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Category: Blog

The Importance of Training When Developing High Performance Teams

Posted on by Doug Roots

When it comes to training, I have often found that the main objection I’m met with is cost and the potential loss of investment – “what happens if we train our staff and they leave?” My response… what happens if we don’t and they stay?”

Yes, training can be expensive and in businesses, people come and go. However, if the training is right, the relevant benefits far outweigh the cost. Training is vital in the workplace as it aids both personal and company growth. Training also makes employees feel valued and invested in, resulting in a happy environment and increased productivity.

Training can benefit company growth in numerous ways:

  • Best practice: Training expands the knowledge base of all employees within a company. By sharing best practice within the company, all employees understanding of procedures and processes and how to deliver a high standard of quality, can then be replicated daily and maintained throughout the entire team.
  • Consistency: Best practice goes hand-in-hand with consistency. With constant and relevant training from day one, all employees should receive a solid foundation of knowledge, which can then be built upon. With this foundation, all employees will possess the tools and knowledge to carry out and deliver work of the same outstanding standard and quality. 
  • Motivation: It is important to keep employees motivated as it has a direct effect on productivity. An increase in motivation will directly increase the productivity of employees and their overall performance as well as that of a team. In turn, this will generate more return on investment (ROI) for the client and the company, representing the importance of investing time and resources into training.
  • Employee satisfaction: Morale is high when productivity and performance throughout the company are strong. This coupled with personal achievements brings employee satisfaction, whereby employees are happy and feel valued, in turn they perform well. It’s a full circle that all stems from and starts with training.
  • Weak areas: Identifying and addressing weaknesses in a company presents the opportunity to carry out refresher training or upskill sessions to educate and share knowledge. This ensures that everyone is comfortable in what is required from them and the level of performance is once again maintained.
  • Collaboration: We all know that ‘two heads are better than one’. It makes sense then to share knowledge and experience, both within specific teams as well as between them. Coming together to help one another, as well as bringing different perspectives and opinions can sometimes be beneficial for everyone involved and helps to present various aspects of the company in various ways. This can be a training lead collaboration, whereby everyone can learn and benefit while also feeling like they have a voice.
  • Reduced employee turnover: When employees receive the relevant and correct amount of training, they should feel more comfortable and confident in the workplace being able to carry out all aspects of their role with ease. Thus, reducing anxiety, unhappiness and a desire to leave the company.

Training doesn’t always need to be delivered in-house. At times it is necessary to seek out external guidance and assistance. External training really helps with:

  • Access to expertise: When specific training is required, it is always best to go directly to the source and get the experts in, as they will know all the relevant information and the current tips and techniques being utilised and will be able to share best practice.
  • Fresh look: External trainers may be able to provide valuable insight into inefficiencies within the company and help us to see opportunities for improvement that we could implement smoothly and efficiently. By bringing in an outside view, they can suggest changes that we may have otherwise not been aware of or thought of.
  • Stretching our comfort zone: External trainers who are new to the business get employees stepping outside of their comfort zones immediately, as someone new is around.

When our comfort zones are stretched, we find it fosters creativity making us more flexible and adaptable to unexpected change. It also motivates us and increases our overall productivity and performance.

So, if you’re considering implementing a training programme for your team, give it a go, you’ll only know once you try – ‘the proof is in the pudding’ so to speak.

Opinion Piece by Nicolette Karides, Learning and Development Coordinator at Air Marketing.

Digital Lead Generation: Are you using it?

Posted on by dukadmin

We live in a digital world where browsing the internet, especially social media, on a daily basis undeniably shapes and influences our lives. As marketeers, we have the power to use social media to make a significant difference to business performance – not only in the soft, traditional sense of building brand awareness but by Digital Lead gen – generating valuable marketing qualified leads.

Leads are a form of data identifiable through unique information such as a name, email address or phone number. Generating these leads is a primary goal of sales-driven businesses, aiming to maximise the amount of people from their target audience in their sales funnel. Leads tend to enter the funnel fairly cold and, once sent information that is relevant and of interest to them, alongside conversations are nurtured through to encourage conversion.

In this blog we discover why so many businesses use digital lead generation and provide you with our top 10 tips for success.

Why so many businesses use digital lead generation:

A high number of quality leads: Intelligent audience targeting and geotargeting combined with a vast number of users means that with the right content and budget, this type of marketing activity is an effective way to generate a high number of quality leads. What more could you want?

Cost-effective: With most social media lead generation activity on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis, you only pay for activity. This is a great way to easily manage your budget and monitor spend against return-on-investment (ROI).

To track conversions: By integrating social media accounts with your CRM, you can track where your converted leads have come from and use this information to inform ROI. Real-time delivery of results also means that you can engage with leads immediately.

Optimisation: As changes to most social media channel algorithms now make it difficult to gain organic reach, businesses are always on the look out for other ways to optimise their social media accounts – paid activity is a fantastic way to do so. Additionally, being relatively easy to monitor and report, digital lead generation can be optimised through A/B testing to ensure budgets are efficiently spent on the best performing ads or LinkedIn InMail messages.

Top 10 tips for success:

  1. Implement persona marketing to refine your target market.
  2. Use visual content and copy that is relevant and interesting to your target audience.
  3. Produce gated content (e.g. whitepapers, case studies, vlogs, infographics, webinars) and email opt-ins to capture lead data.
  4. Include a call-to-action, directing leads to take actions that are going to be of value (e.g. form completion).
  5. Consider what activities you are going to do to directly remarket to your leads and nurture them through the sales funnel (e.g. email marketing, direct mail, telemarketing and appointment setting).
  6. Allow activity to run for 2 weeks, then set aside time in your schedule to regularly review and optimise.
  7. Mix-up your strategy – use paid activity to complement organic outbound and inbound social activities.
  8. Find and engage directly with leads on social media.
  9. Stay up to date with the latest social media trends and channel updates – implement them to stay ahead of the game.
  10. Outsource to the experts.

Is digital lead generation a part of your marketing strategy? Understanding your business aims, marketing goals and sales objectives, the Roots to Market team can help you shape your digital marketing to get the most out of your investment. We will advise you on the best strategy for your target market and your budget. Schedule a call with us to learn more: 01392 796 702 or email contact@roots2market.co.uk

Persona Marketing: Who are you talking to?

Posted on by dukadmin

Defining a target audience is simply a must for business success. But to stand out and produce a pipeline that delivers, it is wise to further refine your audience using persona marketing.

By implementing persona marketing, you allow yourself the opportunity to refine your audience into key segments creating ‘characters’. The way that each ‘character’ or persona experiences your brand will be influenced by their business needs, industry and of course, their demographics.

Getting to know your target audience in this way is a powerful tool that helps shape your marketing strategy. If you’re consistently generating unqualified leads from outside of your target audience, or your leads aren’t being generated at the rate they’re forecast to, it is likely your messaging is too generic. Persona marketing is a well developed technique best placed to help you meet and exceed lead generation and conversion targets.

What can persona marketing help with?

  • Lead Generation: Identify with your audience and get to know them better – making them easier to target and tailor messaging.
  • Lead Nurturing: Produce specific strategic content that appeals to your target audience to warm them along your sales pipeline.
  • Client Satisfaction & Retention: Meet their goals and solve their challenges.
  • Strengthened Strategy: Enhance overall marketing and sales performance.

Getting started:
Begin with a small number of personas and branch out as your original personas become more refined and sophisticated. Between 3 and 5 personas usually provide an accurate representation of the majority of your core audience, although it’s not unusual for large, complex businesses with a diverse product or service portfolio to develop up to 20 personas.

Using a template will help you to structure your personas into clear and concise sections. We recommend using:

  • Name
    – Say hello to Justin, Gary, Francis and Elizabeth – the persona names of our sister brand, Air Marketing. Gone are the days of simply numbering your personas… be creative (but realistic) and bring your persona to life by referring to them in conversation, email and strategy planning as their name.
  • Job title
    – Setting a brief job title or business area alongside professional seniority informs interest, goals, frustrations and decision-making ability.
  • Company
    – It may be useful for your business to define a company or industry to inform interest, goals and frustrations.
  • Demographics
    – Use gender, age, income/salary, family, location and education to learn about what influences your target audience.
  • Background
    – Role, decision-making ability, motivations, loyalty and professional interests.
  • Previous experience
    – Educational experience and career path.
  • Personality
    – Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
  • Goals
    – Career goals, company goals, targets and responsibilities.
  • Expectations
    – Expectations, values and ability to influence.
  • Frustrations
    – Frustrations and restrictions.
  • Social
    – Interests in social media, digital content, events, education, professional development and purchase behaviour.
  • Spare time
    – Interests in music, sport, TV, travel and socialising.

A persona template can initially be optimised by considering core areas of your marketing activities. For example, if you use social media and/or print advertising, for each persona include what social media platforms they use and what publications they are likely to read.

Collecting data:
Team Meeting: Meet with team members who have regular interaction with clients. Knowing your clients best, your team can provide valuable insights, each with different perspectives. As a group, put yourselves in the shoes of clients so that you can fully immerse yourself in characterising them into personas.

Client Interviews & Surveys: Discuss with your team which clients may be open to participating in an interview or survey. If you prepare questions around your persona template, client interviews are a brilliant way to discover in-depth qualitative data.

Data Review: Reviewing analytics and lead scoring (if implemented), will provide quantitative data about the audience and leads currently being generated. This activity is useful if you are happy with the quality of leads but you are aiming to increase the number generated.

Market Research: If you’re working in a start-up, lacking raw able data or unable to reach out to existing clients, we recommend using reliable market research. Using market research alongside other data collection methods is an optimal mix for highly informed and accurate personas.

Implementation:
Consider personas throughout your marketing activity:

  • Demand generation
    – Target the right people in the right place at the right time. This will allow you to better meet client needs and generate marketing qualified leads (MQLs) with a clear website user journey including relevant landing pages, call-to-actions and forms.
  • Marketing strategy and planning
    – Help shape strategy by determining a focus point for all marketing activity and attract more of those types of clients.
  • Digital marketing
    – Easily analyse your campaigns – identify the best performing channels and platforms for your personas and use results to intelligently target prospects.
  • Direct marketing
    – Start conversations with valuable marketing qualified leads (MQLs) via telemarketing, direct mail or direct email campaigns.
  • Content creation
    – Blogs, articles, infographics, photos, videos, vlogs, podcasts and brochures are proven to increase lead generation and engagement if implemented effectively. Consider where content is broadcast, how it is used and change topics as new trends arise.

Optimisation:
We are all striving to continuously improve our business activities and make the most out of our opportunities. Take your persona marketing to the next level by:

  • Testing and analysing to refine messaging and sharpen targeting.
  • Reviewing on an annual basis, or ad hoc, when your target audience focus shifts to accelerate results.
  • Using information to brief sales teams and outsourced telemarketers (see our sister company Air Marketing) for lead nurturing and conversion conversations.
  • Produce negative personas to segment out ‘undesirable’ clients and avoid resource waste.

Reflecting on your own business and target audience, think about the quality and quantity of leads that you are generating, as well as the individuals that you are talking to. Are you consistently talking to your ideal clients?

If you think that your marketing could be improved through the implementation of personas, we would love to hear from you! Here at Roots to Market, we are driven by building intelligent marketing capabilities that generate demand and marketing qualified leads. Call 01392 796 702 or email contact@roots2market.co.uk

What should you consider when outsourcing your sales and marketing activity?

Posted on by Doug Roots

For any business looking to raise brand awareness and encourage growth, a strong sales team will quickly become your best friend. But the world of sales is vastly different to what it was a couple of decades ago, the traditional hard sales tactic simply won’t work anymore. In order to reach and nurture your prospects through to close, you need to pair your sales with targeted marketing activity and offer a consultative, expert approach. So, what should you consider when outsourcing your sales and marketing activity?

For any company looking to drive ROI and gain traction, we know that there are 3 key things to consider when outsourcing your sales and marketing activity:

Data

Whilst you may be tempted to jump in, buy data and begin calling, it is vital that you take the time to work out what specific data you want using market segmentation, i.e. industry, company size, geography, etc. In narrowing down your data, based on your target audience, your efforts are more likely to hit home and lead to conversions. With data, cleansing is key for a more personalised, targeted sales and marketing campaign – at the end of the day, no one likes, or should receive, spam.

Once your sales team have the data, we suggest that your marketing team run an introductory email pre-calling and use the report from this to further guide your sales calls, generating Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). For example, did people unsubscribe, open the email, or click on the content within it? In raising awareness pre and post dialling, you are more likely to see engagement with your initial and further calls – for one client, we saw a 20% increase in engagement by accompanying our dialling with an email campaign from Roots. This also works in reverse, it is vital that you use the data from your calls and feed it back to your marketing team, in doing so the data can be put to use in a nurture stream, further assisting the close of your sales.

Dialler and Pitch

Once you have quality data, and your sales team are ready to begin dialling, it is vital that they are prepared. As we’ve mentioned, the hard sales tactic simply doesn’t work anymore, especially if you’re selling high value products/services. Instead, people want to talk to an expert and be guided through the sales journey.

With this in mind, it is vital that you outsource your sales and marketing to a team/s that place an importance on training, everyone involved should have in-depth knowledge of your product/service, industry and target audience. At Air we place an importance on dialler training and encourage our clients to come to the office and assist in the training of our team, after all no one knows your business and it’s aims like you do.

From this training, our diallers will be well versed in the tone and insights needed to pitch your business in an optimal way. We don’t want our diallers to sound like robots, so we avoid implementing a strict script, however we know that our diallers need to pitch themselves as the expert in order to sell well.

We believe that through the perfect combination of data, dialler & pitch, even can make even the most difficult campaign successful.

Integration

At Air, we are lucky to have the services of an intelligent marketing team, our sister company Roots to Market, in house and fully at our disposal. If there’s one thing we’ve refined since Roots was established, it’s integration and we feel that we have now achieved that magic mix of sales and marketing.

In order to fully service our clients to the best of our abilities, we know that we all need to be working from the same page. Communication is key and both sales and marketing need to be involved at every stage, from strategy planning, to technology implementation and campaign start.

With any campaign, regular reporting and campaign catch ups should be in place to ensure that both teams are working to a common goal and completely understand how each team is working to meet your qualifying criteria. There should also be complete transparency with yourself, with sales and marketing both reporting back to you on campaign progression.

If you are considering working with a fully integrated, intelligent outsourced sales and marketing team, get in touch. Call: 0345 241 3038 or email: contact@air-marketing.co.uk

Phone appointments vs face to face: Which is better?

Posted on by Doug Roots

Sales appointments play a crucial part in the sales journey, giving your sales reps the opportunity to further develop relationships with prospects and encourage them further along the sales cycle, towards the point of closing the sale. But which is better, phone appointments or face-to-face?

We’ve booked thousands of appointments for clients, across an array of different industries, both over the phone and face-to-face. Based on their experience, our expert Sales Directors feel that you should always strive to organise a face-to-face appointment.

We’ve listed their top three reasons to schedule a face-to-face appointment:

  1. Higher uptake/contact rate

The world of business is a busy one, with schedules changing on a daily basis, even hourly, and unexpected tasks popping up. With this in mind, your prospects could find it tempting to ask their gatekeeper to hold their calls and deliver the all too familiar line;

“Sorry, they’re busy at the moment, could you send over some information?”

However, if you’re already sat in reception, or they’ve come to meet you, the meeting becomes harder to reschedule and ignore, so you’re therefore more likely to make immediate contact with your prospect.

  1. Body language

A good sales professional will be able to read people and assess whether or not they are truly interested in a product/service quickly, in order to avoid wasting time on unqualified leads. Whilst it is possible to gauge a prospect’s degree of interest over the phone, there is more value in getting in a room with someone and paying attention to their body language – do they seem open or guarded, do they look bored or alert? And this works both ways, whilst sales calls, for some, are the bread and butter of being a sales professional, they can take their toll throughout the day. Removing yourself from the phone and offering a face-to-face appointment can let your prospect gauge your body language too and determine your investment in what you are selling.

  1. Engagement

If the prospect is not directly in front of you, it’s impossible to know how well they are actually engaging with your conversation. Whilst they may say all of the right things or appear to be listening, they could also be answering emails, texting, or being distracted by their surroundings. If you want to truly engage your prospect and build a relationship based on rapport and trust, it is far better to organise a face-to-face appointment and talk directly to them.

Got a question about how to fill your diary with quality, face-to-face sales appointments? Give us a call on 0345 241 3038 or email contact@air-marketing.co.uk

It is just a job, or it is a culture?

Posted on by dukadmin

What is the best thing about your job?

A fairly common question, asked by relatives, friends, new employees during an interview process. The answer, well my answer, is not normally based on the actual delivery of the job but more around the culture.

When you break the concept of work down, no matter who you are or what you’re doing, I can almost guarantee nobody likes the concept. You spend the majority of your life, typically working at least 8 hours per day, 5 out of 7 days per week. Within this you commute, you work hard, you may interact with people who may not be the characters you’d typically choose to spend time with and then you cram the rest of your life into the time you aren’t working.

Crazy when you break it down isn’t it! But we live in a world where we have to work to earn money to enjoy the ‘rest of our life’ segment.

So, for me, essentially culture is the difference between making work bearable, enjoyable, giving some meaning to all those hours, or not!

For both me and for Roots as a business (and part of the wider Air Marketing) culture is key.

Culture is the feeling that you get when you walk into the office, the relationships you build within the team and the support offered from those relationships. We want people to enjoy coming into work, into a thriving, high-performance, motivated environment. Having experienced workplaces where culture was never considered, where environments were tense and going into work was anything but enjoyable – I don’t want Team Roots to experience that. Of course, that doesn’t mean we eat cake, finish early or slack off daily, but what it does mean is that we have established some core aspects of our culture which our team can rely on including:

  • Quarterly and yearly performance-based treat outings
  • Idea brewing sessions – allowing everyone to be heard and new ideas to be brought to the table
  • Friday end of day catch up meetings over a little tipple
  • Monthly one-to-ones, no matter how long someone has been part of the business
  • Monthly try something new Tuesdays as a team outside of work
  • And much more…

You see our service is delivered by our team, so to get the most out of our team culture is key which in turn delivers even better results for our clients. It’s win-win with a happy, motivated team and happy clients.

In my eyes, it should never be just a job – you are investing precious time into this job which you can never get back – make it mean something.

Opinion piece by Verity Wootton, Associate Director

Content Marketing: How to make the most out of your blog

Posted on by dukadmin

Content marketing is a softer way to get your product or service in front of your prospects and there is perhaps no easier way to do this than through a company blog.

A blog allows you to share your company story, news, insights and industry relevant opinion pieces. When done well, they can provide an informative platform & wealth of knowledge, that your prospects can dip into and learn from, when in the awareness stage of your sales pipeline and beyond. They allow you to position yourself as the expert who can be relied upon from a distance, this is beneficial as often prospects aren’t committed to having an initial in-depth conversation with you, they are still getting to know you, your business and your offering.

However, there are many traps that companies fall into when they first begin pushing out content. We’ve outlined a few below and given some hints and tips to avoiding making the same mistakes:

  1. You post irrelevant content

Your prospects have clicked onto your blog for information about your product or service and how it can help them. It is therefore essential that your blog doesn’t ramble off down multiple tangents but provides them with information that is valuable and informative. Prospects don’t want to sift through endless content to find the answers that they need, they should be able to click on a blog and know that it will be relevant to them. The rule of thumb? Whilst you may have insightful opinions about every aspect of life, unless it is directly beneficial to your prospects needs, it’s best to keep them to yourself.

The solution: create a monthly content schedule and align it to the benefits/attributes of your product or service, or new campaigns/products that you are rolling out. For example, if you own a B2B telemarketing company, focus on generating B2B leads one month and then build on this by following on the next month with a blog on Inside Sales to manage the leads generated.

  1. Your personality falls flat

When writing a blog post it is vital that some personality from your business shines through and, importantly, that this personality is one which is relevant to and appeals to your prospects and clients. By this we don’t mean that you should have a joke a minute to make them laugh, but that the language, form and style you use is reflective for your organisation and its goals and values. Is your brand quirky, funny, informative or formal, for example? Understanding this is key to ensuring your personality resonates with prospects and helps you to sell your product or service.

The solution: There is a two-pronged approach for ensuring that your blog reflects a personality that sells your business. Step one is to ensure that you understand your business. This may sound obvious, but many organisations end up finding that their team don’t have a cohesive idea of the goals and values of the company, in turn having to re-evaluate these further down the line. Step two is to fully understand your target audience – how do they want to be spoken to, what appeals to them and what will make them want to get in touch and find out more?

  1. You don’t do your homework

If a prospect is looking at your blog, it is more than likely they have a need for your service/product, e.g. they are a new manager who is looking for a performance management tool to improve the engagement of their staff. With this in mind, they probably don’t have much more than a high-level awareness of what it is they need and are looking for someone to help them understand. If you want your prospects to take your brand seriously and value what you have to offer them, it is vital that you demonstrate that you know your industry and position yourself as an expert – a guiding hand there to help them reach their goals.

The Solution: Do your research. Make sure that you know the ins and outs of your industry and can point them towards various surveys, results or articles that highlight the importance and success of your product or service. If you don’t have any research material of your own, align your blog to industry leaders, sourcing their statistics in your blogs to back up your offering and demonstrate its value.

81% of B2B companies use blogging as a content marketing tactic, if you feel that your content marketing is lacking strong blogs and written content, get in touch today. Call us on 01392 796702 or email us at contact@roots2market.com

How do I generate more B2B leads?

Posted on by Doug Roots

Lead Generation is a key focus for many of our clients when they begin working with us – at the end of the day, without sales how will your business grow?

In order to keep your business afloat, your pipeline needs to be stocked with a healthy pool of leads that you can reach out to and convert into sales. Whilst you may be tempted to target as many potential prospects as you can with your offering, it is more often than not better to tread lightly, carrying out market research and using buyer personas to sketch out exactly what the best lead looks like to you. It is essential that leads are of a good quality, in line with your target audience and meeting your criteria – for us, and you, there should always be a focus on quality over quantity.

So, how do we go about generating quality B2B leads for our clients?

Integration is key

As an outsourced sales and Demand Generation partner, we are lucky enough to be able to work hand in hand with our sister company, Roots to Market. Our combined specialisms allow us to provide fully integrated sales and marketing services to our clients, helping them to generate qualified B2B leads.

When it comes to generating leads, we understand that cold calling prospects alone is not always the right approach. More often than not, the most effective method is an integrated sales and marketing approach. This involves rolling out Demand Generation campaigns before launching any outsourced sales calls, where Roots will create pre-call emails to introduce the brand and warm prospects, social media campaigns to generate opportunities through data capture and nurture email campaigns to support B2B leads through the sales pipeline.

Working with Roots, and utilising their Demand Generation expertise, we are able to score B2B leads as they work their way through the marketing and sales process. This intelligent approach allows us to gauge when it would be a good time to reach out to prospects with a call, based on how they interact with our clients marketing collateral, such as blogs, whitepapers, emails and adverts.

When a prospect reaches a score that our clients deem high enough to warrant a call, it shouldn’t feel out of the blue, as they will have already engaged with our clients offering in a number of ways, through the marketing activity – whether that’s downloading a white paper or completing a form fill on a social advert.

The human touch

Although our integrated approach allows us to reach prospects the more aware stage of the sales process, we understand the important role that a human voice still plays in what we do. In our digital world, it has never been more valuable and will ultimately be what closes the B2B lead into a sale.

Whilst prospects can find out much of what they need to know online, many B2B leads are looking for high value products or offerings that they need to discuss before making a purchase. In reaching out to the B2B leads generated with a call, our business development team are able to fully understand their needs or business pain points and discuss how our clients offering can help them to overcome these.

As opposed to chat bots or mass cold calls, our campaigns are based on personalised conversations which offer a consultative approach. When we call a prospect, we offer an ‘expert voice’ and we understand that these B2B leads may still not be ready to buy for a number of reasons – they may be tied into a contract with a competitor, for example.

When generating B2B leads, what is most important is that you get your product or service in front of prospects that have a genuine need or interest – which is why qualification criteria is so important. You need to qualify if they are right for you or whether to move on, as you may have thousands of leads but if they don’t 100% understand or have a need for the product, it isn’t worth spending the time talking to them when you could be closing sales with better qualified B2B leads.

If you feel that you could benefit from the services of our integrated team to generate you B2B leads, get in touch today. Call 0345 241 3038 or email contact@air-marketing.co.uk.

Sales, It’s not just a job…. It’s a lifestyle!

Posted on by Doug Roots

Being a Sales Professional requires not just a certain skillset, attitude or level of experience but an entire lifestyle, sense of dedication and a driven mindset.

It may surprise you but being a Sales Professional is not actually all about selling. Top performers don’t just sell, we build relationships and problem solve for our prospects and clients. We dedicate ourselves to building businesses one customer at a time and leverage our experience to help solve any challenges that may be impacting the progress of the next. To us, a problem is an opportunity to provide a solution, not a dead end!

We always put ourselves out there, ensuring that we have a presence in our prospects day to day lives. In order to be successful and progress sales, we show ourselves as the expert, the “go to” for guidance, regardless of whether that results in an immediate sale or not.

This presence can be developed through social media, networking, podcasts, cold calling, blogging, thought leadership or a combination of them all. It may take 1, 5, or even 10 years to build a relationship, but you can guarantee that the person we helped with no immediate benefit to ourselves will come back or refer our next potential customer.

At the end of the day, strong Sales Professionals will have a genuine interest in what we can do for someone else, as well as what they can do for us. More importantly, we’re proactive in helping them.

We never wait for a change in the economy, industry fortune or the circumstances of an inbound lead. Top sales performers are almost fanatical about our craft and we are constantly in preparation, plan and pipeline building mode.

In the words of Grant Cardone, “be obsessed!” There is no shame in following up with a prospect more than once, in fact it’s argued that an average prospect will need 8 touchpoints to convert. At the end of the day, a lost opportunity is lost ROI for ourselves and our clients. We hold ourselves accountable and set ourselves goals – our ambitions are always even higher than those set for us to ensure we always hit target.

As top performers, we hunt down those next opportunities and never give up. In a book I read recently, Richard Forrest, explains how opportunities are like icebergs – whilst 20% of buyers are already online, in buying mode, 80% of buyers are those that we must go and hunt down under the water line, unaware they even have a problem or maybe didn’t know there was an answer for the one they do. In order to reach that 80%, we have to pick up our spear (our phone), our shield (our objection handling) and hunt down that next opportunity.

Don’t be fooled, success is a long hunt and results don’t always come quickly. Top Sales Professionals dig and keep digging until we fully understand what a prospect needs, uncovering all of the issues and gathering the information that we need to make our solution a no brainer.

Opinion Piece by Simon Murthwaite, Leading Sales Director, Air Marketing Group

Integrated telemarketing campaigns – the boost your business needs

Posted on by Doug Roots

The development in internet technology means that businesses who are looking for a product or service to support their organisation no longer heavily rely on sales reps in the initial stages of the customer journey. In fact, 62% of prospects will use a search engine to learn more and, when asked, 57% of sales reps agreed that they are less dependent during the decision-making process compared to 2-3 years ago.

With everything online, why would busy business owners or purchasing managers answer a cold call? When we also consider that when many prospects think of telemarketing the first thoughts that spring to mind are double glazing sales and PPI calls, it’s not surprising that only 3% of them trust sales reps. But, when used well, and conducted correctly, telemarketing can still have a beneficial impact on the growth of your business.

So where can telemarketing help?

With prospects faced with a multitude of offers for similar products/services online, they are increasingly tough to crack and so in order to be successful, telemarketing is best used as part of an integrated sales and marketing campaign. Integration isn’t just a buzzword to throw around, it could be the difference between a dynamic sales pipeline and a static one.

By combining telemarketing with tactical sales and marketing activity, such as email marketing, direct mail, appointment setting, etc, you will be in a better place to build meaningful relationships with prospects. Prospects value interaction now more than ever, the traditional hard sales tactics don’t have a place in the sales industry today. Prospects are looking for someone to build rapport and guide them through the sales process as a trusted advisor, as opposed to a cold caller offering a hard sell.

It all boils down to demonstrating that you know your customer and that your call is there to help them and nurture a relationship. In many B2B industries, a prospect may require a demo or an appointment for further explanation, by having this as an option within your integrated telemarketing campaign, you will be able to better understand the needs of your lead and decide quickly whether they are in fact a qualified lead. 50% of your prospects aren’t actually a good fit for your product or service, so it is important that you use multiple touch points to find out as much about your prospects as you can.

With 9 in 10 companies using 2 or more lead enrichment tools, can you really afford to be the one that doesn’t?

At Air, we often talk about the ‘magic mix’ of sales and marketing and, working closely with our sister company Roots to Market, we have seen the rewards that an integrated approach can have for a whole range of B2B clients.

To find out more about our integrated telemarketing campaigns, get in touch today. Call 0345 241 3038 or email: contact@air-marketing.co.uk