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Looking out hopefully for that Bluebird deal to come walking in to save the day is not a good place to be in the current climate.

There has never been a more important time to stay focused on developing and maintaining a steady stream of sales ready leads to ensure a reliable forecast whilst providing clear visibility of its development.

This of course requires patience and tenacity and a need to keep the plates spinning with lots of potential prospects.

Telephone prospecting is a job that few sales people relish. It is also clear that the effectiveness of cold telemarketing does not deliver the return it once did, since most buyers use online searches to fast track their research, identifying and building their shortlist of potential suppliers, in preference to initiating a conversation.

That’s why many companies look to outsource their demand generation to an agency that will bring focus to pipeline development, provide effective techniques for attracting and nurturing leads, and apply targeted callouts to identify priority opportunities to fast track the pipeline development process.

Engage Smarter Demand Generation Tactics

XLR8 Marketing delivers joined-up marketing solutions – accelerating business results and delivering measurable return on investment for the technology sector.

By combining latest inbound marketing methods with targeted outbound tactics to nurture winnable sales lead opportunities, you benefit from a sustainable stream of high quality sales leads for your sales team to close.

Find out more

Back in the unconnected world of yesteryear, buyers would roll up at computer exhibitions and if your stand looked interesting enough, they might have been tempted to start a conversation and share with you a business problem or aspiration that they were looking to address.

Nowadays, the buyer is typically at least 50% of the way through their procurement cycle before a supplier is even aware of the opportunity!

Think about the process. The likelihood is the buyer will have:

• started with Google searches (is your own website Search Engine Optimised (SEO)?)
• subscribed to an e-newsletter (do you have one?)
• been invited to a webinar (do you run these?)
• put a long list of potential suppliers together (will you feature?)
• visited numerous blogging sites (do you have one?)
• read white papers and e-books (do you publish them?)
• followed companies on Twitter, (are you active here?)
• visited LinkedIn profiles (will they get a positive experience of your company?)

Having identified a list of potentials and perhaps looked at videos on YouTube, or run an online demo, they might view community sites to find recommendations on your products, or Google with relevant phrases to look for complaints/issues or other bad customer experiences.

At this point the buyer will have identified potential suppliers.

The key question is – Will your company make the short list?

So unless you have a robust digital marketing strategy, opportunities will get to the tender stage without you even being aware of them. However, this can be rectified by developing interesting and original content (and carefully curating and repurposing content) that adds value to the reader at each stage of the buying process with the aim of positioning you as a thought leader and keeping your proposition front of mind.

Furthermore, by managing all this through a digital marketing platform, it enables you to optimise your online presence, track and measure your prospects level of engagement and develop a prioritised, steady stream of qualified leads for your sales team to follow up and close.

You can turn this situation to your advantage quickly and for minimal investment.
Contact Us To Find Out How.

Alternatively, you can invest heavily in poorly targeted outbound marketing methods, trawling the market in an attempt to engage with them before it’s too late.

Still not convinced? Then ask your customers the question. Or you can just hope they find you before they find your competitors….

Find out more about our full service marketing capability.

The smallest of changes can have the biggest impact on your organisation’s sales effectiveness.

The cost of competing for business can be so great that it is vital you give yourself the best chance of winning.  Gaining insight into the effectiveness of your sales and marketing capability is a key step to improving your sales success.

As a full service marketing agency working with technology companies, we collaborate closely with our client’s sales and marketing functions.  With an outside eye looking in, we provide an external insight into our client’s sales and marketing effectiveness and share our observations and recommendations where we believe improvements can be made.

Whilst presenting our observations, internal stakeholders often have different views as to their organisation’s sales and marketing capability and this all too often puts the brakes on implementing a change programme.

A Get to Great ™ assessment eliminates these issues by giving the customer the tools to determine their own issues, gaps and resolution path against these proven benchmarking models.

By delivering the Get to Great™ benchmarking methodology, XLR8 Marketing uses best practice models to enable organisations of any size to assess the gaps and identify remedial actions in key areas of sales capability, quickly and effectively.

Assessments are delivered as a one day interactive workshop, led by our expert facilitators who are acknowledged subject matter experts in the technology sector.  The assessment drives actions to deliver a performance step-change in line with the agreed goals, typically improved sales revenue and margin, increased win ratio and reduced timescales and costs.

Desired outcomes are identified quickly and cost-effectively, under the guidance of the facilitator, providing a comprehensive report of detailed findings, conclusions and recommendations, including contributor and facilitator commentary, prioritised action plans and targets.

Progress and success are measured by repeating the assessment at agreed intervals, clearly demonstrating progress towards the operational goals set by the leadership team.

Only organisations that are truly sales ready will achieve optimal sales effectiveness.
So what does your organisation need to do to be sales ready…?

Ever been so busy delivering client projects that you have taken the focus off pipeline development and before you know it next quarter’s forecast is looking really flaky?

By definition it is difficult to focus on several things at once.  In addition, lead generation is an activity which most sales people shy away from and will do ANYTHING rather than pick up the phone to someone they have never spoken to before!   In any case, tied to a phone playing the frogs and princes game, is unlikely to be the most cost effective way of keeping a highly paid sales team occupied!

That’s why many companies look to outsource their demand generation to an agency that will give it focus, bring some fresh ideas to prospecting and provide measures for the effectiveness of your marketing budget.

Many IT companies are currently driving towards their year-end – flat out to close deals for 2012.  But where does this leave 2013? The smart money is on companies who maintain dedicated lead generation activity to nurture leads, understand clients’ pain points and build deeper relationships with their target audience.   Whether this service is delivered in-house or outsourced to a marketing agency, now is the time to start building the pipeline for 2013.

Alternatively, you can always try relying on the pipeline fairy!

Within the IT/Hi-Tech industry, marketing is too often seen as a cost or a fluffy expense that can be cut when times get tough. It is of course an investment opportunity proven to increase revenue (if done well!) and provide strategic direction for the business.

Investment in IT marketing may not impact ROI straight away due to the frustrating yet necessary lead times associated with influencing the market and gaining sales traction. For organisations with lengthy sales cycles this can be a particular challenge.

So how can a business assess the value from their investment in IT marketing and be confident that they are focusing on the right things?

Set marketing objectives with specific KPI measures that are aligned to your business goals and monitor their rate of change. You need to accurately measure marketing KPIs (ideally in real time using best in class tools) and fine tune your marketing strategy and blend of tactics to get the highest ROI possible.

Focus on setting marketing KPI measures with SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant/Realistic and Timely) targets that align with factors which are critical to achieving the business goal. Measure and monitor your performance metrics to determine what really drives your business.  The relevance criterion is particularly noteworthy as we seek to perfect the right mix of ingredients that have the greatest impact on business performance.

Furthermore, the relative importance of specific marketing KPIs will vary according to the type of IT organisation. Don’t look at marketing KPIs in isolation either. For example you could have the best marketing and zero sales if the product was developed without the customer in mind or if the business is heavily dependent on winning business through personal selling and its sales people are the weakest link!

On 1 August 2012, XLR8 Marketing Ltd relocated to new offices at the Loughborough Innovation Centre, situated within Loughborough University’s Science and Enterprise Park, on the western boundary of the University campus.

The Innovation Centre is designed to meet the needs of innovative, high growth companies and it provides an ideal Midlands based location to better serve our IT / Hi-Tech clients.

We are delighted with the facilities and support services available to us as this will enable us to serve our clients more effectively.

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