AWS Snowmobile: Because Data Is Still Transported Physically

AWS Snowmobile is an 18-wheel truck that physically transports Exabyte-scale data from customers’ premises to AWS Regions in a 45 feet container. For the uninitiated: 1 Exabyte = 1000 Petabyte = 1,000,000 Terabytes = 1,000,000,000 Gigabytes. AWS Regions are separate geographic areas that Amazon uses to house its AWS infrastructure. These are distributed around the … Read more

Why Rockstar SDRs Obsess Over Dial Volume

This blog post is about a controversial topic in B2B technology inside sales: Dial Volume. It will not endear me to Inside Sales folks. Nevertheless, since dial volume pushes the revenue needle, I decided to write it. Cold calling remains an important part of business development in large ticket B2B technology products and services. Every cold call … Read more

Creating ASPO To Bolster Cold Call Success Rates

In Use ASPO To Boost Cold Call Success Rates, I’d introduced Account Specific Point Offering and touched upon how salespersons can use it to spark off the conversation with potential buyers at the top of the funnel. In this post, I’ll describe ASPOs in greater detail and outline a methodology for developing them. ASPO DEFINED ASPO … Read more

Use ASPO To Boost Cold Call Success Rates

Cold calling requires lot of skills and perseverance. Not everyone has them. Sales Development Reps who mask their shortcomings by claiming that “cold calling is dead” need not read further. On the other hand, if you believe that cold call is an indispensable part of B2B sales, and are looking for a way to improve … Read more

The Severe Identity Crisis On Twitter For Digital Marketers

This Finextra article highlights a major challenge facing digital marketers using Twitter for business development: How do you determine the veracity of a Twitter account? Put in another way, how do you verify if a certain Twitter handle really belongs to the person to whom you think it does? This is a big problem because you … Read more

3 Ways To Execute Government Technology Contracts Profitably

There’s a lot of buzz in the media about how delays in realizing payments are making life difficult for vendors selling servers, laptops, tablets and other IT hardware to the government. Click here to see a recent article on this topic. While the industry is aware that government generally takes longer to settle invoices than the private … Read more

Use Social Sharing To Pump Up Lead Generation – Even On B2B Websites

We always recommend short or prefilled forms on B2B websites to reduce friction and thereby boost conversion  for various CTAs like whitepaper download, webinar registration, request for quote, and so on. We’re now happy to propose another type of call-to-action that’s even more frictionless: Social sharing. By avoiding forms altogether, social sharing can bolster website … Read more

Small Conversion Can Create A Large Business

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half. This famous quote is attributed to John Wanamaker (1838-1922), the US businessman who is often considered to be the father of the department store. We use the slide at the bottom to explain the impact of our go … Read more

When Does Marketing End & Sales Start?

The typical sales funnel starts from Target Audience and goes through various stages like Suspect, Lead, Qualified Lead, Opportunity until it ends with the Deal. It’s jointly owned by Marketing (which includes product management, business development, marketing communications) and Sales (which is comprised of presales and field sales functions). Since times immemorial, there has been a … Read more

To Pinterest Or Not To Pinterest?

With all the recent buzz around Pinterest, our inboxes have been flooded with several white papers and blog posts on the relevance of the latest social media network for B2B. After a quick glance at its website, we realized that it was easier to simply jump aboard Pinterest than to keep mulling over whether to … Read more