Insights and Research for Marketing, Sales Development and Sales

Most sales reps know that discovery is an important part of an effective sales engagement. But too many reps use the discovery process (often limited to just a single meeting) as a way to promote the features and benefits of their solution, rather than exploring the challenges faced by the prospective buyer and determining thoughtfully how the solution can best answer those challenges. This tendency undermines reps’ ability to build rapport with clients and act as insightful, credible resources for them—which means fewer closed deals.

We’re excited to see you at The TOPO Open House in SF Nov 20-21st at The Cavalier from 8:30-4pm each day. Whether you’re attending Dreamforce or not, we’d love to have you stop by and check out presentations from our Analyst team and several leader panels taking place over the two days. Stay the whole time or just pop-in, either way come join us for a great time!

What’s Scarier than Zombies? You missing these TOPO Sessions at the upcoming TOPO Open House! 

Lots of scary good content at and around Dreamforce this year for marketing and sales leaders who are shaping their 2020 strategic priorities. TOPO Open House is a quick walk from Moscone, and a cross walk away from Ops Stars. Even walking zombies will be able to find us!

If you want to join the ranks of the highest of high-growth companies, do not leave alignment to chance. It’s a fool’s errand to expect a 22-year-old sales development rep (SDR) fresh out of university to develop a consistent, scalable, repeatable prioritization, execution, and qualification process. Be prescriptive in your expectations and methodical in the tools you arm your teams with. I use the sales development team as an example because they bridge the gap between marketing and sales, and are a pivotal piece to the pipeline puzzle.

Orchestration design is about creating high-intensity, short duration, high-impact programs designed to advance a select set of target accounts to a desired outcome. These marketing programs only succeed at meeting their objectives if they include the right tactics.

Marketers target the most important prospects with cross-functional plays designed to drive meetings, and frequently send a unique gift as the core of the orchestrated play. The hope is that the gift will stand out to the prospect and they will agree to a meeting. With 87% of top-performing account based organizations using meeting plays, that’s a lot of iPads, drones, and bottles of wine shipped to corporate executives. Corporate gift policies—and the sheer volume of such gifts—can limit a marketer’s ability to be effective with this approach.

The only thing growing faster than our clients revenue today is the change they face in order to sustain growth. 

With our mission to help sales and marketing organizations grow revenue faster, we are excited to share that TOPO has agreed to be acquired by Gartner, the world’s leading research and advisory company. 

The job of a sales development rep (SDR) involves a high volume of repetitive tasks aimed at eliciting a response from a prospect. SDRs use different channels to contact prospects multiple times using similar, but slightly different, language based on the situation. The sales development leader is responsible for making the SDR team as effective and efficient as possible by providing proper guidance for this core job function.

One of the most critical roles a sales development rep (SDR) plays in an organization is to qualify prospects before they speak to sales. But the pressure to quickly qualify and handoff meetings to sales reps often results in leads that are passed along before the prospect has been fully qualified. This issue is compounded by sales reps with differing opinions of what constitutes qualification and who may ignore qualified leads that have come from SDRs. This lack of alignment causes problems on both sides of the handoff.

Marketing organizations need to accurately track and measure results for account based and volume efforts separately, but require the ability to view them side-by-side. The world’s fastest-growing companies understand how all go-to-market (GTM) approaches contribute to revenue. Reviewing common metrics together demonstrates how account based and volume initiatives move through the sales process to generate results.