Acquiring Minds

Outbound demand generation is experiencing a renaissance.   

Hastening this rebirth are pressures from dissatisfied buyers, a growing imbalance between spending on sales efforts and buyer’s budgets and scrutiny of return on marketing spend.

What to do?  

The answer:  Innovate to improve the buyer experience and enhance outbound productivity.

Organizations such as Ariba, LivePerson and TriNet are reinventing their go-to-market and sales strategies through innovative approaches to outbound demand generation.

• Ariba radically changed their approach to event recruitment with startling results by using social networks and a sales intelligence solution.
• LivePerson bolstered the outbound productivity of their enterprise sales team with a new telesales enablement solution.
• TriNet increased sales productivity and expanded into new geographies more profitably with accelerated customer acquisition rates with a sales intelligence solution.

I reviewed these outbound success stories on our webinar on April 13.   Couldn’t attend?  No problem, go ahead and view the webcast here (no registration required).

The significance of the outbound renaissance on B2B sales & marketing is profound as these innovative approaches drive organizational change:

• Sales Six Sigma – Once the domain of manufacturing and other back office functions, organizations like TriNet are ‘ripping apart and putting back together’ sales processes.     To drive scalable and profitable growth, sales and marketing teams through their operations teams, are taking rigorous, analytical methods to improve their business models.
• Front End Loading of Talent – Enabled by intelligence and productivity tools, sales can now afford to position higher skill set and even subject matter experts at the top of the sales funnel and at the first touch with the prospect.     Ariba now engages sales reps to precisely target prospects in event recruitment programs.    In the past, the first touch would come from marketing and not sales.    
• Hybrid Roles Align Sales & Marketing – Marketing operations collaborating on sales process.   Field marketing reporting to sales management.    Inside sales reps recruiting prospects for events.   These cross-over and hybrid roles are driving alignment between sales and marketing.
• The Democratization of Sales Intelligence – Once the preserve of senior management or analysts, business intelligence is speading out to the far reaches of the organization.    At TriNet, front line sales reps are enabled to engage CXO level decision-makers at small businesses in timely, relevant and meaningful messages.     Prior to enabling solutions such as InsideView, only enterprise sales reps would be able to profitably leverage sales intelligence gathered from disparate sources.
• Sales Labor Arbitrage -  The first human touch between the seller and buyer cannot be automated, only outsourced.   At least, that was the approach before new solutions like ConnectAndSell.   Now the low skill set dialing can be outsourced and the high skill set discussion with the prospect is conducted internally.      In the past, LivePerson outsourced appointment setting.  Now LivePerson’s enterprise sales team sets their own appointments. (Full disclosure: my organization, Direct Impact Marketing is a ConnectAndSell solution provider partner).