Outsourcing B2B Sales Development? How To Keep From Overspending→

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Outsourcing B2B Sales Development? How To Keep From Overspending

For a startup chief marketing officer (CMO), one of your first assignments will be to help drive more prospects into the sales pipeline.

One option is to build an internal business development representative (BDR) team, but that takes time. It also requires a skilled professional to onboard, manage and motivate the team.

Another option is to outsource. There are a lot of good agencies to choose from. They can be onboarded quickly and are already skilled at booking a lot of high-quality discovery meetings with prospects in the right job roles at a list of target companies or companies matching your ideal customer profile (ICP).

The problem is, they can be expensive. Based on my experience, for a team of two BDRs, you’ll typically pay in the neighborhood of $20,000-$25,000 per month, plus a cost per meeting held or a percentage of the closed/won annual contract value (ACV). That can add up pretty fast.

So, for marketing as with carpentry, it’s important to “measure twice and cut once” to ensure that you’re getting a positive return on your investment. Make sure that you’re not overpaying by managing your program to a target customer acquisition cost (CAC).

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How to Cash in on Conversational AI→

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How to Cash in on Conversational AI

Two years ago, Gartner predicted that by 2020, 25% of customer service operations will have adopted virtual agents, which use natural language to automate routine (and increasingly complex) customer interactions over voice and chat. Recent trends certainly support this prediction, as Siri and Alexa bring conversational artificial intelligence (AI) experiences increasingly mainstream, and service managers seek solutions to support a growing number of customers across a growing number of channels.

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What's Powered by AI, Speaks Over 100 Languages, Works 24/7, Reduces Service Costs & Delights Customers→ December 21, 2018→

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What's Powered by AI, Speaks Over 100 Languages, Works 24/7, Reduces Service Costs & Delights Customers→ December 21, 2018

Intelligent Virtual Agents are self-service applications that BroadSoft service providers license and re-sell to their customers. Virtual Agents offer capabilities that are similar to human service and support agents -- they just never rest or take a vacation -- and they’re substantially cheaper.

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Solar Sales: Phone Calls Ring In Lower Customer Acquisition Costs

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Solar Sales: Phone Calls Ring In Lower Customer Acquisition Costs

This article originally appeared on GreentechMedia.

It costs a lot to acquire a new residential solar customer - as much as $3000 for an average home.

Marketers have little control over regulatory, structural and other exogenous issues that drive up costs. What they can control are the types programs and technologies they use to find and convert ideal solar prospects. They also have control over how they optimize conversion at each stage of their sales funnels.

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Social Media Customer Care: Whose Job Is It Anyway?→

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Social Media Customer Care: Whose Job Is It Anyway?

In my last post, I described some of the most common reasons that brands often fail to respond to customer questions and complaints on social media. One of the main reasons is confusion over whose responsibility it is to respond.

Historically, responsibility for social media has fallen to marketing, PR or corporate communications. That made good sense because social was used primarily as way to build brand awareness and encourage word-of-mouth marketing.

However, brands have realized that social media is not just a promotional tool, but also a channel for customer care. It has become crucial to ensure that the right department (or person) can respond accurately and effectively. In many cases, that’s not a marketer, but rather someone in sales, billing, tech support or customer service.

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Why Brands Don’t Respond on Social Media→

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Why Brands Don’t Respond on Social Media

(This article was originally posted on Social Times)

If you’ve ever used social media to ask a question, look for information or vent your frustration about a product or service, you may have wondered why your post was met with silence. Maybe another consumer responded with a suggestion, but where was the brand that was the subject of your ire? Why didn’t they reach out to help solve your problem? Given that so many people now use social media to discuss products and services, why aren’t brands tripping over themselves to offer help?

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Why Brands Struggle to Care for the Connected Consumer [SLIDESHARE]

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Consumers are now more connected and more demanding than ever before.

As highlighted in the presentation below, 86% of surveyed consumers reported that they would be more satisfied if offered their channel of preference and half would move to a competitor that did offer their preferred channel.

Meanwhile, brands increasingly realize the importance of engaging with consumers not only through 800 numbers but also through social, mobile, email, chat and self-service channels.

However, the increasing complexity of dealing with so many customers across so many channels has presented brands with a wide variety of new obstacles.

Please take a look at the presentation below to learn more about the survey findings in addition to key challenges organizations face when attempting offer multichannel customer care.

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Richard Dumas

I have led marketing and product management initiatives for leading technology, media and software companies including Nuance Communications, Sun Micro, Apple Computer and DNN Corp. I received an M.B.A. from M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management and a B.A. in Cognitive Science from Wesleyan University. I am currently the Director of Product and Solution Marketing at Five9, the leading provider of cloud contact center software .