It is clear as we talk to sales leaders that at the same time they want quality leads for their sales teams, fundamentally in a B2B world it is almost impossible to score a lead accurately until a sales rep picks up the phone or engages in an email dialogue with a prospect.  No amount of white paper downloads or website visits or email opens or clickthru’s can validate what  a lead is truly worth to the organization until that conversation occurs.  Yes an inbound inquiry that says I am interested and want to purchase is incredibly valuable, but there are so many other times when a customer is doing due diligence on an industry, gaining insight competitively or looking for a new job that once again is hard to score accurately until a conversation occurs. 

That’s where the inherent analysis of each conversation that occurs within the sales organization occurs.   By categorizing the initial disposition of the outcome of the call and then capturing on what attempt it occurred on and the interval in between Jesubi creates Prospecting Velocity reports.  We have filed a patent on it as more and more customers come to depend on it to help them assess their own sales efforts when it comes to funnel managment and they tell us they can’t get that information anywhere else. 

Our goal is to integrate in Prospecting Velocity with some of the other Marketing Automation solutions so we can bring the scoring together with the sales reps activity.  In that way both sales and marketing can gain a true appreciation for all of the Marketing Qualified Leads being generated and assess their true value to the organization.

Right now in my inbox I have 7500 unopened emails – the proliferation of un-solicited email has made it hard to get messages through with all the noise. Suppose you were one of the 125 plus internet security software vendors who was funded by Venture Capital in the past 5 years, is it possible to differentiate yourself solely on your email content, website and white papers? I don’t think so.

What if you have a brand new product that is revolutionizing a functional area, but have not raised $ 10 Million from Kleiner Perkins or Benchmark Capital yet, can you get all the white papers you need created and analysts following you? Probably not.

As I have stated in earlier posts, when I was the VP of Sales for Aprimo in the early days, there were no analysts covering what became the EMM, EMA, MRM space, the space didn’t exist. Marketers weren’t waking up and saying “gee, I have to solve this Enterprise Marketing problem I have”, had we relied solely on the e-marketing play and nurturing prospects we would have been out of business a long time ago. Instead, through all of the e-channel strategies as well as dedicated cold-calling efforts, we were able to secure 75 new name accounts within the biggest companies in America, as well as secure clients on two other continents! All but two of those clients came from dedicated prospecting efforts by not only our direct sales team, but our inside sales team as well. I venture to say, none of those 73 new name clients would have been clients in the first 5 years had Aprimo waited for the leads to score high enough or them to place an inbound inquiry.

For Jesubi’s own purposes, we use every channel we can, but of the 490 plus demonstrations we have done, 14 have come from email, 476 have come because our sales team picked up the phone and called someone. We have a 15% response rate from the leads we’ve talked to in securing a demonstration. Is it expensive, to have a team making those calls, yes!! Would the cost of not having all the customers we’ve secured by doing those initial demos be more expensive absolutely yes, we’d be out of business.

In the B2C game, the web and the e-channel are powerful drivers, in the B2B game, every channel must be used and used effectively and efficiently to drive customer wins. Cold-calling isn’t going away soon unless American Entrepreneurialism dies a sudden death or the need to drive increased revenues dies as well.