Insights and Research for Marketing, Sales Development and Sales

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:

Today, we’re excited to introduce TOPO. We’re a research, advisory, and consulting firm that believes in a really simple, but powerful idea – that all revenue can be distilled down to a series of conversions. By connecting everything we do back to this core idea, we help sales and marketing organizations exceed their revenue targets. Some of the world’s leading companies already depend on TOPO to improve their sales and marketing programs. For these clients, we’re delivering comprehensive audits, specific playbooks, and actionable advisory and consulting services across a range of programs. For example, one of the world’s largest technology companies used a TOPO playbook to increase their “lead to opportunity” conversion rate by 30%. More recently, a startup media company engaged TOPO to increase sign ups for their live events by 41% using a variety of online and phone-based conversion tactics.