With over 17 years experience helping Fortune 500 companies increase their revenues with successful sales and marketing campaigns, ELEVATE – the global leader in Insourced New Business Development – is seeking a Data Entry Specialist.

He or she is responsible for creating, updating, maintaining and validating the database and provide reports of the data. He or she is should be able to prioritize work in line with project management decisions. The responsibilities of the Data Entry Specialist is to manage the database by reviewing, cleaning and auditing the data in compliance with standard operating procedures and client guidelines.

Competencies:

• Work precisely according to procedures, rules and regulations.
• Consistency in delivering positive results, following tasks through from start to finish and meet deadlines.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills and be able to follow oral and/or written instructions.
• Must have an exceptional eye for detail and be an accurate typist.
• Work as a team player and be honest and dependable.
• Ability to work unsupervised taking responsibility for own actions and must be able to maintain company confidentiality.

Responsibilities include but are not limited to:

• Create, update, maintain, review and audit data into our CRM system with standard operating procedures and client guidelines (Salesforce.com experience beneficial).
• Create, update and maintain the database in various Excel spreadsheets (Experience with pivot tables and formulas is an advantage).
• Prioritize work in the line with project management decisions.
• Create/prepare and distribute reports of the data entered.
• Query data inconsistencies that are not in compliance with standard operating procedures and client guidelines

Experience/Requirements:

• Working knowledge of record management procedures.
• Working with a wide variety of computer systems, software and databases.
• 2+ years in a similar position.
• Bilingual (Spanish and English – Portuguese is a plus).

This position is a contract position. To apply, please send your resume, salary expectations and three contactable references to careers@thinkelevate.com

If you saw this great article “One-on-One with PwC’s Tom Craren” about PWC’s 10 Minute Thought Leadership series. (see the News Feed on the Group home page).

My thoughts immediately went to “that’s all well and good, but they don’t mention how they capitalize on this to drive leads and revenue”. All to often we see great pieces of content produced by Marketing and other Thought Leaders in the firm, but it needs to be turned into real tangible results.

A lot of people read great articles and have good intentions, but they seldom turn that thought into action.

We believe the key lies in creating a two way dialogue – picking up the phone to the senior executive – and arranging meetings to discuss how this new trend or area of expertise relevant to their organization.

For one of our consulting clients, we just implemented such a program – through our telephone outreach we generated over 20 meetings with c-suite Executives across only 80 of the Fortune500 Companies – all on the back off one piece of thought leadership. Something that has never before done before in the firm.

What is your experience with arranging meetings with Senior Executives in Best in Class companies – How do you do it? Does a “content marketing” strategy work? Can you attribute deals to a particular piece of research or thought leadership?
Please share your thoughts.

Thanks

Nick

When it comes to excuses, pick your poison: it’s too early in the morning, it’s too late in the afternoon, if you get into a conversation you will need to get your boss on the phone and she’s not around.

Here’s our Top 10:

1. I’m booked for at least six weeks. I couldn’t handle another deal if it landed on my desk.
2. My business development discussions, if I get into a good one, take an hour. I only have 45 minutes to make calls now so I should wait until I have more time.
3. This isn’t a good use of my time. Somebody else should source leads and I should deliver work.
4. I’m not good at it so what’s the use? (And I sure can’t tell anyone this, so I’ll make up another reason.)
5. In my business, leads only come through referrals. Proactive outbound business development, even networking, doesn’t work. Why bother?
6. I’m deathly afraid of selling.
7. If I reach out to prospects, I will sound like a used car salesperson. Since I’m a professional, I can’t set up that dynamic.
8. I know how to talk about what I do (I think). Yet, for some strange reason, the words never come out right.
9. I don’t even know who to contact. I have the time and the will, but what do I do?
10. I hate selling.

Regardless of your reason, the end result is the same; another day goes by and you don’t work on business development.

Most CPAs (or technology consultants, or lawyers, or management consultants) show up in the morning and start doing accounting. They crunch numbers, manage teams, and take client meetings. Maybe there’s an hour and a half window in their schedule in the late afternoon. Here’s what most of them won’t do with that time: business development.

That’s right, 9 out of 10 professionals agree that engaging anything but business development in their open time slot is best to whiten teeth and freshen breath. The number one reason that professionals fail at business development: finding something else to do, or doing nothing, when they could be developing business.

Fortunately, the answer is simple: Start selling now.

Unfortunately, it is not that easy to take a deeply embedded behavior (not selling), flip a switch, and be able to do today what you did not, or could not, do yesterday.

And it doesn’t work like that for professionals who want to develop business.

You can’t just magically develop a hankering for dialing the phone. For the most part, it takes a robust personal change effort to make the transition from business-development-avoider to focused-client-developer.

3 ways to break the cycle:

1. Respect the effort. Realize that it takes significant time, effort, energy, and sometimes resources to develop business and stick with it.
2. Leverage your team. Seek help if you are stuck in a sales avoidance rut. Breaking out of a rut alone is extremely difficult. You will find help in the form of a peer, coach, boss, or someone else. Whoever it is, involving the right people increases your chance of success.
3. Develop an ongoing strategy. Before you engage in ongoing business development, know what tactics you are going to employ and why. If you have a clear end goal, and know how each tactic you undertake helps to get you there.

We make light of excuses for avoiding business development in order to raise the issue. Breaking the cycle of excuses and starting to develop business is never as easy as it sounds. But you can do it. Do what you need to do to prepare for success, know what you are going after, and then “just do it”

We all know how to determine our target market – its simple – “we are targeting all the Fortune 1000 companies with 1bn plus turnover and we are connecting with C-suite decision makers” – right?

Correct – however in reality, when you really start to look at the information that you have – is it really complete, accurate and everyone accounted for?

Are you confident that you can touch every single company at the level you require to convey your message correctly?

Based on our experience over, most firms are missing over 37% of their total available market, in addition to this they don’t proactively update their database on a regular basis.

The impact that this has on your marketing efforts is huge – not only is the firm NOT connecting with all the relevant decision makers, the number of these decision makers are constantly diminishing – reducing even further the impact marketing has on this target market.

The key to reaching your Total Available Market is twofold.
- Firstly, identify every relevant organization and decision maker, and
- Secondly to make sure it stays that way – updated
I would be delighted to learn your experiences identifying and reaching your target available market.
If you would like to find out more how ELEVATE can help you in these goals, do not hesitate to contact me directly.

-Nick

As Marketing Automation technologies start to gain momentum in sales and marketing functions, will it actually add revenues to the bottom line or just highlight sales and marketing inefficiencies?

Several people in my network have been boasting their increased pipeline activity since implementing marketing automation as well as the justification that marketing can now make on the revenue it provides to their service line or business unit. Now, they can directly demonstrate the value and secure a greater budget to focus on key revenue generating activities.

On the flip side, the increased visibility shows the vulnerabilities of marketing and client teams. I just received an email this morning from a Service Line Lead – asking how he can fix the problem of his teams not following up hot prospects fast enough – he was furious that all these key targets were being left to their own devices.

We would like to hear your thoughts and experience on using Marketing Automation technologies, what value they bring and also how much or little you know about the benefits and downfalls.