Professional Services Leadership, Marketing & Rainmaking
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According to a recent study conducted by RainToday.com and ITSMA, nearly 70% of the 859 service and marketing professionals surveyed said they plan to increase their lead generation budgets. Only 3% indicate that they’ll spend less on lead generation. That means 97% believe they’ll spend the same or more.
If you think the competition is tough right now for winning every new client, have a look at this chart. First, try not to have a heart attack; then consider what this means.
Until a little while ago, social media was an experiment. Will it work? Will it make a difference?
In 1995, so was that Worldwide Interweb thing. Not so much anymore.
Same goes for social media. We’re currently making the transition from if to why and how.
According to a recent study by Business.com, webinars and podcasts are the number one and number two social media resources that North American business professionals turn to to get what they need (advice, tips, etc.) to do their job. And a lot of people now, people with decision making positions, are included in that group.
Let’s take a closer look.
We’re always trying to get in front of the decision maker, many of whom are C-level executives. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been told that C-level executives don’t search online, don’t spend time in social media, and don’t do their own product, service, or company research on the web. Perhaps they’ll make a cursory glance at your website to see if you exist, but beyond that, some underling is doing the research for them. If they’re doing research at all. Right?
When it comes to business-to-business purchases, few buyers are willing to take chances on new providers, according to a recent survey of 3,600 B2B buyers conducted by Enquiro.
When it comes to cost per sales lead, inbound marketing channels continue to deliver dramatically lower costs over outbound channels. In fact, organizations that primarily use inbound channels experience a 60% lower cost per lead than those that mainly use outbound channels, according to HubSpot’s The State of Inbound Marketing 2010.
As we’ve mentioned here on the Services Marketing Blog before, between 40% to 80% of leads are dropped. For over a decade now it’s been within reach of services firms to automate lead flow to make sure leads don’t leak out of the pipeline. But in the last few years, the lead management automation tools have come a long way.
Indeed, best-in-class businesses that employ automated tools are seeing a significant return on their investments.
Professional services firms are rarely referred to as having “sales organizations.” But we can learn a lot from those that have them.
If sales organizations want to succeed, they must employ a combination of sales technologies. Using such technologies allows sales and marketing people to gather, and share, more information about their prospects and clients and gives them more ammunition to get the job done, according to Aberdeen’s report Sales Intelligence: Preparing for Smarter Selling.
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