Page 142 - The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million - PDFDrive.com

and mundane tasks for salespeople.

2. Sell better: Create a better buying experience for customers by capturing
buyer context and making that context available to salespeople wherever
they are. As a result, salespeople can engage buyers with the most helpful
information at the most helpful time.

“Companies should strive to adopt sales technology that enables better
buying for customers and faster selling for salespeople.”

In this chapter, I will provide detailed descriptions of how sales acceleration
technology benefited our sales team at each stage of the sales process. As of the
writing of this book, I had teamed up with one of our most talented product
leaders at HubSpot, Christopher O'Donnell, to commercialize this sales
acceleration technology so that every sales team could benefit from our insights.
The first application that originated from these efforts was Sidekick, available
for free at www.getsidekick.com.

Accelerate Lead Sourcing with Technology

One of the most time-consuming steps of the sales process is simply finding
qualified buyers to call. I call this step “lead sourcing.” Some organizations
attempt to streamline the lead sourcing process by purchasing lists of supposedly
“qualified leads.” Unfortunately, these efforts typically yield a list of bad
prospects, many of whom no longer even work at the companies listed.

Other organizations subscribe their salespeople to data sources, equipping their
salespeople with the ability to filter through massive amounts of contacts to find
the perfect prospect to call. Sadly, as the data often lacks accuracy and
comprehensiveness, this filtering process becomes an extremely inefficient use
of the salesperson's time.

When we at HubSpot set up our first team dedicated to sourcing leads and
making proactive calls into the market, we made these same mistakes. After a
number of frustrating cycles with purchased lists and data source subscriptions,
this team ultimately resorted to simple searches in Google. These salespeople
conducted Google searches for phrases that they presumed would yield a list of
“good-fit” companies for the HubSpot service.

The process effectively yielded qualified companies on which to call. However,