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.
The first step in any account based go-to-market program is to create a target account list. Whether based on a formal Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) or not, the target account list represents an organization’s definition of the best accounts and those most likely to become customers. But in reality, marketers really only communicate with a subset of the account list at any one time, and even struggle to cover the full list over the course of a year.
Sales technology changes constantly and rapidly, which is why TOPO analysts continually gather data, talk to companies, and study the entire sales landscape to pinpoint the latest market trends. Considering how much of their budgets sales organizations spend on technology, it is crucial to have guidance about the areas of tech that are most important and what other sales leaders—especially competitors—are doing about them.