Predictions 2013 What’s in Store for Sales, Marketing and Big Data in the New Year?
As December gets well under way, it is time to start focusing on what is to come for the New Year. With that I'd like to introduce the latest ebook from Lattice - Predictions 2013: What's in Store for Sales, Marketing and Big Data in the New Year? This year we turned to over 20 industry experts to offer predictions on the sales and marketing landscape for 2013 and Big Data's projected impact.
A big thank you to everyone who contributed their thoughts to the ebook. Here are a few sample predictions:
• Greg Alexander, CEO of Sales Benchmark Index: Sales rep prospecting will be a top challenge. In 2012, companies over rotated towards lead generation being the exclusive responsibility of the marketing department. Sales has to generate their fair share of the leads. These muscles have not been used for a while and reps currently are not very good at generating their own leads. Sales departments got caught up in the hype cycle of marketing automation.
• Dave Brock, president at Partners in EXCELLENCE: High performance sales hone in on prospects. In 2013, high performance sales organizations will provide their sales people with “intelligent leads.” Today, these companies are leveraging marketing automation systems, lead nurturing, lead scoring and other techniques to provide high sales accepted leads. By incorporating rich analytics, these organizations will make quantum leaps in lead quality/conversions.
• Heidi Melin, CMO Eloqua: Companies will continue to seek a deeper understanding of buyers and the foundation for achieving this will be Big Data. Marketers will leverage their ecosystem of technology and the insight it provides to further understand their buyers’ ‘digital body language.’ The explosion of available data, beyond demographics, that captures a prospect’s online behavior will help organizations move potential customers through the buying stages by delivering the right information at the right time in their journey from awareness to consideration to, ultimately, purchase. If marketers can take advantage of Big Data, companies will benefit from the insights necessary to drive revenue.