The idea of the funnel belies the truth about sales: Conversion takes work. Here's a better way of thinking about the sales process and identifying your hottest leads.

We all love the concept of a sales funnel. Maybe that's because it makes selling seem so easy. Your potential buyer shows some interest in your product or service and--whoosh!--they're spiraling inevitably toward that glorious state of sold.

Except, as much as we love that image, we also know that's not really how it goes. Leads appear and disappear for any number of reasons, both early and late into their supposed funneling.

"The classic sales funnel model is quite accurate, but only if you expect the funnel to be seriously leaky," consultant Peter Sandeen (@Peter_Sandeen) writes for KissMetrics.com. He proposes a new way of thinking about the sales process--one that's especially relevant in the era of e-commerce.

"The most useful model, I believe, is the conversion path that consists of all the steps people take before buying," Sandeen writes. "Instead of a funnel, leads start at the beginning of a road that leads to buying. All along the road, they can drop off, get lost, or start moving backward. So, make it easy--almost inevitable--to keep [people] moving toward buying."

With this in mind, use your web analytics to figure out where on the conversion path your leads are falling off before the sale, Sandeen suggests. For instance, you may find that, after using a free trial of your service, those trial users simply aren't converting into buyers at the rate you'd expect.

To keep your prospects headed toward a purchase, he advises, "build a bridge from the free trial to the paid subscription by scheduling one-on-one calls with trial users close to the end of their trials. During those calls, you could offer users a discounted price if they signed up right then. In other words, you'd be making it much easier to take the step from the free trial to the paid subscription."

The design team at inbound marketer HubSpot operates with something like Sandeen's conversion path in mind. Josh Porter, HubSpot's UX director, told Build that his team has identified three user moments on the company's website where conversion rates spike: downloading a white paper, clicking through to a pricing page, and calling the company. When a user does any of those things, Porter (@Bokardo) knows HubSpot has a white-hot lead.

Porter tells Build that, although analytics can help you optimize your conversion process, the old mantra of "lies, damn lies, and statistics" also rings true at times. "A person who really thinks they want your product will sit on your website for days but not end up purchasing. They'll tell you they want it, they just need one more thing to happen--like getting funding, convincing their manager, etc. These people are disqualified pretty quickly by sales folks, but from an analytics point of view, they look amazing."

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Sometimes the hard sell isn't the most effective approach. Sales guru Tom Searcy explains why simply giving good advice may be the best way to make a sale.

A CEO recently told me a story of the best sales call she ever received. As she explains, a sales rep for a payroll-processing firm reached her by phone and said:

"I heard you talking about your company on the radio recently and I was really interested. I've been doing some research on the company and your industry and I think you are going to be hit with some real challenges on compliance costs and healthcare issues. We've been working on this for a while at our company and I have some research on where things are going that you might find interesting. Would you be interested in looking at it together?"

They met and the sales rep presented the research and the implications as to what the challenges were going to mean specifically to employers like the CEO and her industry in general. He made a number of observations and recommendations for the CEO. He did not talk about his products, services, or even much about his company.

He then asked, "What are you going to do about these challenges?"

She told him that she really did not know and was going to have to think about them. He explained that the CEO could take a few different approaches and he outlined the choices--still not talking about his company or their services. He gave the honest pros and cons of each and then said, "Thanks for the chance to come talk to you about your business, I really enjoyed it."

You probably know the rest...he's going to get the sale, and the CEO also expressed interest in hiring him to come sell for her. The lesson to be learned here is:

If you want to land sales, don't get caught selling.

Great sales people know this, yet the natural motivation to close deals pushes us to make bad mistakes or to "Always Be Closing." Sorry, but that quote and approach comes from the archives of things that don't work any more.

Let's break down what the sales rep did well:

I have watched some of the best of the best follow this format in their approach to customers. More often than not, they become trusted advisers on the way to the sale, rather than after the sale.

Understanding the force that is social media is a quite a task. But leveraging effectively it to advance your team’s selling efforts is beyond the capabilities of most companies. (See information about upcoming webinar on social selling at the bottom of this post.)

There is no lack of data to underline how far social media has progressed. Last year Facebook topped a billion users. LinkedIn has over 200 million members. And here’s a statistic you’ve likely heard but may not have a strategy to overcome: according to the Corporate Executive Board, “customers will contact a sales rep when they independently completed about 60% of the purchasing decision process.” How do savvy sellers meet, create a dialog with, and nurture sales prospects during that time? The answer is social selling. Try this. Go to trends.google.com. They type in social selling and hit enter. See what I mean? It’s a force.

Too many companies are leaving the learning and development of a social media strategy up to the individual salesrep, and that’s a dangerous thing. It often leads to wasted time, confused company messaging, offended customers, and, most importantly, not adapting to the new way customers are buying products and services. That disconnect means fewer wins.

You can buy social media strategy advice and training from any number of sources. The challenge is integrating all that into your company’s selling process.  And while some sales training companies have invested in social media learning as part of their solution portfolios, many others are less willing to be held accountable for that component of sales peoples’ skill sets. That’s not a good thing.

Leveraging social media isn’t new to Philadelphia-based Richardson. Over the past several years we’ve given them high marks for how they’ve employed social media in their own marketing and selling efforts. Right now they’re planning to incorporate LinkedIn and Google Alerts into their “Prospecting with Insights” and “Selling with Insights” programs. That’s a good choice of platforms, since Facebook tends to be more of a Business-to-Consumer and friends & family network. Twitter, the other big force, can be a time-waster and risky, as I mentioned above.

Sales Performance International—the Solution Selling® folks—have successfully piloted their “Social Media for Sales” workshop. For that program, they’ve defined emerging roles a seller must play within new customer buying processes. One role is what they call “Micro-marketer,” whereby the seller uses social media for planning and demand creation and generation. The learning objectives and exercises for that program will certainly provide a solid foundation for a salesrep to get the most leverage out of technologies such as InsideView, LinkedIn, Twitter, blogs, and YouTube. This all relates to recent changes in the Solution Selling execution methodology, intended to boost sales performance in our world of tech-savvy, sophisticated, and powerful purchasers.

Solution Selling now includes a new framework for mapping social media into the sales process. They actually open up selected social media tools and exercise them in the context of a sales process.  So they are able to answer the question, “As a seller, exactly how do I use this at a given point in the sales process to advance my sale?”  SPI provides the roadmap.

What can you do now to separate the value from the hype and get up to speed on what social media networks, tools, and strategies to employ in your selling efforts? Talk to your customers. Find out what networks they use to build and maintain business and personal relationships. That’s where you need to be. Find out where they educate themselves so they can perform their jobs better. That’s where you need to be. Then, as we’ve learned from two top sales training firms, get your new social media strategy integrated with your sales process and get your reps trained on how to leverage it.

Anyone familiar with the work of Eric Ries in the Lean Startup or Steve Blank’s books know the concept of the Minimum Viable Product. Their works focus on the need to for rapid experimentation, learning, and improvement in bringing new products to the markets.

For years, I’ve been a proponent of “Just Good Enough,” as a sales or marketing strategy. Perhaps in today’s context, Just Good Enough might be called The Minimum Viable Sales/Marketing Strategy.

Too often, I think we fail to change and adapt rapidly enough. We’re a business culture of careful planning, risk avoidance, fear of making mistakes, analysis paralysis, fear of change, “if it ain’t broke,” or just plain complacency. Choose whichever descriptors that fit.

Yet we’re surrounded with data that says we aren’t meeting our goals or we are not relevant to customers. So something isn’t working.

The concept of minimum viable product is appealing because it’s rapid, real world learning—with customers. When you think about it, it’s such a natural approach to growing and improving our ability to engage customers. Why not make the customer part of our continual learning and improvement process? Why not engage them, their ideas and feedback to rapidly tune our strategies to more effectively engage them?

Over the past year, I’ve seen so many “massive efforts.” One organization I spoke to had spend 4 months evaluating their sales process, analyzing the best way to engage customers and to improve their effectiveness. They were still months away from a launch–a pilot at that. Or the marketing team that a year ago discovered it’s lead gen efforts weren’t producing the needed results that is still struggling with how to improve them, right now they are thinking about SEO. The poor sales team is starving for leads–so they’ve decided to do their own thing.

I see examples of this everyday. I understand it–kind of. Resources and funding are scarce. We can’t afford to waste them. Too many organizations have cultures that don’t tolerate mistakes or failure–so people are afraid to change or study things to death.

We need to radically rethink what we do. Rather than striving for perfection, we need to strive for Just Good Enough. We need to develop cultures which embrace thoughtful experimentation, rapid learning, continuous improvement.

No strategy or program is ever perfect. We refine and improve them through learning what works and what doesn’t But we don’t do that in task force meetings or internal strategy sessions. We can’t learn and improve without the customer.

So let’s start growing, let’s start changing, let’s do that with the customers. Adopt a strategy of Just Good Enough. Build the Minimum Viable Sales/Marketing Strategy. Realize it’s just the starting point, learn from it, improve it, learn, improve……. execute!

We’re nearing the last quarter of 2013, and another year of sales will soon be behind us. An important question all sales and marketing departments should be asking themselves is how they can better communicate in order to follow up on leads.

Finding leads isn’t the hard part, but unqualified leads are just “ash and trash”, according to my latest PowerViews guest, James Obermayer, sales manager extraordinaire. Jim is the CEO and co-founder of the Sales Lead Management Association, which recognizes 50 distinguished sales managers each year and highlights 20 of the most influential women in sales (see his explainer). Jim is also the President of Sales Leakage Consulting, Inc. He has decades of experience as a marketing communications manager, marketing manager, and sales manager.

Jim and I talk extensively about sales, marketing, leads, and how they should all work together so companies can cut down on leakage. Here are some of the highlights of our conversation.

Why Don’t Sales Reps Follow Up on Leads?

Click to start video at this point—We all know about it, and too often we all turn a blind eye to the problem. When sales reps don’t follow up on leads, what questions should we be asking?

Jim points out that if sales managers tell reps to follow up with 100% of all inquiries, it will happen. In other words, falling short of sales goals due to a lack of follow-up is caused by the attitude of managers and an increased reliance on automated inside sales platforms, which are great at generating tons of unqualified leads that won’t lead to sales.

“Marketing automation in the hands of a fool is still a fool’s tool.”

Click to start video at this point—Jim and I also discussed how the creation of inquiries touch more agencies than ever before and involve so many departments that it’s easy for everyone to push the blame for lackluster performance. There are also so many automated software programs out there that marketing, especially, has become confusing for the average marketer.

Jim points out that 3rd party telemarketing services are getting more business than ever because of the need to qualify a large number of inquiries, when really companies should be looking inward. With so many different departments involved, lead generation isn’t just a sales or a marketing issue anymore.

Marketing and Sales Have to Agree on the Definition of a Lead and the Process to Follow Up

Click to start video at this point—We both agreed on the fact that, between all the automation and handing off of functions to other departments (and even between sales and marketing themselves), that there is too much leakage. So many potential qualified leads are being buried beneath the bluster.

One way to prevent this from happening in 2014 is for sales and marketing to really start talking about definitions. What, exactly, is a qualified lead? How do you measure that? How and when should there be follow up, and on whose watch?

At the end of the day there needs to be judicial accountability so that lead generation and follow-up can be tightened up. There’s just such a leakage between marketing and sales on leads; companies are spending immense amounts generating leads that aren’t going anywhere.

Should Marketing be Paid on Qualified Lead Revenue?

Click to start video at this point—Marketing already has a lot of the follow-up functions that sales isn’t taking on. So, should they actively assume these functions? Should marketing pay be determined by metrics that were once the province of sales and sales alone?

It’s safe to say that it has become essential for marketing to be measured on the end-result: revenue. In that regard, there are plenty of simple, actionable rules that can be put in place to keep everyone accountable. For example, if a qualified lead is turned to sales it has to be accepted or rejected within 48 hours by the judicial branch. A traction problem is not a good excuse: appropriate follow-up needs to be defined.

Ultimately it’s still a matter of leadership. “Nobody ever built a statue to a committee”, after all. Jim has personally witnessed many companies revamp their sales and marketing arms by embracing accountability systems and becoming successful.

You can connect with Jim and learn more about the Sales Lead Management Association via the following resources:

Website: www.theslma.com

Email: jobermayer at salesleadmgmtassn dot com

The next PowerViews will be with Jill Rowley of Oracle. Stay Tuned.

By Dan McDade

Just last week,  Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs’ released their fourth annual B2B Content Marketing: 2014 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America. The timing of the report’s release couldn’t have been better, as this week we are hosting our Landing Pages for Content Marketing webinar.

The report indicates some positive momentum for the upcoming year:

93% of B2B companies using content marketing (up from 91% in 2013)

30% of B2B marketing budgets being allocated to content marketing

58% of B2B marketers planning to increase content marketing budget in 2014

Brand awareness, customer acquisition & lead-gen continue as top goals

42% of B2B marketing believe they are effective at content marketing (up from 36% in 2013)

Content is (still) huge.

People want content. Brands are committed to delivering it. However, while the report shows a nice little bump in content marketing effectiveness, there is still a problem.

The problem?

58% of B2B marketers feel they are not effective at content marketing.

Why?

Because (and we are only half-joking here) some content marketing programs look like this:

1. Create amazing content
2. Distribute amazing content
3. ???
4. Get more leads and sales

A whopping 84% of marketers who say they are ineffective at content marketing said they have no documented strategy. Whoa! Brand awareness may be hard to measure, but lead-gen and customer acquisition are not.

What happens next?

Answering the “what happens next?” is the difference between passive and active content marketing. Passive content is “publish-and-pray,” while active content marketing gives the visitor the next step, provides measurable results (leads & sales), and tests & optimizes “framing content” to increase conversions. Simply put, active content marketing leverages landing pages to drive lead-gen and customer acquisition.

Below are nine practical ways to deliver measurable, significant conversions from your content marketing initiatives, beyond dumping your content behind a lead capture form.

9 Ways to Drive More Leads From Your Content Marketing

Sure, you’ve used landing pages to ‘gate’ high value content such as white papers or ebooks, but there more creative ways to up-sell and cross-sell content to convert your audience’s attention into business results.

1. Up sell on your blog

Embed a landing page into your blog to up sell related content or a complimentary offer. The offer must be highly valuable and highly relevant to the specific blog post. In this example, Online Marketing Institute cross-sells to Scott’s Landing Page Optimization for B2B Marketing class at the bottom of ion’s 25 Elements to Test On Your Landing Pages guest blog post. The landing page uses fantastic framing content — benefit bullets, interactive tabbed content, class ratings — to help drive the free trial conversion.

Offer is highly relevant to blog topic — benefit-driven call-to-action is clear & concise.

2.  Offer nurture subscription on your blog

Most blogs encourage readers to subscribe to a feed or email stream of new blog posts. Great! But why not go for a broader nurture approach? The promise of deeper, topic-specific content — beyond the blog — is enough to enough some folks to opt-in to your nurture program. Use embedded landing pages to test your calls-to-action and supporting copy to find the message and offers that drive the most engagement (free subscription, “exclusive” membership, monthly resources, etc.)

3. Cross sell within white papers

Or, as content folks like to call it, contextual content cross sell…allowing readers to opt-in to receive more of what already interests them. For example, in our  Landing Pages for Content Marketing Idea Book, readers can click or scan a QR code to get the infographic companion to the guide. Of course, that infographic is hosted on a beautiful landing page that encourage social sharing/distribution and furthers exposes the ion brand (see #6).

4. Try a white paper teaser

Lists have been shown to work well as hot content pieces, spreading rapidly. You can extract a fairly meaty chunk of content and present it within a landing page as a teaser. The up sell? The full-length white paper, guide or ebook. A microsite is an awesome format for content teasers as they encourage exploration and discovery. eHealth showcases their health insurance buyer’s guide in five steps via a tabbed interface. Readers can choose to read now or download a .pdf copy. An up sell to “Get Quotes” remains consistent on the landing page. Love this interactive teaser — kudos eHealth.

Tabbed content or microsite formats are highly effective at engaging visitors to explore.

5. Drive infographic CTAs to lead-gen forms

Infographics. They attract so many eyeballs that they have huge potential to generate deeper engagement than just social sharing. When distributed as .pdf files, call-to-action can be built in to cross-sell/up sell complimentary content or offers. When distributed as web-native graphics (.png, .gif, ,jpg), they can include QR and URL calls-to-action. I love this example from BzzAgent. The Field Guide to Brand Advocates includes a call-to-action to download the complete Field Guide (see #4 above) and links to a lead-gen landing page. Nice!

Infographic offers a highly valuable complimentary content asset, which is promoted via a landing page.

6. Use landing pages to further “reach” of infographics

There are so many ways to help infographics go viral. In addition to social sharing icons,  ’click to tweet’ link and embed codes, you can also use landing page to showcase your infographic. Check out our Landing Pages for Content Marketing [Infographic] landing page for some inspiration.

7. Try a webinar trailer

Webinars, like infographics, are highly desirable content. They are intensive to produce and can be significant  lead-or demand-generation drivers, especially in B-to-B markets. If you decide to ‘gate’ recorded versions of your webinars, you can easily communicate the value of the webinar content with a highlight reel. Gating an asset, such as a recorded webinar, doesn’t have to be an impediment to a pleasant user experience.  A quality landing experience can ensure value is established and communicated with relevance, design and substance.

8. Use slides as bait

Probably my favorite of the nine — using slides as “bait” for recorded webinars, Embedding a “sneak peek” of webinar slides into your landing page is a sexy (and effective) way to entice and convert. Below, you’ll see how a SlideShare slide deck is being leveraged as a teaser. Users can interact with the excerpt content and decide for themselves if the exchange of information for the content is fair. I love this tactic because there are so many elements within the framing content that can be tested — everything from headline and bullet copy — to specific slides and presentation of the player!

Embed a “snak peek” of webinar slides to engage and convert.

9. Generate leads with slide decks

We are big fans of slide decks as ion. If you are a SlideShare PRO customer, you can embed a lead form into your slide decks. We offer an opt-in to our monthly nurture program. Its easy to set up and works well to capture high-funnel leads. Another way to generate leads through your slide decks is by cross selling to another content asset within your deck. I’d recommend sticking to a relevant and topic-focused piece of content rather than a free trial or sales inquiry. Folks who are viewing your slide decks are more likely to be doing research or looking for new ideas. Don’t interrupt their information gathering “zen” with a noisy sales pitch. Use your landing page to (again) communicate the relevancy and value of the content.

Offers within slide decks must be highly relevant and valuable. No noisy sales pitches allowed!

The idea book

The nine tactics above look at practical ways to introduce landing pages into your content marketing. Each are designed to deepen engagement and participation with your brand, while providing you with measurable results from your content marketing initiatives.

Interested in checking out a really cool idea book, with visual examples of these tactics? Check out our the full guide to turning content in conversions with landing pages!

More than ever, sales teams are struggling with unqualified leads, missed sales goals, and lost opportunities. Increasingly, company and sales leaders are turning to coaching as a solution.

And, why not? Executive and personal-effectiveness coaching have historically yielded great results. According to the International Coach Federation, the average company can expect a return of 7 times the initial investment in coaching.*

Shouldn’t the same be expected from sales coaching?

Yes. Even more. But both the approach to sales coaching, and the results, are pretty erratic.

What we commonly see are sales managers and leaders who:

• Don’t have time to coach
• Aren’t sure what sales coaches are supposed to do
• Don’t have access to the tools and resources that can help them get the most of coaching
• Don’t establish consistent rhythm of coaching conversations
• Can’t lead a great coaching conversation

The best sales coaches—the ones who get it right—play the following 5 specific roles in the sales coaching process...

I don’t know who came up with the title phrase, but I first heard it from John Hensel, with whom I worked in sales training about 10 years ago. I liked the phrase so much that I “borrowed” it and continue to use it in sales training today.

Does your product create a lust for possession in the buyer’s mind? When a product is beautifully designed, uses amazing technology, and is obviously useful, customers will suspend judgment and line up in the wee hours to have a chance to be one of the first to own one and to show it off to their friends. If you’re selling something like that, all you need to do is to show it off and watch the orders come in. Steve Jobs knew that and that is why his presentations centered around the product itself—and why they were so successful.

The problem is that very few products (and I include services in this broad definition) actually work that way. They may not be exciting, they may be difficult to figure out’ their benefits may not be obvious; most of all, they may not look that different from everything else on the market. They certainly don’t create lust in the buyer’s mind.

In fact, most products create the opposite effect: buyers are so wary of being sold that their critical faculties go on full alert. They automatically question all the good things that are said about it and search for reasons not to disrupt the status quo, not to spend money, not to take the risk, etc.

If you have the product with you during the sales call, you will always be tempted to bring it out and show it, or talk about it, too early, like a fisherman jerking the rod at the first hint of a nibble. The instant the prospect drops the slightest hint that they might have a glimmer of interest, like Pavlov’s dogs hearing the dinner bell, you can’t resist jumping straight into our pitch or your demonstration.

Once the product becomes the center of attention, its pluses and minuses become fair game. If you begin talking about the product before they’re thirsty, resistance automatically kicks in, you dig yourself into a hole, and there is definitely no “lust” for what you’re selling.

So, when is the right time to take the product out of the car? When the prospect practically begs you to see it. Just like plain old boring water tastes exquisite when you’re thirsty enough, your job as a salesperson is to make the buyer thirsty. When you have asked the right questions and guided the conversation so that the prospect has told you about their problems and opportunities and has told you that the status quo is too costly or risky to continue—that’s when their minds are receptive to finding out about what you have.

If you’re making a presentation, don’t show the “product” slides until the audience has fully agreed with your description of the need, and every eye in the place is off their devices and focused squarely on you, because they can’t wait to hear how you’re going to make their lives better.

That’s when you are allowed to go get it out of the car, and not a moment before.

Every year I present to a class at the University of Denver’s Daniels School of Business.  This year I was asked to talk about what it takes to be successful in today’s world and what they should be focusing on as they wrap up their school work and head out into the world.

It was a great presentation with lot’s of dialog. It spilled over to beers and ongoing discussion at a bar around the corner. I had a great time.

I wanted to share the presentation here because these aren’t your typical answers.  There is a change in today’s work place and in today’s world and the rules to engagement are changing. This isn’t your father’s world anymore.

Is there anything you would add or take away? I’d love this communities thoughts? How are you seeing the world today?

The post 20 of the World’s Most Humorous Twitter Bios appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

        

Comments

• By: 20 of the World’s Most Humorous Twitter B... by 20 of the World's Most Humorous Twitter B...
• TheMeatSection's is awesome. Such a bad ass! by geofflivingston
• Love these! Love all your twitter bio collections! LOLOL! ... by Pauline Baird Jones
• These are all “meh.” The best one I've read is Jonah ... by Karen
• Thanks for including me Mark! So I guess all my swearing ... by JeannineMorber
• Plus 4 more...

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Connections matter. Big time. Recent research from Reachable.com shows just how much it impacts you're ability to get a callback from a "stranger." In fact, you're: 

• 3x more likely if you contact a mutual acquaintance.
• 4x more likely if the connection calls to make an introduction.
• 11x more likely if they have an actual connection. 

See. It does make a difference. But most sellers don't know how to leverage their LinkedIn connections nearly as much as they could. 

To help you expand your thinking, here are some TRUE STORIES shared by people who took our 2013 Sales & LinkedIn Survey. By reading them, you'll discover numerous ways you can get in touch with someone even if you don't have a 1st level connection. 

Connecting to CEOs. I always look to see if and how I am connected to a prospect. If I find a common connection, I’ll normally speak with him/her first to find out how they’re connected, what the experience was like and whether I can use their name. By doing this, I've landed a number of meetings with CEOs at target companies. ~ Ralph O. 

When Your Prospects Aren't on LinkedIn. "I work with seniors, but I am referred by business partners such as attorneys, financial planners, certified financial planners and insurance planners. Senior workers are good targets, but getting to my senior customers through LinkedIn is almost impossible. I need to get to the people who can refer to me." ~ Bernadette C. 

Leveraging 2^nd-Level Connections. "There was an organization that I was trying to penetrate. As I looked through the list of active LinkedIn users, I wrote down the names of my 2nd level connections. Then I looked at each of their profiles to find out who my 1st level connection was to these individuals. One was connected to a close friend of mine. As I looked over her bio, I noticed she and my friend had worked together before. When I connected with this 2nd level person via email, I mentioned our mutual friend. She then got me in contact with the right person within her organization."  ~ Bryan K. 

Alumni Groups Deliver. "I've utilized my college Alumni Group to InMail fellow alums (who I don't know) to identify my contact within their organization. Every one of them has been willing to help a fellow alumni out." ~ Rob H. 

Leveraging Centers of Influence. "I take my best COI (center of influence) clients and look at their connections to see who they can introduce me to. Then I ask my clients if they would do an introduction to Mr. X by putting in a good word for my services. That way, when I call Mr. X, they are already eager to talk with me." ~ Tom B. 

Who’s Looking at You. "I saw that someone from a company I’d been trying to get into had viewed my profile. It wasn't the purchasing agent I'd been trying to speak with, but her boss. I used that as my 'in' and contacted him directly. After that, I got the meeting I wanted and it ended with a good order. I'm still working on more follow-up business, but am now an established supplier there." ~ Jay O.  

One Thing Leads to Another. "I connected with someone who was interested in using me for a project he was working on. It gave me a chance to get to know him and have several conversations during which I was able to demonstrate my expertise. While that project never came about, he did introduce me to his subsequent employer for some input on another related project. After an in-person meeting, I received a consulting agreement, which later turned into a two year gig. There is no possible way I would have ever met any of these people without LinkedIn." ~ Larry W. 

Old Contact Re-emerges. An old contact (SVP level) popped on the "list of people you may know." I’d lost touch with him because he’d semi-retired. I reached out to him again to connect via Linkedin. One week later, my cell phone went off. I answered it and it was my old contact. He needed help with a sales team he was now leading. This led to a new engagement for me. He then proceeded to introduce me to other division heads in his business. We continue to have a business relationship three years later." ~ Don G. 

Old Friend Opens Door. "I re-connected with a friend from my High School, whom I lost touch with during the past 30 years. After the initial invite and connection via LinkedIn, we spoke on the phone. He asked me what I'm doing and I told him about my business and a new on-line shipping tool. He immediately gave me a key contact for a company that he is an investor with. This opened a door to meet with this contact and start doing business managing their transportation." ~Dave M. 

So what do you think? Any chance you can leverage your LinkedIn connections better after seeing how your colleagues are doing it? I sure hope so!

From here you can see over the horizon.  You have a pretty good idea if you’re going to make the number.  It might not look promising.  About 75% of U.S.-based corporations operate on a calendar fiscal year.  Now is the time to plan for 2014.  Do you have the right number of reps?

Proper headcount is critical to making your number. What else can you do to make the number next year?  Register here for the SBI 7th annual Research Tour to get top-notch insight.  Become best-in-class.

Do you have enough sales reps?  Here’s how most companies (incorrectly) figure this out: 

The CEO hands a projected revenue number to you (the senior sales leader).  You both know for cost reasons what the quota per salesperson needs to be.  So you simply divide the revenue number by the average quota number.  This produces a headcount number.  Then you take the headcount number and multiply it by the cost per rep.  You use the “all-in” cost - base, commissions, overhead.  This yields a cost of sale typically expressed as a percentage of revenue.  This simple analysis is the most common way of headcount planning in corporate America.

Here are the implications of this too-generic approach. Below is a quota distribution chart. On the left side vertical axis is the number of reps.  On the right side vertical axis are quota numbers expressed as dollars. The red bars from <10% – 99% are the number of sales reps for each range.  For example, five sales reps attained between 40 and 49% of the quota.  The green bars indicate numbers of reps who exceeded quota. 

This distribution would drive anybody crazy – especially your CFO.  The CFO sees this and walks in your office.  He says, “Hey, Mark, you should whack your bottom 10 reps.  They cost a fortune and aren’t performing.  We can save the money.”  But you know if you don’t have enough reps, you’ll miss the number. 

What’s a better way to do this?  I’ll give you two: a top-down approach and a bottoms-up approach.  The combination of these two will keep your CFO out of your office.  

Top-down: Calculate the territory market potential 

This method works best if you employ Hunter sales reps (who hunt new logos).  First, using your Ideal Customer Profile, identify the number of opportunities in your market.  Then calculate the potential revenue from the market.  Do this by looking at the current spend of customers who resemble the ideal opportunities you’ve identified.   This allows you to see the total potential of your market.  You can also see the potential of each existing territory.  If you haven’t done this before you’ll be surprised.  The potential will vary dramatically by rep territory.  This is a common cause of unequal rep quota attainment. 

Bottoms-up: The Workload Analysis approach 

Download an advanced example of a Workload Analysis Calculator today.  Get a copy by signing up for the SBI Research Tour: "How to Make Your Number in 2014: A Sales Strategy You Can Execute." 

This method works best if you employ Farmer sales reps (who develop existing accounts).  Start with your total number of existing target accounts.  Have you mapped your ideal customer’s Buying Journey?  If so, you know how often they want to be called on.  Multiply this call frequency by the number of accounts.  When you multiply these two numbers you get an annual call volume.   This is the total number of rep appointments per year.  

Let’s apply some math to this. Assume you have 2,000 target customers.  You want to call on each one of those accounts once a month.  That’s 12 x 2000 = 24,000 calls. 

Now calculate rep capacity.  Based on your experience, how many appointments can your reps handle in a week?  Let’s say it’s 8.  Multiply that by the number of working weeks in a year (typically 47).  47 x 8 = 376 appointments in a year. 

24,000 annual calls divided by 376 calls per rep equals about 64 reps.  This is an example of a workload analysis, or bottoms-up approach. 

When you use these two methods you get a quota distribution curve like this:

This kind of a standard distribution makes CFOs very happy.  You’ve staffed your organization properly to enable you to make the number.  You’ll produce balanced quota attainment, which is typically in the 60-75% range.  Put another way, 38-48 of your 64 reps (60-75%) should make the number. 

Download an advanced example of a Workload Analysis Calculator today.  Sign up for the SBI Research Tour: "How to Make Your Number in 2014: A Sales Strategy You Can Execute."

Author: Mark Synek

Follow @MarkSynek

Follow @MakingTheNumber

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Transforming into a social business is a pretty big concept with several pieces and there is a lot of debate around what those pieces should be. However, most will agree that there is an internal communications component of becoming a social business. When you look at how social media is being used to improve internal communications, you can start to separate those who are providing lip service to the social business transformation to those that are serious. This also extends far beyond becoming a “social” business and using social technology. The real questions I believe we should be asking are: how can technology be used to increase the speed of knowledge transfer, to influence the culture of working together, and to improve internal business processes.

I’ve worked for several large organizations and one thing was true in every one of them. There are huge information silos between different divisions, different offices, and even within departments. These information silos can be very costly for organizations. The cost impact can range from not knowing the internal expertise available to having multiple departments working on similar initiatives and spending money for outside consultants to do the same projects as well as having employees who do not even know they exist. For many companies, the quickest way to break down silos is to leverage an internal social network.

Create an Internal Social Network to Improve Relationships

The biggest opportunity for mid-size and enterprise organizations is to create an internal social network. The primary goal of the social network is to improve communications and the transparency of those communications. One of the biggest hurdles for large organizations is to stop the turf war between different groups. Internal turf wars are a huge waste of resources and can cost companies millions in wasted effort. While an internal social network won’t stop the turf war, it can absolutely help people develop better relationships.

This is important. Don’t tell employees to use your internal social network purely for business communications. Encourage employees to share posts related to things they are interested in, photos of their kids if they would like, and anything else that will help employees know more about who they are out of the office. This is what will help to break through some of the turf wars. People who like each other as human beings are more likely to communicate with each other when there is a potentially heated issue that needs to be discussed. It also can help to create relationships through all ranks in the organization. Leadership needs to be a part of this type of sharing too. They need to show employees that they are actual human beings, not just their boss or a member of the executive team. Just imagine the power of knowing the CEO is a huge runner as a point of hallway conversation for other employees, or that she has a daughter the same age, or that he also is a foster home for rescue dogs? Getting employees to share what happens outside of the office helps people connect around areas of common interest. If the only thing your internal social network does is provide a forum for sharing things employees get excited about outside of work, it will still be a huge win for the organization.

If your internal social network is a broadcast channel to communicate with employees, you are doing it wrong. This is an opportunity to build connectivity between employees, rather than another HR portal for dissemination of information.

Use Your Employee Social Network to Increase Project Transparency

There are several benefits of increasing sharing earlier in projects

One of the biggest challenges in large organizations is employees simply understanding what other people are working on. There seems to be this veil of secrecy for projects until they are complete, rather than open sharing about what is in the works. This is a huge missed opportunity because there are several benefits of increasing sharing earlier in projects. First, it is highly possible that another team is working on something that could benefit from a project another department has in the works. Second, it’s also possible that teams are working on similar initiatives and that money could be saved for outside consultants if they simply worked together, even if their goals for the projects are different. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen groups working on a small piece of something that could turn into pure awesome if they simply combined forces to solve the greater problem instead of just the piece that impacts their team. Create an area where employees share status updates on the projects they are working on and the progress they have made. Allow them to invite cross-functional teams for projects and invite collaborators. Allow people to subscribe to updates and ask to join a project team. Allow employees to list the types of projects that could impact their role or department and provide a stream of updates based on that list of interests. If companies can use their social network for information sharing and collaboration around the actual work it can create huge efficiencies for getting the work done.

Use Your Employee Social Network to Find Internal Expertise

Provide employees with a searchable area where they can list their professional experience and talents

This is the age old problem in large companies, we have internal expertise yet we continually hire consultants to do jobs another employee could do. Why does this happen? Most likely it isn’t because an employee is trying to stick it to the man and spend unnecessary money. More likely it is because the employee responsible for getting a project done has no idea the talent exists in house. Trust me, most employees would love to save that budget money for something else, if they knew there was a competent internal resource that could help them get the job done.

Your employee social network can help solve this problem too! Provide employees with a searchable area where they can list their professional experience and talents. Also make sure they can list how many years experience they have in each area. Then when someone is looking for someone with a specific skill set they can search the database to see who could potentially help with the project, provide guidance on some good outsourced talent to hire, or even just act as an internal consultant for a project they want to get done this year.

If you want to take it a step further, allow employees to list skills they are simply passionate about. Then when a team has a project they don’t have the budget to hire external resources to complete, they might be able to find an internal employee who is really passionate about the subject matter or area of expertise they can tap to help. Just imagine the employee talent development that could happen if I was really passionate about SEO and studied SEO in my free time, but it wasn’t part of my actual job at the company. Then someone else in the company gave me the opportunity to spread my wings with helping the company with SEO efforts. As an employee, I would be ecstatic and have the ability to do a project involving something I’m excited about. As the employee who needed help I could get help with a project I couldn’t fund otherwise and possibly find someone to hire into my department down the road. For the company, I’d be able to identify internal talent and provide employees with the opportunity to expand the talents they are “perceived” to have based on job title. If that isn’t a win-win-win, I don’t know what is!

Use Your Employee Social Network to Increase Mind-Share

Every company has a wealth of talent and knowledge internally that goes untapped

This is a pretty big one and honestly, I could write an entire post about it, but let’s start the conversation here. Every company has opportunities in the market place they don’t have time and resources to pursue. Every company has a wealth of talent and knowledge internally that goes untapped. Just imagine for a second that employees were able to propose projects they want to work on and what talents they could bring to a cross-functional team. For example, there is a huge opportunity in mobile, but the company doesn’t have the resources to fully explore the opportunities. But we have an employee who is really passionate about mobile technology and really understands the landscape. He/She could propose a project to explore how the company could expand into mobile. He/She could post “positions” they would need to fully explore the opportunity and make a business case. Other employees could apply for these positions on the team to explore the possibility provided they could still complete their other job responsibilities. An executive could sponsor the project and provide credibility to its potential opportunity. The manager’s of these employees could approve them to dedicate a small amount of their time provided it didn’t impact other job responsibilities. In essence, as an employee I could single-handedly create a internal task force to explore new markets and new opportunities for our company. If it’s good enough, my project could be sponsored by an executive and I could get a little recognition if we are able to do it well. I could recruit other employees with expertise I don’t have to make sure all bases are covered for the exploration project.

Wow! Just imagine how much faster your company could move on market opportunities in this type of environment. At the freaking speed of light! It could truly transform how opportunities are researched and pursued. Instead of requiring an executive to light the fire, it would create an environment that recognizes that employees have the best ideas. It would be even more amazing if executives had a budget just for these types of projects so they could “fund” them and create an internal start-up community. Let’s just put it this way, this could, in fact, change the world.

Those are my thoughts, but now it’s your turn. How can mid-size and enterprise companies leverage an internal social network to solve business problems? Where do you see opportunities? Where do you see pitfalls? Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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The world over, the performance of colleges is under fire.  It’s about time that happened, but there should also be serious concerns about the new report cards that are being fashioned for tertiary educational institutions.

The Obama Administration in the U.S., for instance, plans to create a new performance-based rating system with teeth.  In future, it says, resources will flow only where tangible student-focused outcomes justify their deployment.  Those outcomes will be, most likely, improved retention and graduation rates; fewer wasted credits; lower student debt-burdens; easier access to financial support; greater efficiency estimated by linking progress to degrees and demonstrations of competency, not to credit hours or seat times; more students hired within a reasonable period after graduation; higher salary levels for them; and so on.

Are these useful measures?  Of course.  Will tracking them prove helpful to college managements?  Of course.  Will knowing them be relevant to students and families?  Of course.

But these are not measures of educational performance; these measure only the efficiency of the educational process.  Think, for a moment, of a college as if it were a factory, a pipeline that takes in raw materials and puts them through a structured series of steps that leads to the creation of  “finished products,” namely well-educated students.  The measurements under discussion are yardsticks of the pipeline’s asset utilization and process efficiency levels.  If we improve them, the “factory” will run better.

However, if colleges use only these metrics to evaluate their performance, they will continue to repeat past errors.  For, they will be measuring virtually everything except the one thing that matters most: Student learning.

Nonsense, will be the predictable rebuttal; colleges already measure learning.  What do you think grades indicate?  What do you think degrees stand for?  What do you think the Latin on a diploma signals?

Even if you believe that colleges grade, certify, and award degrees accurately, there are grave limitations to the way they do it.  Their measurements primarily reward discipline-based knowledge — not the capabilities in critical thinking, analytic reasoning, communication skills, and interpersonal effectiveness that employers most care about and that are essential for students to succeed as adults in the real world.

Research shows that there are links between traditional academic performance and economic status.  For instance, students with the advantages that prepare them to test well at one level tend to test well at other levels too.  So the fact that students are performing well according to standard measures may have little, if anything, to do with a college’s learning-related performance.  It may just have a great admissions office and a powerful brand, taking in talented kids through the front door and not messing them up.

Meanwhile, two great ironies are unfolding.  One, while the accuracy of traditional grading stagnates, the ability to carry out true learning-related assessments has advanced with lightning speed.  Improvements in the U.S. Collegiate Learning Assessment; the skills-and-employability assessment instruments pioneered by organizations such as Aspiring Minds in India; the algorithms used to track learning in online video games; the analytics that underlie the learning experiences offered by massive open online courses; and US Education Testing Services’ new proficiency profiles and skills instruments are all changing what assessments can lead to.  (That’s a topic I will revisit in my next post.)

Two, this is also a time when corporations and executives can help create the outcomes they desire as long as they don’t focus only on helping colleges to boost process efficiency or re-shape curriculums.  The corporate world knows a lot about how to evaluate the kinds of learning that matter to it.  It’s time business shared that expertise with colleges, and joined them in efforts to build novel tools that will help measure students’ real learning performances.

There is widespread agreement that if the United States is to achieve sustainable levels of health care spending, it must make greater use of payment mechanisms that reward physicians, hospitals, and health systems for the results achieved. The vexing question is how best to make this transition.

Today, payers and providers are using a range of strategies to accomplish this goal, including patient-centered medical homes, value-based contracting, and accountable care organizations (ACOs). We applaud this trend. However, our research and experience have convinced us that the transition to outcomes-based payment will occur more easily if both payers and providers take an intermediate step and make greater use of retrospective episode-based payment (REBP).

REBP focuses on “episodes of care” (any clinical situations that have relatively predictable start and end points such as procedures, hospitalizations, acute outpatient care, and some treatments for cancer and behavioral health conditions). REBP identifies which provider is in the best position to affect the clinical outcomes and total costs associated with an episode of care; it then assesses (through retrospective analysis of claims data) the outcomes achieved and costs incurred during each episode over a specific period of time (e.g., quarterly). The identified providers are then rewarded or penalized based on their average performance across all the episodes.

The desire to jump straight to outcomes-based payment models focused on the total cost of care for an entire population has led many payers and providers to overlook, or give up on, episode-based payment. We believe it is worth reconsidering.

The Advantages

REBP offers a number of advantages. For example, because it uses the current fee-for-services claims system as its administrative platform, it does not require providers to make significant investments in new infrastructure or establish new contractual arrangements with other providers. And because it focuses on acute episodes, REBP acts as a necessary complement to payment and care-delivery models designed to improve prevention and chronic-care management. Furthermore, administering and/or participating in an REBP model can help both payers and providers develop many of the capabilities they will need for total-cost-of-care management. In short, REBP can serve as a bridge to more comprehensive total-cost-of-care approaches.

How Does REPB Work?

In the U.S. health system today, a dozen or more providers may be involved in an episode of care, and each provider typically bills separately. None of these providers is rewarded financially for helping ensure that the desired clinical outcome is delivered with the highest quality at lowest cost across the entire episode.

REBP is designed to change that. It is somewhat similar to and shares many of the same goals as the “prospective bundled payment” approach, which calls for making a single payment (or budget) to the accountable provider for all the services used to treat each specific episode for each specific patient. But key differences in design and administration make REBP more scalable in the current U.S. health system.

The six core steps required to implement REBP are listed in the exhibit “Steps Required to Implement REPB.”

Why Should Payers Pursue REBP?

Our analysis of data from private insurers, Medicaid, and Medicare suggests that 50% to 70% of all health care spending could be included within episodes of care. REBP establishes end-to-end accountability for more than half that spending.

REBP also gives payers a direct way to incentivize providers to reduce health care waste. We have consistently observed that some providers deliver the same or better clinical outcomes at dramatically lower costs than other providers in the same market. The exhibit “Average Cost Per Episode Varies Significantly Across Providers” illustrates variations in average, total per-patient costs for three different episodes in three different states. Even after we excluded patients with certain complicated conditions and adjusted for patient severity, the average cost per episode in each market still varied from 60% to over 300%. Further analysis showed that much of this variation could be explained by differences in practice patterns (e.g., decisions about device selection, diagnostics use, discharge planning, hospital admission).

REBP also offers a quick path forward, because it requires only modest additional infrastructure. We have seen multiple payers define and implement the necessary infrastructure within six months of when they agreed on an episode’s definition. Turnkey analytic vendors are also beginning to emerge.

In addition, REBP gives payers considerable strategic flexibility. Many REBP parameters can be adapted to address local conditions, align with network and member-engagement approaches, and strengthen competitive advantage. Among these parameters are cost thresholds, stop-loss provisions, the degree of gain- and risk-sharing, whether and how to normalize unit prices, and whether to steer members to certain providers.

Finally, REBP gives payers a way to prepare for the future, when episode-based performance management is likely to be a required capability. Most providers do not have access to sufficient claims data to assess performance on their own. If providers are to accept partial or total cost-of-care accountability, payers will need to offer them a performance-management infrastructure to understand clinical outcomes and costs.

Why Should Providers Pursue REBP?

If contractual terms are fair, REBP can deliver meaningful value to acute-care providers in particular. For example, it has the potential to give them a net increase in margin, because many of the sources of savings are either variable costs to these providers (e.g., implantable devices, extra care required for surgical complications) or are associated with upstream or downstream providers (e.g., pharmaceuticals, physical therapy, skilled nursing facility care). REBP can also help acute-care providers reinforce and accelerate existing strategic priorities, such as improving how hospitals influence and partner with physicians, increase adoption of clinical pathways, and reduce input costs.

REBP empowers all accountable providers by reducing the need for payers to monitor clinical decision making (e.g., through preauthorization). It also positions them to assume a stronger role in influencing the performance of upstream and downstream providers.

Strong episode performance has the potential to strengthen a provider’s value proposition to patients, employers, and payers. It may also be grounds for negotiating a stronger network position.

Furthermore, REBP requires providers to make only small, if any, investments in new infrastructure — at least initially. And it will enable them to strengthen their ability to understand end-to-end performance, a capability any providers considering more holistic total-cost-of-care payment models will need.

What Changes Must Payers Make?

To implement REBP at scale, most payers will have to shift their focus from prospective to retrospective models in most markets. Doing so will enable payers to simplify their infrastructure and focus on analytic processes that are separate from claims adjudication. This infrastructure is less invasive, requires less investment, and offers faster time-to-market than do solutions that necessitate material changes to claims-adjudication processes.

Second, payers will need to develop greater technical sophistication to ensure fairness (e.g., through episode-specific risk adjustments) and provider acceptance. They will also have to develop or adopt new standards as they emerge. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation’s efforts to create standard episode definitions, including through the Bundled Payments for Care Improvement Initiative, are a promising starting point.)

Finally, if REBP is to succeed, payers will have to implement it at scale by promoting REBP, whenever possible, across all books of business and all network providers. Most payers should also strongly consider participating in multi-payer efforts to set standards to help overcome common barriers to implementation.

Follow the Leading Health Care Innovation insight center on Twitter @HBRhealth. E-mail us at healtheditors@hbr.org, and sign up to receive updates here.

Leading Health Care Innovation
From the Editors of Harvard Business Review and the New England Journal of Medicine

It’s proving to be an eventful year for AirAsia, the Kuala Lumpur-based airline that has emerged as Asia’s most successful low-cost carrier in recent times.  The last 12 months have seen the collapse of AirAsia Japan, a once-promising joint venture between AirAsia and Japan’s ANA, and the birth of AirAsia India, an alliance between the company and India’s Tata Group.

AirAsia’s experience is instructive.  The history of joint ventures is filled with stories about failure.  As happened at AirAsia Japan, partners often find it difficult to reconcile their views about how they should manage a new venture.  Even if strategic visions align, cultural differences and the inability to build trust often torpedo partnerships.

Despite the low odds of success, though, the urge to set up joint ventures remains strong.  That’s because either government regulations dictate joint ventures — for example, in the auto sector in China and multi-brand retailing in India — or because two companies believe they need each other’s complementary strengths, as in the case of AirAsia Japan.  It’s therefore important for corporate leaders to be smart about how they can improve the odds of success.  Five contemporary guidelines:

• Define a  joint venture’s charter narrowly.  Doing so provides focus, reduces complexity, and enables companies to collaborate with different partners to meet their goals.  When Honda entered India in the early 1990s, the Japanese company struck three focused alliances: One with the Hero Group for low-end motorcycles, one with Siel for cars, and a third with Siel for portable generators.
• Choose a partner that embodies a low risk of conflict in the long run.  The chances of breaking up are high if partners’ long-term ambitions are in conflict, and each sees the joint venture as a stepping-stone to learn from the other before competing with it.  Several joint ventures in China, such as the alliance between General Motors and Shanghai Auto, are beset by this underlying tension.  AirAsia has made a smart choice by tying up with the Tata Group; that alliance is high on complementarities and low on conflicts.
• Allocate decision rights based on the context and logic.  Who has the final say in functional areas, such as R&D, operations, and human resources, does matter.  For instance, in Japan, ANA ceded control to AirAsia on key decisions such as customer service levels.  Given the differences between the expectations of the Japanese low-cost traveler and his counterpart in the rest of Asia, it may have been smarter for ANA to have retained the final call on those decisions.
• Consciously over-invest in building mutual understanding and trust.  All joint ventures are mixed motive games; value creation requires cooperation while value capture requires focusing on what’s best for one’s shareholders.  Since it isn’t feasible to anticipate every contingency and build them into a contract, it’s important that partners  focus their efforts on cultivating mutual understanding and trust.  An excessive or premature focus on value capture will leave them fighting over the crumbs instead of striving to make the pie bigger.
• Agree upfront on the terms that will guide a break-up.  As happened at AirAsia Japan, all joint ventures eventually end.  Upfront clarity on how the end game will play out often has unintended positive consequences.  It will help partners devote their efforts to the motive that brought them together in the first place, viz. to maximize the synergistic benefits from their complementary strengths.

After all, the partners in a relationship usually realize intuitively when to end it.  What they don’t know is how to make a joint venture work.

Almost famous

You know, I wasn’t always this largely unknown, B-list, minor celebrity.

Oh no, no, no.

It’s taken lots of work to scale this particular mountain…

Since I launched the Great Work MBA virtual conference last month, I’ve had quite a few people (well over 4) ask me how I got the likes of Brené Brown (TED talk superstar), Beth Comstock (CMO of GE), Brenda Chapman (Oscar-winning director of Pixar’s Brave) and 22 other amazing speakers to be part of this virtual conference.

What’s the secret behind my ability to get these well-known and busy people involved in this and things like the End Malaria project?

Well (and cue music signifying us going back in time…)

It was GTD that did it

It was 2004, and my first book Get Unstuck & Get Going was almost done. Admittedly, it was an idea that I’d had ten years earlier and filed away carefully in my “one day maybe” file. It was only when someone asked, “Do you mind if I do this, seeing as you’re clearly not planning on putting the idea into action?” that I’d finally got things going.

I’d done a number of things right…

• I hired a coach whose job was to stop me finding excuses for not writing the book
• I got a cool designer-y friend to make it look funky
• I created and tested iterations, so it went from being grey and called The Booster Shot to being funky orange and called Get Unstuck
• I even hired someone to project manage the complicated process of getting it printed (you whippersnappers with your Lulu.com and your Amazon have it so easy….)

But I hadn’t done any thinking at all about how to market it.

So I asked myself this: “What wouldn’t I do, to have this be a success?” That handily ruled out things like robbing banks and wearing a sandwich board on the street, but it did leave this solid book marketing tactic: Ask someone famous to write a testimonial.

When I flicked through whatever my equivalent of a rolodex was in 2004, it became immediately apparent that I knew not a single famous person. At all. No successful book authors. No rising-star-bloggers. No Hollywood heavyweights.

Nada.

So … what to do?

How do you sort your books on your bookshelf?

At the time, I was experimenting with alphabetical. So top left-hand corner was a book that I’d not really read, but a friend had recommended: David Allen’s (I can say excellent, now that I’ve actually read it) Getting Things Done, one of the classics of productivity.

As good a place as any to start, I thought, so I went onto my pre-Google search engine, found Davidco.com, found a phone number and gave it a call.

And on the first ring, actually even faster than that, the phone was answered and someone said, “Hello, David Allen here.”

Cue panic.

I didn’t have a script prepared, I didn’t have a request clearly formulated. Heck, I wasn’t even sure who David Allen really was.

Where was the voice mail? Or at the very least, the long line of personal assistants I was expecting to encounter?

Nope, right through to David Allen himself.

So I asked him if I might send him the book, with the possibility of his writing a testimonial.

He graciously agreed.

I sent the book.

He wrote the testimonial.

And good things happened from there.

I’d uncovered the first secret

The very first strategy to getting the cool kids or the influencers or whatever label you want to give them is you have to be willing to ask.

Be brave.

Be bold.

Be smart. (Who exactly are you inviting, and why?)

Don’t do the “who am I to ask THEM?” thing.

Be willing to make the request.

But you need to do more than that

You’ve got to be smart and generous and different.

1. You’ve got to find a way to make it good for them, not just good for you.

When I was inviting people to the Great Work MBA or End Malaria or the 200+ Great Work Interviews I thought hard about each invitation, found a way to make it useful for them, and personalized it.

With many of the people, I’ve tried to build and maintain a relationship (not a Big and Heavy relationship but a “weak ties” relationship). Scott Stratten and I first had a coffee together more than six years ago. When Sally Hogshead came to Toronto to speak at the HRPA conference, I emailed her and met her for a drink. When I’ve seen a new book out from Roger Martin over the last five years or the news he’s moving on from his position of Dean of Rottman business school, I send him a quick congrats. I invited Tim “Dr. Happy” Sharp to come as my guest to a program I was running in Australia in 2007.

And they’re all speakers at the Great Work MBA virtual conference. (And you can read all about them here.)

2. You’ve got to stand out from the crowd.

Look how Erin Giles invited me to be part of her (awesome and important) indiegogo campaign, End Sex Trafficking Day.

My personal video invitation.

(And yes, I’m supporting this, and I’d love you to support it too. Even $1 will make a difference.)

Even people like me – not very high at all on the totem pole – receive more invitations than I can say Yes to. In fact, I say No to most of the requests I get.

AND … I do say YES to some that feel personal, clever and meaningful for me. Like Erin’s.

3. You’ve got to be persistent.

To cut to the chase, I’m clear that it’s not a “no” to my request until…

• It’s actually a definitive, black and white, unambiguous No
• It feels like I’m stalking them.

I’ve made 6 or 7 requests – by phone, by email, by web form – until I’ve finally abandoned the chase.

Don’t think that asking once is enough.

Don’t think that silence is a “no”.

Are you picking up the subliminal messages here?

Hidden behind this conversation about how to get funky/cool/influential people to be part of your game, there’s something else going on.

They messages are subtle I know, but I’m really hoping you’ll join me and some of these fabulous speakers at the Great Work MBA.

In case you haven’t yet clicked on any of the links above (and how could you possibly resist?) here are the essential details:

• November 10-15 at a screen near you: it’s virtual and it’s free
• 25 extraordinary speakers, ranging from TED superstars to New York Times best-selling authors, from Oscar winners to innovators in the non-profit field
• Each day has its own focus. Day 1′s theme is Grounding Yourself. Day 3′s is Connect to Purpose (and you can see the other themes by scrolling down this page)
• Each talk is 27 minutes, and available for 24 hours
• There’s a bunch of things to help you engage with the learning and move from insight to action, from a team of Super Coaches to a daily debrief to three live calls
• And did I mention it’s virtual and it’s free?

You can sign up for the Great Work MBA here.

And support the End Sex Trafficking Indiegogo campaign here.

Why do potentially great sales people shy away from sales? Because they can’t stand the constant rejection. Does anyone like being told “no” 95 percent of the time? Of course not. To make matters worse, it’s usually in the form of a one- to two-sentence email from the so-called decision maker with a lame excuse that you never even discussed in sales calls. After all of that nurturing and hours of free consultation, you’re reduced to a sentence or two dismissing you and your company for no obvious reason. Surely there’s a better way.

Sales people should be prepared for this rough handling, because it’s inevitable. Why? Because buyers really don’t want to buy unless they absolutely have to—unless they can’t accomplish the mission without your products and services. The only high probability sale is one that was decided before the first sales call—when buyers do their homework and figure out which solution is best and only need your input for pricing and support. Otherwise, the odds are stacked against you, and buyers (rejectors) come armed with standard objections designed to defeat you and make you scratch your head in bewilderment.

Some of the more common objections:

• “You’re just too expensive for us.”
• “We decided to go with a less expensive option.”
• “We’re just not ready for such a big investment right now.”
• “We’re just putting together our plan for next year.”
• “We’re taking a look at our options and will get back to you.”
• “Our committee will be evaluating all of our options and will let you know.”
• “Our executive team just doesn’t understand the value.”
• “We like your stuff a lot, but it’s just not a fit for us.”

What went wrong?

I could give you a checklist of things we failed to do, but the bottom line is almost always that we failed to fully qualify the buyer and rushed into the negotiation stage in the hope we might get lucky. The problem is either the buyer isn’t ready or they never intended to buy and are just gathering information. These are the “root cause” objections. Your job is to ferret out this information as early as possible, which can avoid the other nebulous objections and two-sentence rejection emails. But how?

5 key questions to ask—and demand an answer (or bail out).

1. Why are we having this call? – This is my favorite Rick Roberge tip. It’s simple and innocent enough, but telling. What is the buyer trying to accomplish in the first call and going forward? If you get evasive, generalized answers, it’s a pretty safe bet they’re kicking tires.
2. Why did you contact us? – Let them explain their own compelling reasons for submitting your form or downloading your content. Listen carefully for signs they are just researching. If so, politely end the call and suggest a follow-up when they have figured out what they want.
3. What are your economic goals? – If they don’t know, they aren’t the decision maker and don’t understand the real value of your stuff. Ask to speak to the decision maker. If they refuse, you aren’t going anywhere. If they do know, now you can start discussing plans, previous efforts, challenges and positioning to accomplish their goals. This is where you need to be if you expect to win the sale.
4. What’s the process for evaluation? – Who’s going to be involved and at which stages? These are your buyer personas. Is this going to be a beauty contest with the low-cost provider winning the day? Are there other criteria, and which ones are most important? When is a decision expected? Armed with this information, you can assess your own comfort level about moving forward, or not. Don’t drag this out. Check your gut and move on if you don’t like what you hear.
5. What’s our next step? – If your buyer has passed all of the above tests and it sounds like a fit for both parties, say so. Tell them where they stand and suggest a next step. If it makes sense to put together and review broad deal points now, do that. If either party isn’t ready for that step, find out why. If it will take another phone call, schedule that for tomorrow. Don’t wait until next week—they will be out of the office and they will not return your calls and emails. Don’t send a proposal until the deal has been discussed and verbally approved. You’re just inviting rejection based on price and/or scope.

Getting to “yes” or “no” and not wasting your time.

There shouldn’t be any surprises if you are doing your job right. Don’t jump the gun and skip the all important qualification step. Qualification isn’t just about economic factors like company size, technical fit and budget. It’s really about reaching the right buyer and understanding their needs and plans. Be prepared to offer a few surprises of your own. Research your buyer before you call, and you can position your company as innovators with something special to offer. Remember, it’s a two-way conversation, and you have critical questions that need to be answered. If they can’t or won’t tell you the truth in the first call, you have no chance of winning the deal. The good news is, you won’t be getting those disappointing emails.

Photo credit: pennyspitter

Ren′aissance man`
n.

I have long believed the best sales people are renaissance men and women. They are prodigious learners, with an intense intellectual curiosity. The have wide, deep, robust knowledge in a myriad of fields and interests.

Renaissance sales people leverage their broad intellectual knowledge to solve problems, dissect complex challenges and create opportunities. Their broad knowledge is a force multiplier.

Recently, I watched two sales people address an “stuck” opportunity with an online invitation company. The invitation company was struggling to see the value in my clients offering. Each sales person shared their thoughts in how we could get the deal unstuck. Here’s what happened.

The first sales person, smart, articulate, and driven, lacked any understanding of how companies like this earned their revenue and more importantly how that business model worked and what was important to success.  Therefore, their suggestions focused on “yelling louder,” in other words, telling them more about the product, and ask questions about “why” they didn’t see value. The first sales person lacked the knowledge to go deep and see things from the customers point of view.

The second sales person happened to have a fairly decent understanding of the type of business model the invitation company had. They understood how the invitation company made their money AND they understood the challenges of that type of revenue model.  The sales person was very well versed in online marketing, banner advertising, pay per click revenue streams etc. Although it was NOT the field they played in. It was not a criticial element of his profession, yet they possessed the knowledge. This sales person was a prodigious reader, they are deliberate learner.  This sales person knows a LOT about a LOT of things. This knowledge helped him identify an entirely different set of questions and approaches to addressing the invitation companies objection and inability to see the value of his company’s service.

Knowledge is critical in selling. They more you know, about more things, the more value you will bring to your prospects and customers. Having deep and solid knowledge about your products and services is good. Having robust knowledge about your industry  and your product is even better. But, having a deep knowledge about your products and services, your industry AND a shit load of other stuff, across a myriad of topics, interests and fields is GOLD!!!

The best sales people are renaissance people, they know a lot about a lot and bring it to the table when selling.

Start reading for 30 minutes in the a.m. and for 30 minutes in the evening — at least. Read non-fiction, subscribe to blogs and start a Feedly reading list across a myriad of topics, science, art, business, psychology, sociology, technology and more. Read, read, read, and read some more. The key is to be constantly learning. Grow your knowledge base and develop a powerful database of facts and information in your head, so at any given time you can teach your prospects and customers something they didn’t know, something that could improve their business or make better buying decisions.

If you are not familiar with landing pages, a landing page is a page on your website that people land on after clicking on what we call a call-to-action.

Most businesses do not use landing pages but they are a highly effective way to turn anonymous visitors that come to your website into known leads and are key components to any inbound marketing strategy.

If your business is not getting the leads it deserves through its website and you would like to learn more about how landing pages can help you generate more leads and sales then read on.

The beauty of landing pages is that they are laser focused to one particular topic or service and are highly relevant. According to Interactive Marketing Inc, by creating landing pages that are relevant and focused you can increase conversion by 55%.

But before we talk about how you can best leverage landing pages to increase leads, we first must talk about calls-to-actions.

Calls-to actions: The taster for what’s to come.

Think of calls to actions as a little advert that entices your website visitors to a page where they can download really helpful information that’s relevant to what they are currently reading or searching for.

See the picture below that shows the relationship between content, calls-to-actions and landing pages.

Once a user clicks on the call-to action it is now the landing page’s job to convert them into known leads. Kind of like a virtual sales person.

How can landing pages help generate leads?

Landing pages are excellent at generating leads because by offering your potential customers something useful they are more likely to give up some of their identifiable information.

The key is you have to make sure the content you offer is of high quality. Create great content that people would pay for and give it to them for free.

Most of your visitors are not ready to buy so having a softer approach and offering them information that they find helpful will result in much higher conversion rates.

The beauty of landing pages is once they fill in their information they can then be nurtured into a customer with more helpful information via email, telephone and in person.

How to get started with landing pages right now!

It is a lot easier to get started with landing pages than you think. I will go over what you need and some best practices so you can get started today.

Depending on your knowledge you may need a web designers help. If you do need help why not download our extensive guide on landing pages and print it off and give it to your designer.

In a nutshell your landing pages need to have the following elements:

1. Heading: It all starts with a great title. Give your landing page a title that will make the reader want to fill in your form. A good practice here is to basically state what you are giving them. For example ‘FREE GUIDE: 10 Signs your Mother is an Alien’. This explains exactly what you can expect by downloading the guide as the headline is the first thing they will see.

2. Sub Heading: It is also good practice to add a sub heading, but this heading has a different purpose than the main heading as it describes the benefits so people know how it will help them. This may be the only content they read so be concise and demonstrate the benefits.

3. Image: Images are great at quickly demonstrating information people can understand. An image of a physical book can convey substance so people feel they are getting something of worth.

4. Form: This is a very important element, without a form people cannot give you their information. The information you ask will depend on who your buyer personas are (more on buyer personas here) and the amount of form fields you include. We would say stick to 3-7 and ask for information that helps qualify your leads.

5. CTA: Create a call-to-action for the title of your form. A great tip here is to make it the same as your submit button, this really helps lift conversion rates.

6. Content: Keep this short and snappy to only a few sentences and focus on the benefits and how it will help the reader. Use bullet points to highlight the main benefits.

7. Navigation: You will see in the example above that we have removed the navigation as this is just a distraction. We do not want people leaving the page we want them to focus on the offer.

Conclusion

By creating great offers and landing pages you can quickly see an increase in leads and if you follow the best practices above there is no reason why you cannot see 40-50% conversion rates on your landing pages.

Get your designer to create a landing page template, this way you will be able to create more without their intervention. Better still use HubSpot marketing software that lets you create landing pages with no technical knowledge. This is how we create ours.

Now it’s your turn

Have any questions about landing pages we didn’t cover? Then let us know in the comments below.

I turned the big 4-0 this year, yuck. It seems like just yesterday that I had started my sales career. Back then I would have described myself as an eternal optimist. While I wouldn’t say I’ve changed my view point dramatically over the years, what I have noticed is not everyone has shared my bright eyed- bushy tailed view of the world. As you can imagine over time my cynical view of potential outcomes has a tendency to quickly rear its ugly head a bit faster than it would have in the early days of my career.

Now it could be that I’m just getting more crotchety in my old age OR that I’ve gotten accustomed to the fact that that things rarely end up exactly as I hoped they would. With that said what I’ve also realized is that I should get over it quick, take out the good and bad lessons from the situation and move on.  No point in dwelling on it.

Saturday morning I was up early with my 6 year old eating waffles and watching videos on his favorite website Wimp.com. It’s a nice “kid friendly” site that has everything from cuddly animal videos, guys getting kicked in the groin and periodically some inspiring words from inspirational people.

One particular video from Conan O’Brien really spoke to me. Even if Conan isn’t your bag I recommend you check out this 2 minute video where he discusses his departure from the Tonight Show and his thoughts on how we should look at the world

It struck me how applicable his messaging is to the sales and teleprospecting game.

If you have a general lack of faith in your ability to get someone live on the phone you WILL fail. If you feel there is little or no hope in closing a sale, then there is high likelihood that you WILL fail.  Funny thing is what he describes here are the qualities of the most successful people I’ve had the pleasure to share my company with, both on a personal and professional level throughout my life and career.

Where does your mind go when faced with a tough task? How do you deal with tough people? Do you go to negative-town?

Again, in the words of Conan- “Please do not be cynical. It’s a crappy quality and doesn’t get you anywhere. If you work really hard and you’re kind, good things will happen.”

It really can be as simple as that….if you want it to be.

Whether in business, education, entertainment or sports, success is generally associated with the number of achievements—how many customers you’ve served, how many degrees you’ve earned, how many Oscars you’ve received or how many championships you’ve won. People rarely look at the manner by which those feats were accomplished; they often just look at the stats sheet.

Lead generation is a different kettle of fish, though.

When a considerable amount of effort is utilized to generate as many leads as possible in a campaign, less focus is put into looking at the quality of each lead, which in turn becomes counterproductive. A truckload of leads is pointless if only a canister-full can be turned into customers, right? And Lord knows whether those customers would actually follow through.

Rather than aiming for a large number of leads, why not work on increasing the percentage of leads that convert instead?

By making sure your leads are healthier, you lessen the fuss of numeric quotas and instead hit the bottom line rather dead on. Here’s how to convert more leads into sales:

1. Score your leads, create a ULD, and weed out inessentials

The first logical step is to make things systematic. To distinguish the “cream of the crop” from the pedestrian leads, develop a concrete unit of measure in scoring them based on strength and potential. Others call it a Universal Lead Definition (ULD), but ironically the “universal” part is still subjective. Point is, it doesn’t have to be an industry standard—formulate a scale as you would please, just make it at least reasonable. After identifying the bottom-dwellers, you know what to do. RELATED CLASS: How to Setup a Lead Management Process

2. Develop middle-of-the-funnel content

Now it’s time to nurture those special leads. Marketers sometimes become caught up with focusing only on top-of-the-funnel content—you know, these typical blog posts and how-to-articles which are strictly educational. If you really want high quality leads to stand out, you’ve got to start creating middle-of-the-funnel content. These are more customer-tailored and they tie in information about your industry to your product. Gradually, as these leads view you as a valuable resource, you can insert more substantive content until finally you can harness them into the next step of the lead process. RELATED CLASS: How to Implement and Operate a Content Marketing Program

3. Identify positive patterns and work on them

As middle-of-the-funnel content is more aggressive in nature, you would almost immediately begin to notice which efforts are gaining traction. Now you can gain insight into this data and double down on the strategies that work for you and nix the ones that don’t. You can also gather additional nuggets in the process: Which industries are more receptive? What is the general economic classification of the companies that recognize my content? What is their typical decision-making behavior?

4. Delegate—and dedicate—people

You’re almost there—all you need to do is make sure these leads are brought to the right places. And to do that, you need the right (number and kind of) people. Now you see, you’ve given yourself the luxury of being able to delegate personnel to work faithfully on a promising prospect—an otherwise nearly impossible task had you chosen to sift through piles of questionable leads.

Do you want to nurture more leads to revenue with relevant content?

Watch Creating Content That Converts: Lean Content Marketing for Lead Generation, and in just 30 minutes, you’ll learn how to create a high-impact content marketing plan and put it into action immediately. Plus, you’ll learn lean content marketing techniques to save time and resources, and how to build your content program around themes and personas. This class is available with a FREE trial to the Online Marketing Institute. Get instant access now.

An Easy Answer for Choosing a Sales Process or Methodology is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

Karen wrote to me to ask me which sales process or methodology I use. She’s asking this question because she wants to know what she should adopt and her sales practice.

I don’t know anything about Karen or her business, so it would be criminal for me to make a recommendation as to what process or methodology she should use. But that said, I badly want to tell Karen that I don’t use a single, off-the-shelf process or methodology. I want to tell her something different. I want to tell her that I’m agnostic, that that I’ve read hundreds of sales books, that I’ve been on thousands of sales calls, and that I’ve made distinctions that of help me choose what I believe to be effective based on the facts and circumstance confronting me. I do have a process, but it isn’t in a book.

But that won’t help Karen. She doesn’t have the same experience that I have. I want to help her, so I am giving her an answer directly.

Step 1

Choose a book. Start with Spin Selling by Neil Rackham. Read the book from cover to cover. Make a list of questions that you can use on sales calls and adopt this questioning methodology. Try things. See what kinds of questions work for you AND create value for your clients.

Step 2

Then read my friend Mike Weinberg’s New Sales Simplified. Study Mike’s ideas about targeting and your sales story (your value proposition). Work on these ideas the way that Mike lays them out in the book. Figure out what a target looks like for you, and develop your sales story.

Don’t forget what you learned from Spin Selling. Oh, and don’t miss the part about “advancing”  opportunities (pages 64 – 67, I think).

Step 3

When you’re done with that, pick up New Solution Selling by Keith Eades. The process might not work for you, but you’ll understand the principles of solutions selling, and you’ll get some ideas as to what an effective process might look like for you. Put those ideas to work in your practice, keep what works, drop what doesn’t.

In Conjunction with These Steps, Do This

As you’re reading these books and taking new actions, keep a journal. Make notes on your experiences. Be honest with yourself. Track the mistakes that you make so that you can capture the learning outcome failure provides you. Also capture the things that you do well, the things that work for you, so you can do more of them.

If you don’t like these choices, choose some other books.

And This

If you can afford a seminar, a workshop, or online training, make that investment. Study. Study. Study. Act. Act. Act.

Decide what you believe is true for you and what you believe may not be as effective in your particular situation. But don’t be too fast to judge an idea as wrong or because it makes you uncomfortable. A lot of people believe that the most effective processes and methodologies won’t work in their business–even though they’re almost always wrong.

Repeat this process over and over again. Don’t ever stop.

If you follow this path will become a better salesperson.

By Tibor Shanto - tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca

If you are a regular reader of this blog you know that I run, (sometime towards something, other times from something), different distances, but I do three or four half marathons, 21.1K, per year (it’s that last .1 that always gets me). This means a year round routine of training, spiking in the periods leading up to the halves.

It struck me a while back that the approach that works best for succeeding with my longer runs, is very similar to the approach I take with my pipeline and sales success. In many fortunate ways for me, I have slightly better returns on my pipeline efforts than I do with my runs at times, oh well, I’ll just put that off to age.

So here is my approach and thinking.

Running 21.1K is demanding, certainly not as demanding as a full marathon, but I need to deal with both the physical demand, and the mental outlook required to do my best at each run, and hopefully better than the last run. And while everybody seems to be able to relate to the ongoing training for the runs, some are surprised that the same “training” discipline applies to selling. People tell me “you know what you are doing by now don’t you?” Yes I do, which is why I apply what works for one to the other.

When it comes to the running a 21.1K race, you actually need to train for longer distances if I was to train to do exactly 21.1K, I could do well, but it would leave little room for error along the way, especially unpredictable things which may come up; it would require perfect execution every time. So to ensure that there is room for the unexpected, I instead train for 30K runs. In conditioning myself for longer distances at the same pace as I plan to run the half, I build in room for any number of things that may come up on race day, from simple things like the weather, to more difficult things, like the voices in my head asking “why am I here?”

The same goes for my pipeline, I gear my activities to go beyond what I need to make goal. A lot of sales people work their pipeline to deliver exactly what their quota is, leaving little room for error. On the other hand if I had a 4:1 closing ratio, it is a good idea to work the pipeline as though the closing ratio was 5:1. Taking it further, and applying that thinking to conversion rates between stages of the sale will help you build in enough buffer to withstand negative surprises.

Unfortunately, many sales people apply the opposite, view and work their pipeline close to the line, even the smallest blip will cause them to fall behind quota. Worse, many have questionable prospects in the their pipeline, many with no next steps, or timelines that extend well beyond the average sales cycle, or even the fiscal period in question.

The push back is usually around time, and the market, or any familiar battle cry. But as one marathoner I once replied when asked what the hardest part of training was, she replied “getting out the door”. Once you decide to build in a buffer by aiming beyond the bare minimum, you’ll be out the door.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto  

Sales Training Article: Do You Know Who Your Competition Is?

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

Image courtesy of Ambro at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

For many years there has been a common way that sellers added opportunities to their pipelines. Other vendors developed opportunities first and these sellers often could skew the requirements in their favor. If and when a purchase appeared likely, other vendors (Columns B, C, etc.) were invited to compete, but had a low chance of winning the business. They were called in primarily to gain pricing leverage against Column A sellers that had already themselves established as the vendors of choice. Vendors invited in later were told budget was already approved, given a short window to respond with proposals and frequently were denied access to Key Players. The bad news is that they were going to lose. The good news is they got to add prospects to their pipelines (albeit for a short time).

When invited in as potential Column B vendors, competent sellers realized they had to try to make themselves equal to the vision Column A had created, add requirements if possible (things the first vendor's offering didn't have or that the seller had neglected to highlight), establish value and gain access to Key Players. "Quote and hope" strategies would yield very low win rates.

In today's selling environment, the rules have changed significantly. Sellers may want to consider that if and when prospects (usually mid to low levels) contact them and have done their homework, it's likely there is no "Column A" seller nor vendor. The requirements established are an aggregate of all the research they've done in visiting websites, reading white papers, attending webinars, input garnered from social networking, etc.

Buyers do research on their own because they don't want sellers influencing their requirements lists and decision-making processes. When contacted, sellers using traditional selling approaches that try to alter the requirements prematurely run the risk of providing a poor buying experience and not making the "short list." Any hint of manipulation or persuasion will not be appreciated by buyers.

Seller that can engage buyers in conversations, understand their visions, help uncover potential areas of payback and ask questions to help them realize additional capabilities could be helpful stand the best chance of becoming "Column A." Even if successful, however, dependent upon the level of the buyer, there may be a fair amount of selling that remains to be done gaining access to Key Players, identifying outcomes they want to achieve, creating visions and helping to create a cost vs. benefit to help secure funding.

If asked to describe the difference between A and B/C players in a word, I'd choose: Patience. Years ago it meant resisting the temptation to get into premature product discussions. While that still applies, in today's selling environment it means treating knowledgeable buyers with respect and over time earning the opportunity to enhance requirements lists by asking situational questions and listening to buyer responses.

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.

I am on a Madlibs run right now and maybe I should slow it down but I had to have this one – Brian Bachofner from InsideView. I met him at the InsideView conference and the dude was wearing a searsucker suit which clearly automatically put him in the “guy you want to party with” category. Anyway, we got to hanging out and the guy is really smart, really knowledgeable, and with a great sense of humor aka a perfect candidate for Madlibs. I thought his contribution was fresh and fun. In honor of our first meeting, I was going to do a picture of a guy in a searsucker, but I just loved his Grady Booch reference: A Fool with A Tool is still a Fool. Madlibs after the picture:

1. The b2b buyer is: 
NOT a buyer until confronted with a need to change the status quo.
2. The biggest innovation in sales is how we: enable Reps, through the use of Intelligence and Social, to bring value to every sales interaction.
3. The coolest thing happening in b2b sales is: Marketers with revenue goals.
4. My favorite Sales 2.0 technology is InsideView.  Come on!
5. My favorite sales book is: “Conversations that win the complex sale”, by Erik Peterson and Tim Riesterer
6. My favorite social media site is: Twitter
7. Social selling is: too often divorced from CRM, we’re just starting to bring them together in a way that provides efficiencies and measureable outcomes.
8. I use LinkedIn to: share content and expand my brand/thought leadership.
9. Cold calling is: a great debate (is it dead? what is it?) and worth having as long as it’s helping clients sell and not contributing to marketing speak by vendors/consultants on one side or the other.
10. In b2b, the idea of a funnel: has changed from marketing just stuffing the top, to a more collaborative full-funnel approach with Sales.
11. The first thing every sales person should do is: commit to their craft.  Sales shouldn’t be the job you have because you didn’t plan well in college
12. Voicemail is: usually full for a reason.
13. The biggest mistake sales people make is: not having a measurable goal and plan for each customer interaction
14. The biggest myth in sales is: the “buyer”. I buy groceries, I invest in things that matter.  It’s called ROI, not ROP (purchase) for a reason.
15. My most forgettable sales experience was: not asking for help and trying to solve a customer issue alone.  I disappointed a valued customer and ended up getting kicked off the account.  Learned a valuable lesson that day.
16. The hardest part of selling is: repeating success.  Anyone can win for a quarter or year at a time.
17. The next “hot-thing” in sales will be: the growing role of Sales Enablement.
18. In 2015, sales will be: more virtual inside sales.  Just sourcing inside talent within x miles of an office is stupid foolish.  Especially when so much great experienced “field” sales talent is out there.
19. My favorite sales saying is: A fool with a tool is still a fool
20. Over the next couple years in sales, I can’t wait to see: How Gen X (my generation) manages Millenials.  Going to be interesting
21. Madlibs with the Funnelholic is: Good times

Brian Bachofner is Manager of Alliances and Channel Development at InsideView. With over 10+ years in the B2B Data and Sales Intelligence market, he’s seen the transformation from phonebooks, to lead lists and now the Social Web as a vital way to engage with customers. Brian also manages InsideView’s content for Social Selling University, the leading source for CSO’s and Individual contributors looking for best practices and advice for deploying social sales initiatives.

You can find Brian in the Charlotte airport most weeks, or connect with him on Twitter where he likes to discuss CRM Intelligence, Sales Performance, Social Selling and English football.

 

 

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

The prospect asks you what your price is. You’ve barely met them and you’re eager to close a sale, so you give them your price.

The customer hears your price and then starts to ask for a discount.

You’re still eager, so you throw them a bone, hoping they will take it and you can close the sale.  Yes, the sale comes with a slight discount, but you still got it and you got it fast.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Most of us would read the above scenario and say, “Good! Deal closed!”  Yes, the deal is closed, and a sale was made, but at what cost? 

My issue is when the customer asks us for our price before there is any element of confidence established between us and the customer, then the risk of giving away profit is huge.  Reason is simple: If the customer doesn’t have confidence in us and what we’re selling, their focus is most likely going to drift toward price.

Let me share an example.

You’re in a store and you see something you’re not sure is going to be right for you.  The price appears to be high, and because you’re not quite sure, you simply can’t see spending the money to buy it.

On the other hand, you see another item that again just doesn’t seem quite right, but the price is much lower.  You process the price in your mind, and before you know it, you buy it.  Reason is the lower price offset the lack of confidence about the item.

A discounted price will always make up for a lack of confidence.

What my example points out is if you want to get full price, you have to create confidence in the mind of the buyer.  More confidence, more likelihood the customer will pay full-price.

This is the reason why I cringe when I hear salespeople throwing out a price to a customer just because they asked for it.

When the customer asks what your price is before you have had a chance to establish confidence, your response should be something along the lines of, “I have so many different options, I want to make sure I’m meeting your needs.”

Share your price with the customer only after you’ve shared with them confidence in what you can do.

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

If you answered Yes to that question, here’s the follow-on: Does the buyer feel the same kinds of emotions when they’re engaged in a B2B buying cycle as they do in a B2C cycle?

When B2B marketers talk about their industries, we tend to hear a lot of this kind of talk: “We make data-driven decisions around here.” “We’re in a no-nonsense industry, not sure if emotions play a role.” “It’s a numbers game.” There’s little discussion of emotion in the customer experience.

Colin Shaw and his team at Beyond Philosophy have spent years researching the roles that emotions play in the buyer/seller relationship, and applying the results to help organizations to create emotionally engaging customer experiences. They took a dive into their database to get a detailed look at the relative emotions between the B2C and B2B buyer, and here’s what they came up with:

The green and red bars represent how consumers feel towards businesses they buy from (B2C). The higher the bar, the more that emotion is felt in the experience. The blue line with balls marks how business people feel as a client of other businesses (B2B).

When B2B and B2C emotions across the different areas were compared, there were statistically significant differences in every metric but two: B2B and B2C feel equally “happy” and “pleased.”

So what are those differences?

Looking first at the positive emotions, with the exception of “safe,” B2B buyers feel them to a greater extent than B2C customers. The emotions include trusting, feeling valued, cared for, focused, interested, and energized. This makes sense; in the mass B2C market, people are (for the most part) treated in a mass way. In the B2B world, they’re treated more personally. You have account managers who are rewarded when they build a relationship, earn the buyer’s trust, and close the deal. B2B generally has larger deals that warrant spending the time and money to research “influencers”, “gate keepers”, etc., and build personas. B2B marketers and sales reps target segments so they can personalize relationships and communications more; buyers respond with more positive emotions.

Types of risk

Most of the buying decisions we make as consumers have relatively low potential for negative consequences. A dress can be taken back. A CD that doesn’t satisfy can be given away. We buy time-based experiences (a hotel room, a night at the movies), commodities (paper towels, milk), and things that only one person depends on (that new motorcycle). And we’re spending our own money.

But B2B buyers are spending the company’s money. They have a team or a department or a division depending on what they purchase. If it fails…so do they, and it can be a career-damaging issue for big investments or wide-spread projects. Services are just as risky as goods. The buyer needs to interact with the supplier and manage them to a good performance as well. As you’ll note on the graph, B2B buyers feel less “safe” than B2C customers. That’s because their jobs are on the line.

The dark side

B2B buyers feel more stress, irritation and disappointment than B2C buyers. Again: the stakes are higher, the bets are bigger. Both reputation and return on investment are in play, and both really matter to that buyer. Many people go to bed and wake up with their work in mind and they are much more sensitive to anything that will impact their own work or put their job at risk.

Your takeaways

“We know half of customer experience is how a customer feels,” says Colin Shaw, CEO of Beyond Philosophy. “It’s not a rational thing, and it’s not just the standard place, price and promotion.”

One of the largest shipping companies in the world, Maersk Line, chose to focus on three target emotions that they felt drove the most value – trust, cared for, pleased. They did that to mark the transition from a transaction-driven “A to B” type organization to one that focuses on how customers feel. Three years after, the company had increased their Net Promoter Score by 40% points.

Many B2B businesses work hard to build relationships and gain trust. Whether they identify this as working with emotional factors or not, they’re engaging in it. The key question is: are they focusing on the right emotions – the ones that will drive the action they want from their customers?

You can learn more about the roles emotions play in the B2B environment, including best practices in engaging customers emotionally and whether you can create positive motions without human-to-human contact in this on-demand webinar from Beyond Philosophy: “New research of top emotional touch points: Case studies of how to drive emotional engagement.”

The B2B organization’s need to create and maintain personal relationships is well-served by marketing automation. From list segmentation to website visitor tracking to personalized activity histories, marketing automation helps marketers and sales people understand their buyers as individuals with unique needs – so marketing can craft the right messaging, sales can create the right buying opportunity, and the customer experience can be optimized.

Are you consciously engaging your customers’ emotions? Have a story to share?