In the B2B technology space, growth is everything. You need predictable and scalable revenue—as well as high quality sales leads—to take your business to the next level, gain market share and blast past your competitors.
However, the key to explosive B2B sales growth isn’t hiring more reps or having them make more calls. There’s a better way to achieve predictable and scalable revenue. Aaron Ross wrote the book on this topic.
Aaron is the best-selling author of Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business into a Sales Machine With the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com. The book has been #1 on Amazon’s telemarketing list for over two years and was called the Silicon Valley Sales Bible by Inc.com.
Aaron created a Cold Calling 2.0 outbound sales process for Salesforce.com that helped the company increase its revenue by $100 million.
That’s why we asked him to join us for a webinar about how brands can harness their customer advocates to drive consistent growth and sales. Watch it below, or read on for our recap.
The three types of sales leads
According to Aaron, businesses need a steady stream of three types of leads to achieve predictable and scalable revenue:
Seeds, or leads that come from word-of-mouth marketing. Seeds are the cream of the crop. They usually come from customer referrals or prior relationships and often go on to become your best customers. However, it takes time and effort to grow a Seed into a customer.
- Nets, or leads that come from inbound marketing. Your inbound marketing efforts—SEO, social media, blogging, webinars, etc—can bring a lot of people to your content and help you attract leads. However, when you cast such a wide net, not all of your leads will be qualified.
- Spears, or leads that your sales reps bring in through lists and outbound prospecting. These leads are the opposite of Nets—they are very targeted and small in number. Although Spears can bring you predictable results, they are hard to scale exponentially.
Since these three types of sales leads are complimentary, you need all of them to achieve predictable and scalable revenue.
How advocacy grows seeds into customers
If you cultivate your Seeds with advocacy, you can dramatically increase your conversion and close rates.
Since many Seeds come from word-of-mouth referrals, you should encourage your advocates—or your fans, evangelists and best customers—to spread good news about your brand.
According to Predictable Revenue, cultivating referrals is the most effective inbound marketing tactic: “When customers recommend your product or service to a peer, they’re establishing that you’re credible and trustworthy.”
The more referrals you get, the more you can increase your new sales, upsells and cross sells.
More resources to develop high-quality sales leads:
