MarketStar Blog | Direct (3)

You and your team of salespeople likely excel at closing sales. You likely have a firm grasp of managing your top enterprise accounts. However, managing a funnel of leads and prospecting and qualifying them for growth are also likely consistent challenges.

You aren’t alone. As data shows, 25 percent of leads are legitimate and should advance to sales, but 79 percent of marketing leads never convert. What’s more, 73 percent of leads are not sales-ready, and 50 percent are qualified but not yet ready to buy.

It’s a highly competitive sales market, and new companies of every shape and size are nipping at your heels to steal your prospects and customers. That’s why it’s important to have a concise direct sales strategy in place in order to hit revenue targets, boost growth rates, and increase profits.

It all sounds very elementary, but nearly 20 percent of tech decision-makers evaluate their use of direct sales best practices as poor or below average. Additionally, about one-third of organizations claim they are average in their deployment of best practices across contact and activity management, sales opportunity management, sales performance management, and sales analysis.

Before the internet, there were two sales channels: indirect and direct. If you were a brick-and-mortar business, you sold your products directly in your store. If you were a wholesaler, you sold through resellers or distributors.

In today’s world, things are a bit more complex. And choosing sales channels to reach your targeted customers takes more effort. While the internet has certainly simplified many aspects of selling, it’s also created new demands for teams to learn and utilize disparate marketing channels.

You already know that inside sales drives more revenue at a lower cost. However, in order to manage teams and ensure a steady flow of leads, this requires appropriate tools and technology.

As big data becomes a reality for businesses looking to manage large volumes of information, data analytics tools have emerged as a reliable way to identify trends and patterns and monitor buyer activity. These tools create a better understanding of your prospects. And while this may be a no-brainer, information-based decisions are better than arbitrary or judgmental ones. 

After 28 years in the world of Sales as a Service™, MarketStar has forged many lasting relationships with leaders in our field. We’ve asked Claudio Ayub, a 20-year channel veteran and Chief Channel Strategist of Perks, to discuss his view on improving sales performance through his experience as a loyalty marketing expert with broad knowledge in strategy development, market management, and channel sales planning.

Technology over the last five years has integrated into nearly every aspect of our lives, and it’s not just coming from Silicon Valley anymore. It’s spreading (some may think like the plague—thanks mom), from New England based start-ups to the newly termed Silicon Slopes of Utah. Huge surges of technology start-ups resembling the dot-com days have emerged. Everything has become more efficient, better integrated, and dare I say more complex. Especially as we start talking about direct sales teams. 

We all have them: Zombie leads who invade and spread fear in our marketing databases. Halloween is here and so is the time to talk about "zombie" leads. There are a couple of definitions of a zombie lead: