Revenue Strategies

Corporate Visions launched Virtual Coach, a platform designed to provide salespeople with access to stage-specific reinforcement training and skills content from within their CRM system or sales portal.

Virtual Coach intends to provide salespeople with timely, bite-sized pieces of training reinforcement. The platform presents the information to the salesperson in context and aligns it with each selling or buying stage.

The benefits of sales and marketing alignment have been well documented over the past several years, but many organizations are still not on board. More than half (58%) of respondents rated their sales and marketing operations alignment as “poor,” according to research from SiriusDecisions.

Progressive B2B organizations are re-defining the sales and marketing relationship by forming “revenue teams” or “demand gen teams” with shared performance goals. “We’ve seen an increase in the revenue team model, where members of the marketing team work with sales toward a joint goal to make their numbers,” said Chris Tratar, VP of Product Marketing at SAVO Group.

Over the past few years, many B2B organizations have been growing their inside sales teams, spurred by the better conversion rates and lower costs compared to a traditional sales team.

The most recent Inside Sales Market Size Study, conducted by InsideSales.com, revealed that inside sales is growing 7.5%, compared to field sales at only 0.5%. In addition, more than half of B2B sales reps (53%) sell remotely. Based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the number of U.S. non-retail inside sales positions is projected to increase by more than 40,000 per year through 2020.

Alinean, a provider of marketing and sales tools for B2B companies, announced the launch of a new online portal with tools and assessments designed to help marketing and sales teams measure ROI.

The free portal, named I Want My ROI, is positioned to help benchmark spending and performance, while also helping boost business development. Assessment, performance and spending benchmarks will be aggregated and constantly refreshed from the community of users to provide accurate insights.

Tellwise, a cloud-based sales acceleration technology provider, unveiled a platform designed to automate the sales lead tracking process and enhance engagement between prospective buyers and the sales rep.

The platform, which is integrated with Salesforce, is positioned to combine email, instant messaging, collaboration, and analytics in one location. It is also intended to deliver highly-focused content that relates and resonates with prospective buyers.