These are the findings of a survey of B2B sales professionals conducted by OneSource, an Infogroup company. LinkedIn was rated 3.1 out of 5, compared with ratings of 2.0 for blogs, 1.9 for Facebook and 1.8 for Twitter. LinkedIn also showed the highest growth with almost half of all respondents indicating that they are using the social network more for prospecting and research than a year ago. Nearly one fifth of those involved in the survey have increased their prospecting efforts on blogs, Facebook and Twitter, but the majority do not turn to these sites for research at all.
Nevertheless, when asked to rate various lead sources, sales professionals placed the least importance on direct mail, social networking sites (each rated 2.1 out of 5) and webinars (1.8), while outbound prospecting and corporate websites have been mentioned as the best sources of qualified opportunities (with ratings of 3.7 and 2.9 respectively).
Despite healthier pipelines reported by sales professionals taking our survey, the majority are still facing longer sales cycles, which makes having the right information to identify hot prospects and accelerate them through the pipeline more important than ever before, according to Sham Sao, chief marketing officer of OneSource.
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