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B2B Selling – The First Customer Issue

Thought Leaders in Sales 2.0: Carol O’Kelley, CEO of Salesfusion (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Have you been tracking this area of influencer marketing that is getting a bit of attention these days?

Carol O’Kelley: I’m not sure what you mean. I’m certainly interested in the idea of Masons and that there are gurus in particular areas that can have enormous influence, but I’m not sure if that’s what you mean.

Sramana Mitra: There are two trends that I’ve observed. We’ve profiled a bunch of different companies in some of these spaces. One trend is that there are people with significant influence. These are people who have huge social media influence. Maybe, through their blogs or LinkedIn accounts. In their niches, they are very influential people. There’s a company called Influitive founded by the founder of Eloqua. That one is focusing more on really mining your customers and turning them into advocates. I was wondering if you were tracking any of that work. >>>

Thought Leaders in Sales 2.0: Carol O’Kelley, CEO of Salesfusion (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are other core areas where you think marketing automation and Sales 2.0 is making a real difference?

Carol O’Kelley: To where you can make systems work for the marketers or for the sales people, instead of the other way around. You can even look at an auto dialer that’s improving the efficiency of the sales organization. I think that it’s easy to overlook some of those things and say, “Those have been around for a while.” But if you think about the increased efficiency that’s brought the average demand generation, those can be great productivity boosters.

Sramana Mitra: Are there other trends that you would want to touch upon? >>>

Thought Leaders in Sales 2.0: Carol O’Kelley, CEO of Salesfusion (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The one that strikes me of all the things that you said is ad retargeting. One of the big trends in marketing today is content marketing. I would say, for us, that’s probably the number one kind of marketing that we do.

We have been able to build a differentiated global brand just because we do phenomenally good content. We do real journalism in the technology and entrepreneurship area. We’ve reached a large audience because of that. If you take a scenario like that and you put retargeting there, the budget just goes completely berserk.

Carol O’Kelley: You’re absolutely right. First of all, I agree with you on content marketing. Myself and the rest of the team at Salesfusion all think of content marketing as just a norm for doing business. It doesn’t even necessarily occur to me as cutting-edge anymore, which I realize is not true for a lot of companies. We do a lot of it and it’s very important. We try to do some amount of content syndication. It can get expensive. Most often, it affects the top of the funnel. >>>

Thought Leaders in Sales 2.0: Carol O’Kelley, CEO of Salesfusion (Part 2)

Carol O’Kelley: I think the most interesting thing is the proliferation of different solutions in both the sales and marketing technology spaces and the level of complexity it brings to the job of a marketer. It’s not enough anymore to be a good marketer. You also have to be a technologist and be able to prioritize what types of technology makes sense for your business.

In particular, companies in the small- and mid-sized market that Salesfusion targets have more limited bandwidth and limited financial resources with which to spend on technologies. Figuring out which technology makes sense is an enormous challenge. >>>

Thought Leaders in Sales 2.0: Carol O’Kelley, CEO of Salesfusion (Part 1)

A short discussion on how marketing and sales technologies are evolving.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to your company.

Carol O’Kelley: Thanks for having me. I’m the CEO of Salesfusion. I joined the company earlier this year after having spent most of my career in technology, marketing, and operations. I’ve done a number of very small entrepreneurial things – everything from being the 34^th employee at Retek, which was ultimately acquired by Oracle to starting and managing a self-storage business. I’ve also worked at larger companies like Red Prairie and Oracle. I’m passionate about technology. I love the pace of this business.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you based?

Carol O’Kelley: I’m based in Atlanta, Georgia. >>>

Sales 2.0: Greg Brush, Vice President Of Sales And Customer Success, InsideView, San Francisco (Part 6)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Sudhindra Chada

Sramana Mitra: In your case, you are selling an opportunity intelligence solution. How can you know exactly what is going on inside the account without a defined process? InsideView doesn’t pick up that there is an opportunity intelligence problem going on in your prospects.

Greg Brush: The reason people buy things and invest in things is because they are building a business or they are reacting to business initiatives that are going on in the account, and the fact is there are a lot of different mediums out there that will provide leading indicators of opportunity to their business. >>>