Intelligent Demand Generation / eTrigue Corporation

Making cold calls isn’t fun. It is also inefficient. Sales reps are most productive when they spend their time closing sales rather than chasing unqualified prospects. While hot leads can close fast, cold leads may prove to be extremely time-consuming, and having your sales rep engage with them is wasteful and costly. It is also harder on the sales rep in terms of their confidence levels: when sales pros use generic prospect lists to make cold calls, it takes many calls to generate a single sale. Even the most enthusiastic sales pro can get discouraged after receiving a large number of rejections.

The last thing sales reps need are big generic lists of random prospects. What they do need is short lists of qualified leads that are likely to turn into customers. Marketing automation and sales acceleration solutions provide sales reps with the tools they need to zero in on the most qualified prospects prior to making a call.

When using Sales Acceleration tools, Sales reps can send trackable emails to prospects and track their web site activity. Another hugely useful tool is email alerts that let the sales reps know as soon as a lead reaches a “Hot” status, enabling them to contact Hot leads while they are still browsing your Web site! Obviously, engaging with potential customers while your company is top of mind helps to accelerate relationships and to close sales faster.

Instead of wasting valuable time and energy on cold-calling reluctant prospects, sales pros that use Sales Acceleration tools know exactly which of the company’s prospects is active and ready to buy. By focusing on “warm calling” these qualified prospects, the sales process becomes intelligent and efficient and sales are able to close business fast, and move on to the next qualified lead.

Last year, we wondered if 2009 was going to be “the year of Marketing Automation” and in many ways, it was. The combination of an increasingly buyer-centric sales cycle in the B2B space and the tough reality of a long recession combined to put pressure on marketing organizations to cut costs while improving lead nurturing and customer retention programs. Marketing accountability, a relatively new idea, became mainstream – suddenly marketing departments were expected to show clear ROI – but in the B2B space with its complex sales cycles, this is impossible to do – unless you automatically monitor and track your prospects.

In 2010, we expect to see an even stronger trend towards marketing accountability and measurability. With the recession gradually lifting and corporate spend on marketing programs slowly increasing, and with buyers continuing to gain control of their own buying processes, we expect to see more and more companies investing in the only way to regain control of the buying process – Sales Acceleration and Marketing Automation tools.

In 2010, buyers will become more and more choosy about which communications they are willing to receive and respond to. Organizations will have to provide more value than ever during the marketing process. Since Marketing Automation tools enable companies to tailor their communications to the exact needs of the specific prospect, they will become more important than ever.

Buying relationships will be increasingly based on a strong foundation of buyer nurturing and education, provided for free and on time by B2B organizations who manage to communicate with prospects with the right information, at the right time, without being annoying. Since achieving this manually is nearly impossible, and at the very least extremely costly, marketing automation systems that provide lead-nurturing tools would become a necessity rather than a luxury, especially for B2B companies.

As buyers gather more and more of their early information on vendors and solutions online, the role of the sales organization will change. In 2010, sales reps will expect to only make “warm calls” to qualified prospects on whom they have at least basic information and who are at least somewhat ready to buy. “Cold calls” to uninterested prospects will be considered wasteful. Thus, Sales acceleration and Marketing Automation tools such as lead scoring and real time lead alerts will become an integral part of the sales process.

For the first time in the history of corporate America, Marketing organizations are becoming accountable. Automated Marketing solutions enable smart marketers to track leads from the moment they land on the company’s website until the sales person closes a deal. The art of marketing is still there, of course, and we do believe marketers need to be creative – but in 2010, operational marketing skills will become at least as important as creative skills.