How do Sales Reps get leads?

March 6, 2018 7:11 AM

Sales Reps in B2B territory - how do you find new customers!

From the Pre-Sales role (I asked a question in here sometime ago), I have now been asked to review our Sales process. The company is a B2B IT Services company doing software development and testing.

We have been experiencing 0% growth over the last 3-4 quarters and are unable to find out why. Most of our sales comes from Email marketing, with about 10% coming in through our marketing efforts, which has worked for us historically. We do have some pipeline, but they don't pan out or there is a long sales cycle, even for smaller pieces of work.

We do have a small number of solutions/accelerators, have reasonably competent people and are cost-competitive with offshore providers. Our current customers are happy with us and have given some additional business.

Since we are a SME org, we cannot spend a lot on Events/Tradeshows, aggressive Digital Marketing etc, but we do some of these things (content-based marketing, attending Events as delegates for networking etc)

What other channels can we look at? How do Sales Reps find new businesses on their own (without a email response from a prospect being the only source of business)?


Happy to answer questions.

posted by theobserver to Work & Money (4 answers total)

I am a sales rep in the B2B space. There is no magic to B2B sales. You have to find people that have problems you can solve. Traditionally, marketing's job is to attract those people via a variety of marketing tactics that draw leads to you. Your company seems to be doing that.

The other side of the effort is the sales team going out and finding people that have problems you can solve. That can be everything from cold calling campaigns (increasingly ineffective since nobody answers unknown callers in 2018), networking events, both local and cheap to big expensive conferences, finding partners that may have clients you can help, and a host of other Sales 101 tactics that should be obvious to the sales team, unless they are all very junior.

So if the sales team is really struggling with "what to do" I think your problem is primarily a sales leadership issue or maybe the fact that sales has no leadership if the role is unfilled or non-existent.

Ultimately, it's a math issue. If the goal is 50 new clients a year, and you know that you average 1 win in 4 proposals, then you need 200 proposals over the year. How do you get 200 proposals? You probably have an idea of how many proposals your current marketing plan will generate, so the difference is what the sales team has to do on their own.

You need somebody in the company that can build and manage the execution of the plan that fills that gap.
posted by COD at 8:59 AM on March 6, 2018

Marketing in any industry is about ROI. If there is no I, there's no R. The American Small Business League shows that most companies spend on average 5-7% of their gross on marketing. If you are spending substantially less, you can expect that your growth rate will probably fall short of your goals.

However! You can do a lot with targeted display and text ads on AdWords on a relatively minimal budget of $20-30 a day per campaign (running 4 or 5 is a good place to start). Also, LinkedIn has become the mainstay for a lot of B2B networking, so your marketing department should get moving on making connections, being active in industry groups, and posting relevant content to generate engagement.

Marketing has really shifted focus since the advent of social media, and if your department is mostly of the newsletter / cold calling / email campaign type I can imagine that they might be struggling a bit with figuring out new techniques. You may need to hire a specialist, or at least bring in a consultant to map out a marketing plan for the year.
posted by ananci at 10:36 AM on March 6, 2018

Response by poster: "So if the sales team is really struggling with "what to do" I think your problem is primarily a sales leadership issue or maybe the fact that sales has no leadership if the role is unfilled or non-existent."

@COD - you are so right. Maybe the answer is to hire the right person.

Unfortunately, some of our Sales people are new to this type of service and so don't have the network to make it happen.

@ananci - we do some content marketing, but our brand pull is not there yet. It takes time and a whole lot of money (we discussed with a few digital marketing agencies and they quoted upwards of $20,000 per month for a complete campaign).

Any workshops that any of you would suggest on Sales 101?
posted by theobserver at 1:48 AM on March 7, 2018

I haven't done any formal sales training in about a decade. Snap Selling is probably the best of the current crop of sales 101 types of books.
posted by COD at 5:16 AM on March 7, 2018