A sales blitz, also known as a sales call or a sales campaign, is an intense and focused effort by a sales team to reach out to potential customers within a specified period of time. The term “blitz” refers to a rapid and concentrated effort, similar to a military blitzkrieg. The main objective of a sales blitz is to generate leads, build brand awareness, and increase sales opportunities.
During a sales blitz, sales representatives make multiple phone calls, emails, or (if possible) in-person visits to a target audience, with the aim of engaging them and converting them into qualified leads, opportunities and then customers.
The sales blitz is all about momentum. A single blitz can reach a large number of prospects quickly, leveraging the impact of a concentrated effort. This strategy is often employed to accelerate sales growth, launch a new product or service, or penetrate a new market.
By organizing a sales blitz, companies can create momentum and enthusiasm within their sales teams, resulting in increased productivity and improved sales performance. Overall, a sales blitz is a strategic initiative that helps businesses maximize their sales potential and achieve their revenue goals.
What is a sales blitz day?
A blitz day, also known as a call blitz or sales blitz day, is an intensive and proactive sales strategy focused on generating leads and closing deals within a specific time frame – in this case one day. For the blitz day, the entire sales team is calling on one type of prospect with the goal of creating meaningful conversations that lead to sales opportunities.
The day-long period can give teams a sense of unity, e.g. we’re all in this together, and can allow for focus.
If a sales team is in the same office space for a blitz day, they can hear other conversations going on and can learn specific questions coming in from prospects just by listening to each other. Sales managers can emulate this feeling with remote teams by listening in on a call, hosting post-call chat sessions and monitoring on-going Slack conversations throughout the day.
Planning for a sales blitz
How can you design and implement a blitz program that successfully aligns sales and marketing? Like most things in business, you need a rock-solid game plan.
Leadership from sales and marketing must connect early on and develop a mutually agreed-to blitz calendar. The blitz calendar provides a central source of truth from which both teams can mobilize resources and hold each other accountable.
At a minimum the calendar should specify the date, topic, and team-specific responsibilities for each blitz. Of course, creating a blitz calendar may unearth additional considerations that must be ironed out, such as:
- What should the focus of the blitz be (e.g. a vertical, a competitor take down, etc.)
- How many blitzes should be on the calendar at any given time?
- What is a reasonable blitz cadence (weekly, monthly, bi-monthly)?
- Where should ideas be organized for future discussion?
- Should blitzes align with upcoming product or service releases?
- Who is responsible for maintaining the calendar?
- How often should the leadership team meet to discuss changes to the calendar?
Finding answers to every question may not be feasible or necessary on day one. What’s more important is that both teams walk away with a clear understanding of the agreed-to expectations, timelines, and next steps.
How does the marketing team support a sales blitz?
A sales blitz campaign is an excellent example of marketing and sales teams working together to create better outcomes. With the blitz calendar in hand, it’s time for both teams to get busy doing prep work.
Let’s take a look at some of the pre-blitz priorities:
Create your target list: Randomly selecting and dialing contacts in your CRM isn’t a winning blitz-day strategy. Customers and prospects don’t want to be contacted simply to be contacted. Rather, your B2B prospects want real solutions that help them increase revenue, reduce costs, and gain a competitive advantage.
When refining the targeted audience and segmentation criteria, it’s vital to think from the prospect’s perspective. Do you feel confident that your offers, features, and benefits delight your targets? If not, keep refining your list.
Load the target group of contacts into your customer relationship management system (CRM) and have the campaign associated with the list. This is essential since it will ensure that the blitz campaign is credited with any wins generated from the event.
Craft the message: Once the audience has been established, marketing should craft messaging that’s backed by data and prepare assets for the sales team to use:
- Sales email templates and cadences
- Digital product information sheets
- Sales decks
- Post-blitz drip email campaigns
- Digital ads (banners, text ads, retargeted ads, etc.)
- Battlecards and competitor matrices
- Videos/podcast clips
- Intel on how our solution is best for x vertical
- Supporting social media posts
- Direct mail components (gifts/swag + literature)
Pre-blitz warm up: Ahead of blitz day, marketing can begin to engage with the list of targets to ‘warm the up’ to the message the sales team will deliver during the blitz:
- Pre-blitz nurture email campaigns
- Pre-blitz paid social media ads to the target audience
Blitz briefing: If you are lucky enough to have a sales enablement team, that team would be active in training the sales team ahead of the blitz. Otherwise, this briefing would be led jointly by sales and marketing leaders. Regardless, this briefing is vital to the success of the blitz. It should walk through the plan, the assets that have been created, the event timeline and the expected outcomes.
With the blitz day rapidly approaching, it’s time for sales and marketing to reconnect. At a minimum, marketing should be prepared to:
- Deliver collateral, segmentation data, and messaging best practices
- Provide updates on pre-blitz promotional campaign results
- Share lessons learned from pre-blitz activities
- Answer any questions from the sales team
The sales team should use this forum to make any final requests from marketing, such as additional collateral or more data about the intended audience.
All the preparation and planning culminate in the big day. The sales team has everything it needs to engage the target audience. Marketing team has become subject matter experts and is standing by to assist wherever needed.
Running the sales blitz
And, as the first dial is made, the real fun begins.
Sales starts banging the phones, doing outbound, and getting customers talking. Marketing is available for conversations as subject matter experts. Blitz day has a really cool central command experience that is unparalleled.
Although the blitz itself may only last a few hours, the potential upside can be huge.
Team members can watch the CRM dashboard throughout the day and see the progress being made in lead generation and opportunity generation associated with the blitz.
Whether it be a 4, 6 or 8 hour stretch, keep in mind that your team may get fatigued. Refreshments can help. If your team is in one location, this is a great time to bring in breakfast/lunch/snacks and consider a happy hour to end the day. If your team is remote, consider sending gift cards to a service like DoorDash or UberEats so each person can treat themselves to coffee or lunch.
Recapping the blitz
It’s always wise to host a retrospective session and discuss what worked or didn’t work. Again, your sales enablement team should lead this. If you do not have one, then a marketing and sales leader can co-lead it. Don’t just rely on anecdotal evidence to measure the success of a sales blitz. If used properly, your CRM should be a treasure trove of information that delivers data-driven answers to these questions:
- How much pipeline did the sales blitz generate?
- How effective was the sales team at getting leads on the phone?
- What was our lead-to-opportunity conversion rate for this blitz?
- What percentage of sales emails were clicked?
- Was marketing effective at “warming up” the list?
- How do these metrics compare to other blitzes?
A good format for the meeting is a “Start/Stop/Keep” method that allows people to provide constructive feedback focused on the next blitz in a proactive way.
What is a marketing blitz campaign?
Up until this point, this blog post has been about blitz campaigns that involve both the marketing and sales teams. It is possible for the marketing team to run a blitz campaign on its own without the involvement of the sales team.
A marketing blitz is a strategic and intensive marketing approach aimed at achieving quick and impactful results. It involves the implementation of various marketing blitz ideas to create a buzz and generate leads within a short period of time. A successful marketing blitz requires careful planning, creative messaging, and targeted distribution channels. It is essential to have a clear understanding of the marketing blitz meaning and objectives, as well as a well-coordinated team and resources to execute the campaign effectively.
An example of a marketing blitz can be targeting a specific vertical. In a given 2 month period, the marketing team may use new and existing tactics on that vertical. For example, let’s say you are a manufacturing company and you sell to many industries but you want to focus a blitz campaign on the medical field which represents about 20% of your business.
You may do the following during your two month “manufacturing for medical” blitz:
- Run digital ads with a medical message
- Invite medical customers to do case studies
- Produce an ebook on manufacturing medical devices
- Have medical industry guests on your podcast
- Look for guesting opportunities on medical podcasts
- Create social media posts with medical imagery
- Put leads through a drip email nurture cadence
- Host a webinar on a use case for medical customers
- Send direct mail to medical prospects
Benefit of a sales blitz: alignment
Sales blitz can have different meanings depending on the company, industry, and product or service. Overall, a sales blitz is a marketing-initiated, designed, and supported sales campaign that targets predefined buyer segments in a single or multiple territories, within a specified timeframe, with a single, consistent message. The goal of most sales blitzes is to generate pipeline.
As such, a sales blitz can be a great way to align marketing and sales teams under a common, short-term goal. It can feel like a coordinated effort where everyone is motivated to move together as a unified revenue team.
A marketing blitz can be independent of the sales team, but still has a defined focus and time frame. It still has the goal of generating leads and, eventually, pipeline, so keeping the sales team informed of marketing blitzes is important for alignment as well.
By aligning the right mix of people, tactics, and technology, your team is well on its way to running successful sales blitzes that produce pipeline, foster internal collaboration, and elevate overall performance.
Get the right CRM to align your teams and run a sales blitz
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