A/B Testing for Prospecting Campaigns

The Science of A/B Testing Your Prospecting Campaigns

A/B testing works best when you have a specific result to test for
Make sure to test only one change at a time for clear insights
Test adjustments in a logical order that will help you improve faster
Boom Demand can help you implement testing at a larger scale

One of the most important ways that marketing and sales teams can collaborate within an organization is by testing how effective your sales copy is. This takes some coordination and requires leadership to develop a vision that both departments are fully on board with. Marketing teams mostly concern themselves with delivering high-quality material that accurately reflects brand values. Sales teams tend to focus on increasing volume and achieving targets as fast as possible. Neither of these objectives is mutually exclusive, though, and both teams can find value in each other’s work. A/B testing of marketing materials helps both sales and marketing drive toward achieving their goals faster and better.

What is A/B Testing?

In our context, A/B testing is a way to randomly experiment between the results of using two different versions of the same marketing material with the same objective. When we say that we’re using two versions of the same material, we’re talking about discovering the effects of adjustments in just one element of the copy. For example, every prospecting email that your sales team sends out should have at least a subject line, a body, a call to action, and a signature, among other characteristics. Each one of these parts can have different effects on how the potential prospect responds to them, depending on how you design and write them. To determine how to get better responses and boost sales through more effective copy, you first have to learn what copy is more effective! To do this, you can send one version of an email to one random group of leads, and a different version to another. Tracking and analytics software helps you to discover which version produces better results.

Why It’s Important to Test Copy

Doing this kind of science matters to business, because we never get anything perfect the first time we try it. Not only is there a learning curve, but the curve is always moving. We’re constantly networking, and discovering more compelling ways to write to encourage a sale. Likewise, our customers are always getting exposed to the things we write and reacting to them. Society changes, values and priorities shift, and what worked yesterday is obsolete tomorrow. Sometimes the pendulum swings back in the opposite direction, and sometimes it just keeps smashing through the wall without stopping. The point is that marketing and sales must always go to where the customers are, and reach them the way they want us to. Finding that sweet spot requires experimentation because they won’t just tell us what we have to do for them to give us their money! As anyone in sales can remind us, many times customers don’t even start out knowing that they needed our product all along. We have to help them make that discovery.

How to Apply This Kind of Science in Your Business

Firstly, it’s important to be very specific about what you want to accomplish. Sending an email can have many different results. Are you just trying to see what gets more clicks into your video presentation? Or are you hoping to discover what leads to more final sales? It’s important to be sure of what you’re looking for, because what you test might change more than one result. An adjustment might lead to fewer clicks, but many more of those clicks that still happen might convert, and actually increase revenue. Second, only test one variable at a time. If you make two changes, how will you know which one made the difference? It’s almost impossible to tell, no matter which way the data goes. Third, test your changes in a logical order. Thinking about emails, if something about your subject lines is making prospects go “meh” and hit the little trashcan button without reading further, how much value is there in first testing variants of your call-to-action? This is especially important if you’re actively trying to discover why your current copy might be underperforming. Start at the top, and work your way down. Fourth, you need to get lots of data. The more, the merrier. The more data you can find, the more likely that you will see statistically significant results. The reason for this is that every lead is different, and will respond differently to your unique copy. But in most cases, there are only two or three ways to react to any element of it. They can reject it, they can ignore it, or they can engage with it. The more data you acquire from more leads, the more likely you are to get away from individual preferences towards larger social tendencies that you can bank on in bulk.

Boom Demand: Your Sales Laboratory

That’s where we come in. Our sales development representatives, working on your behalf, can help you dramatically boost your outreach efforts. By implementing A/B testing, we can help you kill two birds with one stone. Not only will you be able to improve your marketing efforts, you’ll have a dedicated team funneling warm leads right to your top salespeople. Contact us today to get started!

Books for Sales Director Success

Top 5 Books for Sales Director Success: Your Must-Read List for 2019

These excellent books for sales director success arm you with better strategies
Experts in a variety of fields provide powerful insights for you to apply to sales
Boom Demand helps sales directors implement better tactics faster

We invite our readers to reflect on whether 2018 was a good year for them or a mediocre one. If you’re doing well but know you can get better, or need to get back on your feet after a knockout punch, it’s time to add some new tools to your sales strategy workshop. We’ve put together a list of the best books for sales director success that we can recommend. The insights these authors provide will help directors see their work with new eyes and finish this decade stronger than ever. Remember that if you’re not always learning new things and applying them, you’re stagnating and falling behind.

Mike Weinberg’s Sales Management. Simplified.

With the subtitle, “The Straight Truth About Getting Exceptional Results from Your Sales Team,” Weinberg helps us remember that no matter how good we are at sales, managing a sales team is different. He covers no fewer than 16 basic errors that sales directors are prone to, and how to overcome them. Chief among them are matching performance and roles better, more effective coaching, and more useful meetings. Learn how to focus on culture, offer better compensation, and even how to keep scheduling under control.

Tony J. Hughes’ Combo Prospecting

We’re now over a decade into the radical shift in global communications wrought by the advent of the smartphone. During this time, social media has turned into a ubiquitous force in both our personal and commercial lives. It’s easier than ever before to find prospects (and to be found), but harder to stand out amongst all the other sales teams clamoring for their attention. Hughes shows us how to use these tools to punch through the very wall of noise they created, and get right in front of the executive buyers who need what we have to offer.

David Brock’s Sales Manager Survival Guide

If you’re new to sales management and wondering what in the world you just got yourself into, this book is your new best friend. If you’re a veteran sales director looking to stay sharp in the most competitive sales environment in history, this book is your new best friend, too. As Brock shows us, the best practices stay true even after decades of experience. His advice cuts right through the fog of modern media novelty to remind us that we’re still managing and selling to human beings whose nature hasn’t changed much at all.

Keith Rosen’s Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions

Do you understand the difference between training and coaching? It’s critical to know how and when to apply these different concepts for maximum sales team success. And it is definitely a team effort! Rosen points out that training isn’t what makes champions. Great coaches are how individual players become part of a championship team. Learn how to become a truly great sales coach and help each member of your team use and develop their unique talents.

Chris Voss and Tahl Raz’s Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

What’s the difference between a sales meeting and a hostage situation? Some prospects would say there isn’t any, but in all seriousness, we know the stakes are very different. Even so, you can apply the principles of the latter to any other negotiation situation to be sure your team members always get the best deal possible. These five books for sales director success offer powerful ways to change the way you do sales. We invite you to put these ideas into action. Boom Demand provides sales teams with the ability to expand flexibly without breaking the bank. With our sales development representatives on your side, you can drive far more efficient sales funnels that help qualified prospects convert faster. Contact us today to get started!

Software Sales Team Help: Finding Great Reps

How to Find Great Representatives to Give Your Software Sales Team a Boost

Software sales effectiveness requires adaptation to changing market conditions
SDR teams need to be able to scale up and down without hurting reps’ careers
The best SDRs will have some experience and training before joining your team

How do you make sure that your software sales team works effectively? It’s about a lot more than just picking up the phone and cold-calling a list. We live in one of the great ages of innovation. Societies and economies are constantly shifting, and we have to be able to keep up. The field of software and tech, in general, is at the epicenter of this commotion. So what does it take to get ahead?

Fast Pivot Ability

The first key to success in the modern world is that you have to be able to move fast. Not just to jump onto the latest opportunity, but to do so when you’re already working on something else. You have to be able to see the opportunities and evaluate them first of all, of course. Once there, though, you can’t afford to waste time. Discovering that the market may not like what you’re working on as much as you thought, and sticking to it anyway, is a recipe for disaster. You have to be free to change your stance and move in a new direction. Your sales representatives should be just as nimble. They should be open to constant training and coaching, constantly learning, even as they keep working hard. They should be accustomed to moving between different products and campaigns. Reps can certainly develop their own style and proven workflows, but if they can’t adapt them to new conditions, the game’s already over.

Flexible Scalability

Another key to success is the ability to manage resources. Using the right amount of time and money to invest in a new software suite are critical. This applies to each step of the design, development, marketing, and sales processes. If you suddenly discover that demand for your service has gone through the roof, or was higher than initial research indicated, how do you deal with it? How fast can you bring more sales staff on board to find the qualified prospects who are looking for a solution like yours? By the same token, if demand tapers off, or something else isn’t working right, how do you scale back? Your company values are at stake here. Does your corporate culture allow for handing out pink slips by the thousands? Or would you rather find a way to cut costs that won’t damage the lives of your trusted team members? What if you could be sure that a downturn would not put your sales representatives completely out of a job? What if instead, it only meant a temporary shift in focus?

New Solutions to Old Problems

These concepts of speed and flexibility are exactly the reason that so many companies have implemented the Sales Development role in recent years. SDRs focus more on the process than the product. They’re all about starting relationships, and the rules for that are the same regardless of what you’re selling. That makes it easy for them to start the sales cycle in any company in any industry sector. The issue of scalability has always been a tough challenge for many organizations, though. In economic downturns, we’ve gotten used to hearing about companies laying off thousands of workers, but it still damages their brand when it happens. That may not change yet next time. We’re finding ways to work smarter than simply putting people out on the streets when the wind blows in a different direction, though.

Looking for Experience

Boom Demand solves these problems for your software sales team by offering a highly adaptive approach to SDR team building. First, we save sales managers the headache of heading up two separate teams with different objectives and managerial needs. Instead of splitting your in-house team between Sales Development and account executives, we enable you to outsource your SDR needs. We take care of every aspect of hiring, training, and managing a team of SDRs on your behalf, at a far lower cost than you’d see doing everything in-house. We help reps gain experience in our own internal campaigns before they join your team. Once there, they integrate as closely as you need them to with the most effective collaborative technology. Best of all, as your needs change, you can expand or contract your SDR team without worrying about their needs. We’ve got them covered, and they adapt to their new campaign responsibilities just as fast as they do to your requirements. Contact Boom Demand today for the best possible version of your software sales team!

Boom Demand Cadence Strategy Tips

What is the Boom Demand B2B Cadence?

Boom Demand uses a defined sequence of contact points to reach prospects.
Our cadence promotes a strong workflow that helps SDRs achieve their goals.
We use phones, email, and social media, so prospects meet us on their terms.
The Boom Demand Cadence is a tool that can work for your organization, too!

Fast and Focused

Boom Demand uses a proven sales cadence that brings us success over and over again. When our sales development representatives begin reaching out to a new cold prospect, they already have a robust plan in place before they even start. Every approach to these leads happens on the basis of a specific sequence of actions that we carry out with careful timing. One of the principal advantages of the Boom Demand cadence is that it involves no more than 19 individual contact points, spread across 18 business days. Many companies push for a considerably higher number of contact tries. What we learned a long time ago is that the law of diminishing returns is a powerfully counterproductive force. Spending too much more effort on a lead that’s just not responding isn’t usually worth it, so we focus hard on a lead for a few weeks. If they don’t qualify themselves, it’s time to move on to more interested prospects.

Persistent but Balanced

Another great feature of our sales cadence is that while it’s fast and focused, it’s not overbearing. We space out the 19 contact points and focus them on certain days. A given prospect will hear from our representatives 19 times in 18 days, but not every single day. During the first three days, we send multiple types of messages one way or another each day, but then take a rest until day six. We reach out again a couple of days later, then the very next day, then every second or third day until the last. The sequence seems random, but it’s actually a highly effective plan. There are at least three reasons why this kind of sequence is important for creating an effective cadence. One of them is that this kind of spaced repetition is considerably more effective at keeping brands and new ideas top-of-mind than a simpler daily pattern. By giving our prospects’ brains different lengths of time to let things settle in between contact points, it helps them better remember our message in the context of their specific pain points. It helps them make more effective connections between those problems and the ways we can solve them. Another reason for this specific cadence is that calling and messaging the same prospect every single day seems both pushy and robotic. Constantly filling up their inboxes doesn’t win friends; it’s just annoying and feels insincere. Additionally, the spaces or “off days” for one prospect are opportunities to focus efforts on other prospects. It’s a simple, yet powerful way to ensure that each Boom Demand SDR is always working dynamically. It prevents the stagnation of dull routines and keeps the work interesting. It requires coordination, planning, and careful recordkeeping, all of which lead to stronger outcomes.

Effective Outreach

Besides these strategic considerations, what makes the Boom Demand Cadence powerful is that it relies on three of the most effective modern communications tools. Our specific cadence starts with a phone call. If that call goes to voicemail, we send out an email. The next day, we connect via LinkedIn or other social media as needed, and follow up on day 3 with another email and another call. We pick the sequence up again on days six and nine with all three contact types. The rest of the cadence calls for two of the three methods on each subsequent contacting day. We’ve learned that for B2B sales, there’s nothing more effective than these three kinds of communications media. The combination of phone, email, and social media ensures that we’re likely to reach our prospect in the way that they most prefer to communicate and interact. That makes it easier for us to engage with them and help them see for themselves the value of our solutions.

Putting the Boom Demand Cadence to Work for Your Organization

Of course, the cadence is a means to an end. Whenever and however the prospect answers our outreach, we immediately break the sequence to focus on them. Their context, their needs, and their goals all help determine how we tailor our solutions. We do our homework ahead of time, too. If we were to start the cadence without doing some research and having a good idea of how to approach each prospect on a personalized basis, it wouldn’t matter much what else we try. That’s the secret sauce of sales, of course: we always remember that it’s not about us; it’s about YOU! This particular cadence is what works best for us. Other companies have different strategies, and it’s mostly a matter of trial-and-error. If you want to boost the effectiveness of your sales team, you could try developing your own cadence, but it will take time to see what works. Another possibility is to let Boom Demand do it for you! We’ve already done the hard part, and with our professional SDR team, we keep doing it. With our SDRs integrated into your in-house sales team, you can enjoy an increase in warmed-up leads, and higher conversion rates, at a far lower cost than splitting your team for the same goals. Contact us today to learn more, and put the Boom Demand Cadence on your side!

SPIN Selling Applications in B2B Software Sales

How to Apply SPIN Selling in B2B Software Sales

When your sales team reaches out to their prospects, who’s doing most of the talking? If it’s not the prospects themselves, then your team is probably missing out on some crucial information. Getting prospects to talk about and analyze their own problems is one of the best ways for sales professionals to build up a new relationship with a potential buyer. How can they do this? By asking the right questions in the right order, in a process known as SPIN selling.

What is SPIN Selling?

The acronym sounds like something shady you would do with a reporter in the parking garage of a government office. It turns out to be quite the opposite. It’s one of the most effective ways to make a sale in business to business interactions. It’s also highly respectful of the prospect. Even today, sales has a reputation for being underhanded that’s hard to shake. In the past, it was all about leveraging an informational advantage that the sales professional often had over their prospect. Now, however, the tables have turned, and buyers have access to more information than ever before. SPIN selling recognizes that turn and acknowledges that the sales professional is the one who needs to gather more information. In 1988, Neil Rackham published the results of a study of 35,000 sales calls. His analysis explained the most successful process he found repeated throughout those calls. This process is all about asking the prospect a series of specific questions. These questions are designed to help both the salesperson and the prospect learn whether a sale can or should be made. They are qualifying questions, and they also lead to a logical conclusion: does it make sense to buy? He called the process SPIN Selling. The word SPIN in this case is an acronym, standing for Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-Payoff. Let’s take a look at what each one means and how it applies specifically to B2B software sales.

Situation

This is pretty straightforward. Where does your prospect stand right now? What kind of software solutions are they currently using to manage a particular problem? Is it what they were expecting? What kinds of pain points are they experiencing? What’s their budget like for upgrades? These questions are all about understanding the present context the prospect finds themselves in. Keep in mind that many situational questions are not necessary. Enormous amounts of general company information are available online, so do your homework! Don’t irritate prospects with stuff that Google and LinkedIn can tell you. Save this moment for more questions that help you understand why things are the way they are.

Problem

Here, you’re still asking questions, but these should be framed in such a way as to call their attention to the fact that a problem exists. They may not have even noticed the problem before. Some of these questions may be directly related to pain points identified in the solution phase. Others may have something to do with the connection between their situation and the specific ways your solution could improve it. It’s important to remember here, though, that you’re still asking questions to get them to talk about themselves, not your solution. Questions formatted like “how intuitive is the user interface in the context of training?” and “How satisfied are you with the responsiveness of their tech support?” tend to yield interesting and thought-provoking answers.

Implication

Those thoughts allow you to drive the point home. If you’ve helped them identify a problem, now you need to help them see how it plays out further down the road. In other words, what are the implications for your company if that problem remains unaddressed? Think of questions like, “If you didn’t have to spend that much money on monthly subscriptions, how could that help you grow in other areas?” and “How is that lag time impacting agent productivity and career satisfaction? These questions create urgency in the prospect’s mind. There’s a recognition that they need to make an adjustment before they start to fly wildly off course.

Need-Payoff

This is where it all comes together. If your questioning helped your prospect recognize that their current situation is problematic and needs urgent attention, then you can help them see for themselves the benefits of your solution. This is not where you start listing features. Nor is it a moment for obvious and condescending questions like, “if you could save that money, would that be helpful?” On the contrary, Sales professionals need to be as careful in this step as in any other. They must tie the problems and implications to very specific alternatives. “If, by using Service Y, you could take those $10,000 you’re paying for Solution X each month and redirect more than half of it into your customer service training, how would that help your team establish market leadership?”

Implementing Powerful Sales Strategies, Faster

Boom Demand sales development representatives use SPIN selling and similar techniques in our outreach to our potential clients and their own prospects. What techniques are you currently using to bring more promising leads through the top of your sales funnel? To what extent are you finding that your most talented sales professionals are bogged down by the need to focus on cold calling and emailing? How much more revenue could you be earning if your in-house sales team members were spending 100% of their time building on existing relationships and closing new deals, instead of cold prospecting? If your sales team had the support of a low-cost, outsourced SDR team that was constantly sending warm prospects to your account executives, how would that help you reduce turnover and improve morale within your sales organization? See what we did there? Those might not be your exact pain points, but if they’re even close to what you’d like to improve, contact Boom Demand today! We can help smooth out those bumps and boost your sales funnel like nothing you’ve tried before.

Outsourced SDR Teams Streamline Sales Innovation

Why You’re Better Off Hiring an Outsourced SDR Team

Companies looking to scale operations often turn to the specializing trend in sales; that is, they build an SDR team. SDRs, or sales development representatives, focus on the top of the sales funnel, cultivating leads that they refer to account executives down the line for relationship-building and deal closing. This allows sales teams to achieve more sales, more efficiently. Some companies do this all in-house, but others have discovered the advantages of using outsourced SDR teams. Let’s take a look at why outsourcing this sales role could help your company more than keeping it in the family.

Economic Advantages

Outsourcing exists in the first place because it’s less expensive for some organizations and people to do certain business activities than others. So, in the simple search for better profit margins, companies seek to cut costs by hiring those for whom it costs less to do the jobs they want done. There are many ways this can happen. One is by simple innovation. One company finds a better, faster way to do a job, so they can lower their prices and win more clients. Another company bases its operations in a state or country where the costs of living and doing business are lower, with the same result. Some combination of these economic conditions provides a way to save money while getting the same job done. Outsourced SDR teams are no different. They exist because they can do the same work as an in-house team, at the same level of quality, but for less money. Whether they’re onshore, nearshore, or offshore compared to your organization, they have all the communications technology they need to be able to work with your existing sales team. At least, that’s how we do it with our nearshore SDR teams. Boom Demand SDRs integrate seamlessly into our clients’ sales organizations, as if they were working out of the building next door to you. Meetings happen online with video chats, and collaborative shared documents keep everyone literally on the same page.

Focused Expertise

Another way that outsourced SDR teams are better than in-house is that they are highly specialized. Rather than splitting your internal sales organization into two teams with distinct management needs, you keep your focus on closing deals, and the SDRs elsewhere focus on bringing you warm prospects. SDRs require a slightly different set of skills and talents to be successful versus traditional sales professionals. There’s certainly some overlap, as almost all salespeople know how to do cold calling, email prospecting, and social media outreach. But SDRs focus exclusively on those tasks, rather than the longer process of dealmaking. This calls for a different management style, different pay and incentive structures, and a different approach from Human Resources. In other words, doing this in-house has the potential to put more strain on your organization than you might anticipate. By contrast, outsourcing this function lets you leave those burdens in the hands of another company, one that’s far more experienced and accustomed to dealing with them. Think of this, again, in terms of the economic law of Comparative Advantage. To use an agricultural example, the USA could grow a lot more coffee plants if it wanted to. Farmers would have to build lots of expensive greenhouses to replicate the right climate conditions. Or, the country could just buy most of its coffee from Brazil, where the conditions are naturally ideal. Saudi Arabia could try to grow wheat for itself by desalinating ocean water and pumping it into the desert. But why bother with all that when it’s less expensive and faster to ship it from the USA?

Outsourced SDR Teams Can Pivot Faster

Companies that specialize in SDR work have much more freedom to experiment on your behalf. They can test out different messaging and strategies for you at a far lower opportunity cost than you’d experience in-house. You can think of an outsourced SDR team as a sales laboratory. The advantages of an outsourced SDR team make it easier for them to shift in response to market conditions. If you need to scale up operations, they already have the personnel in place for you. Likewise, having to scale down hurts an outsourcing partner a lot less than it does to your own staff. They can quickly re-position their SDRs onto other clients’ campaigns. They can also bolster their internal marketing efforts when you need fewer personnel working for you. Consider using Boom Demand’s professional nearshore SDRs to boost your sales volume! Contact us today to experience the specific benefits your business will enjoy from working with us!

B2B Blog Posts to Read Each Day of the Week

The Top B2B Software Blogs For Each Day of the Workweek

What’s the best way to make sure you’re getting the most out of your B2B software? Try reading a B2B Blog every day! Starting your day off with the latest news and ideas from leaders and other experts in the field is sure to keep you current. It’s a great way to make certain that you’re not missing the latest advances and strategies. This way, you can stay at or above the level of your competition. To make it simple, we’ve chosen one blog for each day of the week.

Monday: HubSpot

Mondays are a chore, we know. Even if you love your job to death, it’s sometimes hard to come back into the office after a great weekend. That’s why we like HubSpot first thing on Monday morning. Their B2B blog is never boring. They always cover a variety of topics relating to marketing and sales, and they keep it light. Some of their posts are downright funny, and that’s a great way to start the week. Having a laugh first will put you in just the right frame of mind.

Tuesday: Ramp: the InsightSquared Blog

Call it Technical Tuesday. Ramp, the InsightSquared blog, is a powerful way to learn about the specific ways that tiny changes can make a huge difference. This blog focuses on minor adjustments marketers can make to their strategies. Those minor adjustments, applied over time, can turn out to compound into exponentially greater success. Keep the ball rolling on Tuesday looking for those insights into small things that can become great.

Wednesday: Salesforce

Things tend to slow down on Wednesdays, so it’s a great time to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. As one of the most successful companies of the SaaS and B2B marketing era, Salesforce naturally has a wider perspective. Their B2B blog takes a look at the way marketing interfaces with the outside world. Current events, humanitarian efforts, and macroeconomic changes can all affect the way you do business. So take the middle of the week to pause and think about why you do your work and how it affects the world around you.

Thursday: SiriusDecisions

The SiriusDecisions blog is a powerful resource for the last part of the week because it bridges the gap between the technical and the practical. When you’re stuck trying to get a particular aspect of your strategy to function better, look here for insights. Whether it’s a new management or technology strategy, this B2B blog is sure to give you the jump start you need to finish the week strong.

Friday: Bizible

This B2B blog by Marketo is perfect for wrapping things up. Not that there’s ever an end to marketing. We like reading Bizible on Fridays because they always give you something to think about. Chewing on the concepts they cover during the weekend will position you to make well-informed decisions in the week to come.

Reading a B2B Blog Daily Helps, and Boom Demand Helps Even More

It’s one thing to learn all you can about the latest in sales and marketing by reading a B2B blog each day. It’s another to let experts help you boost your outreach efforts immediately. Contact Boom Demand today to start implementing powerful scaling solutions that will grow your business like nothing you’ve tried before!

Sales Development Vs. Business Development

What Are the Differences Between Sales Development and Business Development?

Modern business terminology changes constantly, and some of it can get confusing. Part of the problem is that no matter how hard we try as a society, language sometimes makes it hard to convey a complex idea in a single word. It’s important to know what your colleagues and competitors are talking about, though. At first glance, one might think that business and sales development are basically the same thing. Looking closer, though, it becomes clear that there’s more to both concepts.

Business Development

This term encompasses a wide range of business processes. On a Venn diagram of all business activities, this one would be a very large circle that surrounds almost everything else. If a particular activity is not helping your business grow in some way at all, only then would it fall outside this category. The biggest subcategories that fall into the larger grouping of business development are sales, marketing, partnership formation, and anything else that expands your company’s influence and market.

Sales Development

Within all of these larger categories, there are specializations. The point of specialization is to take advantage of the efficiency that it brings. The more you can focus on one specific task or process, the better you can get at doing it. Traditionally, what we now call sales development was part of the ordinary activities that every salesperson could expect to do. Every salesperson was responsible for meeting their quota of closed deals. They also did all of the cold calling and other forms of outreach that would be necessary beforehand. A few years ago, though, sales teams started learning that they could split the sales process in half. One part of the team could now specialize in the labor-intensive top half of the sales funnel. By focusing only on outreach, they could qualify as many leads as possible, as fast as possible. These Sales Development Representatives, as they are now known, could then pass these qualified warm prospects along to Account Executives. The AEs, in turn, could focus all their time and energy on building established relationships and closing deals. The efficiency advantages were immediately apparent. A number of tech companies that started using this tactic began to experience phenomenal growth. Among them are organizations that are now household names, such as Oracle and Salesforce.

How Boom Demand SDRs Can Help Your Business Grow

Many companies simply split their in-house sales teams to establish the sales development positions they need. There is a more cost-effective way to boost sales, though, and that’s by outsourcing sales development. Boom Demand’s SDR team is made of trained professionals who integrate with our clients’ own in-house sales teams. They work for you, funneling warm prospects right to your account executives. They also do it at a fraction of the cost of doing it yourself. Boom Demand also provides a variety of other related services that help you scale up fast, so contact us today to get started!

Email Marketing Strategies and Tools for Success

Top Emailing Tools For Reaching Your Audience

One of the essential truths about online business of any kind is that you need an effective way to communicate with your customers. Among millions of other web pages, including thousands of competitors, it’s not as easy for them to come to you naturally. Since the invention of the internet, numerous strategies have been developed and tried. New technologies and platforms have risen and fallen. One of them has been constant, though, almost since the dawn of the Information Age itself: email. You could even go so far as to call email marketing the backbone of the internet economy.

Email Marketing is Essential

It could be easy to ignore email. Nobody likes all the spam in their inboxes, and social media is so much sexier. There’s a reason email has such staying power, though. Everything else online has ended up requiring an email account in order to function. There are a few exceptions, like WhatsApp, based on an even older technology: the phone number. The fact is that email is simple, and already universal. If you want a guaranteed way of getting your message in front of someone, sending them an email is the closest thing that exists. Other platforms come and go, so any efforts spent building up your presence there are riskier. Remember MySpace? Building an email marketing list, though, is not only simple, but greatly rewarding. The hard part is generating the content that goes into them, but that’s nothing a marketing and sales team can’t handle. There are a number of powerful software tools out there that make it easy to manage your email campaigns. Here’s a look at three of the best:

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a basic product, but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful. On the contrary, it’s a powerful system that integrates with a variety of publishing and selling platforms. It’s also free to use for your first 12,000 emails sent to under 2,000 subscribers. When you’re just starting out, it’s a no-brainer.

Salesloft

Salesloft features a bit more automation. One of its most powerful features is that it seamlessly integrates with SalesForce CRM, and also with Gmail and Outlook. With that integration, it helps you design smart templates that still allow for incredibly personal touches.

Outreach.io

Outreach is itself part of a wider suite of sales engagement software that gives your sales reps access to top-of-the-line automation and integration. It’s like the rolls Royce of emailing platforms, among its other features. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more effective way to streamline your sales process.

Power Your Email Marketing With Boom Demand SDRs

Whichever platform works best for your business, you’ll still need to write and manage your emails. You’ll need to jump on the ones that get positive replies. Follow up with prospects who download your free reports and ebooks, or who watch your Consensus demo. That can be overwhelming if you’re just starting out or find you need to scale up fast. Boom Demand simplifies things, though, with our own teams of trained Sales Development Representatives. Our SDRs are highly experienced in managing email marketing tools like the ones listed above. Contact us today to implement an effective email strategy and start closing deals left and right!

Customer Identification Tips for Better Marketing

To 5 Tips for Identifying Your Ideal Software Customer

Customer identification is one of the most basic, essential activities that must take place anytime you start a business. Your market research should have identified a consumer or industry segment where there’s high demand for what you plan to offer. This is as true in the B2B software industry as it is in retail, wholesale, or any other type of sales. After identifying high-demand segments, though, you still need to narrow down an exact definition of your ideal customer. There are several reasons for this, but the most important ones have to do with your sales and marketing efforts. You don’t want to spend resources trying to reach people who are not likely to ever become customers. You’re much better off focusing your marketing and sales budgets on the people who will truly find your software useful. Here are some of the best tips we’ve learned about how to figure out who your ideal customers are, and how to reach them.

1: Put yourself in their shoes

What does your software look like from the customer’s point of view? Imagine what the conditions would have to be like in your customer’s office, what workflow problems they would need to have, for your software to represent an elegant and cost-effective solution. This customer identification strategy helps you to see exactly the kinds of problems you can solve, with the side benefit of helping you discover potential flaws and areas where you could refine your product for either wider or more specific appeal.

2: Where does your buyer stand?

You may be offering software solutions to other businesses, but it’s important to remember that at the end of the day, you’re also dealing with individual human beings. Not only do you need to identify the exact sort of company that would find your product useful, you also need to figure out which person in that company you’ll be dealing with. Where is this person in their career? What role do they have in their organization? What kind of budget will they have at their disposal? You also need to be able to relate to this individual on a more personal level. How old are they and what kind of education and skills do they have under their belt? Are they a business major, or were they a coder who’s risen through the ranks? Knowing this in advance can make a huge difference during the sales process.

3: What’s in it for them?

You’ve done the market research, so you know your competition. You know who offers products like yours that are either cheaper or have more features. Why does your ideal customer care about your software, then? What do they find in your product that makes it better for them than what your competitors are peddling? Are they looking for better customer service? Something that doesn’t crash all the time? A local provider instead of a faceless multinational blob? A sleeker UX? Discover what sets you apart in the mind of your ideal customer, and your sales pitch practically writes itself.

4: Speaking of local providers…

You should be targeting customers in a specifically-defined geographical area. Eventually, that specific area could just be “Earth,” but not likely when you’re first starting. Facebook famously started out serving only Harvard alumni, then other Boston-area universities, where Mark Zuckerberg and associates lived and studied. For the first two years of its existence, it focused on serving only individuals at educational institutions, before opening up to anyone in the world with an email address. The lesson here is to focus your customer identification at first on an area that you know well. Make it as easy as possible for yourself to serve that market. This is because once you do open up to new geographies, you’ll need to become as familiar as possible with the idiosyncrasies of each market you enter. Focusing on what you know at the beginning greatly simplifies this step.

5: Customer identification includes strategy identification

Not only do you need to know who your customers are before you ever meet them, you need to understand what they’re going to do. How are they going to buy your software, and when? If their work tends to be seasonal, when will it be best for them to make a change? Learn from your customers’ experience buying similar products in the past, ad find ways to make it even better for them this time. At Boom Demand, we help our clients through this process of customer identification. We use outreach strategies like sales development to hit the ground running and funnel qualified prospects to your sales team for deal closing. We also develop powerful experiential marketing events that get your brand out there in the wild of the market and bring interested customers on board. Contact us today to start driving new leads into your sales funnel!