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I manage a group of people whose roles and responsibilities have changed often and dramatically over the past two years. Responding to changes in our approach, in our products, and in the market we work in, the team looks very different now than it did in 2009.

Sound familiar?

As economic uncertainty has become the new normal globally, every company has had to reconfigure or face extinction.  Simply “good enough” is no longer good enough.  Luckily, at a small, growing company like enter:marketing, change is the name of the game.

When I first joined enter:marketing, enter:techconnect, the team I head up, was only two guys and a pair of phones.  We were working out how telemarketing could be leveraged most effectively in our direct mail campaigns.  A few months after, we were sorting out the finer details of how techconnect could best usher meetings to our clients all the way from qualifying to purchasing.  Now two years later, the team is building lists, qualifying prospects, managing events, and compiling reports.  And we tweak our processes every day.

The key is to never consider your system a finished product.  The needs of your market are never static, so why ever settle on just one approach?  By staying open to new ideas and constantly critiquing our results, techconnect keeps improving.  The economy will some day be better, but a core practice of tireless invention and self-improvement brings results no matter what the economic climate.

Conventional wisdom holds that approaching a net-net prospect is a balancing game: desire to maximize your exposure to the prospect, versus fear of turning the prospect away with a barrage of contact. It’s a tough position; there’s no one right way, since the ideal balance is different for every situation.

At techconnect, we specialize in one very common situation: after contact with a prospect has been made, but before a meeting has taken place. Many people in sales essentially view this period as a void -maybe some research into the prospect, some pre-meeting game planning, but mostly just a lot of waiting for the meeting time to roll around. The old balancing game is prominent in the mind of the salesperson: you’ve already made direct contact with the customer in securing the meeting, and the worry is that further contact before the agreed-upon meeting date would make the customer feel harassed, blowing any opportunity before you even get to meet.

Basically, I think this concern is overrated. It’s not repeated contact customers dislike, but contentless contact. Anybody would be turned off by receiving the same information over and over, but we find that sending customers new, pertinent information in advance of a meeting (say in the form of a whitepaper on their stated interest, or a background on your company, or even a simple introduction to your tech team) not only reinforces the purpose and value of the upcoming meeting to a prospect, it also conveys that you are on the ball and genuinely interested in speaking. Where there is contact between the prospect and the sales rep before the meeting time, we not only see a higher rate of meetings transacting at their first scheduled time, but also higher quality opportunities being uncovered.

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Sound familiar? It’s an all too-common frustration for salespeople. You’ve had a meeting on your calendar for weeks. You’ve done your research on the company, secured technical resources for the discussion, and gameplanned the dialog perfectly. Then the day before (or better yet, the morning of) the meeting, your customer asks to reschedule.

We see this every day at enter:techconnect. Sometimes the customer’s wrapped up in a project, sometimes the kids need to be driven to school, sometimes there’s no explanation at all. Those resources will have to be re-secured, and that gameplan for the meeting will have to be shelved for now. It’s always frustrating, but after years of experience and thousands of meetings coordinated, it rarely comes as a surprise to the TechConnect team.

The people we target are high-level IT decision-makers. Their responsibilities are numerous, crises are common in their work lives, and many of them manage multiple sites. All are extremely busy. While most people who request meetings through our services do have a strong, genuine interest in meeting to discuss their IT plans and challenges, its not unreasonable that an unexpected circumstance would preempt a first (or even second) scheduled meeting time. Read the rest of this entry »