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3 Ways to Prep Your Pipeline for 2018

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

In the final push to close business in 2017, it can be easy to lose sight of the importance of prepping your 2018 pipeline now. 

Don’t let that be you. If you do, the result of not preparing now means you will be scrambling to catch up on January 2nd, and that’s not the best way to start off your sales year.

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. ― Benjamin Franklin

Here are my 3 suggested strategies for kicking the new sales year off right.

Evaluate your target list carefully.

You’ll need to ask yourself some tough questions as your refresh your target list.

  • What’s makes this prospect a good prospect for what you sell?
  • If your company has designed a buyer persona, does this person/company fit the
  • profile?
  • What do you know about the company and their business initiatives that would indicate a need for your service?
  • Is the person you are contacting the right decision maker? How do you know?
  • Have you tried multiple contact approaches with someone and you never get a response? Could be a clue to move along.

While answering these questions you might notice that some of those seemingly good prospects you’ve been working on lately aren’t going to move forward.

Although technically anyone can buy from you, casting a wide net means you will waste a lot of time trying to engage people who will never become a customer.

Time is one of the most precious assets we have. Spend it wisely. A narrower, more focused target prospect list will yield better sales outcomes.

Go deeper into current accounts.

Companies tend to push their sales teams to constantly acquire new customers, even though on average that can cost the company 7 times more than making time to develop sales opportunities with existing customers. The start of a new year is a good way to get into the habit of conducting quarterly business reviews with your top producing accounts.

Using the Companies by Revenue Source report in HubSpot CRM, I am able to quickly determine which customers produced the most revenue this year and which services they bought. I then narrow my list to the top 10 and book a business review with them first.

I have three goals for these reviews:

One, I want to stay connected with my customers because if I don’t stay visible, a competitor can sneak their way in. Full disclosure… it has happened!

Two, I want to make sure that customers are getting the most value for their financial investment. I’d like them to buy from me again, and I’ll bet you do too. This is especially important if you sell a product that has renewal date attached to it. You will want to know sooner rather than later if your customer feels the money they spent with you is or isn’t worth it.

Three, these reviews provide a perfect opportunity to talk with customers about their current and future initiatives. Armed with that information, you can educate them about other products or services that may help them achieve their upcoming business objectives.

“Call me in January” means acting now. 

Perhaps you’ve recently contacted some people and the interest was there but the timing for a call wasn’t right. When someone tells me to follow up with them in January, I mark my notes and calendar to follow up 30-days earlier.

Here’s why.

After your target buyers return from some holiday downtime, they will be swamped catching up. If you wait until that first week of January to try to book appointments, it will only delay the time it takes to get a meeting scheduled.

What I do is send my January meeting request emails in the early part of December, including my HubSpot Sales Meeting link. I particularly like this tool because it helps me avoid the back-and-forth emails trying to book time when we’re both available, especially when we are crossing multiple time zones.

In my email, I first provide some context for my follow up; i.e. I contacted them about one of our services, they expressed interest and asked me to contact them at the first of the year. Then, I say that I’m being proactive booking the time now knowing that they’ll be swamped catching up after the holidays. This approach will do two things for you. One, you’ll be able to lock meetings on the calendar and be ahead of the curve come the first of the year. Two, you’ll be able to determine if these prospects truly have an interest or were just trying to get you off their back by telling you to follow up later.

In the best of scenario’s, everyone who said to follow up will schedule a call with you. The second-best outcome is that you will learn that some of these folks aren’t interested, the timing isn’t right or both. Better to scrub them off your priority target list and move them back into marketing nurture mode. 

Remember that information without application is useless.

Right now, block planning time on your calendar before 2017 runs out.

You might have to do the work in a couple of chunks but if you block the time and commit yourself to completing the planning, you’ll feel less stress knowing you are ready to go on day one of the New Year!

By the way, have you tried out HubSpot Sales?

A few months ago, I wrote about how I was using HubSpot CRM and HubSpot Sales to increase my productivity and efficiency. The positive results have exceeded my expectations! If you haven’t checked out HubSpot Sales, which includes CRM, I highly recommend you take a test drive now.

Filed Under: blog Tagged With: 2018, Hubspot, planning, productivity, sales. social selling

Less is More When It Comes to My Tech Stack: Why I Love HubSpot Sales

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

I’m on a productivity quest. To focus on the most important revenue activities each day, I need the right processes in place to ensure maximum efficiency. For me, it is an ongoing evolution in how I work. Unlike many in the sales industry who are proud of their burgeoning tech stacks, I’m focused on reducing mine. As I wrote about in a recent blog post, more of anything isn’t necessarily the answer to solving challenges facing sales teams today. More technology doesn’t guarantee improved lead generation, an increase in qualified opportunities in the pipeline or shrink the time it takes to close deals. I believe it is the combination of the right technology, process and selling skills that lead to achieving quota objectives. So, for me, less is more. That’s where HubSpot Sales comes in.

Where I started.

I started with HubSpot CRM, which I’ve been using for over a year now. After testing just about every CRM out there, I settled on HubSpot for its power and ease of use. As much as I love technology, I feel that many CRM solutions being sold today are just too complicated. I want to know about deals in the pipeline, stages of the deal progression, why I won or lost deals, and I want tools that make it easy for me to reduce administrative time, capture sales conversations, track emails and follow a consistent cadence in my sales prospecting and follow up.

I love HubSpot Sales.

While HubSpot CRM is pretty awesome, knowing what I know now, I would have started with HubSpot Sales to capitalize on the advanced sales features from the start. I suggest you start there too. HubSpot Sales includes the free CRM. Since I wanted to create a more robust sales process, and I wanted to reduce the number of other technology tools I was using, moving to HubSpot Sales has helped me achieve that goal.

Check out the Email integration and tracking feature.

Since we all still live in email, I love that HubSpot Sales connects to your Inbox. The moment I start a new email and pop in a prospects email address, HubSpot Sales opens a dialog box to the right of my screen and instantly creates a contact record. The new record is populated with contact details, company information, revenue, social media profiles and more. I don’t have to hunt down the details and type them into the system. It works the same way if I receive an inbound email from a potential buyer too. Anything I need to quickly add, say the name of a referral source, I type that in and save the contact. The manual data entry is minimized, and I have saved so much time with just this one feature. You’ll love that apps you likely use today are supported, such as Office 365, Outlook, Gmail and GSuite.

Because every email interaction is then tracked, I can view a timeline in a prospect or customers contact record to keep up to date on how our conversations are progressing. I also know when someone opened the email, which helps me know that my messages are being not just received but read.

Save time with these additional HubSpot Sales features.

With the new Messages feature, I can see who visits my website in real time, how often they visit, what services they appear to be interested in, chat with them live or give them the ability to book time on my calendar to talk to me.

With the Meetings feature, I easily set up different meeting types based on meeting length and whether that meeting will be by phone or face to face. I can embed that code on my website or include the link in emails making it easy for people to schedule time with me. I love that both features are integrated with HubSpot CRM. In other words, if someone books a meeting using my meeting link, it is automatically added to their contact record. If this is someone who has come inbound to me and not in my CRM yet, once they schedule a meeting, a record is created without me having to do anything. My other tools didn’t integrate with CRM. Thanks to these two features of HubSpot Sales, I got rid of the other tools I was using. My sales process is better streamlined, and I saved money in the process.

Stay tuned for more.

In coming posts, I’m going to talk about other HubSpot Sales reporting capabilities, productivity tools and how they help me reduce wasted effort and improve my sales results. I’ll share with you how I’ve automated my outreach while not sacrificing personalization using Templates. In the past two weeks since setting up my custom templates, I have saved hours of time. You’ll also find out why I love the Sequences feature and how to turn your Documents into trackable links enabling trigger prospecting and follow up at its finest!

Get started with a FREE TRIAL Get yourself set up and come back and share your success stories with me!

 

Filed Under: blog Tagged With: crm, email tracking, Hubspot, meetings, productivity, sales, sales productivity

More Than Mediocrity with Samantha McKenna, ON24

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

In this Women in Sales Leadership episode, I talked with Samantha McKenna from ON24. We talked about:

  • What led Samantha into sales and what she loves about the profession.
  • How she set herself apart with prospects and clients from the other reps she competed against. Think going bigger, stretching further and getting creative.
  • The core values that enabled Samantha’s sales success.
  • Her advice for women in sales who want to move into leadership roles, and what she did to get herself promoted into leadership positions.

And more.

Enjoy the interview.

This episode is sponsored by Hubspot.

Don’t miss out HubSpot’s annual sales event – Inbound Sales Day – on June 6th! 30 leading sales experts will be sharing their knowledge and expertise. Register now for FREE at hubspot.com/inbound-sales-day

About Samantha:

Samantha McKenna is an award-winning leader, who serves as a Regional Vice President of Sales for ON24, and has worked within the SaaS sales and marketing space for ten years.  She is a thought leader in the demand generation and content marketing space, having spoken across the US regarding webinars, the use of technology in the marketing stack, the use of analytics for business development and lead generation, and how leading law firms and professional services organizations are leveraging technology to drive revenue.  Samantha served four years as a board member of the Legal Marketing Association’s Capital Chapter and actively volunteers with financial literacy initiatives in Washington, D.C.

Connect with Samantha on LinkedIn and Twitter

Filed Under: blog Tagged With: crm, Hubspot, leadership, ON24, sales management, selling, women in sales

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