Harp

According to BetterBounces.net, 31 billion emails bounce each day. In other words, 31 billion emails never reach their intended recipients, and all the hard work put into crafting them goes straight down the drain. Email bounces are a natural part of the email marketing landscape but that doesn’t mean you entirely have to live with them. Let’s begin by looking at some of the most common reasons why an email bounces and what can be done to minimize the damage. First of all, not all bounces are the same. Marketers need to understand the various factors that generate those bounces. A few of…

Prakash Natraj

As leaders in the sales profession, we all want to be one of the high-performers winning business left and right. Unfortunately, even when you’ve done everything to textbook perfection the deal may still fall through. One possible reason why – your contact has left their company and gone to work for someone else! How you handle yourself in this type of situation will strongly reflect your value as a salesperson. The decision-maker now may not be in a place or position to help you with continuing your sales but, perhaps in the future, might refer you to somebody else who…

Suzanne Harp

Whether you connect with your prospects on the first try or the fifth, the real struggle comes when you have to develop a strategy to follow-up with them and get them to commit. There are so many things that can go wrong - you either oversell your product, contact them too often, or you come off as pushy and annoying. Here are a few suggestions that can help you build an effective follow-up strategy: 1. Identify prospect interest The journey to understand your prospects’ interests is never-ending, but gaining insight and a better understanding of consumers and consumer behavior is…

Suzanne Harp

When one of your salespeople has their pitch rejected, it can often be stressful and emotionally difficult for them to handle, especially if they’re not seasoned. The sales professional who is the most confident will more often walk out as a winner, irrespective of any negative results they come across along the way.  The opposite holds true as well. A sales professional might be selling the best product or service, but if the prospecting approach fails then not only does the sale die, but it can affect their confidence level as well. The only way to successfully build up that…

Suzanne Harp

Love it or hate it, the fact is that people admire celebrities and want what they have. These days’ celebrities, including social media celebrities from YouTube or Instagram, are selling their “influence” to pitch brands and products. If an influencer recommends a product, people are more likely to trust that product when it comes to making a buying decision. Brands use influencers to drive their message to a captive target audience and for this reason, brands are inclined to use influencers who have some credibility or cachet in their specific industry to push their objectives. In several cases, superstar influencers…

Barath Kumar

Managing customer and prospect relationships is no simple task. Not only do you have to keep up with ever-changing buyer expectations, but to keep those customers with you for the long term you also need to exceed those expectations. You may feel a sense of comfort from the fact that you have a pretty well-populated prospect contact database, but just because you have volume doesn’t really mean you have quality data. With all of those prospects sitting in your CRM, are you taking the time and effort to evaluate and prioritize them in a way that incorporates structure and efficiency?…

Gerald Valentine

The main benefit of personalization is the ability to serve your customers with a one-to-one, relatable touch. It behooves every organization to try stepping into a customer’s shoes once in a while, to take a look at things from their perspective. Taking the time to do this can help to improve an organization’s marketing strategy and increase the effectiveness of your prospect approach. The data clearly supports the usefulness of implementing personalization strategies into your marketing efforts - personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rates. Industry leaders are increasingly seeing that benefit and extolling the benefits of personalization.   According…

Barath Kumar

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems are constantly evolving and businesses are making the implementation of CRM systems into their organizations a major priority – for both start-ups and multinational companies. The advantage of a CRM system extends beyond running a business and its closely related relationships by facilitating the collection, organization, and management of customer information. From recording and sorting every customer interaction, helping sales automation, to customer segmentation and campaign management, CRM software does it all. Ideally, a CRM system should help your business improve relationships with existing customers, explore new customers and win back on former customers. Investing…

Gerald Valentine

Growing a business is no piece of cake. Firstly, you need a viable idea that can successfully live in a niche, be able to define a target demographic, and actually have a product that has the value that you can sell. In addition, without the right strategies to sell your product fueling your growth and making a profit is virtually impossible. Implementing the Right Strategy Identifying the right strategies for your business isn’t rocket surgery. You just need to be able to do a bit of analysis and add a few “spices”. The truth is, whatever it is that got…

Suzanne Harp

When we talk about the difference between sales and marketing it’s important to keep in mind that they also share some similarities. Both are necessary, in one way or the other, for a successful business to make a profit. They are both machines built to serve one purpose to make sales but the way each of these machines is built to serve this purpose is very different. The Sales Machine Approach Inside Sales & outside sales The difference between inside sales and outside sales all comes down to time and money. The cost for an inside sales team to bring…

Gerald Valentine

Personalization generates the positive feelings you want your audience to experience when they think of your brand and helps you guide your customers in every step of their buyer journey. Personalization doesn’t end with adding names to automated emails. More than that, it increases the brand-customer bond and marketers should employ a complete armament of personalizing techniques. Without understanding the customer’s needs through each part of the funnel, it’s impossible to effectively position yourself as a viable solution to their problems. It’s an extremely useful form of targeted marketing that aims to reach audiences with the exact solutions they’re searching…

Suzanne Harp

Identifying the target audience is one of the fundamental steps to business development but do you actually know who your customers are? Can you identify their needs or specific interests? Are you aware of the background of a typical customer? If you feel like you’re struggling to truly understand the customers you are trying to attract, then there’s something you’re probably missing. If you’re trying to build a brand with products or services you are certain your customers will love, you need to have a solid understanding of who your customers are. Building a detailed buyer persona will help determine…

Suzanne Harp

Leads are as good as gold in any business and there is no doubt that lead generation is vital. Many companies invest heavily to generate leads and get details about customers.   If your lead generation campaign is failing, what do you do? You identify the reasons that lead to failure. Here are the top 6 reasons that lead generation campaigns fail. 1. Lack of Analytics Campaigning without analytics is like pointing at a forest and saying “there are probably some trees in there”. You can’t make informed marketing decisions without the data that comes from proper analytics. It’s vital to…

Arun Kumar

Creating video content isn’t very different from producing an effective blog post. The major difference realistically is that an audience tends to retain 95% of the content from a video while only retaining 10% from text-based content. Viewers can absorb a lot of information in a short amount of time – nearly 65% of people consider themselves visual learners. Millions of people consume video content over the internet every minute, from sources like YouTube, Twitch, and other various streaming services. It’s no secret that is now an integral part of our daily lives. According to research, 80% of the content on…

Barath Kumar

125 billion emails are sent every day. More than any marketing channel, emails have proven to drive the highest ROI. And to stay on top of the bell curve requires that companies have both a creative and an analytical eye. To achieve sales goals, keeping up with trends is indispensable.  On average, the first thing 58% of adults do immediately after waking up is to check their email. There are several guidelines and best practices for creating an outstanding email that cuts through the noise. Here are 5 proven tactics that can dramatically improve the results for your email campaigns. 1. Subject line…

Prakash Natraj

The world is in a constant state of change and sadly prospect data is not immune causing a plague of issues for every business’s sales goals. Normally, 25%-30% of a prospect database goes bad every year.  Successful marketing campaigns are solely dependent on accurate prospect data. Likewise, if the sales team fails in communicating with prospects then sales and marketing will have great difficulty in reaching their goals – generation and qualification of leads.    Here are the key factors that lead to data decay: 1. Data accuracy Databases degrade by around 30% per year. Companies in the United States…

Gerald Valentine

Organizations have two choices – either run their business in the way it’s been done in the past, or evolve and meet the needs of modern buyers who are increasingly doing most of their research online. One of the best ways to interact online with those buyers is by implementing Chatbot technology. Chatbots are known for increasing the time a visitor spends on a particular website – converting visitors into qualified leads.  The brand voice of an organization needs to connect with people on a human level. 65% of customers say that they are emotionally connected to a brand they feel that…

Barath Kumar

Cold calling is not dead. Rather, the old strategy that required salespeople to make endless calls every day is dead. It was a common belief that more sales calls equaled more sales closed, which may have been true in a very general sense, but was certainly not the most efficient way to do things. In today’s sales world, wasting time on endless sales calls and blindly trusting the purchased prospect data, puts ROI at risk. The cold truth is that cold calls are ineffective 90.9% of the time. If you aren’t armed with the right prospect data, cold calling is even…

Arun Kumar

For many businesses, the concept of buyer enablement is a scary thought because it involves giving up control. The very thought of letting prospects take control of the majority of the sales process is literally anathema to how sales have been done in the past. But the reality is the days of pushy sales reps and back-and-forth contact are over. According to a recent survey of millennial B2B buyers: 56% held director-level positions42% held managerial positions44% were the primary decision-maker for purchases of $10,000 or more B2B buyers are younger than businesses realize and they expect more of a consumer-style…

Barath Kumar

The pressure is on for businesses to digitize and automate by 2020. However, even a proper business strategy won’t help without clean prospect data generation. A crisis is brewing and no one is talking about it. 1,160 CEOs stepped down in the first three quarters of 2019 – surpassing the figure for the 2008 recession. The B2B world wasn’t immune and the tech sector witnessed the second-highest number of departures: 154. Of course, each company and CEO have their own problems so it doesn’t help to make sweeping generalizations. However, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that businesses are struggling…

Arun Kumar