Sales Management

Taking your sales processes to the next level with marketing automation

Taking your sales processes to the next level with marketing automation

84% of b2b customer inquiries fail to convert. Why? 

A report by the Aberdeen Group tells us that 84% of inquiries that businesses receives will not convert to a sale. These inquiries are usually expensive, you've paid out marketing budget for Google Adwords, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter campaigns. 

So what's the problem and how can you fix this? 

How to make 'Lead Nurturing' work for your sales team

How to make 'Lead Nurturing' work for your sales team

We're doing a lot of work with Pardot (the Salesforce marketing automation software) at the moment. We think Pardot is a fantastic solution, but I'm not going to talk about it (much) in this article. Instead, I want to talk about the piece of our sales and marketing efforts that most of us ignore, the middle of the sales funnel. I think that if companies here in Dubai concentrate a little more effort in nurturing the middle of the funnel sales opportunities that they can enjoy a 10% to 20% increase in revenue within three months. The Pardot marketing automation application provides all the tools needed to convert this unrealised pipeline.

Why's this so interesting? Well, let's consider the two ends of the sales funnel that we all tend to pay most attention to, the top end where the inbound marketing effort creates new leads and inquiries, and the bottom end where the sales team are working hard to convert the opportunities into closed sales.

Learning from lost deals with Salesforce CRM

Learning from lost deals with Salesforce CRM

The only thing that's worse than losing a deal, is losing a deal and not learning anything from it. For sales professionals lost deals are a part of the job, and for the most part, we take it in our stride. From a business perspective, there's still a lot of value in these deals that need to be captured and evaluated. Some of the best sales-orientated companies that we have worked with take a rigorous approach to capturing and categorising each deal that they don't win. When Tenacre implements Salesforce CRM Dubai, we always add a feature that requires the salesperson to add more information to the record when they are closing an Opportunity as 'Closed Lost'. This information isn't to drag the sales staff over the coals, but to ensure that each of our clients are capturing and evaluating this valuable information.

Here's how why you should start evaluating each lost deal, and some tip's on how to start this process off.

60-seconds health check for your sales process

60-seconds health check for your sales process

As an owner of an SME, sometimes we don't have the time or headspace to stop and think about how we manage the sales process in our business. Very often we do things because that's the way we've always done it, right?

Take 60 seconds to think about how you manage sales in your business. Here's some ideas to get you thinking.