The majority (57%) of B2B information technology buyers are using social networks as part their purchase decision process, according to a recent report from IDG Connect. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

We compared attitudes and expectations for the cloud across mainstream and leading-edge IT buyers. The results in the following sections will help you to see how your own organization compares.

Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
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• IT spending’s growth prospects for the rest of 2013
• Second-quarter IT spending: analysis and outlook
• Get the most from your IT service management provider

Sales Training Article: Are you a teacher or a salesperson?

By John Holland, Chief Content Officer, CustomerCentric Selling® - The Sales Training Company

Image courtesy of Scott Chan at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Do you think something is awry when people say that a seller's job is educating buyers? I suppose if sellers are calling on early market buyers and have disruptive offerings it could potentially be productive. Generally speaking I cringe at the thought of taking the time to educate buyers. For those espousing this approach I have a few questions:

1. What do sellers talk about when educating buyers? Sellers talk about their products/offerings when educating buyers, often reciting what they learned in product training. Most everyone agrees leading with product is the sign of an inept seller. Taking this approach can lead to premature price discussions. Disclosing approximate costs before establishing value is certainly not heading calls in a positive direction.

2. What level of buyer is willing to be educated? In my experience executives will end meetings abruptly if they degrade into discussions about sellers' offerings. Anyone that allows sellers the time needed to educate them is probably not a Key Player and unlikely to have an enterprise perspective of what value offerings could provide.

Sign-up for one of these public sales training workshops to learn how to identify and engage the Key Player in your opportunities.

3. Does everyone get the same education? If sellers haven't had an opportunity to discuss buyer challenges, it's likely (nearly certain) that some features/capabilities presented won't be relevant. Without diagnosing a buyer's needs first, education runs the risk of just being "spray and pray" product pitches that buyers detest.

Ideally initial calls on Key Player titles should focus on business outcomes that can be improved through the use of a seller's offering. These executive buyers want the "Cliff Notes" summary and a conceptual idea of specific capabilities that are needed to achieve outcomes. As a seller is designated to lower levels, the discussions become more product focused, but hopefully sellers can discuss or even demo only those parts of their offerings that are relevant.

Unlike teachers that must cover 100% of a curriculum for all students, competent sellers share details about their offerings on a need to know basis for each buyer.

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Need some help with your sales performance? Take a look at the sales training workshops available to you and improve sales performance.

Read more sales training articles from CustomerCentric Selling® - The Sales Training Company.

Pricing has a direct impact on a company’s bottom line.

So why is pricing often not considered an executive management task? 

Can a company develop an affective overall strategy and not take into account buyer’s perception of value, let alone pricing?

All good pricing decisions must involve managing price differentials. Buyers have certain behavioral and cognitive boundaries, and it is critical you understand these boundaries to maximize profit. You can increase prices and not affect your sales volume if the pricing is right.

Determining the Right Price:

At what point does a customer decide the price is too high for your product? In discussing this turning point, we must understand that buyers do not see pricing as absolute. We need to de-termine the tipping point between the customer purchasing your product and your customers deciding the price is too high. It is important to remember that just because you change prices, doesn’t mean you change the customer’s purchasing behavior.  Pricing is seen as a reflection of quality and product/service.

During the PPS 2nd Annual Asia-Pacific Pricing Workshops and Conference in Singapore, you can attend a full-day workshop entitled Managing Price Differentials: An Executive Perspective, Dr. Kent B. Monroe and Lillian Cheng give an executive summary of price differentials, examining how consumers respond to various differential thresholds.

Who Should Attend this Workshop:

This workshop is ideal for those who have a broad range of questions regarding the importance of pricing differentials. Specific topics such as understanding how pricing strategies define pricing tactics,  the role of the executive in pricing, and how to increase prices without affecting sales volume, among others topics, are discussed.

Dr. Monroe is the founding editor of Pricing Practice and Strategy and is J.M. Jones Professor of Marketing Emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign. Ms. Cheng is a partner at Cheng, Monroe, and Associates and co-author of An Appraisal of Behavioral Price Research (Part 1)  and  An Appraisal of Behavioral Research (Part 1).

We all have it.  It is the political bank account inside a company that gets things done. Some people have more political capital than you.  Many have less. You can build or ‘deposit’ this capital through several methods.  For example, making the number consistently helps increase your political capital.  Getting drunk and insulting the CEO at the Annual Sales Kickoff Meeting withdraws it. This political capital bank account can be as important as making your number.

You build political capital over time. It’s time with the person not time with your company.   The proof of this is when the CEO’s former employee is hired.  Or the sales rep you recruited because of their reliability and loyalty to you.  This political capital is easy to lose and hard to get.

Let’s first define Political Capital (PC):

But you as a Sales VP ask several questions about Political Capital. (Let’s call it ‘PC’ for short):

• How do I get PC?
• How can I use PC?
• What do I use PC for?

Download the Sales Political Capital Guide.  It teaches you how to answer those first two questions: How do I get it?  How can I use it? We will answer the other question below:

What do I use it for?                                        

 

What you use your Political Capital for must be done wisely.  There are three rules to follow:

1.  Deposits must exceed Withdrawals.  When used correctly, the PC bank account will take a hit.  You must ‘deposit’ new PC or you run the risk of becoming ‘bankrupt.’  You will need some political capital during this year.  And it’s usually when you think you don’t. Never stop trying to add Political Capital.
2. Use if for something pretty big.  Don’t throw it away uselessly.  Make sure you carefully choose when and how you use it.  The items here are pretty limited.  Big actions that come to mind are:
   1. Hiring a former colleague (when some people on the team don’t).
   2. Sticking your neck out for someone above you in the organization (a.k.a. having your boss’s back)
   3. Saving someone from some a stupid action they did (We have all been here).
   4. Getting the low price approved on the once in a lifetime deal (‘We will make it up in volume!’)
   5. Pushing through the risky sales project.  (You need to create a budget for it.)
   6. Paying the extra bonus to the sale rep that deserved it (The guy who missed his numbers and bonus by .5%)
3. Make sure it helps you make the number.   People always ask me why one sales person gets better treatment then another.  OR why one sales person gets ‘saved’ while another gets ‘fired.’  Great Sales VPs keep people if it helps them make the number. Building PC with someone means helping them get what they want.

We witnessed a great example of using PC recently:

The Sales VP knew this year was going to be tough.  He made his number 3 years in a row.  But the pipeline was the lowest it has ever been in his tenure.  Customers were not buying the same way.  He concluded that either he needed better talent or a new structure.  After self-researching, he wanted to transform the sales team.  This was going to cost about 1.5mm over the next 18 months to accomplish.  It comprised of design, development, training, severance, outside help and adoption.

He didn’t have 1.5 million dollars in his budget.  It was time to ‘spend’ some political capital.

The CEO was nervous.  After all, sales made the number over the past 3 years.  After going through ROI models and cost benefit analysis, the final decision time arrived.  I was lucky enough to witness the interaction between the CEO and Sales VP.

“Jeff (the CEO), our sales team needs this transformation.  As we discussed, if this doesn’t happen I know we will miss our number.”

“But Ray (the Sales VP), 1.5 million is a lot of money.  Can’t we get this done for less?”

“Not if we want it done right Jeff. Trust me on this one.” 

The Sales VP got the funding for the project.  I asked him afterwards why he used the ‘trust’ phrase. (This is usually the kiss of death when asking for money).  Ray replied “I have been playing by the rules for 3 years earning his trust each day.  It was time for him to now trust me.”   The Sales VP had been building his political capital bank account for three years.  And when he needed it, he used it effectively.

Call to Action:

• Download the Sales VP Political Capital Guide.  It will help you start building PC today within your organization
• Look for opportunities to build Political Capital up and down the organization. Having PC with your direct reports is more important than your boss.  Why?  They have your back when you try something different.
• Use it wisely.  Think like this:  It takes five deposits to match one withdrawal.  Consistently build your deposits.  You will never have enough.

Please leave a comment on how you build PC on your team.  Also share how you have used it wisely in the past.  This can be the missing component to get certain things accomplished in your organization.  Make sure though you use your Political Capital wisely.

Author: Dan Perry

Follow @DanPerrySBI

Follow @MakingTheNumber

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There is no substitution for goal setting, then creating plans of action and then taking that action.

This is the time of making plans and creating goals to make this year better than years past.

The famous author on achievement and inspirational speaker Dr. Stephen R. Covey used to demonstrate the idea of getting accomplishments done by putting rocks, stones, and sand into a bucket.  I had the privilege of working for Dr. Covey a number of years ago when I was a Franklin Covey Facilitator.

Dr. Covey was fantastic at getting his point across – see if you don’t envision this as you read:

Grab a bucket, four or five very large rocks – that would all fit in the bucket and make the bucket look full when you put the large rocks in.

The bucket symbolizes your week. You start with an empty bucket at the beginning of the week.

Sand that you put into it symbolizes the minutia – email, messages, etc.  We usually have a week full of sand – if you don’t agree, ask yourself this:

Have you ever completed a week at work and felt like you really didn’t accomplish anything?

The rocks, sand and bucket visual – if you put this idea into place, will keep that from ever happening again.

Small rocks are those small things that are always on to-do lists.  Like cleaning a house where several active children live, the small rocks never go away – they seem to multiply at times. Many of us just chase the small rocks around.

When asked how you are, do you ever tell people, “I’m really busy.” Like that is a badge of honor.

Instead, I ask, “Are you accomplishing your best and highest priorities?”

“You have to decide what YOUR highest priorities are – and have the courage – pleasantly, smilingly, non-apologetically, to say “no” to other things. And the way you do that is to have a bigger “yes” burning inside. The enemy of “the best” is often “the good”. 

- Dr Stephen Covey

Bigger rocks are sometimes feeling like urgent things in our days – they need to get done, but not sooner than the very biggest rocks.

The big rocks, as I learned over the years, are the very top priorities you have for this week.

I encourage people to have 3 or 4 big rocks in their bucket by the end of the week.

Example:

First, identify your top 3 or 4 priorities, write them down or put into a productivity app and work to accomplish those this week.

If you are in sales, perhaps one will be to hit whatever activity goals you have or your boss has for you in a week’s time.

Another might be to reach that elusive CEO you have tried to reach the past couple months. Having a conversation with her will help firm up a sales opportunity you are working on and would be a huge win.

The third big rock might be working with your marketing person to get a Q1 mailing out so that you keep nurturing prospects who are interested but not ready to buy.

At the end of the week, you would have done lots of things INCLUDING these three “big rocks” you identified as wins to accomplish.

Why Do This?

Whether you are in sales, customer service, or leading a company – you have hundreds, if not thousands of things to think about. By accomplishing three or four really big things each week, you move closer toward your goals and you have a sense of accomplishment like you’ve never had. You can move onto the weekend and unplug, knowing you were accomplished and focused the week prior.

Try it if you haven’t before, and I’m pretty sure you’ll find it helpful.

To see our list of productivity and self-management books click here

We’ve written about this topic before -

Put Planning Time into Your Sales Schedule

What are Your Three Big Rocks to Grow Your Business?

Find an app for your Smartphone that helps support you to accomplish your big rocks. We’ll be sharing top apps for this next.

As Yoda said, “Do or do not. There is no try.”
This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Lori Richardson is recognized as one of the “Top 25 Sales Influencers for 2013″ and one of “20 Women to Watch in Sales Lead Management for 2013″. Lori speaks, writes, trains, and consults with inside and outbound sellers in technology and services companies. Subscribe to the award-winning blog and the “Sales Ideas In A Minute” newsletter for sales strategies, tactics, and tips. Increase Opportunities. Expand Your Pipeline. Close More Deals.

The post Use Big Rocks to Grow Your Sales appeared first on Score More Sales.

Putting together a successful inside sales team takes a lot more than gathering up a bunch of charismatic super-stars and throwing them at the phones. There are a lot of pitfalls that actively reduce a sales team’s ability to succeed. And if your team isn’t succeeding, you’re not making money!

There are four pitfalls, in particular, that are worth addressing. These pitfalls plague most sales teams at one time or another. Fortunately, they all have easy fixes.

1. Lead Uncertainty

I have seen sales teams that literally toss the phone book at new reps. “Everyone in there is a prospect, so start dialing!”

This is madness. The rep doesn’t know if some other rep has already called the person on the other end of those numbers. The rep doesn’t know if the person on the other end of the dial is already a customer. The rep has no idea if these people are even  suspects…people with enough money and the right kinds of products to care about the phone call.

At best, a resilient rep wastes a lot of time calling people who will never buy through no fault of his own. At worst, a more careful and less confident representative will spend time overthinking and attempting to research every dial for fear of looking foolish. Both strategies waste time and sap away positive mental energy that could go into making the most out of every sales call.

The fix: You need a good CRM system. You also need a strategy for delivering the right lead lists to your reps, so that they maximize their dial time by calling people who are likely to buy from them.

CRM systems are easy and inexpensive. They’re a necessity too. They allow reps to approach each lead in an intelligent way. How did the lead come in? Who has already spoken to this person? If the CRM system is tied into an auto-dialer so that the information shows up on the screen as the phone call commences, so much the better.

Really good CRMs also allow you, as the team leader, to run analytics that will tell you which leads to cultivate. If you know that 90% of your sales come from businesses with 50 to 100 employees then you (or those responsible for generating leads) will stop building time wasting lead lists that frustrate and demotivate employees.

2. Prospect Chasing

Sometimes sales reps get hung up on one really big prospect that sounds like they’re absolutely going to buy. So they spend an awful lot of time chasing that “guaranteed” sale, time that could be better spent continuing to call and work with other leads.

After all, it’s easier to leave voicemails for the guy who says, “Just call me back in two weeks and we’ll be ready to go” than it is to call complete unknowns, risking rejection. It’s human nature to go after whatever we perceive the low-hanging fruit to be.

The fix: There’s nothing wrong with offering multiple touches to sign a reluctant client. But you can keep it from becoming a waste of time and energy by feeding it into your CRM. Let the employee’s task list or dial list automate when that prospect receives another touch. At that point, the matter is settled, and you can refocus your rep’s attention on the dozens of other calls that might generate money for him over the course of the next month.

3. Sales Script Issues

In my experience there are two mistakes that companies make when it comes to sales script. The first is failing to have any script at all, and the second is failing to train employees on how to deliver the script in an engaging way.

The fix: Get a sales script. Figure down the words and questions that make your sales process successful, and then put it on paper so that it’s a no-brainer for everyone working with you. Even the best conversationalist can ramble, get off-track, and talk himself out of the sale when he’s left to “wing it.” Adding a script–a procedure–for each call will put money directly in your pocket.

Once you have the script, train your reps on it. They’re now actors on a big Hollywood production. How do actors deliver a script? Naturally, as if they couldn’t have said, thought, or felt anything else. Let them practice and roleplay the delivery of the script until it becomes second nature to them, instead of an uncomfortable burden.

4. Failure to use technology to your advantage

It takes time for representatives to physically dial phone numbers. And, if you make them leave every voice mail verbally, that takes time too. Neither of those two activities make money, and they’re both easily fixed with the help of an auto-dialer program that allows representatives to leave a pre-recorded voicemail in their own voice at the touch of a button.

In 15 Time Wasters of Inside Sales and Lead Generation, InsideSales.com offered some insights into how this pitfall truly impacts your bottom line. Here’s what they found:

• Technology-assisted dialing could increase a B2B lead generation specialist’s dials by as much as 29%.
• Technology-assisted dialing could increase the dials of a B2B sales generalist (someone responsible for the whole process) by as much as 35%.
• Technology-assisted dialers took B2C reps up to 400-600 dials per day.
• 60% of a rep’s dials typically go to voicemail.
• It takes an average of one minute for a rep to leave a voicemail without technology, which means reps could waste up to 2 hours leaving messages every day.
• However, leaving a message is a good gamble, offering an average call-back rate of 4.8%. Therefore, the ability to leave a pre-recorded voice message at the touch of a button offers the ROI without the productivity loss.

Technology-assisted dialers and voicemail are also motivators for employees, who are now freed from two of the most tedious, boring parts of the inside sales process.

The Common Theme

If you’ve been paying close attention then you’ll notice the common theme in all of these pitfalls. In one way or another all of them stem from a failure to equip your team with the tools that they need to be as successful as possible.

It’s tempting to tell ourselves that success is all on them, and that they should just work harder and figure it out. But the truth is, success is a two-way transaction, one that demands as much from you as it does from your employees.

Fortunately, when you recognize that and start providing the tools the rewards do tend to follow.

For three years in a row, the highly influential benchmark and advisory firm Sirius Decisions has reported that the number one revenue inhibitor in complex B2B sales environments remains the average sales person’s inability to communicate value.

You’d hope that we would have made more progress in solving this. I believe one of the reasons that we haven’t is that most of the effort has been spent focusing on the value of our solutions and not on the cost to the prospect of not dealing with the problem.

Personalising our value

Of course, we need to find effective ways of conveying the value of our solutions in ways that are personalised to each specific customer and quantified in terms that are relevant to their unique situation.

But that by itself – no matter how good we are – is not enough. We can out-execute all of our competitors in positioning our solution and communicating our value and still not get the order.

Competing against “do nothing”

One of the clues lies in another damning statistic – this time from the equally well-respected CSO Insights – who have consistently found that over 50% of forecasted sales opportunities are not closing at the time and for the value expected, if at all.

They go further to identify the prospect deciding to do nothing (rather buying from a competitor) as an increasingly common outcome. These “no decision” deals are consuming an incredible amount of wasted sales resource.

The costs and consequences of inaction

Why do so many apparently well-qualified sales opportunities end up in this state? I believe that one of the primary reasons is that the sales person failed to properly position the cost and consequences to the prospect of sticking with the status quo.

In short, sales people need to sell the value of addressing the issue before they attempt to sell the value of their solution. In fact, if the prospect’s Cost and Consequences of Inaction aren’t high enough, this by itself should qualify them out, no matter how good our solution fit appears to be.

Your prospects will always have far more things they would like to do than they have the money or resources to implement. That won’t stop them looking at potential solutions – but they are unlikely to actually buy anything unless their case for change is compelling.

Critical questions

Some of the simplest, most effective questions sales people can ask are “what would happen if you did nothing about this issue” and “who else would be affected”, closely followed by “how have you tried to deal with it before” and “why is it critical you do something now?”

If we’re really determined to fix this intractable inability to communicate value, lets start by doing a better job of getting our prospect to agree that the problem is worth solving in the first place. And let’s get a whole lot smarter about qualifying out if we can’t.

One final thought

Great buildings have to be built on solid foundations – and the same is true of great sales campaigns. Establishing clear costs and consequences of inaction – and ensuring the prospect agrees them – is the essential foundation for a successful sales campaign.

We can illuminate the compelling value of our solution far more powerfully if we can relate it to the cost to the prospect of the issue we address. If we get that right, then maybe next year we can focus on eliminating a different revenue inhibitor.

Note: This post was written by Brent Adamson, Matt Dixon, and Nick Toman for the Harvard Business Review.

Companies have long developed and managed their sales people differently from other employees, placing great emphasis on individual performance. To foster it, they often give sales its own learning and development team, recruiting specialists, compensation plan, and management and IT systems — but now they’re finding that those differences can hinder success as much as they support it.

Our colleagues in CEB’s HR practice have documented an extraordinary shift in the relationship between individual achievement and business unit profitability, both across the enterprise and within the sales function. From 2002 to 2012, the impact of individuals’ task performance on unit profitability companywide decreased, on average, from 78% to 51%. But the impact of employees’ “network performance” — that is, how much people give to and take from their coworkers — increased from 22% to 49%. Even in sales, network performance now accounts for about 44% of the impact.

On the most effective sales teams, particularly B2B, the individual no longer reigns supreme. Strong sellers don’t merely execute their day-to-day tasks well; they also engage with their colleagues to marshal resources, wrangle involvement, and coordinate people’s capabilities. As we discuss in our recent HBR article, “Dismantling the Sales Machine,” they rely on collective, even crowd-sourced, skills in ways that weren’t possible just a few short years ago.

Take, for example, a large media company we work with that invested in an internal social-networking platform for the commercial organization. The goal was to help sales reps exchange information about complex accounts. In the few years since the system has been in place, cross-sales have increased, cycle times have declined, and conversion rates have gone up. In one account alone, the improvements have driven $3.5 million in incremental revenue. Collaboration is better not only among the reps selling into different parts of that customer organization but also across the product and marketing teams charged with building and positioning broader solutions for the customer. Because sales reps are more directly networked with their colleagues through technology, they more easily aggregate skills, knowledge, and experience to uncover new opportunities and to debate tactics for generating business.

Click here to read the rest of this post on HBR.

Well-planned contests that recognize employees' successes can get your company off to a strong start toward its annual sales goals.

There's a common misconception that the first quarter of the year is a period of time when you can briefly relax. That's not the case, however--especially in sales. It's essential to maintain sales engagement and excitement coming into Q1 and to get reps focused on the behaviors that will lead them to a successful year. If you miss benchmarks in the quarter that tends to have the smallest goals of the year, it'll affect your team down the line considerably.

One method that will help make the most of the first quarter is implementing dynamic competitions to engage your employees. Here are three simple steps to incorporate gamification into your Q1 sales strategy:

1. Map your route

Before you get a competition up and running, clearly define the day-to-day activities your team needs to complete to accomplish the sales goal. For example: How many leads do you need to create to achieve that number of wins? How many opportunities do you need to win at your average selling price? Then choose between one and three sales activities to focus on. Take a look at all of them, from face-to-face meetings to product demos. Ask yourself: Which will have the most impact on Q1?

Most of the time, you're going to want to focus on your sales pipeline in the beginning of Q1. But regardless of where you choose to focus within that pipeline, you should prioritize closing deals at the end of each month. The worst thing to do is to wait for the end of the quarter to start rallying your team around securing business. Get your reps to focus on activities at the beginning stages of your sales process--such as prospecting and booking first meetings--early in the quarter.

2. Encourage energy around goals with competition

Implement a variety of contests; some can last for an hour and others can run for a full week. Spicing up the durations and type of competitions keeps them fresh, which promotes participant engagement. Throw individuals' names and faces up on a leaderboard and watch their efforts stretch once they begin competing with peers. Competition and recognition serve as the top two non-financial motivators for your sales team, so you want to fully leverage both.

3. Increase recognition

The more you recognize your team and publicize their accomplishments companywide, the better. Leaderboards that display competitions keep sales goals at top of mind, and allow both managers and sales reps to remain cognizant of who is flourishing. Furthermore, other sales reps can take away great sales techniques and inspiration once they know who their top-performing peers are in each category and how those peers got to the top. Then your entire team's performance will rise collectively, so all of your reps can race together toward those quarterly goals.

Q1 is your sales team's chance to set the pace for 2014. Sure, you can bounce back from a low first quarter and still hit annual sales goals. But think of where you can take the company's sales if you crush Q1 right off the bat. How far could you go after a stellar first three months? You can find out if you understand clear steps to hit your sales goals, take advantage of gamification techniques, and recognize your reps for even the small wins along the way.

For marketers, competition can be a good challenge at best and a death sentence at worst. It’s pretty natural to never see it as a good thing. Heck, the only good thing about competition comes from beating it and getting (or perhaps retaining) your market share.

This leads many to think that it’s better to aim for a niche market that’s got no competition to begin with. But is a no-man’s land like that really a likely source of more sales leads? It might as well be like this year’s nominations in the Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film.

Why the analogy? Well, try asking anyone familiar with the many animated feature films that were marketed this year. Think your B2B company’s got nothing in common with Pixar or Dream Works? You will if you’re going to talk about the lack of competition. Only three nominations were selected from last year’s line-up.

Is little competition really a good thing?

Of course, this isn’t the first time that the Golden Globe Awards were pretty sparse in selecting animated films (they’ve only started allowing five nominees since 2009). But the fact remains, fewer competitors means lesser competition. This is a dream situation for plenty B2B marketers but what’s the reality?

• Competitors culled by the powers that be – You may think you’ve found a niche but it’s also just as likely that you’ve found some legal loophole to market/sell something that normally can’t be sold! Look at how IBM blew the whistle on Amazon’s CIA deal. Sometimes you end fighting the real battle in a courtroom than in the actual market.

• Demand is scarce – Sometimes there isn’t even a real market to begin with! There can be a niche and there can be too niche. It’s like marketing a product for business scenarios that aren’t entirely commonplace. You may not have a lot of competition but neither do you have the necessary demand to generate sales leads.

• It’s a failed market – You could also be going for a market that many have gone to before but with little success. That’s why they’re not always a good sign. If this be the case, you might want to brace yourself (or even research on what your competitors may have done wrong).

Having no competitors is closer to an ideal result than an ideal start. Because at the very least, coming out on top in the end lets you keep the memory of what your business went up against. Otherwise, it’d be just like using this year’s Golden Globe nominees as a reference without knowing just how many other decent animated feature films were released last year.

Today's post is by Norman Behar, Managing Partner, Sales Readiness Group, Inc., a leading professional sales training company that develops customized sales and sales management programs for business-to-business sales organizations. If there is one consistent complaint we hear from frontline sale managers, it is that they are always short on time. This isn't surprising given the numerous responsibilities sales managers have, including recruiting and hiring new sales professionals, day-to-day management tasks, sales coaching, and administrative duties. Additionally, they face the challenge of managing sales professionals who are typically independent, strong willed, and often have little day-to-day contact with their managers....

Why do you need customized sales training program?  Well…there are a few reasons: 1) People learn differently, so an out of the box approach is ineffective. 2) You need to expedite the learning curve of your sales reps.  A customized sales training program will do both of these.  The importance of a customized approach is paramount to the effectiveness of your organization.

Customizing a sales training program is easier than you think.  You’re not going to put each rep through his/her own onboarding class.  But you are going to tailor your content, modality and style to each rep.  Here’s how:

1. Content Options:  Again, people learn differently.  Some people are visual, some are auditory and some need interaction and repetition.  If you only have one style of training, (i.e. pre-reading material and a boot-camp) it won’t stick.  You won’t dismiss the “training event” entirely.  But you will augment it.  You may not have the luxury of an LMS (Learning Management System).  But that doesn’t mean you can’t create and serve up training content in different modalities.  You can create PowerPoints, Prezi, videos or white papers to name a few.  The goal is to step outside the box.  Do more than what you are doing today.  Remember, as the sales enablement leader, your sales reps are your customers.  Create epic content for them, they will thank you for it later.
2. Timing:  A one and done approach is antiquated.  Use a page from your marketing colleague’s playbook.  Use a drip methodology to serve up content to your sales org.  There are tools out there that allow you to gamify, test and drip content.  Look into them, they may be worthwhile.  If you choose not to go that route, it’s ok.  There are still ways to get content into sales’ hands.  Again, think of options.  Daily tips and tricks, weekly newsletters, monthly webinars, quarterly meetings, annual sales kickoffs, etc.  Make sure you have a consistent cadence.  The take away is, a one and done approach won’t work.  Use the same approach for testing.  Tailor the testing to the initiative and group.  New hires should be tested more frequently than tenured reps.  A big initiative (i.e. social prospecting) is a great way to use drip testing.  Frequency and timing are key.  Continue to educate incrementally.
3. Be Agile:  Agility is key.  It’s incumbent upon you and the sales management team to identify gaps in the sales reps’ skills and abilities.  You need to then customize content to fills those gaps.  Identify the modalities that best resonate and drive adoption and roll them out.  This is the true determinant of a custom sales training program.  Ensure you have the ability to see gaps in learning in real time.  Then, close the gaps in real time.

All of these dimensions are customizable.  More importantly employing these different methods are what make your training customized.  As the Sales Enablement leader, YOU are responsible for the sales training initiatives.  The one size fits all approach is stale.  Sales reps have been to “training events” throughout their careers, which makes them callused.  Mix it up on them.  Customization will show that you have a plan on how to enable the team.

Ask yourself.  Do you have the right training content?  Do you have the right training vehicles to drive adoption?  Are you using a customized approach to educate your sales team?  If you answered no to any of those questions, then you need to click here and download: Tips and Tricks:  Customized Sales Training.

Author: Eric Estrella

Follow @EricEstrellaSBI

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No one likes a pushy salesman. However, your close friends are allowed to be a lot more aggressive with you than a stranger. Bridging the gap between these two groups when you're trying to persuade others is an art called "relationship selling."

Read more...

The written case study still reigns.

I realize that I’m not the most unbiased authority on the supremacy of the written customer case study. I earn my living writing case studies and teach other writers to do the same.

But a recently released survey from Eccolo Media backs me up.

Eccolo Media surveyed more than 500 B2B technology buyers about the types of content they consume, when, and the value of it in their purchase decisions. This year's Eccolo Media 2014 B2B Technology Content Survey Report revealed that more buyers prefer customer case studies in a written format than in other forms. They also like the traditional narrative format over shorter formats.

"In general, buyers overwhelmingly prefer traditional written case studies to those presented as audio, video, one-page summaries, or Microsoft PowerPoint slides," the report states (page 9 sidebar).

It goes on to say...

"Small business buyers show a slight preference for one-page summaries when compared with mid-market and enterprise respondents, but even they prefer traditional written case studies over other formats."

That's good news for companies because high-quality video case studies can be expensive and usually require more logistics to pull off. And it's excellent news for writers looking to help companies create their customer stories.

Eccolo also revealed...

• Case studies are in the top three most consumed types of content. White papers again took the lead this year, followed by product brochures/data sheets. Detailed technology guides/implementation scenarios were tied with case studies in the #3 spot.
• In questions about the influence of case studies in the sales process, case studies were the second most influential type of content, behind white papers. Forty-eight percent said case studies are very or extremely influential. White papers and case studies even beat the old product brochure/data sheet!
• 56% of enterprise-level buyers used case studies to evaluate a purchase in the last six months. Twenty-three percent of small business buyers used them.

When are they used in the sales cycle?

• 22% first reviewed case studies during the pre-sales phase when they were not aware of their problems
• 35% reviewed them first during initial sales
• 32% during mid sales
• 11% during final sales

 

What else do buyers think?

• 71% of buyers consume vendor content on a mobile device. Short, digestible, easy-to-read formats aid in mobile consumption. (Perhaps create more than one version of a case study for easier mobile reading.)
• 62% receive vendor content via social channels. Oddly, Facebook is the top social media channel where buyers receive vendor content but respondents named LinkedIn the "most likely to consume" channel.
• 68% often or very often click links embedded in content for more information.

Whether you’re planning your company’s case study efforts for 2014 or you’re a writer assisting organizations with creating impactful content, check out the survey. It’s packed with valuable insight.

The post Do Buyers Still Read Case Studies? appeared first on Stories That Sell.

Sales people quit when they lose confidence.  The top 20% of reps are confident because they consistently hit quota.  You don’t make the number on the top 20%.  You make it on the magic middle.  The Magic Middle is the 70% of reps performing somewhere between poor and excellent.  This is the group that keeps sales leaders up at night.  As the head of sales you need to retain them and improve their performance.  This post provides ideas on how to retain and enable the magic middle.

The problem is that sales people are losing confidence.  Selling has become more difficult.  More pressure is being put on reps to perform.  Time horizons are shorter.  More products and solution are being introduced that are sold to “new buyers”.  You can’t have the magic middle constantly in a state of flux. High turnover within this group will consume your front-line sales leaders.  These conditions result in reactive behavior. 

The magic middle relies on active demand from established contacts within current accounts.  Active demand occurs when customers bring you a defined problem to solve.  The sales rep doesn’t get engaged until late in the buying process.  As a sales person, active demand is messy.  Active demand neutralizes the skill of the sales person.  Opportunities become a price game. Sales people don't see all the potential within their accounts.  They lose confidence.  They quit.  

Download the Grow Your Wallet Share Mini-Playbook  to enable the magic middle.  This tool will help you get more out of the 70% of middle performers.  As performance improves, turnover declines.  This tool includes instructions on how to execute this concept in the field.

SPREAD WITHIN CURRENT ACCOUNTS

Start by helping your sales people grow their footprint within current accounts.  Don’t minimize the effort to get access to new buyers within customers.  There is a reason that sales reps gravitate towards lower level contacts.  People inherently descend to the path of least resistance.  If you allow this to be the norm, your wallet share will shrink. Enable your reps to reach higher level buyers and new buying centers. 

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?

Build confidence in approaching other buying centers within current accounts.  This focus on growing wallet share will help sales people get quick wins.  Access to new target buyers is a great leading indicator of success.    

There are 3 simple steps:

1. Educate: Build Buyer Personas for each stakeholder involved in the buying process.  Personas help the sales rep get inside the mind of the buyer.  Personas build confidence.  The rep now knows what the buyer cares about and how to approach them.  Train reps on each potential buying center within their accounts and the corresponding Personas. Role play the conversation: 
1. What questions will they ask?
2. How will you respond?
3. How can you bring them value and a good 1^st impression?
2. Access: Sales leaders minimize the difficultly of reaching other buying centers.  They think that since it is within a current customer, it should be easy.  Buying centers can be completely separate and the Personas don’t know each other.  Teach your team to leverage social prospecting to get referred into other buying centers. 
1. Update their LinkedIn profiles to appeal to the other buying centers
2. Extend their reach to Personas in those areas and referral sources
3. Ask for the referral.  The way you do this is very important.  Don’t just ask to be referred.  You need to be specific and provide the message you want to be sent.
3. Prepare:  Approaching these new buying centers is a new skill.  Reps will be hesitant and lack confidence.  The Personas will have different needs and the offering may be foreign to the rep.  Don’t send them in to these calls unprepared.  If you do, you will only hurt their confidence more. Ensure your sales leadership team has a preparation cadence.  Sales leaders should review the following tools with reps prior to meetings with new buyers. 
1. Buyer Process Maps – locate where the buyer is in their buying process.  This can help you prepare for the next meeting.  You know what the buyer will do next and what they are thinking. 
2. Persona Based Call Plan – have clear objectives for the call.  Speak to the objectives and obstacles of each Persona.  Anticipate resistance.  Leave the meeting with clear actions.

A GIFT FOR YOU

If the magic middle has confidence to spread in accounts, they will sell more.  As they sell more, their confidence grows, and morale improves.  Download the Grow Your Wallet Share Mini-Playbook to help your team execute these 3 steps.   This will reduce turnover and improve results.

Author: Scott Gruher

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How to Make Your Number (A Note to the Sales Leader) is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

If you want to reach your big goal as a leader, here is the recipe. It’s simple, but it isn’t easy.

Start with hiring: Field the very best team you can. There isn’t anything that is going to help you more than starting with good people who care about and take pride in their work. What you want most of all is a set of positive, healthy beliefs and positive attributes. You want strong character.

Give them meaning: Your role as a leader is to instill the work with meaning. The mission needs to mean something more than making the number. How does it provide growth? How does it provide contribution? How does it make a difference? This is part of the work a leader does, and it is the leader’s obligation. It’s the culture she creates and protects.

Develop your people: Making your number doesn’t end with hiring well. It isn’t enough. It’s never been enough. If you want to make your number, you need to coach, train, teach, and develop the people you hired. You want to improve their skills from week to week, from month to month, and from quarter to quarter. The world keeps changing and it’s your job to help them keep up.

Give them great leaders: The role of sales manager is a leadership role. You don’t want sales managers who manages their team; you want sales managers who leads their teams. Leaders serve their people. They provide the vision and mission, and then help provide the resources and remove the obstacles. If you want a great team, give them a great leader.

Give them the tools and technology: If you want your people to succeed in making their number, give them the tools and the technology they need. Give them a good sales process. Give them good methodologies. Give them good nurture tools they can use to open new relationships. And give them the hardware and the software they need.

Engage with your team: If you want your team to make their number–and your goal–you need to engage with them. You need to communicate with them. You need to spend time with them. You need to help them with their obstacles and with the decisions that only you can make. Making your number means your engagement is necessary.

Which part of this recipe are you missing?

It seems like everyone is talking about B2C and B2B content marketing. Marketers, sales reps, and business owners are becoming aware of the many benefits of propagating fresh and relevant digital content. But perhaps the most important content marketing benefit is the impact on the sales cycle. A relevant piece of content available to the prospect at the right time in the sales cycle, can accelerate the purchase decision.

What types of digital content shorten the B2B sales cycle? Here are a few ideas:

1. Product Brochures and Data Sheets. Prospects will want to review your product or services literature before making the purchase decision. Perhaps they have made the emotional decision to purchase and are looking to confirm this by matching features and functions against their needs. They may also be comparing your benefits and features against competitive offerings. Either way, it behooves you to have well-organized and complete product and services information.
2. Company and Product Reviews. Your offer may sound viable and the features and functions match the prospect requirements. But the impact of all the other information you provide will be magnified if you have lots of testimonials and independent reviews available. In fact, anything you offer the prospect to alleviate the fear of making a bad decision can help shorten the sales cycle.
3. Case Studies. We love to produce case studies because they are excellent tools to show how a product or service works in their specific vertical or horizontal domain. This specialized content can have a much greater impact on prospects than a generic product pitch.
4. “How To” Guides. Potential purchasers have a great interest in how they will install your product and use it on an ongoing basis. Assuming your product is not overly complicated – providing this information will help motivate prospects to act more quickly.
5. Price Lists. We often have lively discussions with clients about posting their prices online. Companies hesitate to do this because they are afraid it will chase away prospects and because competitors will have access to this information. Both concerns are valid but should be balanced against the benefits.
6. Order Forms. The order form is the ultimate way to shorten the sales cycle since it compels the prospect to take action now. Even if your product or service is high ticket (expensive) or complex, the order form can be used to generate a minor close. A good example of this is the free trial offer, where you are asking for a small commitment now, to be followed by a larger commitment later. We have used this approach successfully for equipment, software, and service offerings.
7. Website Information. All of the content categories mentioned above, plus others, should be available on your website. We like to think of the website as Command Central when it comes to educating, motivating, and converting prospects into customers.

Keep in mind that some of the above digital content items can be offered in non-text formats like graphics, audio, or video. When it comes to shortening the B2B sales cycle, there is no right or wrong when it comes to content length. The point is to get the information to the prospect in the most easily and quickly digestible manner possible. Brevity is often better than comprehensive content, but do make sure that you have links from the summary to detailed information.

Earlier blogs in our Inbound Marketing Trends series examined the future of inbound marketing as a whole as well as that of the content marketing discipline. Today, we continue our examination of the future of the many facets of inbound marketing by speaking with Kuno Creative’s sales experts, Strategic Accounts Managers Stephanie Kapera and Bill Arnold.

See what they say salespeople should be prepared for in 2014 below!

How has the role of a salesperson evolved from 2013 to 2014?

Stephanie: The biggest change is that educating potential customers about what inbound marketing is practically over. In the past, we’d have to convince potential customers they should be doing inbound marketing. Now they know they need inbound marketing in some form, and we’re asking, “Which services do you need? Which tactics can you do in-house, and which can we help you with?” That alone is going to make selling inbound marketing easier and more fun in 2014.

What are your top predictions for inbound marketing sales in 2014?

Bill: The new HubSpot COS is a game changer. After the initial engagement, return visitors will have a unique website experience that can be based on their industry, buyer persona or activity. It will allow you to present potential customers with information specifically directed to their needs and concerns. By providing the exact information potential customers need, companies can demonstrate they truly understand buyers’ needs. Salespeople must be able to explain just how great an impact the COS can have on lead generation.

What tools and resources do you think will be most helpful in inbound marketing sales in 2014?

Stephanie: There are a lot of new interesting and fun technologies for salespeople that didn’t exist at the beginning of 2013—technologies like Signals. I think Signals is great because it gives you a notification when people open your email or when they’re on your website.

For example, there was a prospect I had reached out to the other day who had been on our website but hadn’t filled out a form. I reached out to him just to say, “Hey, I really like your website. You could do X, Y and Z.” Using Signals, I saw which of our website pages he visited, which gave me insight into his thought process. That information is invaluable when you talk to a prospect because you know what he saw, you know which case studies he read.

I also really like Ebsta and Postwire. Postwire is my No. 1 tool because it’s such a cool way to share sales collateral with potential customers. It’s like a mini-website: You can put all your sales collateral on it and create a custom design, and you can track it through Hubspot or Google Analytics to see what’s been viewed.

What is the one thing people engaged in inbound marketing sales need to know to be successful in 2014?

Bill: Inbound marketing is the building of a relationship that begins long before you speak to the potential customer. It begins with the visitor coming to your website to seek a solution to a problem or concern. Providing that person with great content that addresses those needs will demonstrate that your company has the answers they need to be successful.

If you let the lead nurturing process work, the first time you do speak will be a different conversation. They will already know and respect the value you bring to the table. Know that you need to be engaging in a different, more collaborative conversation.

Stephanie: People will come to you with a whole mess of problems they need help with; you have to be able to help them within their budget. Yes, there are some potential customers I speak with where I would love more than anything to redo their websites, but they can’t afford it. You can still help them. Inbound marketing does not have to be all or nothing.

It’s OK if potential customers don’t have the budget for an entirely new website. Sell them landing pages, refresh content on the website, make the website better in increments while you’re building lists and completing other strategic work. Have the expertise to put together a package that offers them the most value within their budget. Customers appreciate it. They really do.

We’ll be covering even more inbound marketing trends for 2014 in design, web development, technology and consulting with experts from the Kuno Creative team. Subscribe to the Brand & Capture blog now so you don’t miss these exclusive Q&A discussions with some of the brightest minds in inbound marketing!

What changes do you anticipate in inbound marketing sales in 2014? Share your insight in the comments below!

Photo Credit: Victor1558

Many companies spend heavily in sales rep training, but are sometimes disappointed when they see little impact on sales growth. Ironically, lack of results from sales training can often be traced to a lack of sales manager training. New skills or methods that reps pick up from sales training fall by the wayside because untrained sales managers often aren’t effective at holding salespeople accountable for implementation.

Untrained sales managers are prone to a number of problems that can hinder their effectiveness and limit the achievement of their sales teams. Unless they are provided with the knowledge and skills on how to be a sales leader, untrained sales managers may cause the following problems:

Fall back on their sales instincts rather than develop a leader mindset. Because they don’t know how to be an effective sales manager, a promoted salesperson may feel the adrenaline rush again of being that “über-salesperson” and want to chase the big deals. Chasing the big deals means they will spend most of their time with their top salespeople. That leaves the rest of the sales team—the people who need the most help—to sink or swim on their own without a leader/coach.

Focus too much energy where it does little good. Untrained sales managers, commonly, focus much of their coaching time on their poorest performers. In other words, reps don’t get coaching unless they do really poorly! One-on-one coaching will have a much bigger impact on the middle performers — people who are showing promise and eager to learn. Improve their skills and you’ve got more peak performers!

Lack consistency. If a sales manager has no training, they have no predictable management process or common coaching language. This can become confusing to sales reps if the coaching message is not well defined, or is subject to change. This can affect the sales manager’s credibility, and the confidence of the sales team that the process will actually led to sales success. It also makes measuring results very challenging. We all know that a common sales process is crucial for effective selling – so why not have a common sales management process, too?

Not manage time effectively, or know how to set and enforce priorities. Sales managers can easily become buried in “stuff” work, and have reactive “hair on fire” responses to problems, leaving them overwhelmed as a result. They’re working harder than ever but are unable to catch up, and have no time for what should be their #1 priority, to coach salespeople.

Fail to develop or enforce performance standards. Inexperienced or untrained sales managers often don’t know how to develop and enforce high standards on their team. They can’t define for their reps what a “success profile” looks like—the skills (abilities) and wills (attitudes) needed to excel in the profession. If they don’t know what success looks like, it’s impossible to steer people in the right direction.

Fail to follow-up. Untrained sales managers make suggestions to salespeople on how to improve and then assume that person will implement their suggestions. Managers who fail to follow-up create a team culture that’s lacking in accountability.

For these reasons and many more, sales manager training is critical.

Sales managers are often top-performing salespeople who have been promoted into management positions. Their background and experience has honed their sales skills, but done nothing to prepare them to be manager-leaders. That’s why, to get the most out of your sales training investment, the best first step is to focus on your sales managers — make sure they have the tools and training to do their jobs more effectively!

 

In this blog post, I am going to discuss lead intelligence,what it is, some examples of the software we use and why you should implement it in your business.

What is Lead Intelligence?

Lead intelligence is a form of data mining, the purpose being to capture as much data as possible on your leads to shorten the sales cycle. The more data your sales team is equipped with, the more likely (in theory) they’ll win the business. This is just a piece of your inbound marketing strategy.

Lead intelligence is kind of creepy, actually. I was talking with my Mom the other day about it and I told her, “it’s like Big Brother type stuff I can find out a lot about the people that visit my site. She said, “won’t that scare people off? Why would you want to know all that?“ My Mom was never in sales, so she doesn’t understand the value of having this vital data and how it can help tailor your marketing message. And close more ales.

I think we can all agree on something — the more you know about your leads/prospects the better, right?

A name and email is a good start, but not nearly enough in today’s World. You need to mine as much data from your leads as possible to help close more sales. Using lead intelligence software this can now be achieved.

How do you gather as much data from your visitors?

Well, Google Analytics is a great place to start as it gives you a wealth of data, but as KISSmetrics points out — Google Analytics tells you what’s happening. It is much more beneficial if you know who is doing what and when.

We use a piece of software where we can learn where our leads are at geographically, what pages they viewed before (and after) they filled out a form, number of pages visited, the days they visited the site, time spent on each page, social media profiles, profile pictures (if available) and more. ee why I said it is like Big Brother (Big Brother was a reality TV show where a group of people that are housemates or houseguests living together in a large, usually specially constructed house)

How Does Lead Intelligence Work?

Below is an example of a lead (I used myself for demonstration purposes) to show you all the data that was pulled when I entered in name/email/phone number. Not all leads pull this much information, but wanted I to show you how powerful the software is.

The second example is the pages visited, date and time on each page.

The third example shows total page views, number of conversions and time since last conversion.

Lead Intelligence Data

Pages Visited/Time on Website

Lead Stats

Here is a recap of the benefits of the lead intelligence software we use;

• What pages the visitor has viewed
• What types of content the visitor looked at
• Social media profile data
• Where they are converting from geographically
• What landing page the lead converted on
• What Calls to Action they clicked on

There are plenty of pieces software on the market that handles lead intelligence (among other things) such as HubSpot, LeadFormix, Eloqua, Marketo and Ad Luge are just a few of the many out there. I do not have experience with these pieces of software, so do your homework before deciding as some of them are quite expensive.

Conclusion

Can you imagine handing off leads like this to your sales team? I would be willing to bet they’d pick up the tab more often as you are making their lives a lot easier.

The online retail game is not an easy one to win, but new research and analysis might help cast a light on the glaring problems causing your site to lose sales and customers.

Collecting user feedback and complaints from 400 websites over three years, Qubit has narrowed its findings to 10 main problem areas. The results paint a picture of a consumer with much higher expectations for retail websites and their user-friendliness.

Based on Qubit's research, here are the top 10 complaints that online shoppers have about their retail sites of choice. Read more...

More about Online Shopping, Features, Business, Retail, and Online Retailers

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is a well-defined management issue by now. But management is only just starting to adapt to a world where you "bring your own everything."

Choosing the right mobile devices for salespeople is not so much of an issue now that HTML5 has matured to a point where it is perfectly acceptable for most business apps. It's the app that matters, not the device. Here's what I mean:

1. Bring your own social networks. You want to hire sales guys who "bring their own rolodex." But technically speaking, the social networks—Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter—are their rolodexes. It's not about the number of Facebook friends or Twitter followers or LinkedIn connections; what matters is the depth and quality of those relationships. Sales is all about "what have you done for me lately?" But if data is power, that data power is shifting to the individual. We can cheer the empowerment of the individual, but it's also important to recognize how this creates a legitimate challenge for managers.

2. Bring your own contact manager. LinkedIn has a special role in business social networking because it is the self-updating rolodex of business, managing people's content independent of their company affiliation. But LinkedIn as a rolodex clearly belongs to the salesperson, not the company. The company is renting a salesperson's rolodex and connections when they hire that person, but they do not own any of it.

3. Bring your own sales methodology. In ye olden days, a company would tell salespeople which sales methodologies to use. Employees would be forced to learn "the way we do things around here." Onboarding included training in the company's standard sales methodology, and while there are lots of these sales methodologies and plenty of good ones—the famous ones from Miller Heiman, SPIN and Target Account Selling (TAS) come to mind—you need to decide if your startup will be defined by its sales methodology, or if you will reject a sales star even if he or she prefers SPIN to your company's standard.

4. Bring your own sales productivity tools and apps. It doesn't matter too much to the company whether a salesperson uses iOS, Android, Windows or even Blackberry. Which apps they use on that device, however, has a much bigger impact on the company because management is all about controlling and integrating data. The quality sales guys will come prepared with apps on their phones and tablets, already hooked up to the networks and services they use in the cloud. They are onboard and productive from day one.

Handling With Care

The mission you are giving these sales guys is tough: Break into a new market for a relatively unknown startup, do it fast, and do it big. You cannot say "oh, and by the way, you also have to use all the systems, processes and tools we give you whether you like them or not."

Imagine telling a salesperson, who has successfully used one methodology and one tool set for years, that she must switch to your company standard. Do you want her to do that, or do you want to generate sales quickly and propel you into a new market?

This does change the balance of power between sales guys and their employers, and frankly, it creates a management headache. Luckily, there are new solutions aimed at cracking this problem.

New ventures focused on this challenge include Nimble, RelateIQ, ClearSlide, Yesware, Tylr Mobile, Social Pandas and Selligy. These "sales productivity" ventures focus on making salespeople more effective as opposed to traditional CRM, which only made their managers more productive. These ventures focus on two types of solution:

1. Integration at the mobile device level. Outside sales people should be outside. Any system that is not mobile first, that does not allow sales people to do most of their work when they are out of the office, is a productivity drain. A sales person who is in the office too much is not a good sign. Mobile is the obvious answer. Mobile is also key to the integration of all those single feature cloud apps. Thanks to APIs, it is relatively easy to integrate these at the mobile app level. This is where the types of services that sales people use every day to get their job done—LinkedIn, email, presentations, CRM, maps, online meeting systems etc—can be integrated and presented in a single user experience.

2. Digital exhaust to replace sales data entry. If salespeople are spending their time in the office filling out reports for management, that is a systems and management failure. You want them meeting customers and prospects—that is when they are adding value.

The great salespeople can write concise reports along the lines of "beat quota by x% this month/quarter." The longer reports usually explain the reasons why the salesperson did not hit their numbers.

Yet, management does need data. The mobile apps do enable quick simple reporting while between meetings (in the elevator, on a train, getting coffee). More strategically interesting is the trend towards auto-aggregation of what may become known as "sales big data." Like all big data, this is aggregated automatically from “digital exhaust," which, in this case, is from what the sales guys are doing all day on their mobile devices. This answers questions like:

1. Who did you meet?
2. Where (in the cloud or F2F?)
3. For how long?
4. How engaged was the customer?

The first three questions answer the most basic management concerns: "Are the sales guys doing their jobs, and they working hard?" Much better to get this reported automatically rather than asking the salespeople to spend time doing this—they are, after all, incentivized to tell you the version of the truth that's most convenient to them. The current system of CRM reporting is doubly broken—it wastes valuable time and delivers suspect data.

The truly valuable data comes if you can answer the last question. Knowing how engaged customers are helps companies do consistently what really great salespeople need to do, which is qualifying prospects with great care and discipline.

We think that sales is all about hard work, persistence, determination and all those other good Protestant work ethics. So we drive relentlessly on, calling that prospect for the umpteenth time. But the best salespeople wait until they can see that the customer’s need is real and urgent. They “wait until you hear the screams.”

You also need to see how much effort the prospect puts into the relationship. If you call five times before the prospect returns your call, that is not equality. If you send reams of information and give multiple presentations but the prospect won’t fill in a requirements questionnaire, then that is not equality of effort. With every call, you want the prospect to do something. If this does not happen, then the screams are not loud enough and you should move onto your next opportunity.

Big data could start to answer these questions at the customer level, by aggregating data such as:

• How many hours has this customer spent talking to us?
• Do they open mails from us and how quickly?
• Are they clicking through our slides during webinars or is their attention engaged elsewhere?
• How many emails did they send us?

The market for sales productivity tools is still ripening, but the need exists, so it is likely to happen quickly. In the era of “bring your own everything,” our sales management systems and tools need to evolve. We need tools that primarily focus on making the front-line sales folks more productive while incidentally also allowing better management oversight.

Harvard Business Review is arguably the most prestigious publication for business leaders and management thinkers. Here’s one of my recent Harvard Business Review articles titled the THE 12 SALES METRICS THAT MATTER MOST.

 

 

Sales is both an art and a science. It is the skillful combination of emotion and logic, people and process, free-thinking and organization. I recently conducted an extensive research project involving more than one-hundred vice presidents of sales at top technology companies (software, Cloud, computer hardware, and telecommunications) to better understand the art and science of managing a sales organization today.

While the study results provided detailed insights about sales organization trends, it also yielded a wide range of statistics that reflect the strategies sales leaders are employing to overcome their top challenges. Below, you will find twelve of these key sales metrics that benchmark sales organization performance, structure, and effectiveness.

1. Percent of Organization Achieving Quota
The overall average for percentage of salespeople that achieved one hundred percent of quota last year was sixty percent. However, the number of salespeople who achieved one hundred percent of quota varied greatly by sales organization. Twenty-six percent of sales leaders reported that seventy percent or more of their salespeople made quota. Fifty-four percent of sales leaders reported that between fifty to six¬ty-nine percent of their salespeople made quota. Twenty percent of sales leaders report that less than half of their salespeople made quota.

2. Quota Attainment Average
The average percentage of salespeople that achieved one hundred percent of annual quota last year varied by type of industry:

    Software                                  52%
    Computer hardware               60%
    Cloud/SaaS                             61%
    Telecommunications             66%

3. Average Annual Quota for Field Salesperson
The overall average annual quota for an outside field salesperson was $2.7 million. Quota for computer hardware salespeople was the highest at $4.2 million. Telecommunications salespeople averaged $3.3 million and software was $3.2 million. Cloud/SaaS salespeople had the lowest quota at $1.6 million.

4. Average Annual Quota for Inside Salesperson
The overall average annual quota for an inside field salesperson was $985,000. Annual quota for computer hardware inside salespeople was $1.35 million, for computer software it was $1.22 million, for Cloud/SaaS inside salespeople the average was $795,000 and telecommunications was $730,000.

5. Average Annual On Target Earnings
The average annual on target earnings including salary, commission, and bonuses for field and inside salespeople at one hundred percent of quota are shown by industry below.

                                    Outside salesperson             Inside salesperson   
                                        on target earnings             on target earnings

    Software                                     $240,000             $120,000
    Cloud/SaaS                                $210,000             $100,000
    Computer hardware                  $180,000               $80,000
    Telecommunications                 $150,000               $85,000

6. Average New Deal Size
The average new deal size reported for field sales was $166,000 and new deal size for inside sales was $19,000.

7. Sales Cycle Length
Seventy percent reported an average sales cycle length of sixty days or less for inside sales while fifty-four percent reported an average sales cycle length of ninety days or more for outside sales. Twenty-four percent of inside sales cycles and twenty-three percent of outside sales cycles were between sixty-one and ninety days in length.

8. Vertical Sales Adoption
Sixty-four percent of study participants have vertical sales specialists on their sales force (calling on verticals such as public sector, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, etc.). Seventeen percent are planning to add vertical sales specialists in the future while nineteen percent do not have any plans to do so.

9. SMB Specialization
Sixty-three percent responded that they have specialized inside salespeople that are dedicated to SMB (small to medium business) or mid-market sales. Twenty percent of these inside sales representatives are allowed to make field sales calls when necessary.

10. Field Sales Revenue Trends
Trends for 2013 and 2015 projected annual revenue attributed to field sales as opposed to inside sales varied by industry. The overall trend is for the number of companies that derive more than ninety percent of their revenues from field-related sales to decrease dramatically. For example, twenty-eight percent of software companies will derive more than ninety-percent of their revenues from field sales in 2013 and this number is expected to decrease to zero in 2015. The number of computer hardware, Cloud/SaaS and telecommunications companies with more than ninety percent of their revenues from field sales in 2013 is also projected to drop by half in 2015.

11. Inside Sales Roles
Sixty-two percent of participants reported their outside field salespeople are assigned an inside salesperson. Seventy percent of inside salespeople carry a quota and fifty-five percent indicated that the revenue generated by the inside salesperson is applied to outside salesperson’s quota. Forty percent of inside salespeople schedule meetings for the outside salesperson. Seventy percent of inside salespeople perform lead generation and telemarketing activities. 

12. Sales Preparedness
Eighty-three percent of participants thought their outside field sales teams were equipped with the sales strategies, tools, and skills to exceed their numbers, compared to fifty-seven percent for inside sales and forty percent for channel sales.

 

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL SALES ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY REPORT

 

 

 

This weekend HP brought in a blast from the past in an attempt to boost its PC sales.

Windows 7.

In promotional material on its website and email blasts, HP says it'll start shipping PCs with Windows 7 again due to "popular demand." And that's not a good sign for Microsoft, which still bets that its touch-based Windows 8 operating system will reinvigorate the PC market.

Many agree that one of the contributing factors to the PC market's implosion is Windows 8, which can be hard to operate on the traditional desktops and laptops that many people still use. Despite manufacturer's best attempts, PC sales continue to decline year over year. In fact, 2013 was the worst year for PC sales, according to research firm Gartner.

Meanwhile, there are a slew of other options for people to choose from, including Chromebooks, the cheap laptops that run Google's Chrome operating system. Chromebooks are gaining momentum with customers, causing Microsoft to launch some very negative ads. HP has started making a bigger push in Chromebooks too.

Finally, Microsoft is reportedly working on a new version of Windows called Windows 9 that will fix many of the gripes people have with Windows 8. We'll likely get a tiny preview of Windows 9 at Microsoft's Build developers conference in April.

Join the conversation about this story »

As per HubSpot’s 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report cost of customer acquisition for U.S. companies with 200+ employees falls by as much as $197 when there is formal marketing and sales agreement.

Surprising right? Read on to know how you can integrate the automation platforms by leveraging the leaders – Marketo and Salesforce.

Importance of Sales and Marketing Integration

Revenue is affected when marketing and sales are silos. Marketing automation platform enables easy tracking and recording of marketing initiatives. On the other hand, sales platform maintains the data that connects closed business to marketing initiatives. By integrating your sales and marketing platforms, you can make this cycle work to maximize the revenue growth. Marketo, a marketing automation platform has grown to 3000+ customers in 6 years of establishment and Salesforce, a cloud CRM is helping 100,000+ customers build better customer relationships. Individually these giants are great platforms for their customers but together they deliver amazing lead-to-revenue conversion. With seamless integration and easy customization, marketing and sales automation is facilitating organizations worldwide break down those silos.Companies who have integrated Marketo and Salesforce have recorded:

• Low cost per qualified lead
• Low cost per opportunity
• Improved response rates per campaign type
• High conversion rates from each stage of your revenue cycle to the next stage
• More Marketing Qualified and Sales Accepted leads
• Better tracking the opportunities and revenue per campaign type
• Increased sales productivity

Now, let us see how salesland and marketingville are breaking down barriers.

Improve Sales Insights with Marketo
Marketo and Salesforce are particularly great together through Marketo Salesforce Connector and products like Marketo Sales Insights. Marketo easily integrates with CRM systems like Salesforce, MS Dynamics and allows you to define and map out stages of sales funnel. It tracks each lead’s progress through the funnel to improve lead quality and lead-to-opportunity conversion. Your sales reps get better access to hot leads, and not just MQLs based on lead scoring campaigns. By tracking in-depth insights, Marketo enables sales reps receive real-time updates on lead status and be better prepared at each stage.

Optimize Marketing Campaigns with Salesforce
Salesforce.com offers a robust platform and cloud CRM solution to assist companies with sales operations and track progress at each stage of the sales funnel. Since Marketo offers native support for Salesforce CRM integration, your marketing team can optimize campaigns and take smarter decisions. Salesforce provides marketers better visibility on impact of marketing campaigns on your company’s bottom line results.

With Salesforce, your sales reps keep a track of their contacts, accounts and opportunities for their prospects and customers and your marketing team can track progress of leads, and run smart campaigns. You can easily leverage Marketo templates in Salesforce and ensure parallel and comprehensive tracking in both the platforms.

Additionally, Salesforce also offers dashboards, chatter, Twitter integration and so much more that can be easily customized and integrated with your Marketo instance.

What to Consider when implementing Marketo and Salesforce
Marketo and Salesforce when combined drive revenue growth for organizations.

However, continuing the analogy, you need to make marketers and salespeople talk in the same language to get revenue growth. Some areas where it can be achieved are:

1. Lead Process
Providing marketing qualified leads and sales accepted leads is not enough for sales team. Your sales team needs to know how the lead was acquired and how it progressed through different stages in the lead funnel. Sales reps need to know the demographic and behavioural traits used by marketing team to create the lead scoring model. In return, the insights from sales team about the buyer characteristics can improve the scoring model.

During the lead lifecycle process, it is imperative that the teams are in constant communication. This process typically starts in Marketo and goes through each sales stage in Salesforce and then is recycled back to Marketo. This process includes change over from Marketo to Salesforce and then back to Marketo. It is important that both the teams understand how and when the changeover is going to happen.

Lead Assignment Rules in Salesforce can be used to automate lead assignment process, but the Sales and Marketing folks have to decide the criteria. While the Sales VP will have ideas on which team/individual is the best person for incoming Leads, the Marketing VP will understand the prospect segments. This combination can help shed light on the criteria that forms the base for creating balanced Lead Assignment groupings.

2. Contact Roles

Contact Roles are the link between Marketo Programs and opportunity in Salesforce. Contact roles as a feature helps the marketing and sales team understand the leads’ role from amongst these:

• Initiator
• Influencer
• Decision-maker
• Buyer
• User
• Gatekeeper

In Salesforce, you can assign a contact role to any contact or person account that affects your account, case, contract, or opportunity. However, when you integrate Marketo and Salesforce it becomes easier to have a holistic idea on the lead’s influence on the buying process. In the integrated instance, it is easier to view unified reports in a visual manner for the different stages i.e. when a Lead is created in Marketo, the nurture track, and then the association with an Opportunity in Salesforce.com.

3. Correct Amount in Closed Won Dollars
For a sales rep, working on Salesforce entering the data is not the end. He needs to enter this regularly and accurately. In addition, when you integrate sales and marketing it is important that you build a mechanism to enforce this. This mechanism helps marketers accurately understand how their marketing initiatives are influencing the activities of the sales rep, which in turn helps better analyse the bottom line results.

To garner support of your sales rep for building this mechanism your team needs to be clear with the reasons behind this mechanism. Some pointers are productivity gain for the sales rep, the increase in value of individual pipeline management, and easy lead follow up.

Now that you know why sales and marketing integration is important and how to leverage technology to do the same, it is time for you to apply this knowledge. When you start applying this let us know, we would love to know how we are helping you create better organizations.

References:

• 1. http://writtent.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/inbound-6.png
• 2. http://www.opfocus.com/blog/achieving-marketing-sales-alignment-using-marketo-and-salesforce-com/

To maximize your Marketo and Salesforce implementation, contact us now at info@grazitti.com

This post was originally posted in blog.grazitti.com

One of the key advantages to “crafting” a product that people around you request is that it puts you next to the customer. That direct connection offers real-time access to feedback, improvement and future product ideas—all critical factors for startup success.

Teajai (TJ) Kimsey, owner of Annique’s Nook in Kansas, created her first product to solve a family need and before long, she was doing the same for others. As a working mom with a daughter active in competitive cheering, having the right shoes to transition from school to practice created a lot of household stress. Leveraging her sewing background, she created shoe covers that quickly converted a pair of specialty shoes into something that could go from gym to car to competition without compromising the integrity of the high dollar cheer shoes. That elegant and functional solution was noticed by other team families and before long she was sewing up shoe covers for other girls on the squad.

Later the same year (2012), she made a cheerleading doll outfit to match her daughter’s uniform and, as with the shoe covers, the requests started pouring in.

TJ realized she didn’t just have a hobby, but a business idea and she created an account on Etsy in January 2013 to test the national waters. By the end of the year, 95% of her business came through Etsy and she was revenue positive.

The most important thing to keep in mind says TJ “is Etsy is a great distribution channel, but it still comes down to your ability to market the product.” Her first order took five months to come in. During that time, she was busy promoting her line.

Prior to the Nook, TJ ran a web development business with 14 employees. That experience was directly transferrable to her new one as she used Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Manta to promote products to her current following with almost daily updates. She used a small budget of paid advertising on Facebook and Google along with content driven SEO to introduce her products to new potential customers.

While orders came in TJ paid close attention to the feedback of her customers. The cheer shoe covers went through several versions based on customer needs to arrive at the current version. Customer communication is vital even today. To that end, TJ recently added chat to her website to help her stay close to her customers. That proved prescient when she could use her cellphone to livechat with her customers during a recent storm that left her area without electricity for two days.

Today, Annique’s products can be purchased on Etsy and a dedicated website and her business is split 50%/50% between the two sites. This former consignment shop owner, Sears Department Manager and Web Marketing owner has recreated herself again.

Now that she is dressing dolls and keeping cheer shoes in top condition with customized products, her next target is the cheerleaders themselves who TJ says “are ready for some big, honking bows” along with other products targeted to tweens.

As the new year begins there are countless articles sharing personal and business advice. One story that caught our eye appeared on the front page of the NY Times Business Section. The article by Adam Bryant, the NY Times columnist and author of Quick and Nimble, shared 6 pieces of advice for managers developing that ever-desired characteristic – nimbleness.

Although the article was about business managers in general, we thought the advice was worth translating for the sales community, since nimbleness is a hallmark of sales success!

• A Simple Plan. Boil down company strategies and priorities into a simple plan that can be internalized and acted on – with clear metrics. We know successful front-line sales managers adopt this principle – they act as filters, not funnels. They make sure their teams are not overwhelmed with administrative trivia and they clarify strategic initiatives into actionable objectives. As one sales manager recently told us – “the more time my people can spend in front of customers with a clear sense of direction, the better our chances of exceeding our sales goals.”

• Rules of the Road. Great companies establish a set of values by which they operate. It is particularly important that sales teams have a set of rules of the road. When rules of the road are in place, salespeople have clarity around expectations (such as the availability of internal resources and the likelihood of accessing them for a particular opportunity) and appropriate behavior (such as under what conditions the sales manager attends sales calls). Sales managers must reinforce the rules of the road and address deviations.

• A Little Respect. Increasingly, selling to major accounts will be a team sport (consisting perhaps of salespeople, support people, tech people, business specialists) that will vary from one sales opportunity to the next. Given this shift, it’s critical that every member of the sales team have, what Robin Domeniconi, CEO of Rue La La, calls M.R.I. – Most Respectful Interpretation of what someone is saying to you. She notes, “If you get people talking and challenging each other, you’re going to have the ability to arrive at the right decision so much quicker and so much easier.” But you have to carry out that dialogue with the recognition of the vulnerabilities of others on your team. This is a tall task when operating in the environment of a major sale – that only succeeds when sales managers provide the required leadership to the team.

• Team Success Also Demands Accountability. In major accounts sales, team accountability must be added to the equation. Sales managers don’t have the time to hold everyone’s hand and walk salespeople through an activity – sales teams must have – and meet – realistic performance expectations. There must be dependability. Everyone on a sales team must do what they say they will do so the sales team can focus on executing their sales strategy – not focusing on making sure everyone does their part. Here sales managers need to establish a culture of accountability.

• Have Frank Conversations. Beyond respect and accountability, teams can only succeed if team members are willing to have frank discussions to work through inevitable disagreements and misunderstandings. These talks aren’t easy and many managers avoid them – so problems are side-stepped. Salespeople and sales managers are no exception. Providing feedback can be uncomfortable for the sales manager and salesperson – but it’s critical to achieving success. How do you share quality feedback? Much has been written about sales managers and giving feedback – including in the Sales Training Connection where you will find a lot of “how to’s” on this topic.

• Hazards of Email. The lure of email is powerful. And for some types of sales communication it’s great, but it’s also open to misinterpretation. If there is conflict relying on email or even worse – 140 character Twitter messages – isn’t the answer. By talking over the phone or in person, sales managers are more likely to avoid misunderstanding.

There are a myriad of skill sets and competencies needed by sales managers. Some are discussed a lot – some not so much. We thought “nimbleness” desired at least a word or two.

If you found this post helpful, you might want to join the conversation and subscribe to the Sales Training Connection.

Many sales and marketing organizations on a calendar financial year have just wrapped up their annual sales kickoffs.  Your sales kickoff is a great time to get everyone on the same page for messaging, product, and expectations.  And a standard time to recognize excellence in your organization through President’s Club, awards, and other incentives.

Those top stars in your organization must be recognized and rewarded.  But it’s important to realize that this is also an opportunity to not only motivate but also help contributors who are on the cusp of getting to the club.  Those team members that in sum contribute hugely to your total.  So, what can you do to make the podium a crowded place next year?

1. Recognize that excellence is an everyday action

The gaudy sales numbers that your top performers put on the board don’t just happen at the end of the quarter.  They are the result of a journey that the buyer and the sales person took together.  Each day is a new close on the path to the contracted close.  So, recognizing that you need to incrementally move each deal through (and often back through) the process is important.

Coach your team to recognize that this game of increments requires a daily perspective.  

The post Not Settling for Average in Your Sales Organization appeared first on KnowledgeTree.

From January 2-31, we are challenging everyone to blog more to see firsthand the results that blogging can generate. Participating companies should submit their blog URLs on this page to enter the challenge. Winner(s) will receive a complimentary ticket to INBOUND 2014 and be featured on the HubSpot Inbound Marketing blog.

Today's blogging tip is brought to you by Sean Rosensteel, Head of Business Development at Savvy Pro Web:

"Ask your sales and support team what types of recurring questions they get asked from prospects and customers alike. Then, formulate a blog strategy based around these questions. Not only will it allow you to attract visitors who have the same concerns, but it will also provide great content for your lead nurturing campaigns."

Did you blog today? If yes, submit to the challenge!