Top Stories: February 13 – 19, 2010
February 19th, 2010 - Posted by Tim Freestone
Take control of your sales cycle: Meet your prospects ASAP: Since self-service information doesn’t always lead to the correct conclusions, as we discussed yesterday, your prospects need your help, whether they realize it or not. They need competent sales professionals and, at times, pre-sales engineers to walk them through the intricacies of a situation to ensure the right solutions are identified and implemented. Without this layer of support, IT buyers who are smart but pressed for time will not always plunge into the details, leaving major causal problems undiagnosed and, post-implementation, not remedied.
Five reasons to market using Twitter: Fifty-eight million people can’t be wrong. There are plenty of people who see the value in this social media platform, and they are casting votes with their personal and professional time. As a result, Twitter has become a robust marketing environment. Long seen as a consumer brand sector play, the potential of Twitter for promoting business solutions – including IT equipment, software and consulting – is quickly being realized.
Fill your IT marketing blog in five easy steps: The hardest part of maintaining a marketing blog is coming up with content … and producing it. Many attempts are abandoned simply because tier advocates didn’t realize just how much work it would involve. Doubtless, blogging is labor-intensive, but there are ways to make it much, much easier to keep your blog fresh without turning it into your full-time job. You have content all over the place and just need to put it to work for you.
Five characteristics of a highly effective marketing partner: There is no shortage of IT marketing agencies on the market that would be thrilled to have you as a client. You get calls regularly, have listened to countless pitches and reviewed what feels like a never-ending stack of presentations on demand generation. So, how do you choose? If you have a partner in place, how do you evaluate its effectiveness?
IT sales call: Best time is Tuesday at 9 AM: At enter:marketing, we schedule a lot of appointments for our clients. Through the demand generation and lead cultivation programs we run, we’ve learned a considerable amount about how IT buyers prefer to be engaged, the best survey questions for triggering interest and even when they want to talk. What we’re about to show you isn’t the result of some survey: it’s live data. Real. These insights are based on the actions of IT buyers.
Most Popular Keyword: Twitter
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Take control of your sales cycle: Manage your information: Before the ubiquity of information, prospects were able to get rid of the sales team with the simple demand: “Get me something in writing.” The sales professional, meanwhile, would guard information carefully, letting it slip out incrementally throughout the sales cycle, rewarding the prospect for moving each step closer to a sale. With websites, blogs and message boards available for virtually every topic imaginable, this doesn’t work any more. Most information is already out there.
