The Vanella Group, Inc. Delivering highly effective sales development solutions for enterprise technology companies

The present-day B2B technology market is highly competitive, and organizations need to execute at a precision level within sales and marketing organizations to meet revenue goals, growth, and manage their sales pipeline. To continually identify new business in a competitive market, it has become essential for businesses to implement tele-based outreach into their sales strategy. Not only does tele-based sales development help in building sales, managing relationships, and maintaining a pipeline; it also enables higher return-on-investment (ROI) of marketing dollars. Sometimes companies lack internal resources for creating a department of the needed caliber that has the advanced skills required, so they opt for specialized firms offering such services. Outsourcing can be an excellent option, but without an understanding of how to choose a partner, the result can be engaging a firm that hires low-level, non-technical and non-business fluent people. Companies today need more than “a person making calls,” they need business-fluent experts on the front lines to gain entry into developing opportunities and manage those relationships. The Vanella Group, Inc. brings a customized, integrated sales development solution that operates at a level to meet that requirement.

Implementing unique lead generation and telemarketing services

Founded in 2001 by Mari Anne Vanella, The Vanella Group, Inc. is a leading firm, providing expert, high-quality, B2B telemarketing and telesales-based lead generation for enterprise tech companies. It was founded with a radically different approach of having very senior level, business-experienced people on the front lines; effectively engaging stakeholders in deep-dive discussions to uncover sales cycles and gain entrance into the opportunity. With its leading-edge approach and processes, they support and enhance sales and marketing effectiveness and enable teams to participate in a much higher number of active deals. Their team has expertise in current selling landscapes, buyer behavior, buyer psychology, and how to executes that into actionable sales intelligence that makes the difference for success within an account.

Initially, The Vanella Group, Inc. focused only on identifying sales cycles. The solution was extremely successful as clients had no visibility of most of these sales cycles in which they could now participate. The Vanella Group, Inc. could articulate important insights into opportunities which often made the difference in winning the business.

Also in 2001, most of their clients didn’t have a CRM and unlike The Vanella Group, Inc., they were not automated. As organizations started implementing CRM systems and then other MarTech platforms, the company saw a need to help them best leverage their systems and develop a good overall model to manage relationships and the lifecycle of the information they uncovered. Clients loved what they were getting because they learned how to factor-in buyer behavior, sales rep preferences, and how best to track and stage pipeline management for multiple levels of visibility for stakeholders at the company. The Vanella Group, Inc. has been a Certified Salesforce Enterprise Consulting Partner, a Marketo Partner, and other sales enablement platforms as well. “We bring a lot of domain expertise in pipeline management, relationship management, and marketing automation our clients really appreciate.” They now often operate as a powerful pre-sales organization to address the complexity needed to manage sales cycles in large opportunities. This requires a level of resource dedication and cross functional knowledge of sales and marketing operations that many sales teams are unable to maintain internally at the same level of efficiency.

Program that impacts long-term revenue attainment

With the unique Telesales 2.0™ methodology, the company has clients reporting results of achieving fives time above the usual conversion rate consistently. Telesales 2.0™ uses a proprietary approach to generate leads with the highest engagement rates. Theirtechnically fluent team have specialized skills and training to understand prospect and buyer behavior, and how to uncover the right data points that make a difference for clients.

This uncovers immediate near-term opportunities, and deals that will soon become active that the client needs to be involved in and maintain a presence. Their unique nurturing and relationship management methodology tracks the progress of the opportunity and maintains the client’s dialog with high-value prospects who are not yet ready to buy but ready to engage. The company maintains the client’s active presence in an account so that they don’t miss the deal when it gains momentum. Thus, it increases the ROI of marketing programs by keeping these larger deals active and managing the relationship so it stays in the pipeline. The impact to retention of deals in the pipeline is a key deliverable.

The Vanella Group, Inc. also implements the Telesales 2.0™ methodology within SDR and Direct Sales teams through onsite and remote training. The immediate lift in results impacts teams positively in a measurable and sustainable way. Telesales 2.0™  was designed to make an immediate impact in results, not serve as a training event that ends up in a binder on the shelf. The methodology is a way that SDR’s and Direct Reps can effectively manage challenges they face with keeping momentum with prospects and bypass many roadblocks that otherwise obstruct engagement. 

Let’s meet the visionary behind the company: Mari Anne Vanella, CEO

Mari Anne Vanella has more than 25 years of experience in sales and business management. She has been the Vice President and Director at companies such as The EC Company (now ADX), Picture Talk, Global Knowledge, and at Skyline, where she led the Cisco Training organization to a #5 position in the country within a year. Prior to these she founded Procom, a sales development firm based in the Silicon Valley serving customers such as State Farm, Waddell & Reed, and many others.

Mari Anne is listed in the #3 position in her category in the “40 Most Inspirational C-Level Leaders in Sales Lead Management” in 2016 and is also awarded the “20 Women to Watch in Sales Lead Management” in 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014. Recently she spoke in featured sessions at Dreamforce on Social Selling and has been invited to represent the SMB CEO role at “LinkedIn Live” which was co-sponsored by the regional Chamber of Commerce. She has authored the best-selling book “42 Rules of Cold Calling Executives” which reached #1 in its category on Amazon. Her blog is widely syndicated and she was recently featured on CRM and Funnel Radio as a guest.

"The depth of critical thinking that happens on these calls is something far beyond what typical telemarketing companies offer, that’s how we gain access to large deals and key stakeholders."