Archive for November, 2012

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!