Insights and Research for Marketing, Sales Development and Sales

Account based marketing is getting serious attention these days. Vendors, bloggers, and market research firms are fueling a resurgence in account based marketing’s popularity. ITSMA coined the phrase in 2004 and B2B vendors have been doing this type of marketing for years (but without calling it account based marketing). For the last several years, sales and marketing teams have been trying to re-think demand generation, understand technology such as marketing automation, wrap their hands around inbound marketing, and have now realized: “Well wait a minute, we sell to companies – we need to build our sales and marketing machine accordingly.”

Here is ITSMA’s definition of account based marketing:

“Treating individual accounts as a market in their own right”

A structured approach to developing and implementing highly-customized marketing campaigns to markets of one, i.e., accounts, partners, or prospects. This approach involves marketing and sales taking a close look at key business issues facing the target, mapping them to individuals, and tailoring campaigns to address those issues.

One of the most critical functions in converting leads to opportunities is a sales development team. Sales development is a group whose main job is to identify, connect with, and qualify leads. When a lead is qualified, they hand the qualified lead over to a sales person who is in charge of working the rest of the sales process and hopefully, closing the deal. Some organizations call this role lead qualification, lead development, account development, telemarketing, or inside sales. For this post, we will call the role “sales development”.

Your revenue often depends on having a high-functioning sales development function. I am one of the biggest proponents of the sales development role. Here is a brief write-up that includes my views from Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Lead Qualification: