Company: SalesStaff LLC, Houston, TX
Company Description: SalesStaff provides high-level appointment setting and demand generation services for business-to-business technology companies through the deployment and management of quota-based marketing programs. We research opportunities and successfully secure meetings with key executives on behalf of our clients' B2B sales teams to expand their sales pipelines and accelerate sales cycles.
Nomination Category: Sales Awards Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Demand Generation Program of the Year

Nomination Title: How Demand Generation Experts, SalesStaff, Construct an Internal Demand Gen Program - Drinking our own Kool-Aid

Tell the story about your organization's demand generation program since the beginning of July 2013 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

We live, breathe, eat, and sleep Demand Generation at SalesStaff. As a provider of Demand Generation services, SalesStaff “drinks its own Kool-Aid”. You would expect a Demand Gen company to have an outrageously successful Demand Generation program to fuel its own sales pipeline… and we do.

In today’s B2B world, the sales funnel looks less like a funnel and more like a game of Chutes and Ladders. Demand Generation has become the fine art of influencing potential buyers to engage – ‘engage’ being the key word because influence without engagement is futile.

By combining elements of outbound and inbound marketing, SalesStaff has been able to generate about 7,000 inquiries in 2014. You read that right. That’s a lot of hand-raisers for any enterprise-level organization, but it’s an extraordinary amount for a company of our size. How did we do it? SalesStaff combined the most effective elements of inbound and outbound Demand Generation, the result of which was a high-octane, consistent stream of inbound leads to fuel our sales team and propel our company to Inc. 500 worthy growth for the second year in a row. Below are the primary means by which we created demand:

Email Marketing

SalesStaff has spent many years maintaining and refining a homegrown database of over 1.2 million sales, marketing, and business development decision-makers worldwide. We’ve also spent countless amounts of time honing in on the messaging and format that resonates with those personas. As a result, SalesStaff has consistently produced a reliable stream of 150 inbound sales inquiries every week throughout the year through email marketing – not opens or click-throughs, actual responses from prospects who want to know more.

Content Marketing

Content is king and we know that. SalesStaff operates a blog on sales and marketing that has well over 500,000 subscribers and 150,000 regular total views. We reached those staggering numbers by providing our audience with quality content which is, by and large, educational, actionable and impactful. In addition, SalesStaff’s premium, gated content has been downloaded a total of 5,250 times in 2014 – which includes 1,300 downloads of our most successful piece, 100 Sales and Marketing Stats that Will Blow Your Mind. SalesStaff also added a webinar series to our content marketing mix, having presented The Ultimate Sales Funnel to more than 500 registrants in December 2014.

Social Media

Our social media presence serves as a hub for our content marketing programs, and the numbers speak for themselves. SalesStaff has garnered an audience of over 50,000 on our three major Twitter accounts, becoming the 3rd most followed account of all Inc. 500 companies. We sponsor and moderate a LinkedIn group of over 20,000 members. Not only are we active on our own social media assets, but in 2014, SalesStaff instituted a program focused on engaging our audience in other LinkedIn groups. As a result, our discussions have received over 1,200 comments and sparked some much-needed debate in the sales and marketing community.

Inside Sales Team

Generating demand and live sales inquiries is meaningless without the ‘human component’ to qualify those leads and provide the transition to the sales team. SalesStaff employs a team of five of the best Inside Sales Representatives (ISR) in the entire industry. They move mountains and work tirelessly to process those 7,000 inbound inquiries we received in 2014, and convert nearly 5,500 into actionable sales appointments. The ISR team has given us the flexibility to turn on a dime and deploy campaigns at a moment’s notice with the comfort that they will be managed appropriately.

We can talk about these components individually, but the real Demand Generation magic happens when they work together in tandem, seamlessly. That interaction of components is achieved through SalesStaff’s (1) series of technology integrations, (2) persistent personnel development, and (3) continuous process refinement. By interweaving these components together, SalesStaff has achieved 100% year-over-year growth for the past three years, with a great future.

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