I placed an order for new business cards the other day. The next morning, I received a follow-up call from the company’s sales rep. Basically, he was trying to upsell, to get me to buy more of the company’s services. By the end of the call, not only did I not buy more, but I doubt I’ll ever do business with that company again.

From a marketing professional’s point of view, the conversation was fascinating. The sales rep was a nice enough person, I’m sure, but it was obvious he was reading from a pre-written script. It wasn’t just the way he was talking with me, as if reading out loud, but also his lack of knowledge about my specific needs.

“Thank you for your order of business cards. I see that you haven’t printed a URL on your cards and wanted to suggest that you use our hosting services, get your own site up and running, and print more cards with your URL on them.”

This was untrue, of course. We do have a website, and the URL has been added to the business cards order.

I remained silent for a few seconds, a little irritated frankly at this waste of my time, when the sales rep added, unfazed, “So, you DID add your URL to the cards?” which made me realize that they’ve been calling people automatically with this offer, never bothering to check their specific order first. So, we need to tell them what we need? But they called us!

The main problem with these cold calls, where you call a prospect without making yourself familiar with their specific situation prior to calling, is not just that you’re wasting their time and yours. These calls are so annoying, that in many cases you will be alienating the person you call. When it’s time for me to reorder business cards, I will probably look for someone else to do it. This cold call had just cost the company a customer. Is it so difficult to have a sales system in place where sales reps actually get access to a customer’s info before they call him?

Instead of pouring money into “dialing for dollars,” more and more B2B companies are shifting their teleprospecting investments to qualifying and nurturing prospects that have already shown some interest in their solution.

By focusing on prospects that have had some prior contact, inside sales or call centers typically have much higher success rates in creating opportunities for the sales team because they are spending time on “warm calling” rather than cold calling.

Dan McDade, President of PointClear, a prospect development company that has worked with B2B brands such as Microsoft and D&B, recommends his clients focus on multi-touch, multi-media campaigns to accelerate their pipelines. “Historically, database marketers expected to increase results by up to 8x when following up a direct mail or email campaign with a telephone call,” McDade said. “However, stopping at a single touch leaves anywhere from half to substantially more business on the table for your competitors to grab.”

To maximize pipeline performance, it takes at least nine individual touches, including a minimum of two email messages, according to PointClear’s research. “Our data also shows that the initial contact cycle, the first time you touch the market with those nine individual touches, will yield only 40%-50% of the total opportunities,” McDade added. “The other opportunities existing within the market can only be identified by continuing to touch the same prospects, with the same multi-media, multi-touch strategy on a regular basis.”

Sales intelligence tools not only allow sales reps to do “pinpoint prospecting,” they also help to identify “trigger events,” which can drive short-term sales opportunities. Real-time lead alerts can increase connect rates by up to 10X. Reps armed with website visit history, campaign and detailed prospect information have more confidence and more information to effectively engage with interested prospects. The result is a much higher success rate then traditional, often futile, cold calling.

The economic downturn has created increasingly lengthy sales cycles in the B2B space, making it important for companies to track more website visitors and their interactions on a site over a longer period of time.

Ideally, you want to start gathering data on a visitor to your site from as early a stage as possible, even at the stage where they are still anonymous visitors to the site and haven’t yet identified themselves.

Later, when an anonymous visitor does identify themselves, you want to be able to tie their information back to their activities on your site while they were still anonymous, in order to get a complete picture about this prospect, which would enable your sales rep to better understand their needs and to better communicate with them.

Following the widespread adoption of social media by B2B organizations, your website probably gets a large number of anonymous visitors. Capturing the history of each visitor before they have registered on your site is essential for helping your marketing team to nurture prospects and your sales team to effectively communicate with them.

Realizing the importance of tracking visitors from the very early stages, we have recently expanded out anonymous visitor tracking and have added unlimited anonymous web tracking functionality to our marketing automation and sales acceleration offerings – eTrigue Professional, eTrigue Unlimited and eTrigue SalesPro. The idea is to help companies refine and better target important inbound prospects before they self-identify.

eTrigue gathers and maintains anonymous information of an unlimited number of visitors from their first visit, to their first ‘hand-raiser” action on the website, such as registering for premium content via a form or clicking on a link in an e-mail. This enables you to nurture new relationships more effectively by having greater insight into each prospect’s exact needs and their level of interest before sales make contact.

Better communication with prospects means more sales – after all, from a prospect’s point of view, the worse thing you can do is to give them a generic pitch.

I have read Michael Gerard’s recent blog post on IDC’s 2010 Sales Barometer Study with great interest.

I can’t say that I was surprised – I think most of us have seen it coming for a while now. More leads are needed to close a deal now than ever before, buying cycles are getting longer, and sales reps are not as prepared for customer interactions as they should be.

These are familiar pain points, and it’s up to each organization to decide how to solve these issues. Certainly, sales and marketing alignment is a key to solving them. Sales reps should be able to leverage internal resources such as marketing assets to better communicate with customers; sales and marketing should be in agreement on what constitutes a sales-ready lead.

Marketing Automation and Sales Acceleration tools should be used by organizations to achieve better alignment of Marketing and Sales, to foster an atmosphere of a joint effort, and to empower sales reps by giving them better access to company assets and by giving them access to as much data as possible about a lead before they contact that lead. The better informed and well prepared a sales rep is, the better the prospect would react to her (remember customers’ complaint that they are tired of generic sales pitches?)

If we agree that increased Sales productivity drives revenue growth, and I feel certain that we all agree on that, then as our economy slowly recovers from the recession, organizations’ first priority is to improve the productivity of their sales organizations. One of the simplest ways to do that is marketing automation, and easier yet if your budget is tight – start with an affordable, stand alone sales enablement tool such as eTrigue SalesPro.

These tools improve sales efficiency and productivity by giving sales reps crucial real-time sales intelligence, eliminating the need for wasting time and energy on cold calls and on cold leads, enabling sales reps to know which prospect is ready to buy and making sure every sales rep/lead interaction is relevant and timely.

The IDC Sales Enablement presentation from last year still is very relevant today, and is one of my favorite tools for demonstrating why sales enablement tools are so important in the B2B space.

When asked about their relationship with sales reps, buyers said that the most important area where sales reps need to know more in order to improve the relationship between buyer and vendor is the buyer’s needs and objectives:

Adding that sales reps need to “put aside the generic pitch”:

Think about it for a moment, even in terms of your own interactions as a buyer in your own life. When someone is trying to sell you something, is there anything more annoying than the seller starting off with some generic pitch that obviously has nothing to do with you and with your own needs? There’s no bigger turnoff for a buyer than to get the feeling that someone is trying to sell them something without explaining why it is relevant to them, and this is true in any sales situation.

Of course, to be able to put side the generic pitch and sell a product based on the benefits it offers a specific customer, the sales rep must be familiar with that customer and have an insight into what they really need. Sales effectiveness can’t be achieved without the sales force having access to relevant, timely information about prospects and their needs. Generic pitches and cold calls are a huge waste of time and greatly reduce the sales organization’s effectiveness.

Arming your sales force with the insight needed to make a timely connection with a prospect and to offer them relevant information that answers their specific needs rather than using a generic pitch is not an easy task. Implementing a marketing automation system, or a more compact and affordable sales enablement solution, is in fact the only way to achieve buyer-seller alignment, using tools such as trackable emails, prospect activity tracking, and real-time lead alerts. The goal: get to know your prospects better and approach them when they are ready, with a sales pitch tailored to their needs, putting aside that annoying generic pitch.

One valid question is, how can they afford NOT to use marketing automation, when managing email campaigns manually is so time consuming and costly in terms of manpower, of inevitable mistakes, and especially in terms of losing prospects because you were unable to give them what they were looking for – timely, relevant messages?

Having said that, we are very aware of the fact that the economy is still recovering, and that marketing organizations in smaller companies may have a hard time getting the budget they need to purchase a full-fledged marketing automation system such as eTrigue Professional.

That’s why we came up with our unique sales enablement solution, eTrigue SalesPro. The idea is to give sales organizations everything they need to effectively communicate with prospects, without forcing companies to invest in fully automating their marketing. We wanted a sales enablement tool that unlike others on the market is not just an add-on to an existing marketing automation system, forcing you to pay the full price tag for marketing automation before your sales rep can enjoy the sales enablement benefits.

Creating a separate sales acceleration system makes automation easy for companies, because the cost is so affordable. Later on, it’s easy to upgrade to a full marketing automation system. So we’ve essentially lowered the entry level for sales acceleration and have enabled smaller companies, and smaller organizations within larger companies, to enjoy its benefits.

The benefits are many.

Sales acceleration in general achieves two important goals: better communication within the company between sales and marketing organizations (also known as marketing and sales alignment); and better communication between sales reps and prospects. Both significantly improve the performance of your sales organization.

SalesPro in particular, despite its affordability, is extremely useful to sales reps. It presents them with a very detailed view of potential leads. Unlike other Sales Enablement tools on the market, eTrigue SalesPro doesn’t just capture website visitors, then email their info to Sales. SalesPro can score and qualify leads, then send out email alerts to sales reps when a lead meets a minimum threshold that was previously determined by marketing and sales. The alerts are full of useful information, including the scores and the reasons behind them, and account and buyer activity. All this information is presented in an easy-to-read format, enabling the sales rep to make an informed decision and to follow up with the prospect, if appropriate, from within Salesforce.com.

IDC defines sales enablement as “The delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time and in the right place, to assist in moving a specific sales opportunity forward.” A pretty basic idea, yet mostly unattainable without automation, and – up until eTrigue salesPro – only attainable when paying the hefty price tag of a full marketing automation system.

The benefits of fully automating your marketing are clear. Marketing automation solutions enable you to market – and to sell – more efficiently and effectively. You can automate your email campaigns, personalize them, tailor them to each prospect’s pain points, level of interest and readiness, and have sales follow up with prospects that are ready to buy – and only with them.

In the B2B space, where highly informed buyers set a leisurely pace for their buying process, NOT automating your marketing efforts is time-consuming, expensive, and can result in serious, costly marketing mistakes.

But what if you’re a young company with a tight budget and simply can’t afford to fully automate your marketing at this point? Since we know that full Marketing Automation can be difficult for early-stage startups, we came up with an affordable package that doesn’t require the deployment of a full Marketing Automation platform and helps sales reps identify and prioritize prospects and close more deals – all from within Salesforce CRM.

SalesPro is a unique stand-alone sales acceleration tool. It’s easy, fast and affordable, yet it gives sales pros everything they need to identify and focus on the prospects that are ready to buy.

Trackable emails
SalesPro enables sales reps to send unlimited trackable emails from Salesforce CRM. They can choose from pre-defined templates, add personalization, and of course track who’s opening the emails and clicking on the links.

Web tracking
SalesPro enables sales reps to know which prospects visit your site and what they’re reading, and to track prospects’ visits’ frequency and duration. This is one of the best ways to identify which prospects are ready to buy.

Real-time lead alerts
Real-time lead alerts are sent to sale reps whenever a prospect visits the web site or opens an email. Sales reps can quickly glance at the prospect’s web activity history and scoring and, where appropriate, immediately follow up with them.

The ultimate goal of sales acceleration tools is to give sales reps the information they need about prospects, so that they can avoid wasting their time and energy on cold calls, and focus instead on “warm” calls to interested prospects.

While fully automating your marketing will bring you a significant, measurable return on your investment, we developed SalesPro to make automation more accessible to smaller organizations with tight budgets. The beauty of SalesPro lies in its accessibility, its affordability and in the fact that it gives sales pros exactly what they need to sell intelligently without wasting their time chasing unqualified prospects.

eTrigue SalesPro is ideal for companies who need the powerful email and web tracking, real-time Lead Alerts and sales intelligence of a marketing automation platform, but lack the resources to launch a full online marketing program. When your company is ready to take your demand generation program to the next level, eTrigue SalesPro is fully compatible with our Marketing Automation solution, eTrigue Professional^TM.

We have to agree with Laura Ramos of Forrester: sales enablement tools became all the rage in 2009. The recession, which forced marketing organizations to attempt to become efficient and accountable, highlighted the importance of monitoring pipeline health and of efficient, targeted lead generation processes. What’s more, it has become obvious that marketing and sales need to work together if lead generation is ever going to become a truly efficient process.

Why do other Sales Enablement tools force you to buy the kitchen sink?

Not all sales enablement tools are created equal, of course. Most tools on the market are add-ons to existing marketing automation suites. This means that companies are forced to invest in an expensive, full marketing automation solution before they can add on the sales enablement tool.

But what if you don’t have the budget to fully automate your marketing? These systems are expensive, and with the economy still in recovery, many businesses that desperately need to automate their lead scoring, monitoring and nurturing simply cannot afford to spend so much.

SalesPro: an affordable stand-alone Sales Enablement tool

eTrigue SalesPro was created to address this need for highly targeted yet affordable sales automation. This sales enablement application is unique because it is a stand-alone tool that does not force you to spend on a full marketing automation system. Yet, despite its affordability, it presents sales teams with a very detailed view of potential leads.

In addition to eTrigue SalesPro , eTrigue also offers a marketing automation platform – eTrigue Professional. eTrigue Professional and eTrigue SalesPro can either work solo, or combined. Unlike our competitors, you don’t have to deploy a full-blown Marketing Automation platform to use the sales enablement application. But when you are ready, both eTrigue SalesPro and eTrigue Professional work together seamlessly within minutes.

Encouraging marketing and sales alignment

Unlike other Sales Enablement tools on the market, eTrigue SalesPro doesn’t just capture Web site visitors, then email their info to Sales. SalesPro can score and qualify leads, then send out email alerts to sales reps when a lead meets a minimum threshold that was previously determined by marketing and sales.

Which brings us to another reason companies love eTrigue SalesPro: it enables and encourages (maybe even forces!) alignment between marketing and sales efforts, an important key to true marketing efficiency.

Enabling Sales to make informed decisions

We said it before: the last thing sales reps need is to waste their time calling cold prospects. That’s why eTrigue SalesPro does so much more than send short email alerts whenever a lead visits the site.

eTrigue SalesPro automatically creates lead routing rules to provide real-time lead alerts based on identified prospects and their activities. It can also be set to send alerts based on prospect scoring and on specific campaign activity, so that sales reps receive alerts when a lead has met certain scores. The alerts are chock full of useful information: they present the scores and the reasons behind them, along with account and buyer activity. All this information is presented in an easy-to-read format, enabling the sales rep to make an informed decision.

If the sales rep chooses to pursue the lead, she can continue communicating with the lead from within Salesforce.com, using email templates that were prepared and approved by Marketing (did we say alignment?) and that nurture and track the activity.

eTrigue SalesPro is a compact, affordable package, perfect for firms that while not yet ready for full marketing automation solutions, are looking to encourage alignment between marketing and sales efforts, and to improve their pipeline health and their lead nurturing process. It also works beautifully for companies who are already running eTrigue Professional marketing automation solution, but want to implement eTrigue SalesPro to empower their sales team to customize, personalize, and take control of separate initiatives while ensuring that marketing has control of the message.

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.