It is no less necessary and it is no less needed whether you’ve hopped on the inbound marketing bus or not. Where do you get inspiration from?  Better yet, how do you inspire your teams to bigger and better things?  To pass more leads of higher quality? To make more calls today than they did yesterday?  To make more calls tomorrow than they’re going to make today?  To talk with more people who will probably hang up on them?  To initiate interest in a product that the prospect knows nothing about but after a ten to fifteen minute phone call now has to have?  For me, I listen to music.  MORE >>

If you’re doing your due-diligence, you should already be creating buyer personas, as marketing strategist David Meerman Scott points out in The New Rules of Marketing and PR (which by the way just came out with a second edition).  If you’re like me and my friends, you were pretty hyped up for last night’s season premiere of LOST.  I came to the game late on this one, having to watch three seasons on DVD (which by the way, is actually more fun because you can just keep watching episode after episode).  Ensure they know who they’re calling. Know when to call your prospects. MORE >>

This question came to me today after reading a blog entry in the Marketing Mélange by Mike Frichol. purports that if prospective buyers, Marketing, and Sales were all aligned, the sales cycle might not take so long.  So, while I’ll leave it to the Marketing and Sales experts to help you align those departments with your future customers, I do see three ways that your teleprospecting teams can do all they can to quicken their aspect of the buying process.  Think about your prospects for a minute.  Maybe you’re not doing that right now but you want to.  He’s right.  MORE >>

Tags: B2B Marketing Lead Generation Tele-prospecting B2B Prospecting cold calling Sales Prospecting Telemarketing teleprospecting teleprospecting qualities MORE >>

In the entry, Nigel goes on to make the analogy that inbound marketing and Sales 2.0 The article is great, but of particular interest to me was this, when talking about businesses that sell something very expensive and have a small prospecting pool from which to generate leads from: “I always imagine a sales rep in this scenario whose boss comes to him and says ‘how are we getting on penetrating GE’ and the rep who loves inbound marketing too much says ‘we’re waiting for them to hit our website and download a white paper.’&#. Sales 2.0 MORE >>