Last month Gartner announced that they were going to cut in half their Worldwide IT Spend for 2013. It’s still a staggering $3.7 Trillion. We have a few ideas. If we were at 50% of quota and we read the Gartner report we might just start to clean up our resume for 2014 if we saw no help or support coming from our sales and especially our marketing organization. But not so past…..if the market is shrinking there are still buyers and now you need to find them accordingly.
CSO Insights continually reports that 38% of a sales reps time is spent really selling. Most analysts and sales management thought leaders, recognize that the more time with customers, prospects and writing proposals or making presentations will ultimately lead to new revenue. Focus on CLOSING.
So throw those under-performers a rope and try to adjust their time by giving them 10% more of their time spent closing? Here was our short list of demand generation tactic ideas for your direct sales team if you are that marketer or sales leader looking to help:
- Take one administrative task off their plate each week and request that they visit an existing customer during that time?
- Give them five strategic accounts to set meetings with in September and justify and PROVE why those accounts are worth targeting?
- Give them two pieces of genuinely unique and or disruptive content?
- Give them two weeks of dedicated teleprospecting support into lost customers or previous customers?
- Help them craft ten interesting executive door opening letters to send to prospects they met with that have not moved into the funnel?
- Any particular solution that is gaining traction that they can focus on only for this quarter to rebuild confidence and to set up for the end of the year?
We thought those were a few simple, quick interesting tactics that can still turn the tide for 2013.
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