Posts I’m Most Proud of from 2012: An End-of-Year Personal Blogging Reflection

December 21, 2012

OpenView Labs team members have incredibly aggressive content goals, not to mention other internal and (most importantly) external portfolio goals. We are asked to contribute a new blog each week that pertains to our particular practice area.

I’m proud to say that this year I have hit my blogging goal — by December 31st I will have generated 52 posts all about lead generation/outbound prospecting, sales best practices, and marketing strategies. The entries that I contribute come from conversations and lessons learned in working with our portfolio company, as well as discussions with industry sales and marketing influencers.

Below are five posts from 2012 that I am the most proud of. These were not the pieces of content that necessarily had the most page views or retweets. But looking back, the topics are truly ones I believe stand out as being important to expansion-stage sales and marketing organizations. And hopefully, if you didn’t catch them the first time around, you will get a chance to check them out now!

1) Rant #2 About Having Realistic Expectations When Launching an Outbound Prospecting Team

This post explains five reasons why you need to temper your expectations when it comes to your outbound prospecting team’s first year. This article was actually the second post this year that I wrote about the topic of managing expectations about repeatable revenue coming from an outbound prosecuting team. Why the duplication? Time after time in 2012, I saw senior managers at expansion-stage companies being dissatisfied with their new teams’ results.

2) Do NOT Invest in Expensive Marketing Automation Software If…

If you haven’t figured out your target segments/buyers, don’t already have a content strategy in place, haven’t designed the processes and frameworks that will support it, and don’t possess a committed resource to own the platform and program execution — don’t invest in a marketing automation like Eloqua or Marketo. You literally need all of the above to justify an often expensive marketing automation software investment. This post explain why in greater detail.

3) Top 5 Reasons for New Sales Rep Failure

When and how often does new sales rep failure occur? This post explains my top five most common reasons why one out of every four reps are getting a failing grade.

4) The Importance of Capturing Messaging Data in Your Lead Gen Efforts

To stay on top of your lead gen efforts you need to capture more than just appointments scheduled, calls made, and emails sent. You need to dig deeper. With your outbound prospecting team being like having a built in research function within your organization, it is imperative that the details of their conversation are recorded and examined often.

5) The Gray Zone: The Place Where Your “Somewhat Qualified” Sales Leads Go to Die

Your first conversation: the lead is the decision maker, understands your value proposition, has identified a pain point, and wants to talk with someone more senior to learn more. But you come to find out that while they like your solution, they can’t buy until the end of the year. What should you do and how should you avoid these semi-qualified leads falling into the no-contact abyss? This post dives in deeper to this VERY common issue.

Thanks for your readership in 2012!