Sales and marketing directors may be reluctant to relinquish control when outsourcing business critical functions like inside sales. Is it really possible for an external agency to know enough about your organisation to deliver an inside sales job effectively?…
IT marketing is aligning ever more closely with sales in an effort to generate measurable results. The criteria for measuring marketing success have changed significantly over the decades. In the past, marketing was dominated by advertising, creative, and big discretionary budgets that were measured in cost per impression.…
Having identified the Industry Trends in Telemarketing in part one of our Industry Trends Blog, we ask Andy Rutherford, “What are the Best Practices and strategy in the industry to manage Telemarketing services whilst demonstrating relative cost effectiveness and efficiency?…
Over the past 10 years I have worked and still work with many channel focussed technology vendors. Most if not all vendors understand their top tier partners very well but conversely know very little about their lower tier partners. Personally I think they might be missing a trick.…
“My budget is limited” I’ve never come across a Channel Executive who told me he had sufficient budget to do what he felt was required to meet his targets. Everyone is under pressure to save money. Considering how much it costs to recruit and enable partners, our experience suggests that firms do not really maximise their full potential. It is a real challenge to understand how best to invest limited resource such as Channel Managers, support and marketing spend but it is vital to understand how allocating this resource to partners will deliver maximum sales.…
A CEO of a software vendor I once worked for once said, when discussing Lead Generation: “Until we get an order, all we’ve done is spend money”. On the face of it, that seems like a pessimistic view, but actually it is very insightful. Every lead is a cost centre that only ceases to be so when it is turned into revenue. If this view is truly embraced by an organisation, the end-to-end process from selecting target data, generating the lead through to pitching and winning the business becomes much more strategic.…