by Elizabeth Hines | Oct 16, 2014 | Blog, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy, Supply Chain
A survey conducted by Fronetics Strategic Advisors found that companies within the logistics and supply chain industries are realizing benefits from social media.
When asked if their company realized benefits from social media 68 percent of respondents reported “yes.”
What benefits are companies realizing?
Increased engagement with customers (86 percent), increased market intelligence (80 percent), and increased business intelligence (73 percent) are the primary benefits reported by respondents. Other benefits include:
- Increased customer retention;
- Increased demand for products and services;
- Increased leads;
- Shortened sales cycles.
To learn more about the use, motivations, benefits, and challenges of social media and the logistics and supply chain industries, download our report: Social media and the logistics and supply chain industries.
by Elizabeth Hines | Oct 14, 2014 | Blog, Logistics, Manufacturing & Distribution, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy, Supply Chain
Social media is a strategic tool. The benefits companies can realize by using social media are immense. Which benefits are motivating companies within the logistics and supply chain to use social media? Even more broadly, why are companies using social media?
A recent survey conducted by Fronetics Strategic Advisors found that the predominant reasons companies within the logistics and supply chain industries use social media are to: increase the visibility of their company; to improve their brand image; establish their company as a thought leader; and to attract new leads and customers.
To learn more about the use, motivations, benefits, and challenges of social media and the logistics and supply chain industries, download our report: Social media and the logistics and supply chain industries.
by Elizabeth Hines | Oct 9, 2014 | Blog, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy, Supply Chain
Report on social media use, motivations, preferences, benefits, and challenges.
Within the past five years companies within the logistics and supply chain industries have begun to see social media as a strategic tool and have begun to actively use and leverage social media.
A survey conducted by Fronetics Strategic Advisors looks, broadly, at the use of social media within the logistics and supply chain industries. The report discusses use, motivations, preferences, benefits, and challenges.
Key findings include:
- 68% of survey respondents report that their company has realized benefits by participating in social media.
- Increased engagement with customers, market intelligence, and business intelligence are primary benefits realized by companies.
- Companies are turning to social media to establish and advance their brand and image.
- The majority of companies are currently managing their social media strategy in-house.
- Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are the social networks most commonly used by companies.
- Twitter and LinkedIn are perceived to have the greatest business impact.
- Time constraints, budget constraints, and a lack of an identified strategy are the key challenges identified by respondents.
To learn more about social media and the logistics and supply chain industries, download the report.
by Elizabeth Hines | Oct 7, 2014 | Blog, Strategy, Supply Chain
Figuring out how to consistently attract the right kinds of leads and meaningfully connect with prospects can be a daunting task. Producing significant returns on your investment, though, is the initial effort of creating a road map for your success. Introducing a standardized sales approach in your organization can increase sales revenue, create clear expectations, and eliminate process ambiguity. But beyond establishing clear objectives and defining measures of success, the development stage of creating a standard sales process should include consideration of a number of internal and external factors. As you begin to craft a strategy of your own, consider how your plan will incorporate these best practices.
Generate Better Qualified Leads
Generating well-qualified leads creates a streamlined and more efficient sales team. Efforts to attract the right kinds of leads should start well before anyone from sales enters the process, though. A standardized sales process allows others in the organization to set the framework for success. Working with the sales team, marketers can determine what questions your ideal customer might be searching for and use content to address those questions in a way that will resonate with prospects. Providing relevant value for the buyer establishes parameters for attracting more qualified leads. By generating better leads, your sales team will enjoy a shorter sales cycle and reduce wasted effort on opportunities that are unlikely to close.
Standardize Sales Procedures
Establish and institutionalize typical sales procedures; each department with either direct or indirect contribution to the sales team should understand and operate using the same processes and assumptions. This continuity removes ambiguous procedures, eliminates uncommon language, allows for team members to anticipate when support might be needed, and helps the organization to pre-plan for workloads as sales close.
Remove Barriers to Implementation and Continued Use
Create value in the sales process, not only for the buyer, but for the organization itself. What benefit will the current activities of your organization bring? Of great importance when considering the development and implementation of a standardized sales process is the ease of implementation and likelihood of continued use. How likely is it that your team will adopt this method? How likely is it to be around ten months from now? Does this process create unnecessary redundancy? Are you maximizing the amount of time your team spends on revenue-generating activities? Spending some time thinking through exactly how and why the process will be used by those in your organization will help guide your decisions in the process development.
Allow for Flexibility
The most significant benefit of implementing a standardized sales process is its structured approach. However, allowing for occasional flexibility in both the structure and application of the process gives your sales team the necessary autonomy to close unorthodox sales. Some leads require a slightly different approach – will your process allow for your team to adapt procedures as necessary? Similarly, requesting and considering feedback from regular users informs decisions to adjust or modify the standard sales process as needed.
Establishing a successful sales process requires building a solid foundation through the thoughtful and deliberate development of a process. Having a well-designed process to guide your daily activities will better position your organization to attract better qualified leads and close more sales.
by Elizabeth Hines | Oct 2, 2014 | Big Data, Blog, Data/Analytics, Strategy, Supply Chain
Big data is big. It is revolutionary. It is transformative. But what the heck is it?
MIT’s Technology Review does a great job of outlining the hype and the confusion around big data:
“There is unanimous agreement that big data is revolutionizing commerce in the 21st century. When it comes to business, big data offers unprecedented insight, improved decision-making, and untapped sources of profit.
And yet ask a chief technology officer to define big data and he or she will stare at the floor. Chances are, you will get as many definitions as the number of people you ask. And that’s a problem for anyone attempting to buy or sell or use big data services—what exactly is on offer?”
Research conducted by Accenture highlights this dichotomy. Eight-nine percent of survey respondents reported that they believe big data will revolutionize business operations in the same way that the Internet did. Seventy-nine percent of respondents reported that “companies that do not embrace big data will lose their competitive position and may face extinction.” However, the research found that companies hold “differing views of data sources and uses,” and that “valuable data sources are omitted or overlooked.”
Big data and the supply chain
Accenture’s Global Operations Megatrends research looked at big data analytics in the supply chain. Ninety-seven percent of supply chain executive reported that big data analytics can benefit their supply chain. Their expectations for big data analytics include: creating an organizational ability to react more quickly to changes (48 percent); helping their company gain insights about the future (45 percent); and achieving a cross-functional view of the supply chain with the objective of optimizing overall supply chain performance (43 percent).
Although the majority of executives believe big data analytics will benefit their supply chain only 17 percent of survey respondents reported that their company has already implemented analytics in one or more supply chain processes/functions. Accenture makes this supposition:
“While there is considerable hype about, and a high level of general awareness of the value of, ‘big data,’ many companies still do not fully understand how to apply analytics to this data to drive higher supply chain (and overall enterprise) performance.”
Given Accenture’s research, as well as that conducted by Jonathan Stuart Ward and Adam Barker at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, I’d take this one step further. In spite of the hype (or perhaps because of it) there remains confusion regarding what big data actually is. Without a clear definition and understanding of big data, it is (and will continue to be) a challenge to implement big data analytics. Before we realize transformation we need to get to understanding.
by Elizabeth Hines | Sep 30, 2014 | Blog, Strategy, Talent
Are your sales reps as sold on your leads as you are?
In theory, it seems straight forward: You write engaging blog posts; you spread your unique as well as curated content via appropriate social media channels; you include calls to action; you watch your prospects take the bait; and, finally, you hand off a neat list of qualified leads to sales.
Sales, in turn, swiftly goes to work and the sale is a fact.
The reality is, as most of us know, far more muddled. You may be in the habit of dumping any lead, qualified or not, on sales. Sales, on the other hand, may be busy doing anything but tending to your leads. Hours go by. Hours turn into days. When sales finally do follow up, the lead has moved on.
Here is the bad news: Time kills even the most eager leads.
The 2014 Lead Response Report by InsideSales.com shows an undeniable connection between the time it takes to make contact with a prospect and the likelihood of converting that prospect into a customer. Since most companies will send out an automatic e-mail confirmation to anyone who has filled out an online form, the study looked specifically at the phone response rate, which it argues is a much more effective sales tool.
Consider a few of the findings:
- Fifty percent of buyers choose the vendor that responds first.
- The median first call response time was 3 hours and 18 minutes.
- Only a fraction of companies reply within five minutes.
That last number is important because another InsideSales study on lead response management found the following:
“Making a successful contact with a lead are 100 times greater when a contact attempt occurs within 5 minutes, compared to 30 minutes after the lead was submitted. Similarly, the odds of the lead entering the sales process, or becoming qualified, are 21 times greater when contacted within 5 minutes versus 30 minutes after the lead was submitted.”
If you need further proof that response rate matters, an article in Forbes on inbound marketing sums it up perfectly: “If your goal is to ‘pull your customer toward you’ in order to sell them something, then time is definitely of the essence.”
With these statistics in mind, it is more important than ever to ensure marketing and sales are aligned. Too often poor lead-to-customer conversion can be blamed on a disconnection between the two departments.
Work in partnership to establish a common sales funnel. Spell out who is in charge of each step of the sales process. It doesn’t matter who makes that first call to your qualified lead, but it is important that you know someone will actually pick up the phone with a sense of urgency.
Bear in mind: All your leads need to grow cold is time.
