After working on Wall Street for 14 years, I’ve always presented facts and figures to B2B buyers because that’s how I felt serious business people made decisions. This belief was backed by 2,500 years of conditioning.

It started when Plato said that man is rational and that it’s our emotions that interfere with rational decisions. But recently, I had an experience that called this belief into question. Shortly thereafter, I was presented with a compelling study from neuroscience that also refuted this belief. So when these two events collided, the myth that buying decisions were strictly rational was busted. I now understood why customers get stuck in analysis paralysis, and what I could do to help then to avoid it.

My experience began when I was about to make the most important buying decision of my life. My daughter, Isabelle, was leaving her small community school, and she was off to grade seven in the city. I had to make sure I made the right decision, so that she’d be on the right track to get into a good university. So, I created a selection matrix on Excel, and off I went to the school’s open houses to make the optimal choice.

The problem was that all the schools seemed the same. I felt nothing. I was stuck in analysis paralysis.

When a good friend, Professor Pete, asked me how it was going, I said, “I can’t decide. I’ve seen seven of the top private schools, and not one has inspired me.” Pete suggested I check out Voice, a small performing arts school in the distillery district not far from my home. Although I didn’t see how an arts school could help get my daughter into a good university, I agreed to go because I respected Pete’s opinion.

The next week, Pete asked me how it went.

“Terrible,” I said. “Within five minutes of visiting the school, Issy and I both decided on Voice because it felt right.”

“Sounds great,” said Pete. “But why’s that terrible?”

“It’s terrible because the school failed on every one my criteria. The teaching was average, the sports facilities were poor, and yet we chose the school because it felt right. Does that make me a bad parent?”

“No, Michael,” Pete said. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. Most of our decisions are made unconsciously.”

Your Rational Mind Can Fabricate Reasons for Your Decision

Because Pete is a professor of neuroscience, he cited a study as proof. In the study, subjects were given a puzzle to solve, and by monitoring their brain activity with an EEG, the scientists were able to show that the puzzle was actually solved eight seconds before the subjects were conscious of solving it.

“So, Michael,” Pete said. “At the open house, I’m sure your unconscious mind was processing all the time in the background, and when it decided, it communicated its decision to your conscious mind through the emotion of certainty that Voice was the right choice.”

“Come on, Pete,” I said. “I’m not going to believe that I bet my daughter’s future on a gut feeling. Sorry, but after reflecting on my decision, I realized that I chose Voice because Issy would gain self-confidence from participating in the performing arts.”

“Really,” Pete said. “You decided all that in just five minutes of visiting the school? Or did your rational mind fabricate a reason, so that you’d have a consistent narrative to consciously justify your subconscious decision.”

“Wow, Pete,” I said. “That’s a little too cerebral for me. In layman’s terms, do you mean it’s like you and your wife? She makes most of the decisions, and you pretend that you’re in charge?”

“Yes,” Pete said. “Exactly, and there is a fascinating study to back it up. The subjects, who had just had their right and left hemisphere of their brain severed in order to treat epilepsy, were well-chosen because they provided the opportunity for the researchers to trick the brain. Because the left hemisphere processes language, the right hemisphere was mute, so it could no longer articulate what it saw to others, or even itself. The only way that the right hemisphere could communicate what it subconsciously saw was by pointing.

“So when the subjects’ right hemisphere was shown a picture of a snowy winter scene, they were asked to point to one of five cards that represented what they had just seen, and the right hemisphere correctly pointed to a shovel. But when asked to verbally explain their choice, the right hemisphere couldn’t do it, so the left hemisphere had to step in. The problem was that the left hemisphere didn’t know the reason why because it hadn’t seen the snowy picture. But did it admit that it didn’t know the answer or say here’s my best guess? No, instead it fabricated a rational reason, and shamelessly said, ‘Oh, that’s easy. The shovel was chosen to clean out the chicken shed.’

“The answer isn’t as bizarre as it initially appears because the left hemisphere was previously shown a picture of a chicken foot. So, the left hemisphere connected the shovel to a chicken foot, and then fabricated the reason that the shovel was chosen was to clean out the chicken shed. So, Michael,” said Pete. “This study may explain why the reason you think you chose Voice was really nothing more than your rational mind trying to consciously justify your unconscious decision.”

“Aha, I get it,” I said.

And suddenly, everything started to make sense to me. Intuitively, I’d always known that people often make decisions emotionally then justify them with logic. But I didn’t have the proof to back up this theory. Now, I understood why.

The reason I couldn’t look back on a decision and see it as exclusively unconscious was because the rational mind would always fill in the gap with a fabricated reason.

Using What I Learned to Sell to B2B Customers

Now that the myth of the rational buyer was busted, I would forever change how I sold to B2B customers.

For example, a couple of weeks later, I was talking to a friend of mine, John, who was tasked with selling Buffalo, NY, as a business location to a group of call center businessmen in Stamford, CT. And after sharing what I learned from selecting my daughter’s school, we concluded that John’s presentation was too abstract to emotionally engage his audience.

So instead of flooding them with data, we showed them a before and after insight scenario™ of what it could look like if they moved their call center to Buffalo.

1. On the first slide, we showed a picture of a house they could buy for $250,000 in Buffalo vs. Stamford.
2. On the second slide, we showed a list of worker qualifications they could hire for $15/hour in Buffalo vs. Stamford.
3. On the third slide, we showed how many square feet they could rent in a prime downtown location in Buffalo vs. Stamford.

Our objective was to create a feeling of desire in the businessmen at the prospect of relocating to Buffalo. Once they’d emotionally bought into the idea, John had more than enough information to help them rationally justify their decision.

What I’ve learned is that if you just present abstract facts to the rational Mr. Spock, your customer will get stuck in analysis paralysis like I did when choosing my daughter’s school. To bring knowledge to a boil so that someone acts, you’ve also got to present what the facts mean to the intuitive Captain Kirk. To act, people have to not only think it’s right, but it also has to feel right, and that only happens when they internalize the idea. How? By painting a clear before and after picture of owning your idea, your customer is then able to imagine themselves in your insight scenario. So don’t just present the facts and hope the customer figures it out. Instead, let them take your idea out for a virtual test drive.

Have you ever observed a seemingly talented manager or sales person who seems to undermine their own success with a certain behavioral flaw? Sometimes this flaw is actually an outgrowth of their strengths, untempered and overused. Specifically, I’m referring to a lack of active listening. Active listening can be foundational to one’s success, and not practicing it can lead to ineffective communication and a failure to engage staff or customers. As you read this, some of you may admit to having this challenge, while others will identify those around them that face it.

As was shown in the recent races run between man and cheetah, sometimes a strength can become a weakness when requirements change. In this case the world’s fastest land mammal, the cheetah, was racing against two of the fastest players in the NFL. With the cheetah capable of accelerating from 0 to 60 miles per hour in only 3 seconds, you might think it safe to assume the cheetah’s victory. While that might well be the case when racing on a straight-away, in this instance the first challenge involved one turnaround, and the second challenge involved three. The cheetah’s strength turned out to be a weakness when it was required to slow down quickly and reverse direction.

Similarly, often an extroverted manager or sales person can come across very well in an interview with their ease in conversation, however – once hired – they may go on to under-achieve in the areas of staff or customer/client engagement.

Findings from Towers Watson’s global research study of 32,500 workers found that 65% were highly engaged. It went on to indicate that most managers didn’t have time for coaching or listening to their direct reports. The practice of listening to staff and customers in order to respond effectively is critical to effective engagement. But focused listening can be a challenge for fast-paced extroverts (D’s and I’s in the language of the DISC profiles) with a propensity to communicate at rapid speed. Unfortunately this habit, untamed, can disengage staff or customers/clients.

In the Harvard Business Reviews article, The Focused Leader, Daniel Goleman discusses three broad modes of attention as essentials for leadership skills: focusing on yourself, focusing on others, and focusing on the wider world.
“Focusing inwardly (self awareness) and focusing constructively on others helps leaders cultivate the primary elements of emotional intelligence. A fuller understanding of how they focus on the wider world can improve their ability to devise strategy, innovate and manage organizations.”
The same can be said for sales success and engaging customers/clients while in pursuit of business development objectives.

On a recent trip to the lovely Paradisus Punta Cana (we’re big fans of the Melia Hotels), while walking along Bavaro Beach, we came across some other vacation spots that looked interesting. While I generally detest the sales tactics used in the timeshare industry, when we saw a lovely smaller resort we accepted an invitation to visit the “lifestyle” property. We took the initial tour in our bathing suits and flip-flops, and were shown some palatial ocean-view suites with lovely kitchens and dining areas, etc. After seeing the impressive suites, we were handed off to a closer for “the kill”.

The final presentation included graphics, and descriptions of top-of-the-line packages with helicopter transfers from the airport. The sales person mentioned repeatedly that members would party weekly at their Puerto Plata location, which was frequented by artists such as LMFAO and various rappers. We politely let him know that it wasn’t our thing to attend loud parties of 5000 people while on vacation, that we generally traveled for some peaceful unwinding time. After watching him dance across the declining sales numbers to close the deal, we were surprised to see him go back to his iPad, saying “You’d love the weekly members parties!” as he once again started the loud music and video of the party crowd on the beach. He clearly hadn’t heard/listened to our input on what interested us, or if he heard it he lacked the flexibility to alter his approach. At that point I stood up and said, “Thank you – this meeting is over.”

The practice of listening to staff and customers in order to respond effectively is indeed a critical success factor in engagement. For many people, with the busy digital pace of the day and many items to check off on the to-do list, the temptation is to confuse talking with effective communication. On its own, talking without listening and adaptation will fail to engage staff and customers.  Don’t confuse your activity with productivity. It’s no surprise that the most effective executives start their days earlier with an internal focus on tasks to complete, prior to their engagement with staff and teams (and deployment of active listening) later in the day.

Sales Training Article: Reduce Stress

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

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

One definition of skill mastery is technique under pressure. A golfer that made putts with near perfect form on the practice green stabs at and misses a six-footer on the 18th hole for the match. The more athletes want or need something, the harder it is to get. Sellers striving to achieve quota in December face similar challenges. Sellers needing orders late in the year often pass their anxiety onto buyers that don't want to be pressured to buy. A seller's usual sales techniques can be compromised and sales can be lost.

Register for one of our 2014 sales training workshops and get a jump on making your new number. 

In December some of the most optimistic people are sellers that are below 50% YTD of quota, but confident they can close more than half of their business in the last 30 days of the year. I've seen sellers, districts, regions and entire companies manufacture ways that they can make their numbers. It's in sellers' DNA to sprint to the finish regardless of how far behind they are 90+% into a race.

Finishing the year in this manner creates problems:

1. There's usually no margin for error and therefore they are likely to come up short.

2. If they pull off a miracle they enter a new year with higher quotas and nothing in their pipelines. They need the first 2 months to build pipeline and are working the equivalent of a 10-month year in terms of booking revenue. This sets the stage for the potential for a stressful end of the following year.

3. The worst outcome is emptying pipelines and still coming up short.

We could all use less stress in our business and personal lives. My suggestion for sellers as the New Year approaches is to consider dividing your 2014 annual quota so that you look at your YTD position every month (12 small increments) rather than wait until sometime later in the year. By doing so, you can see what if any shortfall there is from being YTD and adjust your activities accordingly, understanding bus dev activities must increase if you are falling behind.

Another suggestion is to project a sales cycle ahead based upon your historical close rates. This can be especially helpful with large transactions where you have an idea of when they will close, especially if you have negotiated Sequences of Events with the buying committee.

Striving to be at least year to date against quota 12 times a year should minimize December fire drills that put pressure on sellers and buyers. I wish you Happy (and less stressful) Holidays.

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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.

If you’re like most sales managers, you’re constantly taking shortcuts with the time you spend on sales talent management. In many sales organizations, activities associated with managing people often get put on the back burner either because we are uncomfortable handling them or because we’re too busy reacting to seemingly more pressing problems.

Unfortunately, taking shortcuts in these key processes can bring negative consequences to your sales organization, including negative impacts to your bottom line.

Sales leaders need a process that helps them drive success in these key areas of sales talent management:

• Identifying and Recruiting New Hires
• Equipping New Hires with the Skills to Achieve a Reasonable Ramp-Up Time
• Managing Performance
• Developing and Retaining Top Sales Talent
• Planning for Future Bench-Strength/Succession

The due diligence spent building a high-performance sales team saves both time and money. Nothing provides better proof of effective people management than a simple scenario that calculates ineffective people management.

We all can think of an example – someone you hired who didn’t work out or someone on your current team who’s not working out now. To identify the bottom line costs to your company, it’s pretty simple to do the math. We’ve plugged in a hypothetical example using a B2B sales organization with approximately 500 sales reps worldwide.

You Do the Math:

• How long does it take to find a sales rep? (Probably 2-3 months)
• How long does it take to recruit and on-board them? (3 months)
• How long does it take to find out they aren’t the right person? (3 additional months)
• How long does it take to off-board them and re-recruit? (2 – 3 months)
• What do I expect out of an average territory annually? ($1.5M)
• Now, what about your time? How much of your time has been required in the process thus far?
• What about your team dynamics? This kind of situation is sure to have an impact on the rest of your sales team.

Any way you slice it, it’s a costly, frustrating scenario that no sales manager wants to deal with, but most of us have to. Calculate the costs specific to your organization here.

If your sales organization hasn’t defined the DNA of your top performers, then your hiring profiles are likely off-target. Start by asking the top performers on your sales team these three questions:

1. How would you define success in your current sales role?
2. What specialized knowledge do you have?
3. What particular skills and behaviors make you successful?

Once you determine the traits your top performers have in common, you can create a specific success profile for any person in the same role. Now when you consider new candidates, you will be able to assess them against the top performers in your sales organization.

Developing a Success Profile can help you discover not only what type of person will be successful in a sales role in your organization, it can also provide a tool to guide your talent management processes throughout on-boarding, performance management, development and retention — producing consistent sales performance, reduced turnover and faster time to productivity.

When initiating a sales campaign, reach the highest-level appropriate person you can to hear your pitch.

One of the questions I'm most often asked by CEOs is how to hire sales people.

I've written a lot about recruiting and hiring at startups including my controversial post on whom not to hire and my rapid response to the flame war. I've also written extensively on sales and on which sales execs to hire and how to think about the different kinds of sales leaders.

One of the questions I used to ask in any recruiting meeting for a senior hire or even a junior sales rep is as follows:

"When you run sales campaigns do you prefer to

A. Call high, and get passed down or;
B. Call low, get a pilot project with data running internally, and then present the findings to a senior executive"

Of course there's no "right" answer but I'd like to persuade you that "calling high" will help you greatly shorten sales cycles and help you avoid wasting a lot of time on sales efforts that are not likely to close in the first place.

If you don't have a good sales methodology already in place in your organization you might try reading that last link.

Call High

Calling high means reaching the highest level appropriate person in an organization that you can reach to hear your pitch. In a small to mid-sized organization this is likely the CEO or perhaps a COO or SVP. Clearly in an enterprise customer this is unlikely.

The senior person you meet is unlikely to be the person actually making the decision. They are likely somebody who would hear about the purchase but may or may not weigh in on the decision.

The most likely outcome if you manage to interest the senior exec (for the sake of this post let me call her the CEO) is that she will refer you down the organization to somebody who would be involved in the decision.

The benefits of this are clear:

1. High priority / more attention: A person passed down from the CEO tells the person making the decision that they ought to prioritize this.

2. No gate keeper: One of the most destructive forces in a sales campaign is when mid-level manager blocks you from meeting her boss. When you're passed down the organization this isn't an issue. You have already established a direct connection to the CEO and have earned the right to contact her on an as-needed basis.

3. You avoid time wasters: Occasionally when you meet senior executives they will give you negative feedback on your prospects.

"We don’t have budget for that this year"

"I don’t believe in social media advertising."

"I'm already in a pilot with one of your competitors."

"There’s no way we’re going to partner in this area. It’s too strategic. We will have to build (or buy) technology in this area."

Whatever this issue is. The thing is … what I see many sales execs do is burn up countless hours on mid-level campaigns that get torpedoed when the go up the organization due to lack of budget, a desire to own that core IP or other more pressing organization priorities. You need to align your selling cycle with a buyers purchasing cycle otherwise you’re wasting your time and theirs. If they're not buying you need to be marketing to them not selling to them.

So as much as it sucks to hear, "We don't have budget for (or interest in) your product" it's far better to hear it early and move on to your next qualified lead.

4. Learn the internal politics: You'd be surprised what the CEO would tell you about her organization. She might gladly tell you who gets decisions made, who is a pain in the arse, who is super technical, etc. Once you've reached a level in a company where you're less worried about daily politics above you people are much more relaxed about sharing information. Not always, of course. But more than junior people.

5. Sales & post-sales support: One of the most important roles the CEO can play is to help you in the sales cycle and even in post sales. After you have found a business buyer often you need to get through procurement, legal and technical reviews (aka "sales prevention"). Having senior executive air cover is invaluable to help streamline these leg-breakers. Following the sale having a CEO relationship can help you greatly to make sure you product gets the training, implementation and rollout support it needs to be successful. Not to mention it would be nice to have the CEO on your marketing reference list!

The Case for Calling Low

When you hear the case for "call high" it intuitively feels obvious. I have met several sales execs who argue the exact opposite strategy. Their view is that without "proof points" the senior leadership teams are likely to be cynical about the benefits of your product.

In the "call low" camp they advocate:

1. Find a business unit leader who would be positively impacted by success of your product

2. Run a short, quantifiable pilot

3. Have that business unit leader champion you to a senior exec with data and proof in hand

4. Land bigger deals with more assuredness.

The mantra of this school is, "keep your head below the parapet and avoid getting shot. You can rise up once you have your armaments."

While I understand the logic, I personally believe you need to provide enough evidence through case studies to talk with the CEO and if she can't convince herself that it’s worth exploring being a buyer then you could recommend you do a pilot internally to prove yourself.

Summary

While the logic of calling high is clear I can tell you that most people -- leaders and sales execs -- opt for the more comfortable territory of the next layer down in the organization.

I have seen countless organizations waste time peddling to companies that have no intention to buy or to prospects who have no authority to purchase.

Whether you’re selling your product or selling your company - there is nothing more valuable than having

• A champion who will help you take ownership for your success
• The air cover of a senior executive
• A buyer who has IA - influence & authority (Avoid NINAs)

I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments section.

Photo credit on 500px to Roof Topper. Check out his other photos. He's insane. And brilliant.

This article was originally published on Mark Suster's blog, Both Sides of the Table.

Nothing matters more than revenue, and the new year is a great time to re-evaluate your sales approach.

As you move into the New Year, you're probably thinking about all the different ways you can strive to improve your company in 2014. You may choose to focus on reducing costs, worry about how the new healthcare laws will impact your benefits, or revisit your product roadmap and pricing.

But success and growth are most often measured by one number: overall revenue. What are the strategies and moves you should make (or not make) to move your sales to a new level?

Here are three tips you can implement to bolster your sales as you move into the New Year:

Put Your People Out in Front

The old-economy approach was to put all of the equity into your brand and to rarely, if ever, actually mention the people that work for your company. Company first--individual contributors second.

Today, the customer wants to buy from an individual, not a company. In order for your company to accommodate this change successfully, you must have individuals who are willing to take the spotlight, and you must have ways to highlight their expertise.

Encourage your employees to contribute to your company's blog, write articles and whitepapers for publication and speak at conferences. The public exposure keeps your company top of mind. These activities help to establish and maintain relationships with your customers that will encourage them to reach out when they have a need.

Stop Responding to RFPs

More often than not, responding to RFPs is a waste of your company's time and money. Consider an evaluation of the number of RFPs you have responded to, the amount of time and costs tied up in those responses, and then your win/lose ratio. The numbers will probably surprise you.

I really like Ken Robbins from Response Mine Interactive's thoughts on why his company doesn't participate in the RFP process. While most of Ken's comments are related to RFPs for a new agency, most of his points are valid for any RFP process--especially No. 1.: The truth is that the "winner" is often already known at the beginning of the RFP process. In many cases, the company that is ultimately selected actually helped write the RFP putting them in a very good position to win the business.

My standard practice for responding to RFPs has been to send a one-page letter that highlights the unique attributes of my business and includes some marketing materials about my company's products and services. I invite the company requesting the RFP to sit down and have a meeting to get a better understanding of their needs. The time saved on responding to low-odds RFPs can be put towards activities and customers with a much higher likelihood of success.

The caveat to this is if your company happens to provide a technology or process that is so unique that no other competitor has an opportunity to compete successfully--or if you happened to be the preferred vendor who helped write the RFP in the first place.

Master the Follow Up

Sales is still a numbers game. The difference between the salesperson who is successful and the one who falters simple: The successful salesperson is persistent and continues to stay in touch long after others have given up. Studies have shown that few salespeople follow-up more than three times, but most sales happen after the fifth contact.

But today's definition of follow-up is more complicated than picking up the phone to touch base. A touch-base should include a calculated drip campaign that provides useful and meaningful content to a prospect, staying connected through social media and hosting webinars to provide content and training.

You should evaluate your sales process and see if you have the right touchpoints in place to ensure you are staying in front of your decision makers on a regular and consistent basis. Utilize technology where you can to automate this for your sales team. The added benefit of automation will be the metrics you can use to evaluate the effectiveness of your different approaches.

As you move your company into the New Year, take time to evaluate what you are doing to affect the number most pay attention to--your topline revenue.

If carefully executed, contests can keep your team members motivated, enhance their skills, and improve their communication.

You've run what you might call the typical sales contest, with spreadsheets to track points earned and cash offered to winners. But that format is actually not so typical anymore. Today, contests involve apps and digital leaderboards and personalized badges. This evolution makes you wonder: Is "sales gamification" unhealthy for sales teams?

In certain cases, the answer is yes.

When sales leaders constantly pit members of their entire team against one another in one-size-fits-all competitions, for instance, the same reps end up getting an ego boost seeing their names atop the leaderboard, while others find discouragement at the bottom. When management only publicly recognizes those falling behind in competition, they incite negative morale. And the cases when leaders don't take advantage of the communication opportunities that leaderboards open? Unfortunately, they're all too common.

You could try to choose from hundreds of resources for help in avoiding these and other crucial sales gamification mistakes. Instead, save yourself the overwhelming process by starting with these three best practices:

1. Don't just run sales competitions. Use them to coach the team.

Simply running competitions via leaderboards around the office isn't going to effect beneficial change in your sales environment. You need to get conversations going with a positive spin, by asking salespeople questions like: "You should be rocking this leaderboard, so what's going on there?"

A well-executed competition can also inspire reps to open the lines of communication themselves. Let's say a usually lethargic sales rep knocks on your door and says, "I'm not okay with being at the bottom of the leaderboard. Can you give me some advice?" Since the competition motivates a critical sales behavior--like moving prospects to a key stage in the sales funnel--you answer by doing more than just coaching that rep to win. You teach your team sales strategies and share insights.

Sound ideal? Publicly display leaderboards, keep your door open, and you can expect it. The Monterey Company, a California-based lapel pin company, can attest to that. Two weeks into its first competition, the rep at the bottom of the leaderboard approached Paul Stark, the company president, to ask for help moving up. Stark offered ongoing coaching from there, and the rep took his advice seriously. The rep didn't win that specific contest, but he continued using what he had learned long after the competition had concluded.

2. Open opportunities for peer mentorship.

There will be times when reps just don't feel comfortable approaching their superiors for advice. That doesn't mean they won't seek mentorship elsewhere. Sales gamification can inspire reps to approach their top-performing peers for coaching, too.

For example, say low-performing reps hesitate to take a new product to market. They're nervous to pitch it until they see colleagues higher on the leaderboard selling it. When reps see that a new product can be sold successfully, they'll ask those top performers for tips and tricks, generally becoming more comfortable with the task at hand.

3. Restructure competitions as needed.

Don't limit your gamification strategy with one-size-fits-all designs, in which all team members compete against each other time and time again. If you do, the primary product of the competition will be burnout.

Instead, break up competitions according to performance levels. The most basic way to do that is to create three different versions of a contest--one for top performers, one for middle-level performers, and one for bottom-level performers.

With this structure you won't have reps at the bottom of the leaderboard staring at the same faces that consistently dominate the top and thinking: I have no chance to win, so why should I even try? Rather, individuals will compete against others on their level, which will help to raise everyone to levels higher than they would reach in a one-size-fits-all competition.

Building competitions to motivate specific behaviors, like making calls or booking meetings, can change your team's habits. At the same time though, make sure to keep focus on your own habits. Leverage the communication opportunities that sales gamification offers and structure competitions carefully. You'll not only be maintaining healthy gamification but ensuring healthy results.

Today’s guest post is from Derek Singleton of Software Advice. A great writer who recently published research on converting inbound leads. Enjoy his post!

As an online business, Software Advice thrives off connecting with business-to-business (B2B) software buyers on the Web and the phone. Since our company was founded in 2006, we’ve learned a lot about B2B buyer behavior on the Web—and we wanted to share what we’ve learned with the B2B sales and marketing community.

Toward that end, I recently analyzed data Software Advice collected from more than 6,000,000 unique visitors between January 1, 2008 and August 31, 2013. What I found offers insights into when B2B buyers research on the Web, when they convert on a website and when you can get them on the phone. As inbound marketing (and inbound leads) become a larger part of the overall B2B marketing mix, I believe it’s important to understand these behaviors.

Here are a few of the my most interesting findings, along with additional insights provided by Craig.

A Lightning Fast Lead Response Time Significantly Improves Qualification Rates

A few years ago, InsideSales.com published The Lead Response Response Management Study, reporting that calling a buyer within 5 minutes of converting on your site leads to dramatically improves your changes of qualifying that buyer. I wanted to know what happens if you call in 5 within seconds of converting, which our phone system allows us to do.

While I expected to find that calling this quickly would improve our qualification rate, it was pretty stunning to see that when we call a buyer within 5 seconds of converting on our site, we qualify that buyer at a rate 30 percent higher than our average qualification rate.

Qualification Rates at Second IntervalsMeanwhile, it only takes 11 minutes for our qualification rate to drop below average. And after just 1 hour, our qualification rate drops 13 percent below our average qualification rate.

Qualification Rates at Minute Intervals

Derek’s analysis: For any company that relies on inbound leads to generate a considerable portion of their revenue, I think this data makes a strong case for investing in technology that will allow you to respond to certain types of buyers as quickly as possible.

I say certain types of buyers because this data is based on buyers that converted on a call to action that requests information from us directly—e.g. a price quote or request for a demo. For other types of buyers that aren’t ready to speak with a salesperson, I still think that lead nurturing is the best way to start the sales process.

Funnelholic analysis: Most studies confirm Software Advice’s data. As Derek mentions, technology is key to make this near-instantaneous follow-up work. Another factor I have found is mental. 50% of the time, I will hear: “Well I don’t want them to think we are stalking them” or “I don’t want to appear too salesly”. While some buyers are surprised that you will call them that quickly, no one complains. As a matter of fact, you are contacting them when you are top of mind so the conversation is typically very productive.

As Derek mentions, there are some leads you should call right away and there are others you should nurture over time. This is an important consideration as you design your lead follow up process. Derek mentions that his data is based on a desire to hear more or a demo request. You will have to test which offers work with immediate follow up and those that don’t. For example, one company worked with found that the Gartner Magic Quadrant was it’s highest converting piece. (I was surprised) They called these downloads right away.

B2B Conversion Rates Peak at the Beginning of the Year

After looking at the impact of time-to-first-call on qualification rates, I wanted to better understand what happens to B2B buyer activity at different months of the year, days of the week and times of the day. Looking at buyer activity month to month, the most interesting finding was that conversion rates were higher during Q1 and Q2, although there is a dip in June.

Conversion Rates by Month of Year

Derek’s analysis: In my view, the above average conversion rates at the beginning of the year are likely due to the fact that businesses are working with renewed budgets and funds are more readily available at this time of the year. Meanwhile, conversion rates drop off a bit during the summer as people take vacations and they slide again in Q4 when budgets start to become a bit strained.

For us, this means that we have to plan for our inside sales team to be at full capacity at the beginning of the year, and to have new hires trained by the end of December. For the larger B2B community, I think this illustrates the importance planning your inside sales team’s capacity to match seasonal variations in lead volumes.

Funnelholic analysis: The summer months make sense…I felt like October would be closer to January and February. Oh well, that is why we have data! I like Derek’s analysis. It basically tells you to be fully ramped and trained up for the beginning of the year. Heck, raise quotas if you want.

Tuesday Through Thursday is the Best Time to Reach Buyers

In my analysis of B2B buyer activity by day, I found that we qualify buyers that convert on our site Tuesday through Thursday at twice the rate of buyers that convert on a Monday or Friday.

Qualification Rates by Day of WeekDerek’s analysis: The obvious implication of this data is that you should knock out your offsite and other meetings on Mondays and Fridays when qualification rates are relatively lower. Meanwhile, your inside sales team should hammer the phones Tuesday through Thursday.

But what’s perhaps even more interesting is how poorly we qualify buyers that convert on a Saturday or Sunday. The reason we don’t qualify these leads as well as leads those that come in during the workweek is because we don’t have a sales team to call them right away, which our time-to-first-call data shows significantly impacts qualification rates. I think this makes a good case for having an inside sales team around to respond to leads on the weekend, if there is enough lead volume on these days.

Funnelholic analysis: I never thought about having inside sales reps working on weekends to convert leads. I still don’t think I would recommend this action. Besides, I am sure buyers are downloading on weekends without the expectation that will be talking to sales. A b2b sales call on a Sunday may turn people off.

Tuesday through Thursday have traditionally been the best days for calling for my teams. I like Derek’s recommendation to clear the decks for Tuesday through Thursday for hardcore calling.

B2B Buyer Activity and Qualification Rates Are Highest Before Noon

Finally, I looked at B2B buyer activity throughout the day. As you might expect, I found that traffic, conversion rates and qualification rates are all at their highest during the work day (8:00 AM to 5:59 PM CST for us).

But what’s interesting is that our traffic and qualification rates are highest in the first half of the day. Our traffic picks up steadily starting at 8:00 AM CST and peaks at lunchtime, nearly doubling our average.

Unique Visitors During Working Hours

We see a similar pattern in our ability to qualify leads that come in at different times of the day. Our qualification rates peaks at the just before lunch time and from them on it’s comparatively more difficult for us to get buyers on the phone.

Qualification Rates During Working Hours (Central Standard Time)

Derek’s analysis: Your inside sales team should be able to hit the phones by 8:00 AM CST as leads that come in at this time of day qualify at an above average rate. If you’re on the West Coast, that means hitting the phones by 6:00 AM PST. Moreover, our data suggests that it’s crucial to have your inside sales team at working at full capacity in the first half of the day when research activity is the highest and your inside sales team is most likely to get a buyer on the phone to discuss their needs.

Funnelholic analysis: All my clients who I have begged them to have people on the phone at 6am are laughing right now. It’s amazing how much conversion happens before 9am PDT. If you are west coast, you absolutely HAVE to have people on the phones at 6am.

 

While this data just reflects our experience at Software Advice, I hope it offers some fresh perspective on how B2B buyers research their purchases on the Web, convert on a website and engage with inside sales. If you’re interested in learning more about the report, check it out at B2B Buyer Behavior – Web & Phone Channels IndustryView | 2013

This morning, I read an interesting post by SalesDrive on persistent candidates in which the article makes the following observation:

Hiring managers occasionally encounter sales candidates who are especially persistent . . . calling or emailing them frequently to get an update on their status. Of course, persistence is a very important trait for success in sales. So, it can be tempting to conclude that a persistent candidate will be high in Drive, tirelessly tracking down new leads.

We agree that it is easy to assume that a persistent candidate will be a persistent and high achieving sales person and they may in fact be just that, however it wouldn’t be a sure bet to conclude that the candidate be able to consistently close sales. There are a couple of reasons why this may be the case:

• Pressure - People often behave differently under pressure. Sometimes a candidate who is desperate to secure an income will display all the qualities of a proactive sales person with a high sense of urgency, but later reverts to their normal behavioral style once they have found income.
• Skills Gap – Persistence is merely one trait required to be consistently successful in sales. A candidate that is persistent may or may not possess the other critical skills that will make them successful.
• Interview Savviness – Some sales people excel at interviewing because they attend a lot of job interviews. A candidate who is not otherwise persistent, may act persistent if they know that persistence in the interviewing process sends a positive sign to the hiring manager.

It is the minority of candidates that don’t show some degree of persistence during the interview process so persistence on its own, is not an overly useful measure of a candidate’s usefulness and the savvy hiring manager thoroughly tests to ensure that potential candidates possess all the traits that are required for success in a certain sales role.

To your success!

See the rest of the article here.

image courtesy of ddpavumba | freedigitalphotos.net

Dear Marketing:

Because the holiday season is all about giving, the sales team thought you’d like to know what we want this year. We all agreed that we don’t want fruitcake, chocolates, bottles of booze, ties, or scarves, or even Starbucks gift cards. We want gifts that keep on giving—the kind that can make us money year round. What we really want is business-to-business telemarketing.

And we know that it’s better to give than receive. So we’re planning something special for you, too. We’re so excited about it that we’re breaking the news now. If you give us all the tools on our Holiday list, we’re going to work with you to achieve revenues beyond your wildest dreams.

Interested? Good, because here are the details on what we want.

Qualified Leads

You may have guessed this one because we’ve actually told you about this once or twice before. But we think there might have been some confusion. It’s not your fault because we talk a different language sometimes. When we say “qualified,” we don’t mean people who’ve landed on our website and casually entered their contact information into one of your enticing landing pages to download the latest white paper.

Why? I know it’s hard to believe, but a lot of those people aren’t interested in talking with us. They’re doing research. They’re checking out the competition. They might love what we’re offering, but they don’t have the money to pay for it. Or, perhaps they’re not authorized to make this kind of purchase. And, anyhow, they really don’t need our help for a few months.

Lead Nurturing

You’ve told us that some of these leads just need time. They need follow up and nurturing. In fact, we’ve heard that even though 95% of the people who visit a website are not interested in talking with us salespeople immediately, eventually 70% will buy from us or our competitors.

Could you nurture these leads? Send them relevant content, like white papers and case studies, and call them once in awhile to learn more about their needs and see how we can help. We’ve heard they may need 5-8 touches from our company before they’re ready to talk with us.

Do you really think we’re going coordinate and keep track of all that? We’re on-the-go people. We’re interested in the here and now. You guys in marketing live in the promise of the future. So we think you’d be much better at this task.

Clear Picture of Needs

While you build a relationship with these leads and transform them from initial suspects into eager prospects, you’re sure to learn a lot about them. Give us the scoop. That way we can design our sales presentations to their needs, showing them a value proposition that they can’t resist.

Happy Holidays

Your Sales Team

P.S. All we want is business-to-business telemarketing and we’re your faithful team forever.

To learn how to give your sales force the gift that keeps on giving, sign up for our FREE white paper: How B2B Telemarketing Increases Leads and Boosts Sales.

By Tibor Shanto - tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca

As you finalise your 2014 sales plans, it is good idea to review and commit to some of the basics. Some of these may not be fashionable, on the other hand nothing is more fashionable in sales than exceeding quota.

As with many endeavours, we sometime focus too much effort on style and take our eyes of the fundamentals. As Michael Jordan once said:

“…You have to monitor your fundamentals constantly because the only thing that changes will be your attention to them”

While the framework for the fundamentals are process and quality of execution, the key fundamentals that we need to continuous focus on regardless of methodology or approach are:

• Size of Sale (or order)
• Volume of Sales
• Price integrity

Size of Sale – Refers to the specific size of the order, specifically in two forms. One is the result of the type of prospects you pursue; if you are selling stuff measured in units, the larger the target company, the more units they will require. Since in most instances, the effort required to sell a $50 million dollar/40 employee company, is often not that different than selling a $100 million/100 employee company, why not focus on the larger end of the scale. A variation on this is a recent example from a company I worked with. They found that of the three batteries they sold, the mid-range one was the best product/value for the price, for both the customers and them, but people tended to opt for the entry level battery. They discontinued offering the bottom end, their unit sales did not decline, and their revenue and margins increased.

It is no different if you are selling services, if you target companies that can ‘consume’ more of what you sell, you will sell more by avoiding those who consume less. Since the time you have to make the sales does not change, why not target those opportunities that can give you size or scale. You can always go down stream once you have sold the ideal size first.

Volume of Sales – this is different than the first point, it goes more to how many sales you get irrespective of size. If right now you are doing four deals a month, and were to increase that to say 4 ½ deals per month, you would move to 54 sales a year, a 12% increase. Even if you have a long cycle, big ticket, say only six sales a year, increase it to 7, may not sound like much, but.

This involves better use of time, primarily through the discipline of disqualifying those opportunities that will not close now, they may close a year from now or even in the summer, just not now. This is where your process gives you the confidence to say no, rather than spending time to try and get a yes where one does not exist. Like the old gold rush 49ers, the quicker they got rid of the sand and stones, the quicker they got to the gold, increasing their daily take. Get rid of the crap in your pipeline, and you’ll work with more gold.

Price Integrity – as straight forward as it gets, the less we concede the more we succeed. Resist the temptation to “give a good price to get in”, because you will never recover.

As you evaluate your opportunities, it is important to consider how any or all of the above can be leveraged to deliver better and consistent results, and how misalignment can be detrimental to success.

With all of the above methodology and improved execution will help you sell more to more of the right people, but merely adopting a methodology without target one of the three elements above is not enough. You may want to start by targeting one, or better yet explore opportunities that allow you to move the dial on all. We use a simple matrix allowing clients to plot opportunities based on these elements with the added element of time. This allows them to visualize and focus on the right number of highest value opportunities sold at full price.

Everything we do in sales should have a positive impact on one or all of those three elements. It is when we take our eyes off these fundamentals, that the level of effort, training, coach or other initiatives, will always be greater than the results. The start of the year, (quarter, month, day) is a good time to refocus.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto

What are the best lead generation methods?

Ever feel like filing a harassment lawsuit against companies that truly seem to be invading your personal space? Whether it’s ten e-mails a day, two phone calls a day, or a letter in the mail each week; these forms of lead generation become obnoxious and unwanted extremely quickly. According to Mashable’s Content Editor Lauren Drell, 200 million Americans have signed up for the Do Not Call List, 86% of people change the channel or fast forward through television commercials, and 44% of direct mail is trashed without ever being opened. These outdated tactics are considered forms of outbound marketing or as some have dubbed it; interruption marketing. While constant e-mail, cold calls, and television advertisements all worked quite well at one point in time, there is a new era upon us. This era is driven by technology which has allowed consumers to become much more educated and have a plethora of options when it comes to purchasing a product or service. How can your company continue to gain customers when traditional lead generation has reached the point of harassment? How about trying out some of the best lead generation methods around including inbound marketing which, allows your customers to come to you. Through channels such as content marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimization, your business can customize it’s message to reach your audience when your customer is looking for your product/service. This way they don’t feel as if you are hunting them, they find your company. We’ve listed below some of the best lead generation methods you can implement right away for your business..

Steps to Lead Generation with Inbound Marketing

The best lead generation methods do not force a company’s message; it earns the attention and the trust of the potential consumer ultimately converting them into a patron. There are four steps to create a successful lead generation strategy:

1. Attract traffic
2. Turn visitors into leads
3. Turn leads into sales
4. Turn one time customers into repeat customers

Step 1: Attract traffic

Attracting traffic seems simple enough; write a few blogs posts, have a Facebook, Twitter, etc. and link them all together. What companies often do not realize is that much preparation must go into generating content that the customer will stumble upon. You must keep your target audience in mind when posting to the internet. Write blogs potential customers would want to read, create videos they would find useful, and ensure your company website is search engine friendly; making it easy for internet surfers to come across the site in a keyword search. It is also crucial to have active profiles on all the major social media sites in order for your inbound marketing campaign to be most successful.

Step 2: Turn visitors into leads

Converting website visitors into leads comes next. In order to be able to communicate with visitors, one must give them a reason to offer up their contact information. One of the best strategies for this is by offering something in return for their e-mail address. For example, offering a free e-book by filling out a contact information form.

Step 3: Turn leads into sales

The most difficult stage of inbound marketing is morphing leads into sales. Companies must understand that there are steps to interacting with customers. Just like in day to day life; would you trust someone you met today to babysit your child or drive your car? Most likely not. You must gain the trust of the potential consumer by being honest, keeping in contact, and/or giving them time. If your company shoves it’s product/services down a customer’s throat, it defeats the purpose of inbound marketing. Keep in mind that customers are coming to you. Keeping in contact with your potential customer can be done by updating your company’s social media profiles and occasionally sending e-mails that provide value to your leads. In the end, your company can send as many e-mails, post as many statuses, and tweet as many tweets as it likes. This will not make a lead become a customer. The customer must be ready to satisfy their need and make a purchase; the best lead generation methods incorporate a number of moving parts to produce a sale.

Step 4: Turn one time customers into repeat customers

The final step of inbound marketing is to make your one time customer a repeat customer. Besides ensuring that they are fully satisfied with your company’s product/service, you must continue to keep in contact with them by sending e-mails and staying connected to them through all social media. It is more beneficial to keep an old customer than to gain a new one. If your customer is completely happy with your product/service they will talk of their experience, in turn spreading the word of your company’s reputable work, and we all know this is the best lead generation method of all time.

Oh and one more thing…

Following the four best lead generation methods will generate attention, visitors, leads, and sales. It seems to be a no-brainer to get your company involved with inbound marketing! What ultimately causes inbound marketing to trump outbound marketing? Inbound marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing per lead according to Lauren Drell of Mashable.com. So what are you waiting for? As soon as you throw out all that unwanted junk mail you received, get started on your company’s inbound marketing strategy!

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I use Facebook.  So do you.  Your dog, or one of your friend’s dogs, probably has its own account.  I don’t really know why I keep using it.  Does anyone really know, though?  I guess I find some misanthropic entertainment in scrolling through the daily newsfeed to uncover anecdotal blips of ridiculous behavior.  My favorites are the self-pity posts.  These are the victimized, in which their mood has been terribly slain by the harsh reality that the newfound goal of the universe is to suppress just one individual’s complete sense of happiness and ambition.

It’s fairly easy to fall victim to this frame of mind every now and again, some more so than others.  It’s the “Why can’t anything go my way” or “Why do these bad things always happen to me” type of logical processing.

I work in sales and you probably do too.  And you know that in sales we have some form of weekly, monthly, quarterly and/or yearly quotas.  These goals of ours don’t have feelings and they don’t take any excuses either.  In sales we’re relient on other people from other companies, mostly perfect strangers, to nod their head and say “Yes” or to sign and date some sheets of paper.  This process comes with a lot of people shaking their head “No” and not obliging to your requests, even when you’ve “done everything you can.”

It happens.  Forrest Gump traveled across the country on foot and ran through a big pile of “It”…  It happens.  He shrugged it off though and continued on his merry way.  On the different paths we take there are periodic and randomly displaced piles of misfortune that we step on.  They weren’t put there as a personal vendetta against us.  They’re just there.  If it had not happened to you, it would have probably happened to the next person behind you.

People preach about displacing the problems or issues that are completely out of their control.  In actuality, if you’re able to do that and let go of that accompanying stress then you’re defying the notion that you indeed have control over everything.  You may have no physical control over the situation but internally, within your own mind and behavior, you do.  This bad, horrible thing happens to you, but now you have a choice about how you’re going to handle it internally.  Do you let it keep you up at night, harp on it when your eyes open in the morning, or do you press onward, keep active and leave that big pile of misfortune on the road way behind you.  It might still have your footprint on it, but at least it’s out of sight and you’ve made the conscious decision to focus on what’s ahead.

I think that a fragile, insecure shell for a positive mentality is the #1 most lethal obstacle when striving for any type of accomplishment or goal in life.  People all too often hold themselves back because they overthink and overanalyze situations.  But what’s encouraging is that we can change that mind set quite easily.  It takes work and repetition and a strong sense of self-awareness but it’s completely feasible to cut ties with the nuances and the trivial problems that sit like elephants in the room.  There’s always a choice within unfortunate events and it’s empowering when you realize you do have control over it all.

Sales Training Article: What Can I Sell You?

By Joel McCabe, Sales Benchmark Index (SBI)

I recently had coffee with a friend of mine, Max. Max is head of manufacturing for one of the nation's largest credit card manufacturers. This conversation was loaded with insights from the customer's perspective. In a nutshell, Max and I discussed the difference between being sold vs. being assisted. Max shared a telling story that is applicable to most of us in sales. Here's a bit of his story:

Max was notified by an existing vendor that a printable adhesive he uses was being discontinued. The vendor was apologetic, yet unable to help source an adequate replacement. The adhesive is a crucial element of Max's manufacturing process. It needed to be replaced. He began his researching options online. He also contacted industry peers. His research was unsuccessful. As a next step, he began contacting major US chemical companies for assistance. (Continued below)

The next segment of Max's story is one played out regularly in sales (B2B, B2C, inside, and direct). A rep's desire to make a sale trumps the customer's interest and needs. In some cases a sale is made, but a customer is lost. A rep has won the battle but lost the war. This scenario is commonplace, but extremely avoidable. What struck me most about Max's story were the obvious lessons. I'll specify them, but probably won't need to. If you're doing your job right, they should jump out.

Max was contacted by the big 3 chemical companies. The efforts of one rep, Jim, were most notable. He contacted Max and learned of his dilemma. Despite Max's need for adhesives, Jim began to discuss Max's ink business. Jim still focused on adhesives, but was clearly trying to secure all of Max's ink business as well. After Max explained that the ink was not up for discussion, Jim turned his focus to Max's real problem.

Over the course of the next month, Jim had his chemists working on an adhesive solution. However, he continued to try and sell Max on other products. The discussion was always the same. Status update on adhesives. How is business? Here is another product you could benefit from. Max was never interested.

Finally, the day arrived when Jim brought Max a 5 gallon container of adhesive. He dropped it on Max's desk and said, "Here's your stuff. It will solve your problem." Jim was unable to speak to any of the properties of the adhesive. He also could not consult Max on its use. (Continued below)

When the chance for additional business disappeared, Jim disengaged. His focus was on sales, not the customer. In his mind, Max was "tapped out," and no longer required his full focus.

The glaring lesson is the lost art of listening and nurturing. This is an art/skill that most Lead Development Reps (LDR) hone over time. The profile of a great LDR is quite different than that of a sales rep. The hallmarks are patience, understanding, desire to inform, and drive to collaborate.

Download the LDR Competency Profile and learn more about these characteristics. Are you doing it right? Register for a sales training workshop to learn how to sell better and make your number in 2014. 

Frustrated by Jim's lack of professionalism and insight, Max told him to leave. He told him to take his adhesive with him, and to not return. Jim was dumfounded and responded with

"So what can I sell you?"

Jim's company got the message. They removed him and assigned a technical sales specialist (TSS) to the account. The specialist approached the account like an LDR and began to listen. He built trust by listening. He collaborated and provided insight, which Max could use. The approach was long-term, not a quick fix. Max was no longer being sold to. Rather, he was being assisted along his buying journey.

We've all been guilty of this at some point during our career. It's easy to get wrapped up in making the number. Naturally, everyone looks forward to bonus checks. The problem is that this is short-term thinking. Examine your own personal sales strategy. Are you doing this? Five years of growing bonus checks is much better than a small one this year. In the age of information and the Internet, prospects won't tolerate this behavior. They'll move on to someone who can provide value, as well as a product.

The 5 Hallmarks of a Great LDR :

1. Active Listening - Aptitude for capturing verbal and non-verbal queues. Listening to gain insight and understanding. Get more tips on this key skill here.

2. Customer Focus - Putting the customer's interests ahead of your own. Ability to develop customer loyalty and prevent customer attrition through persona-based focus.

3. Patience - Long-term perspective focused on the buyer's journey. Nurture the relationship and customer knowledge along the way.

4. Interpersonal Skills - Deep understanding of people. Knowledge of how to interact with various personality types and temperaments. Able to apply emotional intelligence in various situations and adapt accordingly.

5. Customized Insight Generation - Ability to generate insightful messaging that is custom to a buyer's persona. Takes common messages and customizes them to a specific audience. Provide customers with information before they ask. Keep them ahead of the industry curve.

Max finally experienced these traits through the new TSS assigned to him. As a result, Max's needs were met. A sale was made, and will be made again many times in the future. Perhaps down the line, ink business may even be up for grabs. This is the natural, helpful process that a true LDR takes. Is this the process you use? If not, download the LDR Competency Profile to find out where you can improve.

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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.

Professional sales managers know that in order to get good answers, they must ask the right  questions.

CRM software earns major bonus points for keeping track of sales activity that is otherwise impossible to follow. CRMs empower sales managers with the data they need to direct teams, coach salespeople and report to the C-suite. A professionally managed sales team generates scores of data points in the course of an average workday and the CRM should, inobtrusively, capture that. We pulled together 6 questions every sales manager should be able to answer simply by querying the sales database, aka the CRM.

1. How much money is in the pipeline (and where is it)?

Your sales rep knows the value of the deal they are brokering, do you? The value of every deal should be estimated at the onset of the negotiation. Total deal value should drive resource allocation and its important sales managers have a full picture of how much money is on the line with every potential transaction. By knowing where your deals stand, sales reps and managers can keep track of the progress of each deal and at every milestone, know the likelihood of that deal making it to close. In reports for managers in Base for example, you can:

• Compare your forecasted sales to your actual sales
• See where your forecasted sales are coming from
• Track how long your deals spend in each stage of the pipeline to help identify bottlenecks

2.  What is the biggest obstacle to signing up new customers?

A frank conversation with your sales rep will likely reveal some unexpected opportunities for improvement. The trick to turning up this territory lies in your willingness (or unwillingness) to open your business, your products, your processes and yourself up for criticism. You must be willing to find out what is going wrong to set things right. Sales reps know how to sell, which means they know how to zero in on strengths and weaknesses. A good sales manager will see the salesperson’s perceptiveness as opportunity and solicit feedback to uncover operational inefficiencies and product inefficiencies. Once you open yourself up for this kind of feedback you can iterate, improve and, ultimately, increase sales.

3. Who is killing it on conversions?

Managers must play to their employees strengths and weaknesses. Evaluating the performance of individual rep’s sales funnels tells you at which points in the sales cycle reps are winning or losing business. Its simply true that each of us is more naturally adept at certain aspects of our jobs, while we struggle with others. A business-minded manager will evaluate sales funnel conversions to spot trends in employee behavior and opportunities for improvement. With a smart CRM you can clearly see the points in the sales process where your individual sales reps are losing deals. By zeroing in on performance a sales manager can help a rep improve their pitch and close more deals. For example, in Base you can see:

• How long each team member takes to close
• Reasons a deal was lost by deal owner
• The percentage of won deals by source and user

4. Who is our ideal customer?

You have to know who you are selling to and who you want to continue to sell to. That means you need to have a firm grasp on the vertical, professionals and individuals that are most responsive to your pitch. Using data from your CRM can be an invaluable tool when creating customer personas. Auditing closed deals will tell you about who your current customer is and at what price point they purchased your product. All of this information can be used to develop your pitch for those who are already buying and inforrm you about the changes you’ll need to make so you can reach the customer you hope to target.

5. What are your reps goals for the next quarter?

Sales is a performance based business and every rep should have goals that reflect not only the business’ objectives, but also the reps abilities. Some reps have a knack for closing higher quantities of mid-range deals, others take a more tempered approach and win the enterprise sales. As the sales manager you should have a handle on these metrics and by reviewing CRM activity you will probably know more about your reps style than they even know about themselves. In Base, you can:

• Set revenue-based sales goals for your team and track their progress
• Set quantity based sales goals for your team and track the progress

6. When’s the last time we called that client?

Accuracy is key to running a business and using your CRM to log sales activities (and yes, that includes client calls) will give you a leg up when it comes time to decide when and with whom to follow up. As we discussed earlier this week on our blog, follow up is key to winning new business and keeping the business you have.

Do you have any other questions to add to the list? Let me know in the comments section below.

It seems like no discussion about the value of data is complete without some — often much — emphasis on better business intelligence software and aesthetically pleasing visualizations that let even newspaper readers easily digest lots of numbers. Also, maybe the idea of how data science will let companies and institutions mash together all sorts of data and come out with some new, hopefully earth-moving insight insight human behavior.

How very 2011.

These things are important, but they also represent a limited viewpoint of the effects data can really have on our world and how we do business. Data isn’t just about seeing, it’s also about doing. Data isn’t just about analyzing consumers, it’s also about empowering them. It’s about making dumb products smarter, ugly products prettier and taking advantage of major advances in computing to make entirely new products out of data sources once deemed untouchable.

If you look carefully, you can see these things happening around you right now. Many of our favorite websites and services are the products of data for inform their design and user experience. The internet of things is making our appliances — from toothbrushes to gas turbines — smarter while also inspiring entrepreneurs to rethink the way consumers interact with their own data. Smart energy management is a long way from yelling, “Turn off the light when you leave a room,” and a fitness tracker and mobile app are pretty far removed from a pen and paper.

Then there are the new types of data we’re learning to process, analyze and ultimately turn to our advantage. If you’ve experienced better customer service lately, it could be because speech-recognition algorithms are listening to your words and helping guide the representative’s response. Improved computer vision is helping power advances in manufacturing, surveillance and medical research. And systems like IBM Watson and Google Books are reading our texts to learn about topics and language at a scale unachievable by humans.

Many of these capabilities are already making their way onto our tablets and smartphones, letting everyone make more sense of the photos they’re snapping, the places they’re going and the words they’re saying. Even more than that, though, smartphones are capable of generating incredible amounts of data that can inform macro-level research on everything from the global economy to traffic flows to the spread of disease.

These are the types of ideas that our Structure Data conference, which takes place March 19 and 20 in New York, is about. Of course, we’ll still talk about the future of technologies like Hadoop and the value of adding more — and new — data to those weekly reports. We’ll still talk about using machine learning to discover latent patterns in fields like banking, retail and national security.

Hopefully, though, these are just the starting points for a deeper discussion about where a concept like big data can take businesses, governments and organizations of all kinds. There’s using data for the sake of incremental improvement, and then there’s using data to fundamentally transform how products, services and societies are built — and to help see how entirely new ones might look. We think that’s the ultimate power of data, and its seeds are being planted today.

Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013
• How to use big data to make better business decisions
• Listening platforms: finding the value in social media data

In part 1, I defined social selling as the use of social media by salespeople to generate revenue. In this post, we’ll walk through how one of your salespeople would do social selling. We’ll start with an overview of the biggest social networks, then explore a social selling example to see how it works in practice.

To learn how social selling can boost revenue across your sales organization, download the new white paper from HootSuite Enterprise, Social Selling: An Overview For Sales Executives.

DOWNLOAD NOW

The Social Media Landscape

The largest, most popular social media sites are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube. Pinterest and Instagram are growing rapidly. In Asia, Sina Weibo, Renren, Tencent Weibo & Mixi are more widely used that Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn. VK is huge in Russia as is Xing in central Europe. Where do I start? It seems overwhelming.

Let’s start by understanding the differences in these networks and let that help us know where to focus for social selling.

Facebook

Massively popular but highly personal. Typically used for family and friends. Salespeople should generally not try to friend a company executive as it would be viewed as too intrusive and too personal. It is important to pay attention to what your prospect companies are doing on their corporate Facebook page.

Twitter

Hugely important because Twitter is about people and ideas. Though the ideas aren’t often explicitly written in those 140 characters, the links to blogs and articles of interest are tremendously valuable to seeing what those executives view as important.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is incredibly useful to learn about executives, find mid-level influencers and gain introductions. In addition, LinkedIn Groups are great places to keep up to date with industry developments and hear what people in your space are saying about your company and competitors. You need all of your sales professionals to establish themselves as credible experts on LinkedIn (we’ll go into this in more detail in a future blog post).

Google+

There is a passionate and loyal group of users on Google+ and many are business executives. You will find some key people here that aren’t active on other networks. Google+ is the “social layer” that ties all of Google’s services together, including Youtube, so its importance will only grow over time.

YouTube

YouTube is one of the largest social networks and the importance of videos in marketing, support and education continues to grow. However, you won’t find many executives providing a lot of useful insights here. Like Facebook, it’s important to pay attention to what your prospect companies are doing on their corporate YouTube page.

Targeting an Executive: A Social Selling Example

Before we talk about how to set up your sales force for social selling, let’s jump ahead so you can see how it really works.

I’ve identified a target account in my territory that I want to try to win as a new customer. Through the executives list on the company website and searching LinkedIn, I’ve found four key executives that I think would be the decision-maker or at least key influencers. I use the HootSuite social relationship dashboard to search for those four executives’ social media profiles and I find two of them on Twitter.

I can also use HootSuite to scan all the social media conversations and just display the ones for this company, their industry and these two executives. Through this process, I find additional company executives or mid-level influencers and create a simple Twitter list so I can easily read what they post online. Now, I’ve found five or so key people who are active on social media. The next steps are to listen, understand and engage with them.

In our example, we will attempt to connect with Gerry Moran, an executive with SAP. Note that @GerryMoran gave permission to be used in this example and he is a highly regarded expert on social selling. His blog is essential reading for anyone interested in social selling.

Listening First.

If you are contacting an executive for the first time, it will obviously be a more successful conversation if you know the business issues that he or she is focused on. Using HootSuite, I can easily follow this person on Twitter and see the posts that this executive is making.

I can see that Gerry is interested in social business, social selling, marketing and lead generation. By clicking on the links in his posts, I can read the articles that Gerry finds interesting. If I know what the executive finds important and can relate my product or solution to that interest, I have a higher likelihood of making a sale. Every day or two, I will read the posts made by the executives I am targeting, always looking for key insights or opportunities to position our product.

Engaging

The first thing I will do is retweet or favorite his posts on Twitter and like his updates on LinkedIn. That will usually trigger an email that will notify the executive that he was just mentioned or liked. And where will Twitter or LinkedIn send these emails? Almost always to his or her personal email address, the one they used to sign-up for the social networks. So these execs are going to see your name and know that you are paying attention to what they are saying publicly. However, it is doubtful they will respond to you immediately. Whatever you do, DON’T retweet or like every post. You’ll come across as a stalker and not a sophisticated sales executive. Find the executive’s posts that really are good and that you genuinely like and retweet those.

These activities will help you get your name in front of executives in an unobtrusive way, but if all you do is acknowledge their posts, have you shown them that you can help them? Not yet. Now is the time for you to make some posts on a topic of interest to that executive that relates to the value proposition of what you are selling. Try to use one of the hashtags that the executive used (like #socialselling in the example above). A hashtag (the “#” symbol followed by the keyword on Twitter) allows people to easily find and follow a conversation around a topic of interest to them.

You can see a sample of how I engaged with Gerry below. It was a combination of my re-tweeting and liking a sub-set of his posts and my contributing my own posts on his topic of interest.

Connecting

It took a few weeks of reading, following, liking and contributing before I had established to Gerry that I was knowledgeable about a business initiative he cared about. Not only did he read my posts, but he looked my Twitter and LinkedIn profiles.

This was Gerry’s signal to me that it was OK to connect. At this point, I sent Gerry a LinkedIn invite that he quickly accepted. I then sent him a message through LinkedIn suggesting we have a call and talk in more depth about this topic. We did, and it was a great call!

Note that no cold-call or email was ever used. No junior person blocked me or otherwise made it difficult to connect with the executive. Furthermore, we are engaging on a topic of real interest to the executive. Once I connected with Gerry, I was able to take the conversation offline and speak to him over the phone. In the future, I’ll continue to monitor Gerry on social media and look for other opportunities to initiate relevant, timely conversations about his needs. I’ve integrated social media into my sales flow, alongside other communication modes. This is social selling in action, and it works.

What’s the other lesson here? No shortcuts. Don’t expect to retweet one message and close the deal. You have to genuinely understand what the executive is interested in and add value to that discussion. But this is a path to connect directly to decision-making executives and engage on topics that they are interested in.

If you are a little afraid about whether you will be able to find interesting things to contribute, like the example above, fear not. In a following blog, I’ll talk about how you can achieve this. And the good news is that your company’s marketing department probably has plenty of good stuff.

The other question is whether or not the executives you want to sell to are active on social media. Forrester reports that “fully 100% of decision-makers use social media for work purposes.” Personally, I find it hard to believe 100% of anything really works in practice. I’d suggest you tell yourself that 25%-50% of the executives you want to target are using social media, somewhat dependent on their industry. But you probably have multiple entry points into an account and the probability that one or more of them is active on social will be much higher.

In future blog posts, we’ll look at how you can routinely use social media to discover insights about your customers and prospects, how you can implement a large-scale social selling program for your salesforce, and how Sales and Marketing can collaborate to generate revenue from social media.

To learn how social selling can boost revenue across your sales organization, download the new white paper from HootSuite Enterprise, Social Selling: An Overview For Sales Executives.

DOWNLOAD NOW

Yesterday, while helping a newly hired sales manager build his leadership philosophy, which he didn’t have when we started, got me thinking about a post I wrote in June of 2009. It was the first few months of starting this blog. I was only averaging 45 views a day back then, so it didn’t get very much play. However, it’s one of the most important posts I’ve written, so I am posting again.

Having a philosophy guiding our approach to our job is the most important thing we can have. Our philosophy acts as the guide for how we approach our job, what we emphasize, how we view what’s critical, how we define success, the initiatives we set, the outcomes we demand and more.

In sales, your sales philosophy is the single most important element guiding your success or failure. This holds true for sales leadership as well. Having a well defined, well thought out sales or sales leadership philosophy is the most important thing you can have to ensure your career success.

———————

To Be Good You have to Think About it!

How do you see your job? What is at the essence of what you do?  What is essential to being good? What is critical to exceeding expectations? What does it take to the best in your profession?

Being good at something requires more than practice and effort.  It takes a philosophy, a clear understanding of how to create excellence.  It’s about being intimate with the smallest of details. It’s about a deep knowledge of the tools, the users, the industry, the materials and  the processes.   It’s how you bring them together better than anyone else.   It’s about creating your own unique philosophy on how you do your job.  It’s a personal career philosophy.

This is one of the best career philosophies I’ve ever seen. It’s from a person who restores antique furniture;

“First, one must have a real respect for the piece.  Next one should want to discover what the original maker had in mind.  Then, for the sake of the piece, preserve its history and restore its beauty for the owner.”

You only have to read this once to recognize this person sees a real difference between restoring furniture and restoring antiques.  What type of job do you think they would do?  How do you think they are different than other restoration professionals?  You can’t help but believe this person is better.

Do you have a career philosophy? Are you deliberate in what you do?  Is there a specific outcome you try to achieve that is far better than the status quo?  How do you do your job differently than every other person who does what you do?

Millions of people go about their job everyday. Doing it as it comes. Unfortunately, very few people own their job. They don’t have a clear vision of what they are trying to accomplish and why. They don’t look to differentiate themselves through how they do their job.  They just look to differentiate through what they do.

I ask every person I interview what their philosophy on sales is. If it’s a leadership position, I ask for their leadership philosophy.   Having a philosophy around the things you do makes you better. It says you’ve thought about what it is your doing.  It gives insight into how you do it.   It tells me and others that you actually think about what you are doing.

When people think about what they are doing, they make it better. They improve on it. They expand it’s value and in the end that is better for everybody.

If you’re looking for a great antique restorer I know one. If your looking someone who is really good at something else, just ask them their philosophy.  You’ll find ‘em.

 

———-

What’s your sales philosophy? What’s your leadership philosophy?  Go on and share in the comments. I’d love to read them.

 

 

I am a big fan of Woot’s email promotions. More here.

But they stopped coming months ago — and I didn’t notice. Because nobody cares about missing a sales email, however good it might be. 

The only reason I noticed that they were missing is that they suddenly started showing up again.

Most likely, they had an email deliverability problem and the messages were getting junked until it was recently fixed. How many thousands and thousands of sales were lost?

You need to pay attention to email deliverability. If only 10% of your mail is getting blocked, you’re losing 10% of your sales. If 50% of your mail is getting blocked …

Think about what a 10%-50% increase in sales would do for your company.

It is the one thing that most of us don’t do enough of, even though doing more of it will get us more potential new customers and closed deals. We say we need to do it, yet we find 50 reasons why not to. What am I talking about? Actual execution – taking action to get the things done that lead to more revenues.

Execution – noun - the carrying out or putting into effect of a plan, order, or course of action.

Synonyms: implementation, carrying out, accomplishment, bringing about, attainment, realization.

In sales it is all about execution – the art of making things happen.

Instead of rewriting your pitch or re-organizing your list of who to contact, pick up the phone and reach out to have conversations.

You should be talking with potential buyers, people who can help you get to potential buyers, and potential referral partners every day. If your title is sales rep or business development or account executive, you should be talking with these folks more than a dozen times a day. That’s right – I said TALK to – not dial for.

Assuming you know who your buyers are, and have a well-crafted message to engage them to be curious to want to hear more, it all comes down to the act of connecting directly to those people.

If you believe strongly in the products and services you represent, then it is upon you to reach out to potential buyers and engage with them to learn about their challenges and their goals. If your offerings add to what they are working to accomplish, or eliminate something they want to get rid of, you need to find ways to reach them.

Most sellers are not talking enough with probable buyers. Most of us are getting organized, and putting our lists together, and updating our CRM, and talking to those of us around us.

Pick up the phone.

Make 25 dials before coffee.

Work to have 12 actual conversations today. That’s easy for you? Then make it 25.

I promise you that if you have a valuable offering and you ARE out there engaging with probable prospective buyers, you will find interest every day or almost every day.

On the other hand, if you don’t pick up the phone and call administrative assistants, and internal coaches at prospective companies, and c-level contacts, you WON’T.

I know inside sales professionals who go a day or two not connecting to anyone by phone. I knew a rep who never even left voice mail messages. (For tips on voicemail read this post “Eight Best Ideas for Voicemail Messages”.) He might as well have signed up to be a non-speaking monk. That’s crazy.

You gotta get out there!

Craft your messaging.

Try it out on colleagues and trusted partners.

Add value – help companies and individuals with great products and services.

Then call them and share the good news.

What can you do TODAY that will get you more conversations with prospective buyers?

Will you make that happen?

Share the good news – drop me a note if this causes you to increase your connections to potential buyers. You could win a coffee card – the BEST story about increasing your dials wins a $25 coffee card. Must post a comment on the blog by 12-23 for a holiday treat on us.  Must be in a B2B sales role. Winner announced 12-24.

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 in selling. Increase Opportunities. Expand Your Pipeline. Close More Deals.

email  lori@scoremoresales.com | View  My LinkedIn Profile

The post Inside Sales Power Tip 145 – Execution appeared first on Score More Sales.

A Sales Leader’s Perspective

You ask yourself most mornings ‘what can I do to make my sales team more effective?’.  When individual team members are more effective the group will succeed and you’ll hit quota.

After all, it’s not about being the hero sales leader that swoops in and closes business.  That’s not a repeatable model and can demotivate the sales organization.  Instead, look to some key best practices for sales enablement and how Content Selling can help support you.

What Makes Individual Sales Reps More Effective?

So, let’s ask ourselves what tools and practices sales leadership can apply to make reps more effective.  At it’s most fundamental, with other externalities excluded (like ‘is there product / market fit for your offer?’), there are two primary elements that you must improve.

• More Core Selling Time: Less than one third of a sales person’s time goes to core selling.  So, how do you get more time focused away from drudgery and non-core activities and back on actual selling?

• Better Engagement with Prospects: When your sales team is engaged in core selling activities, are those engagements rich enough to advance the buyer’s journey?

If these are the two principal areas that need to be worked, then how can we make them more effective?  

The post How Sales Leaders Measure Content Selling Metrics appeared first on KnowledgeTree.

Return on Investment (ROI) projections are often regarded as a critical element of B2B sales proposals, particular for high-value considered purchases. There’s no arguing that they have a role to play - but your sales people would be very unwise to rely on them.

In fact, I’ve become convinced that over-reliance on ROI calculations is one of a number of key factors that are driving the high level of “decisions to do nothing after all” that so bedevil many long and complex sales cycles. Here’s why:

1: Most prospects distrust vendor-supplied ROI projections

Most prospects have an inherent distrust of vendor-supplied ROI projections, and with good reason. In fact, a prospect’s client recently described them as “like sausage” - “the more you know what goes into them, the less you feel like consuming them”.

All too often, the ROI calculation is either over-complicated or based on a black-box approach in which the relationship between inputs and outputs is unfathomable. And anyway, the vendor will always exaggerate the outcome.

To be credible, any ROI projection must be based on inputs that the prospect has supplied - and on visible assumptions that can be externally validated through case studies and customer references.

But it’s even better if the prospect thinks of the ROI mechanism as their process, rather than the vendors - and this is particularly the case when the organisation has defined internal ROI guidelines that they expect to be applied.

If this is the case, you have to have discovered this - and collaborated with your mobiliser within the prospect organisation - long before you put your proposal in. There are few things more certain to torpedo your proposal than challenging (whether you realise it or not) your prospect’s investment case evaluation criteria.

2: ROI isn’t the most important factor anyway

But the real problem is that having a strong ROI is absolutely no guarantee of a successful sale. To start with, ROI is relative. Whether you know it or not, it’s almost inevitable that your proposal is competing with a raft of other projects that are all screaming for investment.

So your ROI compared to your competition is always going to be far less important than the project’s ROI compared to all the other competing projects, which could involve spending money on something completely different - or leaving it in the bank.

You can’t discount risk from the equation, either. If the project is a new one for the prospect (or if they have been badly burned before), the at-face-value return is inevitably going to be balanced against the risk of failure.

3: The Cost of Inaction is the biggest risk of all

So the risk you must focus your prospect’s attention is the risk of doing nothing. What would happen if the status quo were to prevail? What would happen if the organisation just decided to do nothing at the end of the day?

Who else would be affected? What impact would it have on them? Why is it that the organisation has to do something, and do something now, rather than later? Why change at all? Why change now? - and Why change to you?

If your contact can’t clearly articulate the costs and consequences of inaction, you’re almost certainly talking to the wrong person. And if you can’t find a mobiliser somewhere within the prospect organisation that can answer these questions, you’re almost certainly talking to the wrong organisation.

In an era of risk-averse, consensus-driven decision-making, if you can’t get your prospect to acknowledge the costs and consequences of sticking with the status quo, and if the numbers aren’t strong enough, then it’s almost certain you don’t have an opportunity.

It doesn’t matter how positive the ROI looks - if the costs and consequences of inaction are not painful enough, then the prospect has no motivation to change. You have to demonstrate that your proposal represents the lowest risk of all the options that are open to the prospect - including a decision to do nothing.

How many sausages do you have in your forecast?

I urge you to take a critical look at all the important “qualified” opportunities in your sales forecast. Are the costs and consequences of inaction clear for all of them? Does your proposal spend as much time on the COI as on the ROI? If not, if I were you, I’d start to get nervous.

By the way, mastering the COI is just one of the essential elements that need to be in place if an organisation is to implement the principles behind The Challenger Sale - and it's just one of the characteristics of top performing B2B sales and marketing organisations.

To learn more about these winning habits, please download our guide.

One of the questions I’m most often asked by CEOs is how to hire sales people.

I’ve written a lot about recruiting and hiring at startups including my controversial post on whom not to hire and my rapid response to the flame war.  I’ve also written extensively on sales and on which sales execs to hire and how to think about the different kinds of sales leaders.

One of the questions I used to ask in any recruiting meeting for a senior hire or even a junior sales rep is as follows:

“When you run sales campaigns do you prefer to 

A. Call high, and get passed down or;
B. Call low, get a pilot project with data running internally, and then present the findings to a senior executive”

Of course there’s no “right” answer but I’d like to persuade you that “calling high” will help you greatly shorten sales cycles and help you avoid wasting a lot of time on sales efforts that are not likely to close in the first place.

If you don’t have a good sales methodology already in place in your organization you might try reading that last link.

Call High

Calling high means reaching the highest level appropriate person in an organization that you can reach to hear your pitch. In a small to mid-sized organization this is likely the CEO or perhaps a COO or SVP. Clearly in an enterprise customer this is unlikely.

The senior person you meet is unlikely to be the person actually making the decision. They are likely somebody who would hear about the purchase but may or may not weigh in on the decision.

The most likely outcome if you manage to interest the senior exec (for the sake of this post let me call her the CEO) is that she will refer you down the organization to somebody who would be involved in the decision.

The benefits of this are clear:

1. High priority / more attention: A person passed down from the CEO tells the person making the decision that they ought to prioritize this.

2. No gate keeper: One of the most destructive forces in a sales campaign is when mid-level manager blocks you from meeting her boss. When you’re passed down the organization this isn’t an issue. You have already established a direct connection to the CEO and have earned the right to contact her on an as-needed basis

3. You avoid time wasters: Occasionally when you meet senior executives they will give you negative feedback on your prospects.

“We don’t have budget for that this year”

“I don’t believe in social media advertising.”

“I’m already in a pilot with one of your competitors.”

“There’s no way we’re going to partner in this area. It’s too strategic. We will have to build (or buy) technology in this area.”

Whatever this issue is. The thing is … what I see many sales execs do is burn up countless hours on mid-level campaigns that get torpedoed when the go up the organization due to lack of budget, a desire to own that core IP or other more pressing organization priorities.  You need to align your selling cycle with a buyers purchasing cycle otherwise you’re wasting your time and theirs. If they’re not buying you need to be marketing to them not selling to them.

So as much as it sucks to hear, “We don’t have budget (or interest) in your product” it’s far better to hear it early and move on to your next qualified lead.

4. Learn the internal politics: You’d be surprised what the CEO would tell you about her organization. She might gladly tell you who gets decisions made, who is a pain in the arse, who is super technical, etc. Once you’ve reached a level in a company where you’re less worried about daily politics above you people are much more relaxed about sharing information. Not always, of course. But more than junior people.

5. Sales & post-sales support: One of the most important roles the CEO can play is to help you in the sales cycle and even in post sales. After you have found a business buyer often you need to get through procurement, legal and technical reviews (aka “sales prevention”). Having senior executive air cover is invaluable to help streamline these leg-breakers. Following the sale having a CEO relationship can help you greatly to make sure you product gets the training, implementation and rollout support it needs to be successful. Not to mention it would be nice to have the CEO on your marketing reference list!

The Case for Calling Low

When you hear the case for “call high” it intuitively feels obvious. I have met several sales execs who argue the exact opposite strategy. Their view is that without “proof points” the senior leadership teams are likely to be cynical about the benefits of your product.

In the “call low” camp they advocate

1. Find a business unit leader who would be positively impacted by success of your product

2. Run a short, quantifiable pilot

3. Have that business unit leader champion you to a senior exec with data and proof in hand

4. Land bigger deals with more assuredness.

The mantra of this school is, “keep your head below the parapet and avoid getting shot. You can rise up once you have your armaments.”

While I understand the logic, I personally believe you need to provide enough evidence through case studies to talk with the CEO and if she can’t convince herself that it’s worth exploring being a buyer then you could recommend you do a pilot internally to prove yourself.

Summary

While the logic of calling high is clear I can tell you that most people – leaders and sales execs –  opt for the more comfortable territory of the next layer down in the organization.

I have seen countless organizations waste time peddling to companies that have no intention to buy or to prospects who have no authority to purchase.

Whether you’re selling your product or selling your company – there is nothing more valuable than having

• A champion who will help you take ownership for your success
• The air cover of a senior executive
• A buyer who has IA – influence & authority (Avoid NINAs)

I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments section.

Photo credit on 500px to Roof Topper. Check out his other photos. He’s insane. And brilliant.

It never fails. In nearly every client we hear about the emails and calls. Sales Reps hear through the grapevine about a sales or marketing improvement project. Then they ask their managers what’s going on. A worry about job security starts a panic.  Now, a resistance has taken form – even before the project gets any traction!  

This is avoidable.  Strong communications are the key - enlist the HR Business Partner early to manage the change. In this post, I discuss the components of effective change communications.  I include some tips on launching change communications.  For help, download the Change Communication Creator tool.  It has samples of communications to use in various situations related to Sales improvement.

 

The Impact of Poor Change Communications

By far, the worst change communications I’ve seen are like this:                           (Nothing!) Sales or Marketing leadership thinks there’s a problem and decides to fix it.  They use internal or external consultants to identify the true cause of the problem.  But they forgot to tell the field that this is going to happen.  So, the field finds out when a consultant starts poking around.  Now the questions and rumors start:

• Who are these people and what do they want?

• Is our company getting acquired?

• Is there going to be a RIF (Reduction In Force?)

• Will our compensation change? Our territories? Our quotas?

• Are we getting new leadership?

With the questions may well come response tactics at the field level.  These tactics may be damaging to your company.  For example, with a RIF rumor, Sales Reps may cozy up to top accounts – to make sure they can count on them at the competitor.  Pipelines may magically grow to show “better performance”.  Some may even start to spread the internal rumors externally to customers and prospects.  Top reps may start to put out feelers for a new position.

Ineffective Change Communications

Aside from NO change communications, there are other types that have poor effect.  These 2, for example:

1. The verbose, consultant-ease communication.

You know this one. 2+ page email with 20+ words in a sentence. Uses fancy phrases like “an initiative that implements world-class capabilities to keep our market-leading presence in an enviable position”.  A plethora of words doesn’t convince anyone.

2. The terse “I’m too busy of a leader to get involved” communication.

Almost the exact opposite of number 1.  It is a short, “forced” communication. It is usually from a leader that wants the benefits, but doesn’t want to do the work.  The tone of this type gives the beneficiaries the idea that it isn’t serious.  Words something like “This project starts next week, so I ask for your earnest contributions. If you have questions, ask your manager.”

Components of Effective Change Communications

To ensure the improvement initiative will have high adoption, pay attention to these components:

1. WHAT/WHO/WHY: Short statement of what the change is, why it is needed and who is impacted.

2. ALIGNMENT: Show alignment with company or sales goals, especially stretch goals. There may be an overarching theme to tie to, like $20B by 2020.

3. FUTURE: A future vision of what the change will bring. In this, provide reasons why the field wants to be a part: WIIFT/WIIFU (What’s In It For Them/What’s In It For Us.)

4. ENGAGEMENT: What is the expected level of engagement of the message recipients. Also, show evidence and promises that senior leadership is engaged in this effort.

5. REACTION: Provide and communicate a method for those affected to get more information.  This feedback loop should allow for anonymous questions and suggestions.

Tips for Effective Change Communications

• Multiple Messages - This list of components to include is lengthy.  You don’t have to put them in one single communication.  Space them out in separate communications.  Use different communicators for the different pieces. Leverage different communication formats. Email, blog post, newsletter, town hall meeting, video, etc.  You can even put a note in (or on if electronic) the paycheck

• Enlist the Managers - Bring the front line sales managers into the project early. Enable them with messaging and actions they will use to communicate to their teams.

• Get Beneficiaries to Contribute - Include the beneficiaries in the initial decision and design of the project.  This involves being transparent.  For example, let the field know that things need to improve. Point out the issue(s) and ask for their feedback for potential resolutions.  This helps the field feel something is being done WITH them, not TO them. Consider assembling a team from the field that can help be mouthpieces.

• Get Creative Help - Leverage Marketing resources for creative assistance in crafting messaging.

• Show Senior Leadership Involvement - Ensure that senior leadership (CxO-level) is actively communicating and showing involvement.  This means they are plugged into the project, not just the initial introduction communication.  Have different senior leaders communicate via different channels throughout the project. The communications from senior leaders should include a personal tone.

• Over Communicate - Continue with communications throughout the whole project.  Don’t just stop with the initial messaging. 

What to do next

You don’t want to set a panic among your sales force.  The top reps shouldn’t get a scare.  Carefully plan your initiative to ensure a calm, logical adoption.

1. Enlist the help of HR for managing the change related to any improvement initiative.

2. Completely plan communication content, dates, channels, and communicators. Pay special attention to the natural low points of the change impactees. This is when encouraging communications help push everyone through.

3. Download the Change Communication Creator for sample starting points of various message types.

4. Create effective change communications.  It helps if the basic message is “ghost written” beforehand.  Then, HR will provide it to the communicator to personalize it before sending.

5. Be sure that the field has been involved early – BEFORE this change is foisted upon them.

Author: Steve Loftness

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Photo courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net -> Imagery Majestic

Thanks to a new survey from Ink from Chase, we’ve gotten an interesting look into the plans of small business owners for the holidays and the coming year. The findings show where small businesses plan to focus their efforts, and also show what strategies are expected to become more popular in the coming year. Here are a few of the more interesting facts:

Not everyone starts holiday promotions early.

Only a third of small businesses are running holiday promotions that start on or before Thanksgiving. Apparently, the desire to boost revenue is still outweighed by the desire to keep the holiday season extending beyond Thanksgiving (keep fighting the good fight, people!).

Preparing for the holidays.

Almost half of small businesses increase inventory in preparation for the holidays, an obvious and necessary strategy. Interestingly, however, about a fifth will increase their social media activity as well. Online strategies are an extraordinarily cost-effective way to reach people, and when winter weather drives people inside, online activity can only increase, right?

Are things looking up this year?

Only 34% of small business owners think that this holiday season will be better than the one before. The optimists from this group think that expanded marketing efforts and offerings will drive the increase, as well as new consumer demand.

Fortunately, we don’t need to wait for next year to find out whether these folks are right or not. As we’ve recently reported in other posts, the optimists are correct, at least as mobile commerce is concerned. Sales through smartphone-enabled websites are up a mind-blowing 258%, as compared to last year! If the respondents of the survey want this holiday season to be merrier than the last, a little mobile website or app in their business’s stocking just might be the answer.

As a last note, small business owners are feeling quite generous this year, with 71% planning to spend extra on employee gifts and celebrations. All we can say is, we wish all small businesses a prosperous new year, so that next time around, the number is closer to 100%!

Oracle will report its quarterly financial results at the close of the stock market on Wednesday. Analysts are expecting flat revenues but we're hearing that there could be a couple of bigger items of interest:

• A reorganization of the U.S. sales force, which may be announced only internally, not publicly.
• A big new agreement with former-partner-turned-bitter-rival, Hewlett Packard.

Both of those tidbits come from Wall Street analyst Pat Walravens, director of technology research for JMP Securities, one of the analysts who closely follows Oracle and breaks a lot of news about the company.

Walravens tells us that the reorg could be taking place in the current quarter and that people inside Oracle expect to be called into a meeting "to announce the change later this week." There may also be news about a restructured hardware business.

Oracle declined comment when reached by Business Insider.

Most analysts are expecting less-than-stellar financial results from Oracle. The consensus is 67 cents a share on sales of $9.2 billion. That's flat revenues from the year-ago quarter, and slightly improved profits.

Walravens expects software sales to be flat, and hardware revenue sales to be worse than expected, diving 13%. Oracle has said hardware revenue will be down 1% - 11%. Oracle's hardware sales have declined heavily for 11 quarters in a row.

So a reorg of the North American sales force could be good news.

As we've previously reported, Oracle president Mark Hurd has been systematically overhauling the sales force for more than two years, but so far, his changes haven't sparked the kind of growth analysts would like to see.

When he began, we started hearing stories about how some of the company's more experienced salespeople were quitting because the atmosphere had become too cutthroat and stressful.

A few weeks ago, we talked to one salesperson who quit the company less than a year after joining. This person told us that, under Hurd, the sales territory was less than 20 square miles of a metropolitan area and included so few companies that it would have been very difficult to earn the quota Oracle expected, about $2 million in annual sales.

"My territory was extremely small. The amount of business I could call on, I exhausted that in amount of time I was there. They wanted you to keep calling those same companies. I'm not the kind of sales rep that's going to call on the same company over and over," this person told us.

Walravens is hearing similar stories. As he reported in his research note, an Oracle reseller told him that in one territory alone Oracle had "16 reps just [selling] on the database. I don’t know how they make a living."

We're told that the North American sales teams to be restructured report to Matt Mills, who took over after top North American sales guy Anthony Fernicola moved to Salesforce.com. This could be Mill's first big attempt to put his own stamp on things.

On top of all that, Oracle may have patched up its relationship with HP.

Walravens expects the two companies to announce that HP has signed a $150 million contract to renew its Oracle licenses. HP has always been a big Oracle customer, and for decades was a close partner who helped sell Oracle technology. But their relationship went south after Oracle bought Sun and started competing head-to-head in the hardware market with HP.

Oracle also hired Hurd after HP fired him as CEO, which lead to a lawsuit that was ultimately settled. Then Oracle said it would stop making its database software for HP's flagship Itanium computer servers. That lead to another lawsuit, which HP won.

Given its lack of overall growth, Oracle may have decided it needs HP again. Given Oracle's lackluster hardware sales, HP may have decided that Oracle isn't much of a threat. "Sun is a lot smaller when Oracle bought it," Walravens points out.

If that's the case, the companies may announce a big kiss-and-make-up partnership, similar to the one Oracle signed last summer with another friend-turned-rival, Salesforce.com.

But that's just speculation at this point. Sources close to HP tell us that they haven't heard about a new contract or partnership with Oracle.

HP also had no comment.

SEE ALSO: THE MOMENT OF TRUTH: It's Crunch Time For Oracle And Mark Hurd

Join the conversation about this story »

It’s tempting to believe that Sales can’t change how receptive customers will initially be to your company’s offerings. Customers are more receptive to ideas from a brand they like, after all, and brand is in Marketing’s purview. While this is true, recent experiences in casinos suggests that customers are more open to new ideas when they are in a particular emotional state—a state that Sales can help create.  If you want potential customers to break their habits and buy from you, you need to make them feel comfortable.

Steve Wynn has made billions by making customers feel comfortable, at ease, at home.  The designer of luxury casinos like the Wynn Las Vegas and the Bellagio, Wynn bucked the standard casino ethos that places customers in dimly lit mazes of slot machines and blackjack tables.  Instead, he filled his casino with skylights and vaulted ceilings, keeping his customers relaxed, unstressed, and abnormally profitable.

Generally speaking, when people are comfortable, they are more willing to entertain new, risky propositions.  In a casino, unstressed people are willing to think about how they could win that big jackpot—and they’ll spend a large amount of money trying to win those jackpots.  In a sales interaction, unstressed people will consider what they might gain from switching to a new supplier—and they’ll be more likely to convert as a result.

If you’re in the business of convincing people to give up something familiar for something unfamiliar, it’s in your interest to make those people feel comfortable.  When people are stressed out, they avoid risk, holding on dearly to their money, their supplier relationships, everything moderately valuable that they have.  Even if a potential customer likes your brand, they won’t be amenable to your new proposal unless they they’re in a calm state of mind. 

Fortunately for anyone who acts on this insight, a small change in comfort can lead to outsized effects.  Wynn found this out at one of his high-stakes slot machine rooms that wasn’t producing the anticipated revenue.  After an investigation, the problem came down to a mismatch of décor and clientele.  The room, filled with heavy curtains and dark mahogany, had been designed to fit the predilections of older men.  The clients, however, were mostly older women.  After a redesign aimed to create, in the words of the designer, “a place where a lady might feel comfortable,” the room began to produce the higher level of revenue it was designed to generate.

Making customers feel comfortable does not seem, at first glance, compatible with being a Challenger sales rep.  However, these goals can actually go hand-in-hand.  It’s likely important to make your customers feel comfortable precisely when you’re about to challenge their preconceived ideas, something that is always a bit stressful for customers.

When you’re proffering penny slots or a transactional sale, you can afford to stress out your customers.  But when you’re offering high stakes gambles or complex solutions, you can’t afford to make your customers stressed.  Stressed people hunker down for safety.  Comfortable people, on the other hand, are willing to explore new ideas, to double down on an 11, to entertain the idea that your company is offering exactly what they need right now.

Since most of the research in the area has focused on changing a person’s physical environment, it isn’t clear precisely what salespeople should do to get their customers into a comfortable state of mind.  That said, it is clear that whether a salesperson is positioning a product’s benefits, preempting a common concern, or sharing an anecdote about a current customer, they are affecting how comfortable their potential customer feels.  The connection between these things—how a salesperson’s actions lead to emotions that lead to a purchase—is something that we’ll be exploring in the coming months.

What do you do that helps your customers get comfortable with you and your company?

CEB Sales Members, learn more about Challenger Selling that leads with insight and challenges customer assumptions to mobilize customers around a purchase. For more about the designer of Wynn’s casino, see the New Yorker article “Royal Flush.”

50% of solving a problem is defining it correctly. If you’ve read our blog lately, you’ve noticed
sales execution is a popular subject. A few recent examples:

• Selling to the C Suite
• The Death of Event-Based Training
• Increasing New Hire Productivity

Each of these articles focuses on your sales reps. Effective ways to enable your sales reps to make the number. These are critical components to achieving your top line revenue goals. However, they are not the only path to reaching your goal.

Rep Focus Isn’t Enough

Today’s post focuses on the missing link: Enabling your front-line sales managers. They are the connective tissue that makes sure the field executes your strategy. Without strong front-line sales managers, your chances of making the number are low. They ensure the day-to-day fundamentals are executed. Things like:

• Deal strategy
• Pipeline reviews
• Call plans
• Rep time allocation
• Career development

As the CEO, you may wonder if addressing this is within your control. You’re busy running the business. How can you help your sales managers execute?

Download the CEO’s Sales Manager Test to help with this. This tool is 10 questions to give you problem clarity (50% of solving). Your involvement in problem definition puts solving it squarely within your grasp.

Why Sales Managers Fail

There are a number of reasons top managers fail. A few examples you may be seeing:

• Cadence – They aren’t sure where or how to spend their time
• Talent – They have a hard time finding and hiring ‘A’ player sales talent
• Performance Management – They aren’t sure what to measure and how to fix sales issues.

It’s likely you’ve promoted some of your top reps to sales managers. When this happened, were they taught how to do this job? Were they given training and tools to address the above issues?

The answer is usually “no.”

Perhaps you assumed their success as a rep would carry over into sales leadership. You are not alone. Almost 100% of sales training in B2B companies is focused on reps. Onboarding. Prospecting. Sales Process. Handling Objections. Selling to Decision Makers. Etc, etc. Managers are left out in the cold.

5 Steps to Developing Sales Managers

Take control of this issue. Here are 5 things you can do for your managers.

1. Define the Problem – As mentioned, half of solving the problem is defining it correctly. In this case, you have to know what current state looks like. Look for things like:
   1. A defined role description and scorecard
   2. Current training and development content designed specifically for managers
   3. Uniform metrics used to manage rep performance
2. Design the Framework – Determine the items required to improve the performance of your sales managers. Think of this as the blueprints you are creating for success. You should involve your top leaders here. Their input is critical in determining how they’ve become successful. This should include:
   1. Sales leadership training courseware
   2. Tools and job aids for sales managers
   3. Activity cadence (time in the field, 1on1s, deal reviews, etc.)
3. Develop the Courseware – Similar to sales training, you need a repeatable process to develop your sales leaders. Your investment here is critical. It cannot be event-based or it will not work. To make the training stick, it needs to have enablement.
   1. Role plays and face-to-face leadership scenarios
   2. Quizzes and mock presentations to test for understanding
   3. Follow-on workshops for continued development
4. Implement – Your work is just beginning. The “playbook” has been designed and is ready for release. Now, it’s time to teach your leaders and focus on adoption. In this phase, you have to:
   1. Provide the initial training
   2. Deliver a coaching handbook to your managers
   3. Give them coaching forms and expectations
5. Field Adoption – The most important step. This is why event-based training fails. The team can’t sit in a room for 3 days and then be expected to change. Adoption focuses on developing habits of successful sales managers. Ways to make this step work are:
   1. Gamify the new curriculum and reward quick wins and positive behavior changes
   2. Reinforce changing behavior by communicating wins as the CEO
   3. Seek regular feedback on the cadence and tools
   4. Iterate the tools and processes to develop a sustainable program

Call to Action

The most important link connecting your strategy and field execution is sales management. Ineffective sales leaders will be the death of your number. You can’t scale and the long-term implications of this are bleak.

As the CEO, you can control this. Spend a few minutes taking the CEO’s Sales Manager Test. It will help you diagnose potential issues you might have in your organization.

The solution to creating sustainable top line sales execution is within your grasp. It will require some investment on your part to do it right. When the team is blowing out the number, it will be well worth it. 

Author: Ryan Tognazzini

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I was speaking with a prospect the other day and the subject of recruiting women in sales came up. This company is extremely impressive: high-growth, exciting market, great location, amazing sales culture - the works.

However, they hadn’t made much progress in balancing the gender of their sales force. In fact, their current ratio was roughly 7:1 (male to female).

This blew me away as this company had so much going for them. If they were struggling to find women for their sales organization, what does that mean for our industry? 

So I did some research and came up with a few ideas.

Recruiting sales women

• Make job descriptions gender neutral
  Watch your pronouns, "AE isn’t afraid to have his performance measured against others" or “Candidate must take ownership of his territory.”
• Lay off the war words 
  Hunt, kill, crush – these words tend not to appeal to female candidates. “The VP Sales is looking for other sales animals.” (Some might argue that ‘ninja’ & ‘rockstar’ are male-centric too.)
• Balance the 'perks' 
  Kegerators-on-demand, competitive darts, flag football, etc. might not be balanced benefits. Compare that to the great job Forrester does here:
    

Interviewing sales women

• Scope realistic job ‘requirements’
  Hiring managers often write job requirements aspirationally – meaning listing stretch goals. Men, more often than women, will apply for jobs that ‘require’ skills they haven’t yet mastered. From Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, ‘An internal report at Hewlett-Packard revealed that women only apply for open jobs if they think they meet 100 percent of the criteria listed. Men apply if they think they meet 60 percent of the requirements.’

• Remember: you want a good negotiator
  Again, from Lean In, ‘There is little downside when men negotiate for themselves. People expect men to advocate on their own behalf, point out their contributions, and be recognized and rewarded for them. For men, there is truly no harm in asking. But since women are expected to be concerned with others, when they advocate for themselves or point to their own value, both men and women react unfavorably.’ Note that last sentence. Interesting, no?

• You want assertiveness too
  Similarly, assertiveness has been found to help men and hurt women. So if an interviewer finds a female candidate ‘overconfident’ or ‘too aggressive,’ ask them to reflect 'If this candidate were a man, would I feel the same way?’ At Dreamforce, Marc Benioff shared a story around this very issue (link jumps you to the relevant moment).

To road test these theories, I interviewed a Sales Manager at Yesware, a Boston-based high-growth SaaS company. Zoe Silverman runs Sales Operations and has been responsible for hiring the current Inside Sales team of 6 (4 of which are women).

Here is what she had to say:

So, how about you?

Has the gender balance of your sales team ever come up? Are you succeeding or struggling to recruit women?

I'd love to hear if (and how) your organization is addressing this challenge. And hey… if you are a woman in sales, share what attracts you to a company and help the entire community! Thanks in advance.

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Today’s guest post is from Derek Singleton of Software Advice. A great writer who recently published research on converting inbound leads. Enjoy his post! As an online business, Software Advice...