• Neuro-Sell: How Neuroscience Can Power Your Sales Success
• Bare Knuckle Selling
• Bare Knuckle Negotiating
• Bare Knuckle Customer Service
• The Inner Winner

In a conversation with a very busy CIO (Chief Information Officer) recently he said that he hates when sellers do any of the following:

• lie about being connected to someone he knows when they aren’t, in order to get him to respond
• use overused terms like “synergy”
• over-inflate possible results using the seller’s products or services
• write five paragraph e-mails (he hits the delete button)
• doesn’t follow-up more than a couple of times (actually he’s glad, because they won’t waste his time)
• uses jargon and talks too much

He regularly receives 200-300 emails in a day and cannot be bothered with most sales “pitches”.

Like other C-level executives I speak with, he says that sales people can seem lazy and are not persistent. He is the fourth executive I’ve heard recently who says that UNLESS you leave a number of email and voice mail messages it won’t seem like you are trying very hard to reach him.

This brings me to the question – Are you studying your buyers to even KNOW what they like and don’t like?

For starters, ask good existing customers about why they worked with you in the first place. Ask them what they do with new people trying to sell them on ideas, products, and services. It will help you to KEEP the business, because they will let you know what your industry counterparts might be doing, and they will be reaffirming why they are working with you and your company.

Understand the business your perfect buyers are in

Know their job description and what issues are on their mind

Learn ways you can interact with them that add value

Offer them ideas they can bring forward to be a hero to their colleagues

Engage with them when it is convenient for them. How about after 5PM?

Bottom line is that it is about them, not you. To be about them, you need to understand more about them.

Joining a LinkedIn group or other community where your buyers are can be a great start.

Where else can you find information out about your buyer?

How can you add value to their day and to their job?

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 140 – Study Buyers appeared first on Score More Sales.

There are no obviously good ideas when it comes to B2B Marketing strategy. The same strategy you saw someone else follow to great effect, or have done yourself and 'killed it' will almost certainly fail this time. The best strategy setting for your best-fit target market, product, pricing, channel and competition (that is, everything), depends on the answer to one, simple question. Get that right, and finding the best strategy is a walk in the park. 

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This past week I was in a meeting with some of my colleagues and we were talking about the best Halloween costumes we’ve ever seen.  I brought up how Minnesota Vikings quarterback Christian Ponder and his wife dressed up as Squints and Wendy Perffercorn from The Sandlot—clearly the top couple costume I’ve ever seen.  Shockingly, there were a bunch of people in the room who hadn’t seen The Sandlot (a problem in and of itself) but when I tried to explain how this movie was one of the best childhood shaping movies of all time, no one got it.  “So it’s a movie about kids who like baseball?” they said. I mean, yes, but it’s so much more than that!

We were essentially speaking two different languages, and I couldn’t illustrate my point as effectively as I would have liked.  Sadly, I don’t think I convinced anyone in that room to go rent The Sandlot immediately.  While you may not care about my Sandlot rant, you will care about how this type of communication misalignment affects marketers.

In an earlier blog post, we told you just 10% of B2B purchases are still made by a single decision maker and the average buying team includes 5.4 people.  In all likelihood, those 5 (and four-tenths) people all have opinions, and all those different perspectives causes your marketing message to get lost in translation.  If only there was a way to bridge all these disparate perspectives and get everyone on the same page (your page)…

There is!  Technology giant Cisco’s cutting-edge marketing squad actually listens for interests and language that are shared between stakeholders in their customer buying groups (think CMO and CIO) and then create messages based on that overlap so they’re appealing (and relatable) to everyone involved.  Here are the steps Cisco took (and you can take too):

1. Identify each stakeholder’s naturally trending terms and themes:  Cisco uses social listening tools to identify, and monitor topics stakeholders talk about.
2. Identify common ground between stakeholders:  Compare and contrast these identified topics to find common ground.  Use this diagram as a sample.
3. Test for resonance and shareability: Let us help you determine that shared language and craft your messages for optimal shared significance.

What we have here is the transcript from the webinar: “10 Ways Sales Can Deliver a Great Buying Experience” featuring Scott Albro, CEO of TOPO moderated by Megan Toohey, Digital Content Manager of AG Salesworks. First a warning, transcripts are hard because people don’t talk the way they write. I am constantly trying to edit this post on the fly…Nonetheless, its a great webinar and a great read. I suggest you check it out. First, here is the webinar:

Secondly, here is the transcript:

Slide 1:

Megan Toohey: Morning. Thank you for joining us today. Welcome to sales summit brought to you by the funnelholic. You have joined Scott Albro presentation 10 Ways Sales Can Deliver a Great Buying Experience.

Slide 2.

When tweeting about about today’s sales summit please use hashtag # Crushyourquota.

Slide 3.

My name is Megan Toohey, and I am the Digital Content Marketing Manager for AG Salesworks, and I will be your moderator today.

Slide 4.

The Funnelholic will also be presenting three other webinars today. So please take a moment and read through this slide, and also a big thank you for today’s sponsors: Citrix GoToMeeting, DocuSign, KnowledgeTree, Socedo, and TOPO.

Slide 5.

Today’s webinar will be 45 minutes in total. 30 minutes will be dedicated to the presentation, and the last 10-15 will be for your questions. Feel free to type in your questions throughout the webinar. We’ll get to as many as possible at the end of Scott’s presentation. Now let the fun begin. I’ll hand it over to Scott Albro, founder and CEO of TOPO.

Scott Albro: Well thanks for the introduction Megan. Good morning everyone it’s great to be here, and great to be presenting about what we think is one of the most powerful ideas in sales and marketing today. And that’s what we at TOPO call the buying experience. So we’re going to spend the next 45 minutes talking about that, and we’ll do that by showing you 10 ways that we think the buying experience can help you beet you quota. And we’ll talk about some really specific tips and practices that you can really use as a sales person in your sales organization to deliver what we call a great buying experience to your prospective buyers.

Slide 6.

So what we do at TOPO is we’re basically a research advisory consulting company that helps marketing and sales organizations design and deliver great buying experiences. We’ll talk about what a buying experience is, to start today’s presentation, and then we’ll get into these really practical tips to help you exceed your quota.

If you want to learn more about buying experiences in general, and see how companies are delivering great buying experiences throughout the world. The best place to do that right now is on our blog. You’ll find a lot of detailed information about designing and delivering great buying experiences.

Slide 7.

So for TOPO, and our clients, the buying experience is really a new way to think about sales and marketing, and we came up with a definition, (every great business term needs to be defined. Right?) We came up with a definition that we think describes what the buying experience actually is.

So we define the buying experience as how people perceive the experience of buying a product, or service in your market. And the first kind of notable aspect in this definition is the buying experience is about what the buyer perceives. So as you think about designing, creating, and delivering great buying experiences. Step number one is to take the buyer’s or the prospect’s perspective.

The second sort of definitional attribute of a buying experience is that it’s representative of the entire journey that the buyer has as they move from status quo, they’re doing nothing, to actually making a final purchase. There are lots of steps that sit between the status quo and purchase. As a matter of fact, for some of our clients we define as many as 50-60 steps in their buying experience. It starts with the buyer doing nothing. They are operating their business, or running their life, or whatever it is according to the status quo all the way to the completion or the consummation of the final purchase. So it’s really representative of the entire journey.

The third kind of definitional attribute is that across those 5, 10, 15, 16 steps that might exist across the buying experience, we want to make sure we understand the entire experience the buyer’s having along that journey. Some of the things we focus on with our clients is we want to understand the buyers emotions, what their objectives and wants are, what interactions they’re having during the buying experience, the information that they’re consuming. We want to understand all of those things across the entire journey.

Finally one really important thing to understand about the buying experience that relates directly to what you do as sales people, or what your marketing organization does is we really believe that job number one for sales and marketing organizations today is to exceed the buyers expectations. As a result, they end up buying your product or service, and we’ll talk more about that. And again in today’s presentation we’ll give you these ten practical tips that we think will allow you to do that.

Slide 8.

So one of the things that is really important to understand is why the buying experience is so important to a sales organization. Something that we do at TOPO is we benchmark companies buying experiences, and one of the things that we’re always on the look out for is what companies out there are delivering a great buying experience. And there are lots of examples of companies that do this. One of my favorite examples right now is Zendesk. Zendesk is a fast growing company. They sell customer service software to all kinds of companies these days, and they deliver a truly exceptional buying experience. By virtue of delivering this buying experience that out ranks what their competitors are doing, they’re able to grow a lot faster. In fact, we find based on our benchmarking data that the companies that deliver great buying experiences grow greater than two-times faster than companies that just provide average experience.

And the reason for this is that great buying experience has a profound impact on sort of all the revenue-oriented metrics that we care about as sales and marketing professionals. So great buying experiences allow companies to generate more traffic and leads. One of my favorite metrics to look at when we look at our client is how the buying experience impacts conversion rates. A great buying experience builds larger average deal sizes, shorter sale cycles, lower churn on the back end, and more customer referrals on the back end.

When you start to sort of average all of those metric. What it means is that these companies just grow a lot faster than their peers.

Slide 9.

And the reason for that is because great buying experience gives buyers what they want, and in fact we find sales organizations that are delivering great buying experiences. And really what they are doing is their engaging in what might be called buyer responsive selling. So they’re able to respond to what the buyer wants, and as you might imagine that has a profound impact on something like conversion rates.

So one of the things we also do in addition to looking at our clients, and sort of bench marking who’s delivering sort of a great buying experience versus who’s not. Is we’re also out there surveying buyers, and trying to identify what buyers want. And how they define there own buying experience, and we pick up on hundreds of different preferences and behaviors that buyers provide to us in our surveys. Five of the most common references can be found on this chart.

So we find that buyers really value simplicity in this day and age, they also value relevance, they value information that helps them make better decisions, they value risk mitigation or the reduction of risk throughout the purchasing cycle or buying cycle, and they value control. And let’s just pick one of these to dig into. So when we look at these different preferences that we hear from buyers, one of the preferences that I’m most interested in is risk mitigation.

So buyers really prefer that vendors help them reduce the risk associated with the purchase, and you might sort of think of this as truly a financial preference. Right? Where the buyer wants you, for example, to offer them a discount to reduce the risk. And that may not be true. But a lot of things that is happening in the technology market, and in other markets for that matter. Subscription oriented market that targets consumers, is that companies, brands and vendors are starting to offer free trials. And free trials has become a very effective type of offer for. For example, selling a piece of [inaudible 09:25] software.

And we find that reduced financial risk is cited as a top three priorities for 54% of buyers in B2B markets. That’s a big deal that vendor marketing, and sales organizations need to be aware of to design their buying exuberance from. And in fact many [inaudible 09:43] companies, for example, are offering free trial right now. And some [inaudible 09:48] companies do a real exceptional job of that. They make the free trial easy to sign up for, and perhaps most importantly easy to use.

That’s a really important point, so we find across a number of our clients that we look at that companies have made it easy to sign up for a free trial. But not many companies have figured out how out to make it easy actually use. Examples of obstacles that sort of get in the way of making a trial easy to use include things like how do I configure the software, or administer the software so that I can actually use it, how do I put data into the software so that it’s actually helping me do my work better. Right? Those are two-common examples of obstacles that get in the way of making a trial easy to use, and again if we go back to buyer risk here.

The fact that the buyer wants you to reduce risk, and combine that with another preference that’s listed on this site, simplicity, you start to understand what’s required to deliver the buying experiences that the buyer really wants. They want a free trial because it reduces the perceived risk of evaluating the software. But they also need it to be really simple. Right? They are not going to spend days configuring your software, or loading data into the software. Whatever the case might be.

So you have to make sure that that free trial is not only easy to sign up for, but easy to use. There are lots of specifics around that, how you do that, how you design for that, and so forth. But that’s a good high-level summary of what we talk about. Of what we mean by buyer responsive selling, or buyer responsive marketing.

Slide 10.

So with that, why don’t we dig into 10 ways that we think sales could deliver a great buying experience, and one of the things that we try to do with all of clients when we help them design and deliver a great buying experiences. Is we want to make sure that there’s a conceptual understanding of what the buying experience is, and that we truly understand how the buyer goes about making a decision to buy your product or service.

But the other thing that we try to do for our clients, is we want to make sure that we are offering specific practical actual in sites that allow you to start improving the buying experience that you’re delivering to your prospects. And so this list of 10 tips that sales can use to deliver a great buying experience some of these are more conceptual in nature. How do I understand what the buyer’s truly experiencing today? But then there’s practical tips in here as well. We’ll cover both.

Slide 11.

The first one is really a conceptual tip. Which is, how do you help a sales organization understand the importance of the buying experience? And one of the things that we realize with sales people, is sales people need real tangible specific proof of why they should spend time on certain things, and we’ve collected a lot of data about different buying experiences over the years.

And one consistent theme that we pick up on our data is that buyers care about three things when they’re evaluating a purchase of a product or service. They care about the product or service itself, and typically what they care about there is quality and functionality. They also care about easy to use around the product. They care about price, so that’s kind of the second-high level criteria that they look at when it comes to evaluating a product or service, and then they care about the thing that they call the experience. And that’s really the experience that they have with you the sales and marketing organization.

And what’s really interesting is that when we first started doing these surveys. We fully expected the data to come back and rank that [inaudible 13:48], and the buying experience that they had would rank third. And what we actually found was that the buying experience ranked first, product ranked second, and price ranked third. And when you go into sales organizations, and talk to them about the buying experience, and when you talk to sales people about the buying experience very few sales people have a concrete understanding of the fact that this thing even exist.

But buyers rank it as the most important thing when they’re evaluating a product or service. And so helping sales people understand that buyers actually care about the buying experience. Than that of a sales person you can achieve your quota by delivering a great buying experience. Is sort of priority number one when it comes to making a sales organization buyer responsive.

The other thing is, back to this benchmarking data that we shared with you at the beginning of this presentation is that when we look at companies and we look at sales organizations that are delivering great buying experiences. They just simply grow faster than companies that don’t, and again this goes quota achievement right? We want to help our sales people achieve their quotas. Help them understand that delivering a great buying experience is just as important, if not more important, than having a high quality product, or a fair market price. That’s a great motivator to get a sales person behind this notion of the buying experience.

So that’s point number one, about how sales can deliver a great buying experience. Point number two is that before you can even start defining the buying experience, and before you can start delivering and optimizing your buying experience you need to truly understand the buyer. And one of the things that our clients ask us a lot about is, is they like to ask us questions like “Well, is this like buyer personas?” The answer to that question is, no it’s really not.

You know for a lot of clients we found, and in a lot of sales and marketing organizations, they’ve developed buyer personas that sort of sit on the shelf and age. And buyer personas in our opinion tend to be a lot less actionable, than truly understanding whom the buyer is, and truly understanding the buying experience of the product.

So one of our favorite quotes here is buyer personas like to tell you about what brand of coffee the buyer drinks. That’s not really what we’re trying to do when we try to understand the buying experience. We’ve identified over 40 questions to help us understand who the buyer is, and we like to pay particular attention to when we’re trying to understand the buyer is what experience they are having as they move from status quo to actual purchase.

Slide 12.

And when you start to ask these interesting questions, you know, these 50 questions that you can ask of a buyer. Or you can ask of really star sales people in your organization, or really star marketing professionals in your organization. You start to be able to map the buying experience, and the buying experience maps can actually get pretty detailed.

So there’s certainly high level buyer stages like status quo, the buyer identifies a problem or opportunity that they want to pursue, they move to try and understand requirements, the various options that are out there in the market, they actually engage with vendors, and then they make a final decision or purchase. That stuff interesting at a high level conceptual level, but what’s more interesting is when you actually start to map the specific steps or activities that a buyer takes as they work their way through the buying experience.

And so these are really specific steps. Just so we were talking about the notion of a free trial earlier. You know, a specific step that might exist in a buying experience. The buyer actually signs up for a free trial, and then the step after that, the buyer starts using the free trial. So one of the things you want to do as you start to define your buying experience, is you want to start thinking in terms of these specific discrete steps. One of the things that we advice is as you do that, try and think of the conversion points, and so in some markets, in some B to B markets in particular, you’ll see dozens of steps that exist in a buying experience.

Some SAS markets we see 20-30 steps on average that exist in a typical buying experience. We’ve even identified markets where there are 50-60 steps in the buying experience. Some consumer markets for example we’ll see dozens of step. You know, buying a car for example, or buying a house, or refinancing a mortgage. Those deep considered purchases consumers make. Some markets, for example consumer e-commerce market, there are fewer steps. Maybe five to seven steps, but the key point here is you want to make sure you define these specific steps. It’s not good enough to define these high level conceptual stages, and for each step it’s important to understand some key attributes.

So examples of some things that you might want to understand with respect to each step is, well what’s required to move to the next step? Right? So using that free trial example, for someone to be able to move past the free trial they have to be able to use the free trial. They have to be able to get their data in there and configure the software to do what they want it to do.

Slide 13.

So these are all examples of qualitative attributes that you can lay on top of your buying experience map. There’s also real data and in sites that you can lay on top of your map. We collect a lot of data for each step in the buying experience. Two of our favorite data points, this is a chart that we will commonly produce for a CEO, a CMO, a Chief Revenue Officer, a VP of Sales, is to make sure we understand which steps are really important to the buyer and the buying experience. These are the green dots on this slide. It might be a little hard to see. So you can see the free trial is extremely important to the buyer. That’s a critical point of the buying experience to the buyer, and then we like to cross-tab that with well how satisfied is the buyer with that particular point in the experience? Again those are the red dots on the slide. Again you can see looking at the free trial step. The buyer thinks that that’s a really important step, and they’re actually not that satisfied with the experience that you’re delivering there as a sales and marketing organization.

So those are examples of data points that you can start to layer on top of your buying experience map. One of the other things that are really important to do is to understand exactly what the buyer’s saying in each point of the buying experience. We call those things verbatim, so an example of a verbatim around a free trial is a buyer might say: “It was easy to sign up for the free trial, but it was really hard to actually use it.” So that helps you understand where this dissatisfaction’s coming from.

So layering data and insights onto your data and buying experience map is another great way to help sales delivering a great buying experience. The fifth point, and this is one of those higher-level conceptual points. Is to make sure you design your sales organization based on the buying experience? And when we talk about sales organization, designing the organization at a very high level, we think of a few different things.

The first is: What do you want your sales process to be? The second is, how do you want to organize, and what type of people do you want to hire to support that organization? The third thing we think about around designing sales organizations is what specific plays, or activities do you want to use to target, engage and convert buyers. The fourth thing that we think about when designing a sales organization is what metric should we track to make sure that we’re actually measuring whether we’re successful or not.

And the fifth thing we’ll look at when designing a sales organization is what technology should you use? And the idea here is that we make decisions in each one of these areas here. These really important strategic decisions, and to make those decisions based on what the buyer wants from you. So you can see some examples up here, but an example around sales profits is if the buyer won’t have budget authority until 90% of its sales process is complete. Maybe because for whatever reason in that market, and in that organization the buyer has to actually go to the CEO at the end of the buying experience to get budget authority. You would adjust what your definition of a sales qualified lead is to make budget a nice to have as part of the [inaudible 23:11] definition, as opposed to a must have.

Another example of a decision you might make is in certain markets really value vertical or industry specific context above all else. This is particularly true in B2B markets, so from an organizational perspective you might hire subject matter experts out of industries that you’re targeting to support your front-line sales people. A common thing that we are seeing in a lot of markets based on our buyer research, is that buyers don’t answer the phone or respond to voice mail so one of the plays that you can run as a sales organization. You should still use voice mails, but your voice mail call to action should prompt the buyer to reply or respond to you via the email that you just sent to them. And there are other examples of decisions that you can make here.

You know, a simple example around a technology decision is buyers today in a lot of different markets want a simple transparent pricing. We still run into sales executives in our client engagements that want to use fairly complex quoting tools or pricing configurations. When in fact, what really needs to happen is something as simple as publishing pricing on a landing page on the website that shows different common bundles, or packages, or versions. So those are all examples of sort of designing the sales organization in a buyer responsive way.

Slide 14.

Speaking of being buyer responsive, where the rubber hits the road for a lot of sales organizations in terms of achieving quota is the plays that they run to convert prospects into actual buyers. And one of the things that we see real successful organizations do, is they design what we call buyer responsive plays. And so if we go back to the buying experience map that we looked at earlier, where there were 27 different steps in this particular SAS market place.

One of the really critical steps is toward the end of the buying experience. The primary contact for the sales organization actually tells sales “Yup. I think we’re good to go. I just have to go meet with the CEO to get final approval, and final budget, and then we’ll get back to you.” And sales will often not hear back from the buyer at that point in time, or the buyer will come back to them and say “You know, the CEO asked me these really tough questions about the economics of this purchase. And I don’t have the answers, so we need to figure that out.” And you add three or four weeks to your sales cycle as a result to that.  So an example of a play that you can develop based this scenario is something that we call the champion content play. In advance of the meeting with the CEO, you as a sales person provide your champion with a tool kit or content that allows them to have a really effective meeting with the CEO. That might include a checklist, a pro forma economic model, it might include a presentation, and it might include talking points that the champion should emphasize with the CEO. That stuff’s not important. The important point here is to anticipate the experience that the buyers going to have with the CEO, and make sure that they are armed and equipped to actually convert the CEO on your behalf so that you can get to that final purchasing decision.

So that is an example of designing a buyer responsive play. There are literally 100′s if not 1,000′s of buyer responsive plays that are available to sales organization.

Slide 15.

The seventh way that sales can deliver a great buying experience is to make sure that you actually implement these buyer responsive plays. So an example in the world of marketing, in terms of implementing a buyer responsive play is to actually implement certain lead scoring rules or lead nurturing rules in your marketing automation system.

An example of a buyer responsive play in the world of sales might be to use presentation software to make sure that you’re delivering a truly engaging presentation, and that presentation is being shared the way you want it to be shared across the organization. But one of the things that we think is a really interesting trend is actually implementing these plays in the sales organization using CRN technology, using other technologies that other sales organizations are adopting.

Slide 16.

The eighth point, and this shouldn’t really be the eighth point. By the way, it looks like we’re stack ranking these things by using numbers here. These are by no means stacking ranking. In fact, one of the things that we find when helping sales organizations deliver great buying experiences, is that training is a really big deal. It’s critical that sales people are trained on not only what the buyer is doing, as they have an experience with you as a sales organization, but that sales is trained, and individual sales people are trained in specific plays to make sure that they deliver an exceptional buying experience to the buyer. This is an example of a training agenda for one of our clients. Keep in mind; buying experience training doesn’t need to be this big heavy-handed thing. It can be as simple as doing a one-hour training once a week or once a month to make sure that sales people understand the buyer.

One of the things that we recommend with these trainings is that you want sales people to take this information and use it. You want to make your buying experience training really actionable, and we find a way to really make it actionable is to one, to make the training sessions interactive, and use exercises. And two, at the end of the training session make sure sales people have tools, content checklist, whatever it might be that actually allows them to take this onto the phone, into the field, into email, whatever the case might be. The training is a very important point of making sure that the sales organization is actually becoming buyer-responsive

Slide 17.

The ninth way that sales can deliver a great buying experience is of course to make sure we’re actually measuring how we’re doing when it comes to delivering the great buying experience. It’s just some data that we pulled from that earlier chart that helps us understand how satisfied the buyer is, and these are sort of high-level strategic conversions. You can actually collect data on things like when my sales team is calling into buyers for the first time to buy. The buyer’s actually not happy about what they’re talking about. They’re trying to sell the product right away for example. As opposed to really trying to understand the customer’s requirements, or issues, or whatever the case might be. And it’s actually possible to collect that type of data, and make sure that you’re measuring how satisfied the buyer is with the experience that you’re delivering them.

Slide 18.

And that get’s us to the final point which is to make sure that you’re optimizing the buying experience, and this is totally possible. You know, this buying experience thing isn’t just a nebulous concept. It’s actually something that you can improve as a sales organization. So this is some sample data from a client that we worked with where we help improve the sales reps scores when it comes to the experience that they were delivering with the buyer, and you can see that on the left hand of the chart here. On the right hand side here, we’re actually able to benchmark how satisfied the buyers were with our client’s sales organization versus the competitive sales organization. You can see the client ended up fairing very well versus the competition.

So that gets us back to the most important point about the buying experience. Which is because the buyer rates the buying experience as being so critically important to them, and because companies that deliver great buying experiences grow much faster than companies that don’t. Really delivering a buying experience that exceeds the buyer’s expectations is job number one for sales. It’s also job number one for marketing. It’s job number one for every company that wants to grow fast.

Slide 19.

So those are our ten tips on how sales can deliver a great buying experience. Hopefully those are all valuable to you as some of them are real conceptual. Some of them are really practical. They are designed to be put into action right away. But we think it’s really important for sales organizations to deliver a great buying experience.

Slide 20.

So with that, I’m going to turn it back to Megan. I think that we might have some questions from the audience maybe. Megan, is that right?

Megan: Hi Scott, yes we do. We’ve got a couple floating in. Great presentation, and just a reminder out there to everybody. If you’re tweeting, please use hashtag # Crushyourquota, and then I will be looking at your questions.

First question I have for you Scott. How do you know if you are delivering a great buying experience? How do you monitor going forward.

Scott: Yeah. So interesting question. There are two-questions inside of that one that are directly related. So the way that you know that you are delivering a great buying experience is by monitoring it, and the best way to monitor you buying experience is to simply ask your buyer how you’re doing. So let me just give you some really practical tips on how to go about doing that. So a lot of people think that monitoring and tracking your buying experience by talking to your buyer involves heavy-handed qualitative research, and we’ve actually found in a sales setting. Not necessarily in a marketing setting, but in a sales setting, it’s actually counter productive. So an example of something that we recommend to our clients, and what we help our clients do is to go out and talk to five to ten buyers this week and let’s ask them how they feel about the experience that we’re delivering to them.

Slide 21.

And we’ll ask them “How can we improve that experience?” So point number one is to not try to do too much. Simply talking to a handful of buyers can help a lot. Point number two is you have to make sure to ask those buyers the right question. I just gave you a couple questions. “So tell me how I’m doing. Am I doing well, am I not doing well.” I mean it could be as simple as that. Tell me about the specific points in the buying experience where you feel like I am doing well versus not doing so well, and tell me where you think I can specifically improve the buying experience. And just by specifically asking those small number of questions to the buyer. You’ll learn a lot. So that’s how we help our clients think about monitoring the buying experience, and understanding whether you are delivering a buying experience.

I will also add one other tip. In many sales organizations, there are sales people who have a really good innate understanding of how to deliver a great buying experience, and they are in fact delivering that great buying experience. And you should make sure that you’re talking to those sales people as well. Because often times they’re able to aggregate the experiences with 100′s of different buyers that they’ve engaged with, and they’re very forthcoming, honest and transparent and honest with what they think works.

What’s a great example of a great buying experience?

It’s a little bit dated, but everyone will understand this because it’s actually Salesforce.com. You know one of the things people used to talk about ten years ago, with respect to Salesforce.com was the real revolution that Mark brought to the table with SalesForce.com was software as a service, and that was certainly a big part of it.

Another big part that Mark brought to the table was that he made the software really easy to buy. People forgot this, but you could actually buy SalesForce.com using a credit card. And prior to SalesForce.com, that buying experience did not exist in the B to B software industry. It just didn’t exist, and we all know what happened to SalesForce.com. And how they became one of the largest software companies in the world. That’s actually, even though it’s 10-12 years old, that’s one of my favorite buying experiences to this day. And nobody talks about it.

Everyone talks about the SAS model, and how SalesForce.com figured out how to sell to director of sales operations, and how they did a great job targeting start ups out here, but one of my favorite things that market Salesforce.com did was they just made the software really easy to buy. And again the proof is in the pudding: revenue growth. Look at how fast that company grew

Megan: We have one more. What’s the difference between a buying experience and a sales process?

Scott: That’s actually a really good fundamental question that’s important to understand. So the buying experience remember is defined from the perspective of the buyer. That’s point number one. The sales process is typically definned from the prospective of the VP of Sales. The real other important thing to understand between the buying experience and the sales process is, remember when the buyer is have a buying experience they’re experiencing a lot of different things during that process that has nothing to do with you as a sales organization, as a company, as a marketing organization.

And example of this is what we talked about earlier around champion contact play. So when your champion goes into a meeting with the CEO that has nothing to do with the sales process. You’re not involved in that. That’s an experience that the buyer is having without you. Another example of this is a lot of people in the sales industry and the marketing industry like to talk about that serious decisions data point is 70% of the buying experience is done before the buyer actually interacts with you as a vendor. That’s another example of look about 70% of the buying experience has nothing to do with your sales process. In fact, it’s being done without you.

So point number one is it’s done from the buyer’s perspective. Point number two is a lot of the buying experience happens without you, and that’s really important to understand. And one of the things that you need to do as a sales and marketing organization to make sure that you’re able to actually influence what’s happening without you, and that can be done via content, via things like that, and that’s probably the subject of another webinar.

Megan: Alright. So we have a few minutes. So I’ll give you one question, if we can answer this quickly. Can you give examples of other examples of plays? Can you give us other examples?

Scott: Let’s actually take a specific example from a specific type of market. So a lot of B2B companies target fairly narrow markets where there are maybe 1,000′s of companies out there that will actually buy your product and service, and at some of these companies the prospect is incredibly difficult to reach.

You know response rates, things like voice mail, email, and what not are actually quite low. And that presents a problem for sales organization which there are only 1,000′s of companies out there which could potentially buy my product or service, but the prospects of these companies are incredibly difficult to reach. Because they don’t have enough time in the day, they’re too busy. They think they’re above talking to sales people.

So what type of play can you run to actually drive higher response rates or conversion rates with that type of buyer when you first reach out to them. When you’re doing out bound prospecting. So a play that you can run there will be called a multi touch outbound prospecting play. Where you basically design a play which uses a combination touches via the phone, email, and potentially even social media channels, and you run those touches typically over a three week periods, and you’re making anywhere from 9-15 touches against that buyer.

What you say during those touches when you leave a voice mail, when you don’t leave a voice mail, what you say in your email, what you don’t say in your email, whether you use in mail, whether you use twitter. The details in that play, and it’s really specific to the buyer that you’re targeting. But that’s an example of a play that you might run for a specific target if it’s fairly narrow in nature if the prospect buyers are non responsive.

Megan: Wonderful, and I think that’s all the time we have for questions today. I know we had a few more in the queue here. Feel free to reach out to Scott regarding your questions. I just want to say is thank you Scott. Appreciate it, and great presentation. Thank you to Citrix GoToMeeting, DocuSign, KnowledgeTree, Socedo, and TOPO.for hosting the sales summit.

Scott Albro is the CEO and founder of TOPO. TOPO is a research, advisory, and consulting firm that believes in a really simple, but powerful idea – that the most important thing in business is to deliver a great buying experience. By connecting everything we do back to this core idea, we help sales and marketing organizations exceed their revenue targets. Connect with Scott on Twitter.

 

 

 

 

Megan Tooheyis the Digital Content Marketing Manager at AG Salesworks.  AG Salesworks is a sales prospecting and closed loop marketing, lead generation services firm located in Norwood, MA.  You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

 

 

 

 
Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic and a co-founder of Topo. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter

Simplicity photo by _sarchi

For some time, I’ve had a thorn in my side about a particular ‘insight’ floating around the sales punditry.

I’ve grumbled when it was repeated on conference stages, scowled reading it on blogs, and I might have exclaimed ‘for {#$%s sake’ when I found in Dan Pink’s (otherwise) excellent To Sell is Human.

But earlier this week, I heard it from a young Inside Sales Rep as a ‘justification’ for not picking up the phone. That did it. I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!

Here’s what he said: 

This essentially a parroting of the information assymetry idea: that pre-web we lived in an era of tyrrany where sales ruled over buyers mercilessly.

I’ll even admit getting caught up in this line of thinking. I reasoned, “Wow, the internet really has changed things. Buyers have access to pricing, customer reviews, competitive comparisons, the works.”

But then I did something crazy.

I went and asked a few folks who had been in sales for 20+ years. Their response: What the hell are you talking about? It was, does & will take two to tango.

Here’s why.

BACK THEN: Buyers had plently of information that Sellers didn’t

In the prehistoric age (pre-2003), Buyers had figuratively tons of information that Sellers couldn’t access (company financial performance, org charts, new strategic priorities, leadership changes, technologies in use, on and on and on).

To get this information, sellers had to ask the buyers to share it. To my mind, that era of Sales domination never existed.

NOW: The magic weapon that Buyers are using – Sellers can use too

Yes, Buyers can access a litany of information about my products, my company, my competitors, my magic quadrant, etc.

But I can use that same exact tool - the internet - to learn about them. In under 15 minutes, here's what I can do:

• Listen to their last earnings call
• Read strategic guidance on their stock price
• Find quotes from their CIO and CMO
• Gather the technologies in use at their company
• Learn what types of roles they are hiring for and where they are expanding
• Read reviews of their comp &  culture from dozens of current + former employees
• See what emails they open, pages/video/presentations they view
• Capture the titles, tenure, role & contact information of just about anyone in their organization

Seems pretty symmetrical to me.

Net net: the more things change...

I’m not suggesting that exactly what worked 20 years will work today. But to any Reps hesitant to pick up the phone, I offer this:

Stop worrying about who has “all the power.”
Your buyers want to build better businesses, go help them do that.
Find the right information to start a conversation.
Context matters.
She who sets the vision, bends the sale in her direction.
Sell for competitive advantage.
Your competition has access to the same tools you do - so remember Audaces fortuna iuvat.

Think I’m totally off base? Let me know in the comments below.
   

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Connect with Matt on Twitter and Google+

If your prospects seem apathetic, they may be rational. “Rational apathy” is when people perceive a problem to be so small, or the solution to be so enormous that they become apathetic about it. After all, we cannot individually take on every woe in the world. In commerce, rational apathy exists when a problem does not, or the market doesn’t perceive a problem, or solving the problem seems insanely complicated. The word “rational” is included in the concept because prospects are making gut-level decisions concerning their needs and alternative (in)actions. Lackluster concern comes from the perceived effort and benefit in solving the problem, and takes one of many possible forms including but not limited to: No Pain: Prospects perceive that they do not face a threat, the pain within their situation, or that the pain is small enough to endure. Too big to correct: Solving the problem appears to be … Continue reading →

There is one factor that is extremely limiting to sales processes worldwide. Most do not accurately follow the ebb and flow of buyers. A customized sales process is an excellent tool. However, it cannot be viewed in isolation. Instead, you must account for the fluidity in the buyer’s journey. You can do this by incorporating dynamic personas and buying process maps. These tools help to anticipate buyer trends and keep pace with the buyer.  

In this article I cover the value of persona-based selling. To assist you further, download the Persona Builder. You can access the guide when you sign-up for SBI’s Sales & Marketing Research Review. Discover insights and market trends from SBI’s research in 2013. The Persona Builder helps to track buyer anthropology with the use of LinkedIn.

In “Teams, Streams and Provider Dreams,” Hank Barnes provides background on buyer variability and fluctuations.  He also shares an excellent illustration by Gartner which captures the subject well. While the illustration is specific to technology, it is applicable to other industries. How often do we see the buyer take one step forward and two steps back? The best way to align with this buyer behavior is with buyer personas and a detailed buyer process map.

Utilizing 3 Common Buying Trends in your Buyer Process Map

There are a variety of buying trends you may be seeing with your customers. These trends will vary by product and industry. However, they are likely consistent within a given industry. If you can get a handle on these trends, you can leverage them. You’ll know when, as well as why, buyers might withdraw or push forward. See a few examples below:

1. Buying by Committee – More and more companies are moving in this direction. As they do, the need for multiple personas and buyer process maps increases.  Uncovering the buyer’s journey for primary committee members is critical. When you understand your buyers, you are better equipped to help them maneuver the sales cycle. This isn’t about manipulation, it’s about selling the way the customers want to buy.   
2. Late-Stage Vendor Engagement – Now, buyers progress 60-75% through the buying cycle before engaging with a sales rep. This leaves you with 1/3 – 1/4 of the journey to convert the sale. This isn’t a lot. As a result, understanding your personas, and how they interact with the journey, is crucial. Where are they in the journey when they enter? How can you anticipate their possible reactions to your conversations? Buyers are adjusting preferences as they gather more and more information. You can still win by entering late if you “out-educate” the other vendors. Be helpful and not sales-y. With a limited window, you need to hit on all cylinders.
3. Limited Access to Buyers – Email, caller ID, voicemail, and the like all contribute to limited access. Nowadays, buyers realize they don’t have to engage with a rep if they don’t want to. They’d rather go through the process on their own time. Unfortunately, this allows them to reach conclusions on their own that you’d maybe prefer they not reach. Identify how your buyer prefers to communicate, and when. This will help you engage on their terms, and make positive interaction more likely.

Succeeding in these 3 areas above requires a thorough understanding of your buyer. Download the Persona Builder and get started today. This tool will lead you through the process of creating accurate Buyer Personas. By utilizing LinkedIn information, you can get a very clear picture of your typical buyers. Analyze the relevant connections (hopefully they are Tagged as potential buyers). Examine their recommendations, endorsements, and connections. This will tell you a lot about their personality and how they may buy. The Builder will help you compile this information into a usable Buyer Persona.

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Sales Training Article: 4 Things Not to Do at Sales Kickoff

By Tony Albachiara, Sales Benchmark Index (SBI)

Less than 60 days remain in 2013. Over these remaining weeks, conversations with SVP-Sales have focused on 3 areas:

1.What can I still do to Make the Number in 2013?

2.How should I be preparing to Make the Number in 2014?

3.Sales Kick-Off is right around the corner - what am I going to do?

Matt Sharrers recently wrote a great blog that addresses questions 1 and 2. I recommend you read it and download the tool. It will help you balance Q4. Schedule a review of your 2014 SKO at your office here. We will review your plan using the SKO Planning Guide. 

Now, I'll do my best to address #3. As 2013 winds down, 2014 naturally ramps up. SKO is onsales kick-off the horizon. Most organizations want the arrangements completed by the holidays. My next two blogs will help you put on the best SKO. Engage your employees and experience a great ROI.

Schedule this 1-day Refresher Workshop to your SKO agenda so your reps can brush up on critical selling skills to start the new year right. You can also try any of our newly scheduled 2014 public sales training workshops just added to the calendar.

In many cases, SKO is the only time the whole organization is together. Recent research revealed that the average cost is approximately $3,000 per person. Depending on your size, you could easily spend 2 million dollars (or more). Just like any business decision, you need to generate a positive ROI.

How do you match up to the SKOs put on by world-class organizations? Make sure you aren't wasting dollars in the wrong places. Sign up for the SBI Research Tour. When you sign up, you'll get access to the SKO Planning Guide.

Now, I'll discuss the top 4 SKO money-wasting activities. Here are the things you want to avoid.

4 Things to Avoid at SKO This Year:

1) New Product Launch - In my experience this is a huge waste of time. With such a large group and such little time, you're very limited. You're unable to get tactically involved. Any time [wasted] spent discussing the product will have to be redone after SKO. An article by George de Los Reyes explains the 5 Keys to a Successful New Product Launch. SKO is not the way to do it. Instead, spend that time engaging reps with something that will pay dividends in 2014?

The only time a product launch is acceptable is if it relates to big picture. For example:

1.Discussion of a new buyer persona

2.Addressing new buyer needs

3.Reassessing the buyer's journey

Otherwise, forget about it.

2) Hiring The Wrong Guest Speaker - Choose your guest speakers wisely. Many organizations try and make a splash by hiring a big name. That's great to create buzz. But at the end of the day, it ends up just being entertainment. There's no real value provided to your team. They aren't increasing sales skills, tactics, or strategy. Don't waste a platform that could be very engaging and helpful for your team. Hire a speaker that can tie into the theme of SKO, and better your team.

If you want to spend money on entertainment, I'm all for it. But if you're going to make it entertainment, make it entertainment. Invest in better meals or the welcome gift.

Or better yet, invest in your team. Secure a new sales tool, or a training session that will boost their productivity.

3) Letting the Execs Go Rogue with the Microphone - Not every executive has to speak at SKO. A "C" in front of their job title doesn't entitle them to the microphone. The truth is, in most cases they're speaking for their own benefit. SKO is about your organization as a whole. Your reps are going to be wondering all weekend, "What's in this for me?" They want to get something out of these sessions. Let the execs talk that will interest and aid those attending. You don't want to spend $3,000 for a rep to yawn through half of it. That's $1,500 wasted (multiplied by the number of people attending). Line up the execs that will add value, and let the rest talk at the cocktail hour.

4) Death by PowerPoint - Sales guys are generally a specific breed. They don't learn through concepts and theories. They're at their best when interacting with people. They learn through interaction. They need to be doing something. As a result, PowerPoint is a tool that should be used sparingly. Make this known to all of this year's speakers. A few alternatives to Death by PowerPoint are:

1.Role playing

2.Contests

3.Games

4.Forced interaction

5.Peer to Peer learning exercises

These are the ways to truly engage your sales guys. They will learn much better through the hands-on interaction. They'll enjoy themselves much more as well.

You don't want your team leaving SKO annoyed or feeling like they wasted their time. That's no good for morale going into 2014. You want them to leave rejuvenated, ready to tackle 2014.

Don't get caught off guard by these too-often-seen SKO pitfalls. Download the SKO Planning Guide to get on the right track today.

In my next blog, I'll discuss some of the "Must-Haves" for this year's SKO. I'll outline what world-class organizations are doing, and help you leverage this.

Is there anything you are doing (or not doing) to prepare for SKO? Please leave a comment. Your peers would enjoy learning from you.

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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.

New accountability expectations across sales and marketing departments, coupled with increased demand for online content, are changing the playing field for sales teams. How you connect with your prospects can ultimately have an impact on meeting sales goals. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

As you might imagine, I kinda like the funnel. It’s actually not a passionate deal for me. I did name myself the funnelholic, but if you don’t like the funnel, so be it. Interestingly, when people bash the funnel when I am around, they like to say: “No offense Craig”. Like I am genetically a funnel. Since we started doing the Madlibs series, I have collected a lot of opinions on funnels from sales and marketing experts. It’s a range. Some people like, some don’t. The results are a fun read. So read on and then give me your take on the funnel in the comments. I am not sure what to make of this photo by FaceMePLS…but it seems to be a dude with a funnel stuck in him

 

 

1. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is my favorite controversy. It’s like everyone is looking at me for my reaction when some blogger comes out and bashes it. Please go ahead and make the point that buyers don’t go in straight line. It’s still a funnel when you look at it – Tons of people at the top (known as leads) — less people at the bottom (known as deals or revenue). Funnelholic
2.  In b2b, the idea of a funnel is being extended from prospect to customer to advocate. Nick Bell, Eloqua
3. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is still relevant; it’s just more complex and should be customized for each company and type of sale. Garth Moulton, ScanBizCards
4. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is also misunderstood. Jay Hidalgo, Jayhidalgo.com
5. In b2b, the idea of a funnel: has changed from marketing just stuffing the top, to a more collaborative full-funnel approach with Sales. Brian Bachofner, InsideView
6. In B2B, the idea of a funnel is oversimplified. Liza Sperling, ClearSlide
7. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is still valuable for creating process and consistency across marketing and sales organizations for how they execute, as long as you don’t go so far to assume that your buyer actually follows the funnel from top to bottom. Matt Heinz, Heinz Marketing
8. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is one way to represent leads at a specific sales stage. Like any metaphor, be it a waterfall, pyramid, etc. all are designed to show where things are working and breaking during the buying cycle.  Greg Hyer, KnowledgeTree
9. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is: multi dimensional, its a cloud. Mike Damphousse, GreenLeads
10. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is still important. You need simple, clear goals to lead people. Trying to motivate a busy sales team to work their leads through a “multi-channel buyer’s journey of inbound content engagement” (or whatever) won’t get you there. Vernon Niven, NeedTagger
11. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is not synonymous with the buyer’s journey. Amanda Maksymiw, Lattice Engines
12. In b2b, the idea of a funnel encourages enormous waste. Every lead deserves a resolution. Simon Blackburn, CedarCone
13. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is a better analogy than anything I could come up with. Kyle Porter, SalesLoft
14. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is still there. Not going anywhere… Chris Snell, Care.com
15. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is: still alive but flattening. Tony Zambito, Tonyzambito.com
16. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is still a useful way to focus on key conversion points in the customer journey. Karl Wirth, Evergage
17. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is crucial to sales and marketing. Aseem Badshah, Socedo
18. In B2B, the idea of a funnel gets brought up too much. We all know it and get it. We agree that it’s important. You put lots in up top…smaller amount comes out of the bottom. Got it! Peter Gracey, AG SalesWorks
19. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is omnipresent. Joe Chernov, Kinvey
20. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is still relevant despite protestations to the contrary. Toby Murdock, Kapost
21. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is important. Koka Sexton
22. 10.  In b2b, the idea of a funnel is getting over complicated. If people spent as much time disqualifying as they did pouring crap into the top of the funnel we wouldn’t need a 22 stage funnel with diagrams that look like eye charts. Trish Bertuzzi, Bridge Group Inc.
23. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is: Dynamic. Don’t get complacent with a linear approach. Mobile is changing how and when we reach and engage our audiences. Shannon Ryan, Archetype DNA
24. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is a helpful visual tool for understanding the buyer’s journey.  At Vorsight we have funnels written everywhere on whiteboard walls throughout our office. Steve Richard, Vorsight
25. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is - over (for now).  Until we can get past first and last touch attribution and measure the impact of multiple touches via social, it’s just a dashboard in Salesforce used to beat up marketing for more leads at the top. Gretchen DeKnikker, SocialPandas
26. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is – not as straight a pipe as it used to be. Jason Stewart, Annuitas
27. 10. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is – consistency.  Your pipe, funnel, or whatever analogy you want – must be consistent.  It will go up and down, but if you’re always mindful to address your funnel, you’ll be in good shape. Jamie Shanks, Sales4Life
28. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is essential. Mike Volpe, Hubspot
29. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is essential to understanding your buying cycle and the marketing that goes along with it. Jason Miller, LinkedIn
30. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is always morphing. We now have waterfalls and other ways to explain how marketing and sales are working together to create an environment for buyers to buy. Lori Richardson, Scoremoresales
31. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is- a great diagnostic tool. A funnel will never close a deal. But, AIDA, for example, has been helping sales teams craft compelling value propositions for years. The funnel allows a team to understand, and remove, the revenue bottlenecks. Greg Alexander, Sales Benchmark Index
32. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is as relevant today as it has ever been. Sure, there are lots of new, cool views of the funnel – but the reality is that the funnel is a great way to picture and manage lead flow. Dan McDade, Point Clear
33. In b2b, the idea of a funnel still exists but movement through the funnel is generally not be linear.  I think we need “a funnel” to visualize the steps in a “selling” process because there is a natural progression with measurable stages or gates.  Businesses are ultimately using that funnel concept to forecast sales.  On the marketing side, I think we have much better data to expose how someone progresses inside, outside and around the funnel.  The challenge in marketing is trying to keep that buyer on the linear path and help sales be more predictable. Howie Levy, TwoTwentyTwo Media
34. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is killing real progress. Justin Gray, LeadMD
35. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is important and needs to consider that leads don’t necessarily follow a traditional path anymore. As Jim Keenan puts it, “A lead today can be a complaint on Twitter, a question on LinkedIn or discussion on a Facebook page.” I think companies need to think differently about how they capture these types of leads and integrate them into a process that helps them nurture, qualify, kick over to sales and then measure and track results. Barbara Giamanco, SCS-Connect
36. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is becoming antiquated. Brian Vellmure, Brianvellmure.com
37. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is outdated. Think concentric circles… Dan Waldschmidt, Edgy Conversations
38. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is a good way to align marketing and sales internally, but should not be misunderstood for the buyer’s journey. Carlos Hidalgo, Annuitas
39. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is critical to the long term valuation of an organization. Whatever shape your funnel, the process for creating demand, converting demand into opportunities and opportunities into sales is the lifeblood of a business. Dennis Shiao, DNN Software
40. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is  not something I ever think about. I much prefer to go after the targeted few. Jill Konrath, JillKonrath.com
41. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is myopic. So is the idea of a waterfall, a pipeline or any other metaphor that leads marketers to believe that leads flow in a linear fashion. Steve Gershik, Identified
42. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is still relevant but not perfect. It’s more of a cloud or bow tie now…Matt Heinz, Heinz Marketing (2x!)
43. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is: misunderstood, talk to 3 sales people and you’ll get five different definitions, which is better that the 6 you get if you talk to three VP of Sales. While it is not important to have universal definition, it is important to have an organizational one. Tibor Shanto, Renbor Sales Solutions 
44. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is dependent on the configuration. The classic funnel has always reminded me of a meat grinder. My model places a higher value on all prospects. Gary Hart, Sales Du Jour
45. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is just a metaphor for the buying process. It was never alive and will never be dead. You can draw any shape you want to reflect the process but in the end it comes down to buyer roles, buyer needs, the types and places buyers go to find solutions. Mapping that process will always be required. Michael Brenner, SAP
46. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is turning on its side and losing its defined shape. (No reference to Craig, btw) The assumption that we pour leads in at the top and force them to come out the bottom as customers has always bothered me. Buyers move freely and at will into and out of the buying process. A marketer’s job is to engage them enough to have them choose to take the next step with them. Ardath Albee, Marketing Interactions
47. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is to provide the sales person a set of metrics to help identify whether he/she is going to make the number. David Brock, Partners in Excellence

In b2b, the idea of a funnel is…(insert your take in the comments below)

We are approached by many companies seeking to hire their first sales person. This is an exciting time for young companies and often it is excess demand that seemingly requires the addition of a new sales person. In some cases, the founders are unable to effectively sell themselves and hope that hiring a new sales person will allow them to focus their time elsewhere. This is a grave mistake and we advise against hiring in these cases (see CEO Question: Should I Learn to Sell or Hire a Sales Person?).

Hiring The First Rep is Usually a Huge Gamble

First and foremost, in most start-up companies, sales is the most important aspect of success. Hiring a new sales person is a huge gamble, so why would a founder want to take this risk and assign this most important aspect of success to someone else?

A fledgling company has no history of success that would dictate that the new sales person will be successful. Furthermore, customers dealing with a start-up, particularly if the offering is new, want to deal with company founders who know the offering intimately and can have meaningful conversations about the product benefits.  A founder has to accept the reality that a sales person in a start-up is like a boxer fighting with one arm tied behind his back.

So what if the sales person is not successful?

If the founders have effectively resigned from the sales effort and placed all the responsibility on the new sales person, and that new sales person fails to sell at the required clip, the founders have no contingency sales efforts to support cash flow requirements. They also don’t have the key customer relationships to pick up things if they are required to react quickly and jump back into the sales effort. Furthermore, the founders will not have been exposed to valuable feedback directly from customers on critical missing features and benefits in the product or service.

Even if the founders do not consider themselves strong sales people, they are usually capable of generating sales and we always recommend that they stay very involved in the sales effort until at least the company has successfully launched.

To your success!

The post Start-Up Sales and Hiring Advice: Don’t Stop Selling appeared first on Peak Sales Recruiting.

I continue to enjoy the insightful discussions I have with sales and marketing experts in our PowerViews series. There are a few topics that come up regularly. For this ‘best of’ edition we revisit the hot topics—social media, mobile marketing, sales lead follow up. Look for some of these topics to be further explored by upcoming guests Jill Rowley of Oracle and Kyle Porter of SalesLoft. Enjoy!

Each interview is available on our blog and YouTube channel. In the blogs each interview is broken down into smaller segments that allow you to watch brief clips around a specific topic.

Koka Sexton, LinkedIn, People Still Buy from People, Regardless of Technology

Click to start video at this point—Koka’s “eureka” moment was when he recognized the value in connecting his Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. Twitter is more of a running conversation, where people relax and divulge more personal information. LinkedIn is more buttoned up. But if you can get to know people on both levels—personally and professionally—you gain a different insight as a salesperson. This cross pollination fosters relationships and widens your network.

Peter Bourke, The Complex Sale, Unselling: The Less You Sell, the More You Win

Click to start video at this point—Want to win more? Then sell less, Peter says. Does this sound antithetical? Does it go against your instincts as a salesman? Probably. But Peter says the more you sell, the less the client trusts you to tell them the truth. That’s right: the more you sell, the less inclined the client is to listen.

In reality, the more you sell, the less you win. In his ebook Unselling: Sell Less to Win More, Peter will help you shift the buyer-seller relationship from subservient to collaborative.

Lori Richardson, Score More Sales, Are You Tenacious About Sales Follow Up?

Click to start video at this point—Lori regularly encounters issues with sales follow up. It’s so easy for your mind to trick you into thinking that when you don’t hear back from someone they must not be interested, but if you have something of value that you really feel is beneficial and you feel a company is a good fit for the solution then it’s up to you to continue trying to contact them until they tell you directly that they’re not interested.

I shared my thoughts with Lori on a “legislative branch” being established for a period of time to monitor leads, so that if there has been agreement between marketing and sales on a lead definition, and leads aren't being followed up, there is a responsible party in place to look for the reason.

Lori agreed that if marketing does have a process and they feel they’ve qualified a lead through that process, but sales doesn’t follow up, then yes, someone else should look at it and see what the issue is.

I also asked Lori about the challenges around the lack of insight from salespeople into their sales activity and the sales process. Lori sees this also as an ongoing issue that happens every day in sales. She regularly sees leads being hidden until a rep knows there is a solid opportunity. The challenge this presents is the ability to justify investing in an expensive comprehensive CRM tool that has been customized, when in fact it’s not reflecting the true data.

Jamie Turner, The 60 Second Marketer, Are We Returning to the Days of "One-to-Many" Marketing?

Click to start video at this point—When asked about marketing automation and if he felt we were returning to a one-to-many marketing approach, Jamie expressed that with the increased use of marketing automation, even on the social front, it has become somewhat depersonalized. Now more than a listening tool social can in some cases become very automated, without the personal nuance that one-to-one marketing lends itself to. However, Jamie says that this has to happen. Initially, social media marketers had to listen to what was being said about them and then analyze it. This took an enormous amount of time and required a lot of manual labor. Now the data has become so massive this process is becoming automated.

Jamie asked my thoughts on marketing automation and I shared a favorite expression of mine that, “Not every senior executive wants to be treated like the human equivalant of a pinball, only getting your attention when they've hit the right bumpers and scored enough points."

I feel that marketing automation can be a good thing and we use it ourselves, however, the reality is that the more senior decision makers are more averse to giving up their digital body language. I recently read an article that the more average sales reps flock to inbound leads and the more successful strategic reps go after outbound leads.

In addition, companies are rushing to focus on big data because of all the promises and press it’s received. Unfortunately they are forgetting about segmentation and how instead they should be looking at the individual performances.

By Dan McDade

Talk about sales, and immediately the image of the slick used car salesman comes to mind – with his heavily gelled hair, quick-fire sales pitch, and the musky smell of cologne hanging around him. Or maybe you would think of the numerous times you’ve been called by a random telemarketer (how on earth did he get my number, anyway?). Or what about that guy who goes door-to-door pressurizing your neighbors to buy his newfangled vacuum cleaner?

Unfortunately, it seems that most of the images we have of salespeople lands dead center of the negative zone. It seems like all they want to do is sell us their ware, regardless of what they talk to us about. They might be asking us how our day was, but in our minds it sounds more like, “Give me an opportunity to sell my product NOW”. It’s hard to win as a salesperson.

You Give Sales A Bad Name

To be sure, many sales professionals tend to give the sales industry a bad name. Too many times, salespeople are only concerned with the bottomline, that is, to sell their ware, rather than genuinely communicating real value.

A call from a telemarketer always begins with “How are you?” and then swiftly launches into a tirade of one-way monologue (which is the sales pitch). No wonder people on the receiving end immediately get turned off once a phone call is revealed to be from a telemarketer. After all, how can you trust someone who you don’t know at all, or even know where he/she got your number from (which is really creepy)? Worst still, even if you were willing to give this salesperson a chance, you’d hardly be able to get a word in between his well-polished sales pitch. Salespeople simply aren’t creating any real value for the listener.

It gets worse – many companies have sales departments that still subscribe to traditional high-pressure sales tactics. A salesman from British Columbia claims that his sales manager instructed him to run through a canned presentation with potential clients, and if the client doesn’t get hooked, to call the manager down to browbeat the prospect. This might have worked in a pre-Internet world. However, with so much information at our fingertips nowadays, the prospect is well-equipped to fend off such heavy-handed blows.

Let The Seller Beware

High-pressure tactics can never work in today’s world. It may indeed contribute to an anti-sale, whereby prospects get so turned-off by such sales tactics that they end up posting negative reviews of the company in various social media channels or forums.

Daniel Pink, author of the bestseller To Sell Is Human, notes that the principle of the marketplace has transitioned from caveat emptor to caveat venditor – that is, from “Let the buyer beware” to “Let the seller beware”. Historically, buyers have always been on the losing end due to a lack of information or expertise on products or services. With reviews, ratings and online portals readily available on the Internet today, sellers are now the ones who have to be careful, lest they be marked as untrustworthy or dishonest – or just plain annoying.

Listen, And Be Honest

At the end of the day, one thing is for sure – salespeople need to learn how to listen to, and be transparent, with the customer. To know what the customer wants, salespeople need to listen; to sell to the customer, salespeople need to assure the customer of their honesty.

If you have read the venerable children’s book, Paddle to the Sea, then you can understand how frustrating it can be to get a piece of content out the door.

In Paddle, a boy carves a wooden guy in a canoe and releases it. The book tells the tale of the carving’s trip down rivers, across the Great Lakes and, four years later, into the ocean

My friend Joanie has finally seen her version of a carved canoe (which looks a lot like a white paper about clinical best practices for whatever nasty pharma product she’s peddling, hit the ocean

Joanie’s paper took her about two weeks to write. She checked her references, blew the sawdust off and chucked it into Approval Creek, where the current caught it, whirled it around a few times and sent on its way to the Product Team. A few curious product managers stopped jumping at flies long enough to inspect it and then went back to the cool depths of their Gantt charts. Joanie waited as it snagged on the log jam of the Group Product Manager’s backlog. Five weeks and three escalations later, it bobbed to the surface with a couple of revisions, some questions about fonts and a cough drop stuck to it.

On it went to the slow eddy where the designers added some fun charts and graphs before it went off the cliff and into the punishing Class V misery that is the legal review. This bit often ends, as Paddle nearly did, in a sawmill.

In Joanie’s case, what emerged at the far end was a battered old thing with more redactions than a Senate expense report. By the time she negotiated some personality and joy back into the thing, it was a well-illustrated apology with three pages of footnotes. But dammit, it was content, and that, apparently, is what B2B marketing is all about.

Too bad Joanie’s hard-won paper will join the 60-70 percent of B2B content that Sirius Decisions says sales never uses. I don’t have the heart to tell her, but I’m fairly sure when she figures it out, she will wonder, as we all do, why our Squirrels beg and plead for content, which they promptly ignore. Here is my theory, and, surprise, it’s not really a Squirrel problem.

The first reason they don’t use new content is that they don’t understand it. Face it, most marketers are pretty terrible at deploying content. We figure that after so long in the water, everyone knows about it and they all have our intimate understanding of its intent, value and proper use. So we fling it at sales as if they were expecting it all along. Posting a piece of content onto your sales portal or intranet, is about as effective as not writing it at all.

Joanie is a good marketer and this white paper is not her first rodeo. Years ago, the birth of a new white paper in her world would have been met with at least a bit of pageantry: a fancy roll-out, a kind email from a Corporate Overlord, perhaps. Now it’s just another meal deal combo from the content drive-thru. Joanie dealt with this by holding a webinar to educate her friends in sales about the white paper. Predictably, she heard crickets on her webinar instead of excited sales people.

I think we’ve discussed the need for marketing to market marketing to sales. If your Squirrels don’t believe your propaganda, how the hell are they supposed to get anyone else excited about it?

And we know that sales teams don’t like surprises very much either, which is why we need to make sure our content is on their radar while we’re still creating it. I’m pretty sure a webinar is overkill, but it never hurts to crash the weekly sales scrum and talk up your content plans. If that’s not your style, pay a visit to the Squirrel Kings and get them excited about the content, then keep feeding them updates so they can help you sell it to sales.

When Paddle finally got to the ocean, it slipped out the mouth of the St. Lawrence River looking, for all the world, like a piece of driftwood. Much of our content slips similarly unnoticed into the ocean of sales stuff. We need to find new ways to throw this stuff down with an audible amount of enthusiasm and a meaningful amount of direction if we expect content to earn its keep.

Despite all the preparation you’ve done, this thing you’ve been working with, honing, coaxing to life is brand new to your Squirrels and has about as much significance as your last note about updating the CRM database.

Remember, sales doesn’t hate your content, they just don’t understand it. Their brains are full of prices, discounting rules, open-ended questions and golf handicaps. How can you expect them to keep track of your latest infographic if they don’t know what it’s for and how it helps them?

I’m a fan of the crisp one-page overview, but however you roll it out, I promise, the 20 minutes you invest in helping your content make sense to a Squirrel, will make sure it doesn’t end up in the same sad file as their last team-building certificate.

Next time we’ll talk about the perils of letting our content get between our Squirrels and their nuts.

Here’s our mantra: You need to know what people think, not what they say they think.

And, not so much a mantra as a universal truth – commodities notwithstanding – consumers may say they want “cheap,” but that’s usually not what they really expect. Oh, sure, they want to pay a little as possible, but it’s not the way they’ll actually behave when they get around to factoring in what they really expect. The “cheap” part is the rational aspect of decision making, but the expectations part is mostly emotional, and it’s a really good idea to have a fix on those expectations before creating products and taking them to market, because relying only on what people say, can take you down the wrong highway.

For example, four years ago we wrote about the Nano, from India’s Tata Motors. It sold for under $1,800.00. No, not a typo, it was priced to drive off the lot at just under eighteen hundred dollars! Sure, this was the Indian market, but it was conceived as the people’s car. Small, economical, and because the target audience said they’d buy such a car if it was “cheap.” And it was. Cheap, I mean. In lots of ways. Low sticker price, sure. But the car, too. It had a tiny, 0.6-liter engine with only 33 horsepower. The front and rear bumpers were plastic and most of the construction was glued, not welded. Seats couldn’t be adjusted. It had only one side mirror and windshield wiper, hand-cranked windows, a manual transmission and no airbags, hubcaps, or radio. And no AC. It didn’t even have a glove compartment. Sure the engine sometimes sounded like a broken lawnmower, but the Nano got 50 miles to the gallon, so what’s to complain about? Basic car? Sure. Cheap? For sure.

OK, back to the say-versus-think paradigm. Automotive brand success – all brand success, for that matter – is based upon how well a brand meets or exceeds customer expectations for the category Ideal. Expectations will vary by category and demography and geography, to be sure, but most of those expectations are emotionally-driven (no pun intended), many of which go unarticulated. And brands that are able to meet real expectation always do better in the marketplace. But, since folks said they would buy something cheap, Tata Motors produced a really cheap car and thought it was going to be a real growth area for them.

But after nearly 5 years, sales ran out of gas. Why? Well, even though consumers said they wanted “cheap,” there’s cheap (as in price/rational) and there’s cheap (as in image/emotional), and – as usually happens – emotion won, and Tata Motors lost. Turns out that consumers really wanted a more upscale image, expectations for automotive imagery being really high even among the more price-sensitive consumer segments, and pretty much true around the world. So Tata is bringing the Nano in for an image tune-up, to move it from “common” to “cool.”

With that in mind, the new models will have hubcaps. And a Bluetooth-enabled stereo with four speakers, a more comfortable interior, and chrome trim. Oh, and a glove compartment. The top-end Nano LX will cost about twice what the original models cost, so just under $3,600.00. Their new advertising tagline for the new models? “Celebrate Awesomeness.”

Of course, when it comes to “awesomeness,” you may expect something else. Which is probably why it’s a good idea to measure what your target audience really thinks and really expects before you disappoint them – and your shareholders.

 

It’s not uncommon for revenue to slide. It happens to all sales organizations at one time or another. Revenue being down, isn’t the most difficult problem. Knowing why revenue is down and where to look is the biggest challenge. This post is gonna lay the four areas CSO’s/Heads of Sales should be looking if their revenue is on the slide.

When sales are down there are only 4 levers leadership can pull to improve sales. That’s it. Knowing what these levers are and how the organization is faring in each of them can be the difference between further decline or growth.

When sales are down organization have tendency to run around throwing shit against the wall hoping something sticks. The pressure to perform in sales is huge and when performance is down the pressure is ratcheted up. Too often, reactive, misaligned, and ineffective initiatives are put in place, rarely yielding the desired effects.

The best thing to do to keep this from happening is to break your sales team into manageable sections; strategy, structure, people, process. Each of these pillars represents the critical parts of sales and are the only focused areas sales leadership controls that can move the number.

Strategy:

What’s the go to market strategy? What strategy/strategies are you executing to? Do the strategies map to the stated goals. Are they creative and provide a competitive advantage? Has the strategy taken into consideration the market opportunities and the competitive challenges? Does it clearly lay out the direction or the current state/future state?

Take a look at your strategy? Is it still relevant? Are you executing to it well? Do you have one at all? Is it working? Does it need to be adjusted? Is it still aligned with the market trends and opportunities? Is it big enough? Ask yourself, do you have the right strategy in place to be successful?

If the strategy is wrong. If the strategy is not aligned with the market, if you don’t have a strategy or you are executing it poorly your probability for success is very low. The strategy is how you are leveraging your resources, your people, the processes, capital and more. When sales are falling, take a look at your sales strategy. Put it through the ringer and make sure it’s the right one. (You can get a killer strategy developement template here)

Structure: 

Structure follows strategy. Structure is the frame for strategy, it’s what gives it strength. If the structure doesn’t support the strategy, everything comes tumbling down. Structure is how the organization is set up, it’s; services, inside sales, outside sales, sales engineers, sales operations, sales enablement, etc. Structure comprises of the components that drive the sales strategy and allows for execution.

If the structure isn’t aligned with the strategy or is poorly constructed, needing inside sales and only having outside, requiring hunting teams, but building farming teams, you are in trouble. Step back and look at your current structure. Does it map to the strategy. It is optimal for creating the results you are looking for? Is there anything missing? Comp plans are also part of structure. Do your comp plans support your strategy? How well does your structure support the strategy?

Take the time to evaluate your organizations structure. Map it to the needs of the strategy. Make sure it’s developed in a way that drives the strategy and not inhibit it. Structure is too often missed, but very important.

People:

This is the biggest problem with sales organizations period.  Having the right people in the right roles is without a doubt the greatest challenge to sales organizations. It’s people who have to execute and if they don’t nothing happens. Therefore, if the people part isn’t correct, nothing else matters.

The key here is to make sure you have the right people. Do you have the right skill sets performing the right roles? Do you have the right cultural fit? Do you have the people you need to execute the strategy? Knowing this with confidence is critical.

Taking the time to evaluate the team and whether or not you have the right people in the right roles could be the single most effective thing you can do for success. Build a tool that allows you to measure the team in relationship to the goals and strategy. Take an inventory of the type of skills required to execute, then rate the entire team across those skills. Know how well positioned your people are for success and know what skills areas you are deficient. This knowledge will provide you with a roadmap on what needs to be addressed and where you are strong. It will keep you from developing a people or talent gap. (You can get a great sales team assessment template here)

Process:

To keep everything running smoothly, to maintain velocity and efficiency and to ensure the team is operating effectively, processes have to be nailed. Lack of process is like throwing a monkey wrench into the gears. Bad processes can impede time to market, undermine execution, increase costs, upset customers, affect time to deliver etc. No matter how good the strategy is, how sound the structure and how talented the people, if the processes aren’t crushing it, you’re leaving money on the table.

Stop and take a good hard look at your processes. What does your sales process look like? Does it align with your buyers, buying process. How solid is your pipeline meeting process? Do you have a coaching process or cadence? Is it working? What does your people development process look like? What about your lead management process, lead follow up or lost deal process? Are you getting the most our of your strategy, structure and people with killer, effective, efficient processes?

Implementing light, functional and effective processes is like putting nitrous in your car — boom!  Take the time to evaluate your current processes and ensure they too align with your strategy. Make sure they support the structure and ensure they empower the people.

When sales numbers are down or you want to get more revenue, there are only four areas leadership can tinker with — that’s it! They can address the strategy. They can redo the structure. They can hire, fire or fix the people. They can implement new processes or get rid of the old bad ones. That’s it folks. The best way to manage a sales organization is to manage it across these four categories. It’s to keep a score card on each of the pillars and continually measure them.

Step back and look at your sales organization. What is your strategy? Now, grade it. Does your structure support the strategy? Now, grade it. Look at your people, are they the right team? Are the right people in the right roles? Grade them. How effective are your processes? Do they enable growth? Do they empower and accelerate? Grade them.

Start running your business along these 4 sections. They are the only levers you can pull to make your number, so you’re better off knowing where you stand ahead of time. Because, if things go bad, that’s where you’ll go to fix em.

 

 

 

 

In most sales situations, you’re pitching to an individual. Imagine it now, you can see the whites of his or her eyes and know when you drop your punch line; she’s going to laugh. Generally, sales situations are one-to-one. It’s powerful and as sales people, what we’re best at.

But in advertising, you don’t have that luxury. You can’t “see” your customer, and it’s difficult to understand their reactions to your pitch.

So why care about advertising if you’re in sales?

In Sales, you’re pitching one-to-one. In Advertising, you’re pitching one-to-many.

If you’re a fan of Mad Men, you may have heard Roger Sterling referring to the book Confessions of an Advertising Man, written by David Ogilvy. Ogilvy is considered the father of modern advertising, and his book is the prerequisite reading for anyone in the advertising field. The book is peppered with provocative and direct language like, “Pay people peanuts and you get monkeys.” You can take all sorts of lessons from Ogilvy’s book. While the book is directed to advertiser, this blog is directed to you to help you sell. Ogilvy may have written a book about advertising but he may not have realized how many of these lessons can easily be applied to sales and sales leadership.

How Ogilvy Can Teach Us About Sales & Leadership

“Your Client is Your Wife”

A lot of sales pitches today assume your customers are missing information. In order to fix this, your pitch sounds “pitchy” or “sleazy” as you try and sell our product instead of have a conversation. (Hint: if you’re pushing your “features and benefits“, you’re probably not doing a good job of selling.)

Ogilvy writes, “The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything.”

This statement by Ogilvy shows his approach to treat customers with respect. In fact, he seeks equal respect between your customer and your wife. As you prepare your pitch, practice with a significant other or close friend. How do they react to your sales trailer? Instead of making the focus of your sale be on making your product seem interesting, make your customer feel interested.

“Monkeys versus Humans”

Which would you rather have working for you: monkeys or humans? Ogilvy understood the rigors of the advertising world, and in order to get the best out of his team he treated them like human beings—humans as opposed to monkeys. He wrote: “We treat our people like human beings. We help them when they are in trouble-with their jobs, with illness, with alcoholism, and so on.”

What is your company culture? Do you know how your other co-workers are feeling? Often when we focus purely on results and not the salespeople, we don’t get the best results. Selling is a tough job and it can be incredibly draining if you don’t have a human connection with your coworkers, teammates, boss, and clients. Sales leaders should stop treating salespeople like monkeys and more like the human beings that they are. And you know why? Happy employees sell more.

“Never Stop Testing”

“Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.”

The more you test, the better your pitch. The same way you take the time to research your competitors, take it to research and improve your own offerings and pitch. Practice one version of your sales trailer or pitch for a few weeks. Notice if customers or prospects either react, question, or don’t react to it. Think about changing it slightly and trying this new version for a few weeks. Be disciplined about practicing these different versions and assessing which ones are working for you. Then, when you find one that really seems to grab people’s attention, get your entire team using it on a daily basis.

“Good Products Can Be Sold By Honest Advertising”

If you don’t believe in what you’re selling, you’ll be less effective in sales. In fact, you shouldn’t be selling something you don’t believe in. If the salesperson doesn’t believe in the product, that should be a big red flag to management. Note: this problem may be hard to nail down, as management often misunderstands a lack of results for poor salesmen instead of a poor product. Try to distinguish between the two and make changes to the offering if necessary.

You don’t have to use a “mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives” to sell your product or service. If your product is what you believe it is, honesty may be your best approach. Ogilvy said it simply when he wrote: “Good products can be sold by honest advertising. If you don’t think the product is good, you have no business to be advertising it.”

Be Picky When Choosing Clients

In addition, Ogilvy painstakingly took the time to only choose clients he believes he could serve. “We take immense pains to select our clients. It is true that we have selected a few clients who have not yet selected us, but we preserve in their pursuit, and we turn down an average of fifty-nine less desirable accounts every year.”

I was once told the success of an agency is when you can say more “no’s” then “yes’s” to new clients. Instead of trying to close every deal, close the right deal.

There’s a lot that sales people can learn from Confessions of an Advertising Man, and this is only a start to the great amount of advice he has to offer in his straightforward and no-bs book. We highly recommend it.

Over the summer, the AG team created a list of 50 traits an inside sales rep should have.  Number 43  was that an inside sales rep should be invested. Being invested has always been something that I relate to as a Senior Business Development Representative here at AG.  The main traits and skills that I feel an inside sales rep should have to be invested are: Devotion, Persistence, Active Listening.

Devotion:

To clarify, with devotion, I am not talking about a religious experience but more about always striving for your client’s success.  Inside sales reps should immerse themselves in the project at hand.  It should matter to them whether their clients are successful and they should strive to meet and exceed their goals.  When you find business opportunities, you should be excited about the opportunity and want to see it go through fruition.  Granted it’s nice to have closed business, being genuinely excited about this opportunity as you pass it to an outside sales rep will spread your excitement.  This will generate a better working relationship and will ultimately lead to more closed business.

Persistence:

I can write about being persistent till my fingers hurt.  It’s not about calling, and calling, and calling someone until they pick up the phone and then pitching until they agree to a meeting.  One of the traits that I try to teach to new BDRs is “polite persistence:”  following a call plan and always treating prospects kindly.  If they are not interested, GREAT! Find out why.  If they don’t have time to talk, it’s not a problem… When is a better time to reach them?

I was discussing the 80/20 rule with some colleagues, noting where roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This rule is completely true in cold calling.  More than 80% of the time we are leaving voicemails or being told that prospects are not interested.  But that 20% is enough to ensure we make our goals and quotas, so don’t give up!

Active Listening:

If you are an active listener, it will help you qualify more opportunities. Alex Orton wrote in his blog  that “without conversation your prospects will never want to talk to you.”  This is completely true.  We are not robots; we are humans.  In order to get the most information from a person, we need to have a quality conversation.  We need to listen, take notes and show sincere interest to show that we are listening.  Use this information to ask appropriate questions and find the true issues, pains and needs that your solution can fix.

These three traits / skills can help find more business, close more business and keep you excited about finding the next deal.  I feel that we all have these abilities and they just need to be brought out.  What other skills do you feel are necessary to be invested in a project?

It All Starts When Sales Uses KnowledgeTree

KnowledgeTree dramatically increases the productivity of sales people.  It does that by helping sales teams discover, share, and track great sales content with prospects.  To understand how KnowledgeTree works, let’s look at a common scenario for a sales organization.

Inbound Lead, What’s First?

Dave, an inside sales rep, receives an inbound lead in Salesforce.com.  He opens the lead record and sees that the lead is in the financial services industry and wants information about BPM technology.  Before Dave picks up the phone, he wants to provide a warm-up email with value-added information.  KnowledgeTree recommends thought leadership material that Dave can send.  Dave sees a white paper specific to the lead’s vertical and pain.

Value: Rather than searching for relevant content on his website or elsewhere, Dave gets the best content automatically filtered for him.

Directly from in the Salesforce.com record Dave can share the content with the prospect.  He simply clicks “share” and he can send a link to the most current version of the white paper.  Dave doesn’t need to worry about attachments being filtered out by spam filters.  KnowledgeTree gives him a unique URL that can be automatically or manually added to an email.

The post 10 Values that Content Selling Brings to the Sales Process appeared first on KnowledgeTree.

Personal connectivity through social sites and mobile devices has exploded on a scale that was simply unfathomable less than 10 years ago.

Now, the ability to connect with one another in an instant as part of a massive global community supersedes geographic boundaries. However, in order to thrive in this new environment, companies must harness the inherent power of social connections to drive sales.

Businesses of every size have always had some sort of “brand advocates,” a collection of customers, employees, partners and others that know about or are interested in the brand. Within any such group, there are multiple levels of brand knowledge or engagement, from repeat buyers and brand advocates to prospects who have just discovered the brand. The key for any company is to find ways to encourage everyone in this group—regardless of their level of intimacy with the brand—to tell others about the brand, thereby building a rich marketing channel.

With the advent of social sharing, there has been a fundamental shift in the way people make buying decisions. Consumers have become more distrustful of traditional advertising and, instead, rely heavily on the recommendations of friends or other consumers. For example, Amazon.com shoppers often thoroughly read buyer reviews before making a purchase and frequently ignore product offerings that hold consistently low ratings.

In fact, nearly all purchase decisions today are influenced in some way by a brand advocate, which is why it’s critically important that brands identify and cultivate social relationships with current and prospective buyers. Savvy brands must take proactive steps to not only encourage more activity from brand advocates, but also to track and manage that activity for optimal results. This group of advocates should be treated like a tangible corporate asset, one that must be handled with care and nurtured to encourage organic growth. And, brands must provide appropriate tools that make it easy for advocates to share products and services through social and mobile means.

Moving forward, customer acquisition success will rely heavily on how a brand is able to manage its advocates; it won’t come from heaping money on traditional advertising. These social channels also need to be properly “mobilized” by encouraging mobile-based sharing and promotions.

Once these brand advocates are lined up and given the right tools, companies must spur them to action. Here are three simply ways to help mobilize brand evangelists:

• Classic refer-a-friend promotions in which an advocate actively suggests the brand to others in his or her social circle. In some cases, the brand may offer a financial or material reward, which may be tied to a specific call to action, such as generating a signup or direct purchase.
• Encourage brand advocates to create content, such as a review or testimonial. Those who do this can become powerful allies in wooing the majority of prospective online purchasers searching for reviews before making a decision. The way brands talk to their advocates can influence the tone of their reviews, which has an immediate impact on sales.
• Motivate brand influencers to share your message with their own social network. If you are having mixed results using traditional targeted advertising, consider rewarding your advocates for doing the work for you by sending out promotions to extremely targeted consumers.

How do brands encourage these actions among their customers who advocate? Their products or services must be first-rate, but they also need to make social outreach simple and relevant. Even the most devoted brand advocates will be hesitant to recommend products if the sharing process is difficult or takes too much time. In the mobile age, all consumers expect to have results quickly, and the process of sharing is no different.

What types of tools should brands introduce to encourage social-based advocacy? Rewards, contests and other incentives are suitable activities because they are transparent, an effective way to demonstrate that the brand values its customer base, and, they’re trackable, which ultimately aids in gauging results. To support these efforts, companies should also ensure that customer service/support is able to handle queries sent through social or text channels, which shows advocates the brand is catering to their personal needs.

Moving forward, the most successful brands will embrace social brand advocacy as a distinct marketing channel that will drive a greater percentage of revenue down the road.

The opportunities for businesses to interact with customers via social media outweigh the risks when you understand your customer’s needs, wants and habits and use this knowledge to shape your customer service. Businesses must understand how consumers want to use social media to interact with them, and then construct personalized customer service experiences based on those individual social media preferences and behaviors.

We spoke to a panel of experts to get their take on how social media will change the experience for customer service and sales over the next 12 months.

James Kerruish, Digital & e-commerce Manager, UK Life, Aviva

Social media engagement with organizations is set to grow significantly over the next 12 months. We will see a shift from traditional engagement methods to an expectation from the customer that social media is a fully supported channel. The naturally public nature of social media means that it is paramount organizations are prepared for this, firstly to combat any negative sentiments as customers vent their frustrations but equally importantly to seize untapped sales opportunities.

Stormy Simon, Co-President, Overstock.com

In order to answer that is to know what tools or options will be introduced to the future “social” landscape. For consumers, social media provides various platforms in which they can reach you or inform you of your failures or successes with them. For a retailer, social media is a constant reminder to be on our toes. If you fail the customer, the world can know about it in 140 characters within seconds.

Esteban Kolsky, Principal and Founder, thinkJar

This is the wrong question to ask at this time. It’s too late to worry about how it will change it – social media has already dramatically altered all customer interactions; it is time to worry about how to address it. If you think it has not yet changed, you are not paying attention; craft your strategy for Social Media, even if it is “no thanks”.

Aphrodite Brinsmead, Senior Analyst, Customer Experience & Interaction, Ovum

Social media has already altered the way businesses communicate with their customers and it will only become more valuable in improving the customer experience. In addition to creating better marketing campaigns with personalized offers, businesses will view social media as a customer service tool. Over the next 12 months they will gradually become more strategic, using social data and analytics to get a better perspective on customers’ needs and issues. They will use social media to engage with customers and respond to queries, send proactive notifications and, pinpoint useful feedback that will enable them to evolve their products and services.

Brooks Crichlow, Vice President of Product Marketing, [24]7

More and more, your customers expect a great social experience – one that is relevant, contextual and easy – to be a core part of their relationship with your brand. Done well, social sharing and social customer service will feel increasingly like a natural extension of the customer experience regardless of the channel or device, not something that’s bolted on. Leading companies will also begin using predictive analytics to target and engage their brand advocates in the right social interaction at the right time.

How Do You Map A Sales Process?

by: Michael Webb

Mapping a sales process (or designing it) is pretty simple, at least at first. The difference with a sales process is that it must benefit both you and your customer simultaneously. The key is to keep your customer in mind at all times. 

1. Prepare to map the process.

Despite the stories about salespeople out on the road independently, sales is actually a team sport. Salespeople try to get customers on their team, for example. And they require support from marketing or servicing departments, to give the customer what they want.

If you want the performance of this team to improve you have to get them all on the same page. Heck, many of salespeople’s most crucial problems occur because they are not on the same page with the customer, the support departments, or with each other. So, this could be a challenge. On the other hand, it might also provide needed motivation for the mapping effort.  

In fact, it might be even more difficult if you adhere to old-fashioned management notions that focus only on sales results and pit salespeople against each other. However, if you have gotten beyond that issue, you can start getting your team to think about what their biggest challenges are, and the reasons for those challenges. There will be lots of opinions and this is one of the main reasons to “map” the process. Your team needs to understand what they will get out of this. What is going to be different afterwards? What does it involve?

The answers to these questions are always unique to your particular situation, but they involve things like:

• Figuring out what causes variations in salespeople’s performance, and enabling salespeople to learn from each other
• Getting a handle on which deals are most likely to close and which ones aren’t, so salespeople can forecast more accurately
• Standardizing language in order to understand (with data rather than opinions) what factors cause the most challenges for salespeople, so you can try to improve the situation

You should tell them that one of the goals is to achieve “respectful agreement” around the best way to accomplish their objectives, so that as a team they can learn from their experiences, and share important data (with each other and with management) about how we actually do the work. In this way they can start helping each other improve. 

Another goal is to ensure that your team is executing the work in the most professional and expeditious manner possible. There are always things to improve on, and a process is all about making improvements.

2. Identify the customer’s journey.

You or your salespeople may know this already and that's fine. If they don’t know, or if there are disagreements, these have to be sorted out first. Sometimes prospects buy differently if they are in different market segments (e.g., big companies instead of small companies), or if they are buying different kinds of products and services (replacement of supplies instead of deciding to change their internal systems). Also, it pays to actually ask some of your prospects about this. It can be quite an interesting conversation.

Whatever the case, you need to isolate one primary market segment that buys a similar thing in a similar fashion. Draw the stages your prospects go through in sequence on a whiteboard. Here are two examples of customer journeys from different channels within the same industry:

A key thing is to make sure your team is clear on the operational definition of each stage. In other words, what observable customer activity or action tells you they are in one stage or another? This is critical, because for a process map to work, salespeople must be able to rely on these observations.

Of course, be aware that customers can go backward in this progression.  A National Account can go backwards from “Gain Technical and Business Approval” (step four) to “Accept the Need for Water Improvement” (step one). A Small End User can go from “Research Solutions” back to “Identify Cause of Water Problem.” However, what this really means is only some individuals within the customer were at those later stages and they failed to get their organization to follow. The question is what can you observe that demonstrates the entire organization (including the decision maker) is at one stage or another. Doing this effectively requires insight to their motives, which is where the real sales strategy comes in.

3. Identify The Work That Aligns With The Customer Journey.

Now we are getting somewhere. This is the part of process mapping that often generates the most learning and discussion. How, exactly, does your company identify where prospects really are in their journey? Then, what do you do to get them to the next step? It is likely that your team has never thought of their sales process systematically before, so you can expect some struggles as people realize how differently they approach these various stages. There will be gaps and inconsistencies. The thing is, since everyone does so many things differently, just achieving a common language and common ground on how to think about the process usually produces major improvements.

Of course, each company’s particular process will be vastly different. However, sometimes it helps to examine a model of how it should look.  Below is a model of what you are shooting for. It includes the customer journey, a name for each of the work steps aligned with the Customer Journey stages, and indicates the thresholds where the flow of sales opportunities can be measured. 

4. Manage the Process Using the Process Map.

Bear in mind that the diagram above is ideal because it frames the realities the sales organization has to cope with. Do you ignore the customer journey by pushing demos or samples on companies who have not agreed they need your product? Good luck with that. Are your salespeople having difficulty finding enough qualified opportunities?  No amount of discounts or special promotions will solve such problems. This is not process for process sake. Far from it. The value of this map is to help everyone see where the problems are, so they can apply the right kind of work to solve it. And, solve it in a measurable way, I might add.

When you begin to take this approach, there will be some breakthroughs where things turn out easier than you expect. For example, I worked with a sales organization of about 36 people, where to everyone's surprise several of the old salts hugely supported the newly designed approach. However, you will also find some things to be harder than you expect. In that same organization, many of the salespeople came from clinical rather than professional selling backgrounds. It took time for some of them to get used to some terms for buying roles like coaches and gatekeepers, or end users and decision makers.

For this reason, it can take a while before your sales process resembles the ideal shown in the diagram. That is fine, because the purpose of a process map – indeed the entire process approach to business – is to increase your team's knowledge of the best ways to do the work. We all think we understand more than we actually do.

A process approach forces us to be humble, and to write down our beliefs about how the work should be done and what the outcomes will be. Then, buy actually doing it you learn how things really work, which usually isn't according to plan. In fact, the ability to learn, and most importantly to change based on what they have learned is what separates great companies from merely good ones.

 

Conclusion

It is actually a major accomplishment to go from the usual helter-skelter of selling to having respectful agreement in a professional B2B sales process. It means you have elevated the effectiveness of your sales team.  This pays off handsomely, because salespeople are better able to spend more time on the right accounts and less time on the wrong ones. When you stop wasting effort on demonstrations and proposals to customers who won’t buy, close ratios improve and cycle times are shortened. Productivity can increase by 50% or more. Many of my clients also increase their average deal sizes and margins because they are better able to identify and articulate value propositions. Forecast accuracy increases dramatically as well. These are relatively easy to accomplish, actually.

I have also had clients who realized they couldn't make their numbers without reorganizing how they handled customer service, or without giving the sales department help finding enough qualified sales opportunities. Those kinds of improvements might be tougher to achieve, but in the end they are even more valuable. That's because process mapping – and most importantly managing by the process – means decision making can be made based on evidence and data, rather than personality and opinion. So when you need to make more substantial changes, those changes are more likely to succeed. 

Actually, those kinds of improvements are the point of process mapping in the first place. They represent the breakthroughs everyone is hoping for, and are more difficult for competitors to match.

Good luck with your sales process mapping efforts. And, good selling! 

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Visit the Get Started section of this website to see how sales process excellence might benefit your organization. 

• Find out how good your sales process is with the World Class Sales Process Self-Assessment.
• Contact Michael for an initial consultation.  

You’re in sales and you sell the customer something based on a set of expectations they develop from what they have heard from you.

You deliver — or you say you deliver — and the customer doesn’t like what they get.

To them the thing they bought is not living up to the expectations they had been led to believe.

We’re watching the rollout of the on-line enrollment process for the Affordable Care Act (also commonly referred to as Obamacare), and we are seeing what I described above.

The “customers” (American citizens) were led to believe this process would flow smoothly and be easy to understand.

The reality, though, is the on-line system for the Affordable Care Act has been a bit of a train wreck (that may be putting it mildly).

What can we learn from it? Here’s my take:

First off we have to make sure the customer’s expectations match what can be delivered.  It’s not about what we think the product/experience can or can’t do. It’s what the customer expects it to do.

This means in our sales process we have to be dialoguing with the customer, not merely talking at them.  If all we’re doing is telling them, we have zero idea as to their level of acceptance.

Second, although we may be in sales, we do have to understand what we’re selling.   It’s about creating confidence with the customer.   The customer will be far more willing to accept what we have to say and believe what we’re saying if they have confidence in us.   Confidence equals perception.

Third, we have to own the sales process.  Sales leadership is about owning the process. This means being in charge in the eyes of the customer.

Deferring problems to others in an organization doesn’t do any good with regard to creating confidence.   I’m not saying you the salesperson have to be making all the decisions and doing all the work.

What I’m saying is you do need to take responsibility for the outcomes. In so doing, you will be delivering communication to the customer along the way.

How do you measure up with these three?

Remember, sales is leadership and leadership is sales.

Copyright 2013, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog.

When companies negotiate compensation plans with sales people it often feels a bit confrontational. This is natural and I have felt this myself in negotiations with sales reps over the years. I am trying to get the best deal for the company and the rep is trying to get the best deal for themselves. I never forget, however, the value of a sales comp plan that works for both the rep and contributes company business objectives.

In the table below, we have laid out a concise view of what both sales people and employers consider to be a great sales compensation plan.

What an Employer wants from a sales comp plan:	What Salespeople want from a sales comp plan:
Contributes to achieving the sales target Compensation that is always inline with profit generated from sales Incents the right sales behaviors and outcomes Payment schedule that is inline with sales receipts Easy to track Shared risk with the sales person Compensation that is inline with the effort required to achieve the sales	To be paid fairly for their effort A chance to maximize their income Timely payments A simple plan that is easy to understand and predict earnings at any time A share in the profits they earn for their employer Shared risk with the employer Allows the rep to feel successful when success is achieved

Perhaps surprisingly, given the employer’s natural motivation to minimize sales compensation, and the reps desire to maximize compensation, the definition of a great sales plan is similar for both the sales person and the employer: fair, inline with effort, shared risk and simple. This makes negotiating a win-win comp plan a matter of speaking openly about what either side wants.

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If the employer has properly designed the sales compensation plan and the sales reps are driving Porsches, the employer is likely doing very well.

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To your success!

Eliot

 

 

Price optimization requires the consideration of numerous variables.  One of the largest challenges when pricing a product or service is to maximize returns by pinpointing perceived value by consumers.  Perceived value often has little to do with the cost of manufacturing and transportation.  The perceived value of a product can be influenced by some of the following variables listed below:

• Brand reputation and public perception of the brand
• Where the product is sold such as a high-end retail location, a mid-end retail location, on an independent e-commerce website, or on a large e-commerce platform
• Packaging and merchandising strategies

Most retail businesses strive to find an optimal price point for their product lines.  There is a golden ratio of the total product cost (manufacturing, transportation, shipping, cost of completing sale, and cost of customer acquisition) and the average sale price.  Many businesses need to analyze big data to get the information needed to set the right price point for product lines on a regular basis.  Big data analysis has been historically difficult.  However, investing in the right business intelligence (or BI) software can make meaningful analysis of big data readily accessible to small and medium-sized businesses.

The Value of Unbiased Big Data Analysis and Challenges with Self-Report Data

Multiple studies conducted in various contexts suggest that self-report data is not always reliable.  Self-report data from customers or target audience members in the form of surveys, informal comment cards, or market research groups can be helpful to an extent.  However, it is important to remain cognizant of the limitations of utilizing these types of measures when the outcome could contribute to the growth or failure of your business.  The subjective nature of self-report data and market research groups can yield phenomenal or highly detrimental results.  The inferences drawn from the limited pool of data could be on target, or the inferences from self-report data could be far off.  It is important to utilize readily available business intelligence software to get the unbiased big data you need to grow or sustain your business.

Listed below are a number of challenges with different types of self-report data:

• Surveys are often completed haphazardly.  Many customers might not want to be totally candid, and many customers might not want to take the time to give thoughtful answers.  In addition, designing a short survey that accurately measures customer satisfaction as well as suggests areas for improvement is often much more difficult than many people think.
• Market research groups have limitations.  Getting in-depth information from a few dozen real audience members can be a valuable piece of the puzzle.  It is important to take factors such as group dynamics into account when analyzing results.  In addition, it is important to recognize the hit-or-miss nature of correctly interpreting focus group discussions.  The end goal of setting the right price point can get lost in a number of other variables during and after the groups.
• Customer comment cards have a certain place.  Customer comment cards are a great way to address issues directly with unsatisfied customers.  However, comment cards are not typically a quality measurement tool.

Look at the possibilities new IT can bring to your business.  Easily analyze big data, and bring your business to the next tier by optimizing pricing.

The Importance of Perfect Pricing and Big Data

Optimal pricing can help drive sales, maximize the ratio of resources allocated to revenue earned, and attract the best type of target demographic to your business.  Finding the perfect pricing for a product line requires more than having a good feeling or labeling certain products impulse buys.  Customers are often unaware of what price point they feel best about paying.  Optimal pricing is almost never executed with gut instinct and limited data.  In addition, optimal pricing often requires periodic reassessment due to seasonal changes in business and large-scale changes in the economy.  Big data analysis and BI software are necessary components of correct execution of pricing, and while data analysis has its own challenges and limitations, a solid data discovery method can go a long way in helping a business to reach an optimal price point for consumers.

Image Source: Consumer Price Index Up 2.0% Y/Y In July – Floating Path

Top sales reps share a common trait. They are determined to keep getting better. That explains the runaway success of a post by Steve Loftness six months ago. Why Top Sales Reps Will Be Unemployed in 2 Years set an SBI record for most views in one day. The post offered advice for top sales reps to avoid becoming obsolete. The post was widely read, shared and tweeted.

What can sales and HR leaders learn from this massive response? What separates top sales reps from the rest?

This article reveals how top sales reps stay on top. It will help if you are seeking to hire a top rep. Or if you are a manager trying to develop an “A” player. Or if you are a top player looking to maintain your edge. Read on to answer the question, “How can today’s sales rep be ready for tomorrow?”  

To assist you further, download the Top Sales Rep Renewal Guide. You can access it when you sign up for SBI’s Sales & Marketing Research Review here. This no-cost tour presents findings from SBI’s research in 2013. You’ll have access to a host of guides, templates and tools.

Staying On Top

There are 5 key traits shared by top sales reps:

1. Reinvention – Top performers don’t stand still. They relentlessly seek to improve; never satisfied with the status quo. Unafraid to experiment with a new tactic. More worried about missing a new technique than suffering a failure.
2. Best Practices – “A” players constantly monitor what peers are doing. They persistently expand on new ideas to get to the next level. Best practices are just a launch pad for more innovation.  
3. Technology – Top sales reps use technology as a force multiplier. They accelerate their pace with communication devices. They reach new prospects with social media. No moment is wasted in a connected world where support resources are a text away. Customers expect and receive instantaneous response.
4. Rapid Adoption – Not satisfied with just learning new ideas, top reps deploy new concepts immediately. No pilot test, no resistance; just swift implementation and iteration.
5. Mobility – The Bluetooth earpiece and the Wi-Fi hotspot turn the top performer's world into a virtual office. Video training modules are completed on a smartphone. Chat apps keep connections with the sales team. CRM reporting, appointments, call prep, and forecasting are all done on the fly.

What This Means for Top Sales Reps

Steve’s post about Top Sales Reps smashed records on Day One. Was there a massive coincidental urge to search the term “Top Sales Reps?” Probably not. It’s more likely that top sales reps had alerts set to notify them. They were using technology to find best practices. They probably read the post on a mobile device, miles from any office. The readership expanded when they shared the post with colleagues via social media.

To stay on top, take advantage of the Top Sales Rep Renewal Guide. Compare your practices to the best. Learn, adopt and share. See the image below for a preview of the guide.

The sample above shows just a handful of the 13 top sales rep traits. Each is accompanied by a comparison of an obsolete rep and an evolving rep.

What This Means for Sales and HR Leaders

Buyer behaviors have changed and top sales reps are steadily evolving. The guide shows you what they are doing and what they need to succeed. This affects everything from employee engagement to sales performance management:

• Assessment: Do your current players exhibit the traits of winners or dinosaurs?
• Sourcing: What competencies should you look for in your hiring process?
• Development: How can your training programs help top performers?
• Retention: What do top performers need to be productive and successful?
• Engagement: How can you foster a positive, winning culture?

Understanding what drives top performers is the first step to a strong talent program. 

Next Steps:

Prepare for 2014 now. Learn what it takes to hire, develop or become a top performer:

1. Register for your copy of the Top Sales Rep Renewal Guide
2. Use the guide to assess how you stack up against the best-in-class
3. Develop an action plan to fill the gaps
4. Make the Number in 2014

Author: John Kenney

Follow @jdkenney

Follow @MakingTheNumber

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I wanted to go over this topic as it’s something I’m increasingly hearing about through friends, clients and suppliers. It’s also particularly resonant to me as our business deals with it on a daily basis. Over recent years the economic turmoil has made every area of industry incredibly competitive; work is now even harder to win and margins have suffered. Accordingly, the pressure is on sales teams to up their game, innovate and persevere with any hint of a sale. So when it comes to mentioning the competition, where should you draw the line?

Looking strong on paper

It’s certainly not uncommon or unethical practice to compare yourselves to the competition. It is something almost used uniformly by software distributors, for example; often there is an elaborate comparison chart, keenly showing the array of features the company has in comparison to their rivals. Of course, the comparisons are not especially impartial, but for a relatively low-cost piece of software, people often make their decision based on the best solution ‘on paper’, so the chart idea works well.

Actually, I’ve noticed that one of our competitors uses a comparison chart, which our company features in. In our competitors case, they have clearly mystery shopped us at some point, but as evidenced by the chart, some time ago! There are inaccuracies there, with some comparisons simply not true. The tip here is a pretty obvious one: anything you put down on paper needs to be accurate, otherwise it ultimately won’t do its job once the prospect has finished ringing round, and all you’ll end up with is a stern letter from your competitor’s legal team!

Being in the service industry, mystery shopping the competition is not unusual; prices are not often emblazoned on websites or in brochures, so it’s one route to get this valuable information. However, one way we are able to establish our place in the market is by offering a ‘price match’; it results in us seeing competitor quotes, which is useful both in terms of reviewing costing, but also the transparency of the quotation.

Pointing out competitor weaknesses

Let’s get to the crux of the topic then: actually talking about competitors with prospective customers. When it comes to my own experience, the competition isn’t stupid; they’re not silly enough to put anything in an email, or in writing which could then be classified as defamation. Instead, everything is said over the phone and amounts to mere hearsay in comparison.
The key here is that we only find out about some of the things the competition has said about us through the same prospective customers. Of course, we’ll never know if we’ve missed out on prospects that have been taken in by what our competitors have said about us, but we still get a considerable amount of people who will mention it, and importantly, a large proportion that will make a point of saying that they felt it was unprofessional.

Bad mouthing the competition may come out of frustration; you believe you can provide a genuinely better product or service but are having difficulty conveying it. You may even feel some comments are perfectly innocent; perhaps you’ve heard some horror stories or know for a fact you deliver a better service in some areas, but the reality is that buyers are looking for reasons to buy from you, not reasons why not to buy from someone else! By resorting to competitor-bashing, it puts you in to a weak position, undermining what you are saying and thereby making your comments counter-productive.

Standing out from the crowd

The reality is that trash talking the competition is unnecessary, and you can achieve your ultimate aim without resorting to it. Be it a sales call, a brochure, or website, it’s first of all paramount that you break down the features of your service or product down to the benefits. Keep asking yourself the question “so what?”. Whether it saves people money, time, or whatever, you have to get to the benefits.

Your existing clients can greatly influence the decision of prospective ones, so make the most of them! Testimonials, case studies and client survey figures can help build a wealth of reassurance that you are the right company to choose. When it comes down to the crunch, people buy safe, so if you can demonstrate you work with a whole bunch of delighted clients, this will greatly influence their decision.

Ultimately, prospective customers get in touch because they have a problem. Whether it is a lack of efficiency because they don’t have a certain piece of software, a broken radiator that’s annoying staff, or a lack of knowledge preventing them from winning business, they want it solved. The buying decision becomes that much easier if you can present how you have overcome similar issues for existing clients. By citing client names, especially within the same industry as your prospective client’s, it provides that extra layer of confidence. If you have time to prepare then, look to see if you have a similar client you can use as an example.

Keeping on top of your sales team

What you should do and what your sales teams actually do can be two different things. Ironically, one of our competitors we hear much about when it comes to bad mouthing us actually has a publicly viewable ethics policy saying they will not undermine the competition! This is a classic example of when a company’s aspirations aren’t embedded into the culture of the organisation; for all we know, our competitor’s sales team may not even know this policy exists. Ultimately, this is the management team’s failing in not taking the time to engage and involve staff in what they want the company to stand for.

Let’s face it, those in a commissioned sales role have a difficult, high-pressure job. If you want to be part of an organisation that focuses on its strengths, clear and distinctive rules needs to be established with your front-line staff to ensure they don’t go beyond ‘the line’. Instead, to allow them to do the best job, arm them with everything possible so they can shout about how great your company is, eliminating the need to bad mouth the competition.

Do you have any stories or tips to share on this topic? Join in on Twitter @B2Community.

A whitepaper from Cvent notes 80% of companies are convinced they provide a superior customer service. But only 8% of their customers agree.

Ouch. 

Despite being on the business and marketing side, I see where people are coming from. For instance, the other day, I saw a commercial for one of the worst brands I've ever been a customer of ... and it was all about customer happiness. It made me cringe.

Then, the other day, my coworker had to call an Etsy shop to inquire about a shirt she ordered two weeks earlier and was, at the time, a day late for delivery. The shop's customer team then explained on the day she was expecting her shirt (which was the core component of her Halloween costume) that the shirts were on a two-month backorder. 

It's clear some companies aren't aware of just how poor customer service can lead to reputational damage. But if you're looking to ensure you delight your audience -- from visitors, to leads, to customers -- you've come to the right place. Today, we're going to provide you with a free PowerPoint template for creating ecards you can customize and share with your customers, fans, readers, and the like.

Shall we start customizing?

Note: Holiday ecards are not the solution to poor customer service. Messages like these will only enhance a customer experience already bubbling with value, help, and delight. 

A 3-Step Process for Creating Lovable Marketing Ecards

Our free ecard template (which you can download by simply clicking on the image on this page, no form-fill required!) has a collection of six different ecard templates. For this blog post, we'll customize number two from the collection (slide five). 

Step 1: Insert Custom Message

Add a brief message here that relates to the audience and channel you're sharing with. For example, I'm going to write this ecard for, well, you guys! The lovely readers and/or subscribers of this blog.

By the way, we truly do appreciate the loyal readers of our blog. We try our best to serve you great content, but it's your feedback, questions, and ideas that inspire us and help us improve what we do every day. 

Step 2: Insert Custom Image

While some of our templates allow you to add custom images, not all do! You can keep a simple background, pull from any one of our 200+ free holiday stock images, or simply add your own. Whatever you do, make it personalized and fun! In our example, we'll use a festive photo of two members of our HubSpot blogging team.

Step 3: Sign and Send

Once your ecard is customized, simply sign as your name or company. If you create a card as your company, consider adding your own logo! 

To save the card, go to File >> Save as Picture. Under "options" you can select to "Save Current Slide Only" to save only the ecard you customized.

Ready to start customizing ecards and spreading the holiday joy now through New Years? Simply go to hubspot.com/holiday to get download your ecard templates with just the click of a button.