Insights and Research for Marketing, Sales Development and Sales

As sellers across multiple markets face an increasingly commoditized and hyper-competitive buying environment, sales leaders help lead the organization through rigorous change in pursuit of one goal: help deliver extreme value to prospects throughout the buying process, and thus, exceed quarterly targets. The pursuit of extreme value spawns rigorous resource prioritization and a significant investment in a new kind of sales culture full of transparency, feedback, and coaching. Meanwhile, as fast-growing companies rapidly evolve, sales leaders find themselves evaluating tradeoffs between people, process, technology, tactics, and metrics.

All revenue organizations buy third-party data, which is critical to strategy, planning, and everyday execution. The importance of data to day-to-day operations continues to grow, especially its role in creating marketing campaigns and outbound prospecting. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are also driving the demand for data, but the data landscape is changing.

Marketing leaders are encouraging their teams to increase the quantity and quality of leads and prospective accounts at the top of the funnel. Incremental changes in a commoditized environment will not allow teams to meet their goals. There is a series of major shifts in go-to-market (GTM) teams that align with the factors of marketing success and the biggest marketing challenges.

TOPO is actively capturing the impacts of COVID-19 on generating pipeline and how fast moving organizations are offsetting the impact.

Based on over 400 respondents, The Coronavirus (COVID-19) Impact survey highlights a number of changes that have negatively impacted companies’ ability to create pipeline, including buyers working from home (cited by 55% of respondents) and budget freezes (23%). But what is most striking is how quickly factors impacting pipeline have changed from the first week the survey was launched (the week of March 1) until now (partial results for the week of March 15).

The spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) is impacting daily life, and marketing and sales leaders need to know how to rapidly adjust in this changing business landscape. In our survey of high-growth companies, 79% of respondents indicated that pipeline has moderately or significantly decreased due to the coronavirus.

We have been closely monitoring the evolving Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak as we prepare for Summit. We’ve been looking forward to bringing you our fifth annual TOPO Summit, making this the biggest and best event to date. After careful consideration of the current situation, we’ve made the decision to postpone the event.

The moment when we hear something that makes us question what we felt to be true. That is a mind blowing experience!

Now imagine having that moment across two days in eight different sessions while overlooking the Embarcadero in San Francisco on April 23-24th.

Sales development teams spend their time communicating with prospects to understand their specific challenges, qualify them as a potential customer for the solution, and schedule a meeting with sales. The more they know about the specific personas that they are communicating with, the more relevant their messaging becomes and the more successful that they will be at achieving all three of their objectives.

At the end of every year, TOPO reviews the data we’ve gathered through client interactions and industry surveys to analyze trends and make predictions for the coming year. What sets TOPO apart is that we work with high-growth organizations, meaning the data we review is from businesses that are often far ahead of typical companies. We monitor the early adopters of many innovative technologies and processes, which gives us a unique perspective into what other organizations can expect to happen.

Every sales development rep (SDR) needs to do research as part of their prospecting and the more guidance their leaders can provide around this process, the more efficient SDRs can become. A clearly defined process for each stage of prospecting research can help SDRs accomplish one set of tasks then move on to the next set of tasks, rather than wasting time bouncing back and forth between the internet, CRM, and sales engagement platform for prospect information.