I’d like to share with you the most important thing I have learned so far in my life: You become what you focus on and like the people you spend time with. In other words, whatever you fill your mind with and whomever you choose to surround yourself with will in large part determine what […]
The post The Importance of Having a Mentor appeared first on Business Help and Success Tips from John Spence.
Research (Photo credit: Thomas Heyman)
The buyer revolution is in a frenzied uprising. More empowered and influential than ever before, buyers are letting it be known of their dissatisfaction. Several reports during the past year indicate buyers frown upon self-serving as well as product-based content marketing and sales approaches. The power of revolt now a mere click to the trash icon.
What buyers today are beginning to voice is the higher expectations of knowing about their business. With these higher expectations comes a new standard, which must be met. B2B organization must come to the table with business related advice on how to solve business issues – and at the same time, demonstrate how it will improve the business outlook of a buyer’s organization. Pushing product-centric strategies and tactics today will get you pushed out the door.
The Wrong Focus
In the B2B world of literature and reports, the focus has been on the buying process. And, B2B leaders are consuming such content in volume. This may be the wrong focus given how buyers are voicing dissatisfaction. The problem is too much focus on how to push more content and products through the buying process faster. I am not sure this is what buyers are asking for.
What buyers appear to be asking for is greater understanding of complex business issues. Which means, to stop wasting their time with unrelated product solutions. Just as well, to stop making them work so hard to get the information they need. Making the job of solving business issues harder today with increasing volumes of content and sales presentations.
Find the Right Direction
B2B leaders today are faced with the challenge of needing their buyer understanding to become more expansive in order to grow customer acquisition. The standards have changed. It will become clear, obvious, and visible to buyers if companies cannot meet the standard of understanding relevant business issues. And, offer specific plans on how to address. This means more balance as well as a shift in how B2B businesses conduct buyer insight research.
For some, buyer insight research has meant querying the sales force and CRM-based reports. For others, they have put time and effort into quantitative survey methods as well as direct qualitative buyer interviews. With the focus predominantly on selling and buying processes, it leads to not enough as well as insufficient buyer insight research.
It is very much like buyers are going in one direction while sellers are heading in another. While sellers are trying to determine the direction of the buying process to squeeze more content and sales into, buyers are engaged in more encompassing non-linear thinking. This can often mean sellers are not on the same page as buyers.
What Should We Know?
While understanding the buying processes of buyers is one important element, a focus only on this can lead to tunnel vision and being out of touch with buyers. To elevate effectiveness in helping buyers today with complex business issues, B2B leaders should consider gaining more insight about the impact of the following key five elements:
These five elements give us the multi-dimensional perspectives needed to understand buyers today. While buyer research in understanding how to move a buyer from one stage of a buying cycle to the next is helpful, it can lead to a one-dimensional perspective. Which, will actually slow down customer acquisition quite a bit and produce frustrated prospect buyers.
Today’s B2B leaders have to move beyond basic sales-centric and product-centric intelligence about buyers. If you are a leader wondering why, after getting such intelligence the growth needle is not moving, then it may be time to realize buyers have moved on. If you do not get insight into these five key areas, you may be on the platform running to catch the train buyers are on, which has left the station.
(Schedule time with me and a conversation to help you gain more insight into buyers. I am very interested in getting your thoughts and perspectives on how to grow customer acquisition. Please share widely – your peers and colleagues are hoping not to miss the train buyers are on.)
What is a Buyer Persona?
The days when companies could rely exclusively on raw sales data, statistics, charts, and graphs to identify their target customers are gone. Today, savvy business owners take a more holistic approach to targeting and interacting with customers. Instead of adopting a numbers-driven approach, these companies strive to obtain a clearer picture of their clientele, and the buyer persona is a key ingredient in that strategy.
You can think of it like this: buyer personas aim to personalize and bring to life all the sales data, statistics, charts, and graphs mentioned above. The idea is that you can learn more about your target customer if you paint a more complete picture of him or her. To create a buyer persona, companies generally consider their customers’ traits and personalities, including:
The exact checklist for creating a buyer persona will likely vary from company to company, and many businesses will ultimately have various different buyer personas to address the diversity among their client base.
Buyer personas are extremely helpful in growing a business in 3 key areas:
1. Product Development
A good buyer persona will tell you a great deal about the interests and desires of your customer base. That information is critical in determining whether the products you currently offer satisfy your clientele. It is equally important in helping to plan how your brand should evolve. Buyer personas will help a business anticipate how changes in our culture or economy create shifts in consumer needs. That way, you can remain on the cutting edge and will be prepared to launch new products even before the masses realize they need or want them.
2. Marketing and Advertising Strategies
Buyer personas can help companies from a marketing standpoint in two major ways:
In addition, the need for creating an online presence for your company’s brand has never been more important than it is today. Buyer personas can direct how you focus your social media outreach. Does your buyer persona tweet? Is he exclusively a Facebook user? Is he using Pinterest? All this information can shape how you use social media outlets to reach out to the public.
3. Financial Projections
Understanding your buyer persona’s spending habits will help your company grow responsibly. For example, if your customers shop seasonally, it’s best to track those habits and strategically launch new products in peak times during the year. So, rather than blindly producing vast quantities of a new product in the middle of the year, a business that has this kind of buyer persona may choose to wait until the holidays. Similarly, if economic fluctuations tend to impact your buyer persona’s purchasing habits, you should proceed conservatively during difficult economic times.
The most important thing to keep in mind about buyer personas is that, like the real customers behind them, they constantly change and evolve. Therefore, while relying on buyer personas can provide a boost to your business, keeping track of consumer activity, interests, and needs will help you keep your buyer personas current.
Don’t Trust Anyone. That used to be something only the paranoid said, but then something happened along the way. We became informed. We learned that people could listen on on the telephone’s party line, so we paid the extra for a private line. Then we knew our kids or our parents could overhear us on the phone on the wall, so we got multiple lines for our home. Then we could suddenly get a cellphone and have our own private phones anywhere we wanted. Total privacy! Or so we thought, as our words and information went flying through the air....
Read the full article: 3 Ways To Make Your Smartphone Communications More Secure
I’m going to interrupt the normally cheery, uplifting, feel good nature of this blog with a black cloud observation. I suspect, like many of my posts, this one is going be controversial and going to piss a lot of you off. However, my thoughts on that are, if this post pisses you off, it’s your subconscious telling you something. Therefore, you might want to listen to it. It’s not too late to change.
Here is the deal. Most sales people suck. Period, it’s that simple. There is a shortage of good sales people. The talent pool of sales people is desperately small and it’s not improving. The numbers seem to prove this out as well, as some recent surveys suggest less than 50% of sales people meet or exceed quota. Anecdotally, having spent the last 4 years reading, writing, coaching and consulting, the data is telling me the same thing. Sales people suck and there just aren’t that many good sales people out there.
Why? What happened to all the good sales people?
Nothing and that’s the rub. Nothing happened to the good sales people, and everything happened with the selling environment.
Over the past 4-8 years, (it’s hard to pin-point exactly when it all started) sales started to change AND sales people have not kept up with the changes. The selling environment has and is changing yet the participants, the sales people themselves have not. To make things worse, sales training, coaching and consulting has lagged behind, just now having begun to embrace the changes.
Here are the reasons there are so many bad sales people:
Sales people themselves: I have always marveled at the contradiction that is sales people. We hunt what we kill, rely heavily on creativity and resourcefulness, yet are the most conservative and slow to adopt new things folks on the planet. Every sales person on the planet needs to read “Who Moved my Cheese?” because we’re terrible with change.
Sales people have been awful, I mean straight up terrible at adopting social media and social selling. For years the most common phrase I heard out of sales people’s mouths was; “I don’t care what someone had for lunch.” Social media and social selling have moved so far from that it’s a joke. Social selling matters.
In addition to not getting on board with social selling, sales people are unbelievable self-absorbed focusing on their product, it’s value proposition, making quota, their commission plans etc. This self-centric, my needs first, selling approach is a liability that doesn’t allow sales people to truly, teach, consult, engage, or develop solutions that matter for their clients. Sales people are still pitching, telling, yelling and cajoling. It has to stop.
If that’s not enough, sales people have become lazy. Yup, lazy. If I hear another CSO, SVP of Sales, head of sales etc. say their sales people are complaining about the leads they get or how they need more support, I’m gonna throw up in my mouth. Since when has sales become a spoon fed career? Since when did the success of sales people become dependent on the organization, marketing etc?
Yes, there are tremendous new tools, approaches and strategies to enable and support sales people to be more effective, however these things don’t mean sales people don’t have to sell anymore. It doesn’t mean we still don’t have to be the bad asses of the organization capable of brining the big kill and making rain. We’ve gotten lazy and it’s obvious.
The Internet, information and Google: Not long ago, sales people and their organization controlled information. Buyers needed sales people to help them with the buying process. Sales people had most of the information. They used this information to drive the sale. Today, information is ubiquitous. Buyers don’t need the sales person until much later in the sales process. We’ve all heard the stats about how most buyers are anywhere between 40 to 60 percent through the sales cycle before they talk to a sales person. A Google search has usurped much of sales people’s traditional selling power and position. The amount of information sales people need today to make the sale far exceeds what was necessary only a few years ago.
Most sales people have yet to embrace this change. They don’t have the knowledge and insight required to support a client. So, what do they do? They sell features and benefits. They push the value of the product unable to go off script and engage the buyer on their turf, in their terms.
Poor Leadership: I believe effective and impactful sales leadership is at an all-time low. Sales leaders have become increasingly prescriptive, hierarchical and micro-managing than ever before. In response to the increased complexity of sales and the new challenges, sales leaders have continued or even worse reverted back to the days of heavy oversight, demanding quotas, micromanagement, and directive leadership. It’s destructive.
The numbers are proving this out as well. The average tenure of a sales VP is less than two years, with some studies suggesting 18 months. VP’s of sales are getting slaughtered. Most lack the ability to effectively run and develop a sales team capable of excelling in todays selling world. Their sales organizations lack effective team assessment processes, coaching cadences, deal strategy development, people management processes, and more. Straining from the pressure of the organizations demand for more revenue most sales leadership defaults to what it knows and that is what was learned 10, 15, 20 years ago and that’s a problem.
In addition to the ineffective management, just like sales people, most sales leaders have been slow to embrace the changes in the sales world. In A Sales Guy Consulting’s “Social Media and Quota Attainment” report, only 22% of companies provided social media or social selling training to their sales team. This is a complete sales leadership miss. Sales leadership hasn’t been preparing their sales teams for the changes that have been happening over the past 4-8 years. In some cases, sales leadership has just flat-out denied they were happening.
Most sales people suck. It’s that simple. They don’t sell, they are still too busy pitching. They don’t know how to effectively use social media, if they are using it all. They expect the organization to do all the work for them. They lack the in-depth knowledge required to teach and educate their customers beyond their products. They are not perceived as industry experts. They don’t know how to prospect. They complain about lead quality. Their sales managers live in the dark ages. They don’t have solid coaching. They aren’t provided, effective career development and process improvement support. They are too “me” centric. Should I go on?
There are too many bad sales people today. It’s ashame, because our profession is a good one. Nothing happens until a sale is made. It’s time sales people catch up. It’s time to the turn the corner. It’s time for us to focus more on the customer and their needs. It’s time to fully embrace social media and social selling. It’s time to stop micromanaging. It’s time to provide more coaching and stop being prescriptive. It’s time to build teaching organizations rather than selling organizations. It’s time to align sales organizations with outside realities of selling. It’s time to makes sales people suck less.
The good news. It’s not too late.
The moment comes when it’s time to hire your first VP Sales. We’ve talked in the past about the 48 Different Types of VP Sales, What a VP Sales Really Does, and even given you a Script to Use When Interviewing a VP Sales. So then that time comes. Probably, unless you have a ton […]
CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.
Online content in the sales and marketing industries is constantly changing. The Marketing Sphere represents recent good reads from our digital circles about B2B marketing selected by PointClear colleagues.
The 6-Step Path to Creating Inherently Useful Marketing
Are you helping your customers by being as useful as possible? Jay Baer shares his thoughts on Youtility—“marketing customers actually want, instead of marketing that companies think they need”—and shares a checklist infographic to see if you are achieving Youtility. Via Convince & Convert
3 Behavioral Insights Marketers Should Be Mining
Marketers today are inundated with data that can be very powerful when used properly. Tony Zambito shares how to make a connection between the real world and the digital world. Making these connections is key to gaining buyer insight and improving predictability. Via Eloqua
People Don’t Share Brochures, They Share Stories
In his book Contagious: Why Things Catch On, Jonah Berger discusses the premise of why certain things “go viral.” He found that it’s not chance alone that causes some things to catch on, there is a science behind it. Read this article to learn the six keys to sharing as outlined in Berger’s book. Via Duct Tape Marketing
Want More Readers? Create Content that’s Newsworthy
We regularly read about the need to create content that is compelling and newsworthy, but what is newsworthiness? In this article Diane Thieke shares nine attributes that are the most common markers of newsworthy material. Via Biznology
Do you have a resource from your sphere to share? Let us know in the comment section.
We are overwhelmed with digital content on the Internet both in text, sound and video. As almost all B2B companies are now creating and publishing content for their content marketing even more content is produced and available about almost everything.
As people have the choice from a vast offering of content and have to optimize how to spend their valuable time, they learned to quickly evaluate the presented content between quality and rubbish. If the content is not to the point, not suiting their case or matching their interest they will quickly hit the back button and click to the next apparently better suiting content.
So there is some kind of war going on in order to have the content of the company presented and read as there is too much content around and available. Content needs to be found and read. Google does measure the time each visitor spends on the content. If too many people use the back button too fast the content is lowered in importance quickly so it won’t show up high on the search result pages.
So not only your content needs to be found, but also needs to capture the interest of many searching the Internet for a certain topic in order to keep the high ranking. It is not just quality that will make people stay on your content, but also the entertainment level of your content: entertaining content is likely to score higher than dull content.
The best option is avoiding self promotion at all times.
Fight your content war with useful and interesting content, related to your products or services, for your target customers in an entertaining way.
Are you winning your content war from your competitors ?
100 billion emails. That is how many business emails will be sent and received in 2013. Per day.
Good grief.
As a PR professional, I craft countless emails each day. Don’t tell my boss (or clients!) … but sometimes, I find myself plowing through the drafting process too quickly, to check it off my list.
While we can’t eliminate emails from the business world, we can strive for better. Smarter. Or “smahter” as they say here in Boston. Whatever your profession, check out these 10 tips for wicked smaht communications in our slideshow.
Highlights include…
Chances are, by now you have a smartphone and maybe a tablet, and you never leave home without one or both of them.
These devices have transformed our daily lives. While much attention is given to the coolest consumer apps, mobile apps that help you do your job better are arguably even more important.
With that in mind, we've assembled a collection of apps that can help you be a rock star at work.
We curated this list by polling coworkers, researching the recommendations of other tech publications, and sifting through ratings on the major app stores.
Jump to the apps in the following categories:
Business productivity apps will let you work faster, smarter, better.
Jump to:
Price: $0.99
Turn your smartphone into a high-end audio recorder that can record meetings, voice notes, anything. Then send your recordings by email or upload them to Dropbox.
Price: Free
There are a few apps that run Microsoft Office on the iPad and Android tablets. We like CloudOn because 1) it's free, 2) it supports many of Office's more advanced features, 3) it's designed to work on a touch interface.
    
|
l strongly recommend reading Atul Gawande’s piece in the 7/29 New Yorker on how innovations spread. He focuses on medicine – he is a surgeon after all. But his piece has wide resonance for innovators and salespeople in every field.
In explaining why some innovations spread rapidly, and others don’t, he differentiates between innovations which have immediate, positive effects and those which take a while for their benefits to be seen. The former category tends to spread faster.
In the mid-19th century, anesthesia was rapidly adopted, because it offered an immediate benefit to patients by reducing their pain, and to doctors, by making operations much less traumatic. By contrast, the use of antiseptic spray during operations was adopted far more slowly, despite its huge benefits in reducing infection in the operating room. The reason, Gawande writes, was that germs aren’t visible. Their effects take time to materialize. And doctors hated having to work in a mist of antiseptic spray.
“This has been the pattern of many important but stalled ideas. They attack problems that are big but, to most people, invisible; and making them work can be tedious, if not outright painful. The global destruction wrought by a warming climate, the health damage from our over-sugared modern diet, the economic and social disaster of our trillion dollars in unpaid student debt—these things worsen imperceptibly every day. Meanwhile, the carbolic-acid remedies to them, all requiring individual sacrifice of one kind or another, struggle to get anywhere.”
If you’re in sales, it’s worth thinking about Gawande’s distinction. Is what you’re selling of immediate, tangible benefit? Or will the benefits take time for the user to appreciate? Then adapt your sales approach accordingly, perhaps using the 7-touch approach he describes later:
“In the era of the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter, we’ve become enamored of ideas that spread as effortlessly as ether. We want frictionless, “turnkey” solutions to the major difficulties of the world—hunger, disease, poverty. We prefer instructional videos to teachers, drones to troops, incentives to institutions. People and institutions can feel messy and anachronistic. They introduce, as the engineers put it, uncontrolled variability.
But technology and incentive programs are not enough. “Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation,” wrote Everett Rogers, the great scholar of how new ideas are communicated and spread. Mass media can introduce a new idea to people. But, Rogers showed, people follow the lead of other people they know and trust when they decide whether to take it up. Every change requires effort, and the decision to make that effort is a social process.
This is something that salespeople understand well. I once asked a pharmaceutical rep how he persuaded doctors—who are notoriously stubborn—to adopt a new medicine. Evidence is not remotely enough, he said, however strong a case you may have. You must also apply “the rule of seven touches.” Personally “touch” the doctors seven times, and they will come to know you; if they know you, they might trust you; and, if they trust you, they will change. That’s why he stocked doctors’ closets with free drug samples in person. Then he could poke his head around the corner and ask, “So how did your daughter Debbie’s soccer game go?” Eventually, this can become “Have you seen this study on our new drug? How about giving it a try?” As the rep had recognized, human interaction is the key force in overcoming resistance and speeding change.”
7 Steps to Close Sales Fast is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino
Want to close sales fast? Here is your recipe!
Now that you’ve read this list you know there’s no possible way that you can close the business in five minutes. In complex B2B sales, you will have likely invested months working through this process. But having gone through this process, wrapping up the sale is easier and faster because you’ve done all the hard work that leads to the easy yes.
The truth of the matter is you can close in 30 seconds. You can say, “I feel like we’ve done what we needed to in order to successfully execute on this project. Can we begin working on it or is there something else you need to see first?”
I was delighted to be asked by the folks at InsightSquared to contribute to their series of "expert interviews" on key topics in sales and marketing analytics. Gareth Goh of InsightSquared fired off the questions, and I did my best to answer them. I hope you find some of the ideas useful in helping to improve sales performance within your own organisation. Here goes:
Bob: I think there are actually three interlocking capabilities at play here: leadership, management and coaching. All three are important.
Leadership requires a clear sense of vision and purpose, and the ability to inspire. It’s the behaviour that encourages a team of people to perform at their best, to be motivated and aligned. Management is more to do with the nuts and bolts of running a sales organisation on a day-to-day basis. It includes key responsibilities like pipeline management or forecasting or general skills-based training.
You’re right to call out coaching as being a related but separate skill. It’s the ability to help the individuals within your team to make the best of THEIR abilities, to bring out their talents, to stimulate them to think differently, and to help them be more successful in their roles.
When I assess people in positions of responsibility at sales organisations, I tend to think in those three dimensions. What are their strengths as leaders, managers and coaches? An interesting combination of skills is required if you're to do all three well.
I think it’s the ability to get the most out of each salesperson. It’s not just coaching - I think there are other ways where managers can maximise individual talents - but I would say coaching is a big element of that. Something which is perhaps less obvious is the ability to recognise the particular skills and winning behaviours of top performers across the organisation, and to distil those winning attitudes and behaviours in a consistent way across the whole organisation. That’s subtly different from, but every bit as important as, coaching at the individual level.
Bridging the gap between top sales performers and the rest. You can’t expect training people in sales methodologies to achieve much by itself. This sort of training might be a necessary foundation but it’s really only a small part of the story. Sales managers really have to recognise those winning habits and behaviours, which include things like what top performers do particularly well when it comes to qualification.
One of the distinct differences I find between top performers and the rest is they tend to be much better qualifiers largely because they have too much respect for their own time to waste it pursuing un-winnable deals. They have the confidence to qualify out at an early stage whereas you frequently see middle-of-the-road sales people hang on to similarly un-winnable deals because they think if they qualify them out their pipeline will look smaller. In practical terms, the opposite is true.
So I think improving qualification can go a long way towards bridging the gap. Another skill you typically see in top performers is the ability to look at things in a way that uncovers pain points, establishes context and focuses the broad value proposition of the vendor onto the very specific needs of the individual customer.
Some people seem as if they have just been born with these instincts but my experience is that they can be developed in others and that you can narrow the gap. But in complex sales environments, sales people must have a reasonable level of intelligence - both intellectual and emotional - and curiosity. If you have those foundations, you can use training and coaching to drive substantial improvements. If they don’t exist, it’s usually a hopeless case, and you'd be better off persuading them to find a job that involves selling something simpler.
Individual sales managers have different personalities. You come across managers who are at all points on the scale, between seeing sales as a heroic art, a science or as a process that can be engineered. But I’ve got to say that sales management cultures that are fundamentally based around the expectation of heroic but unscientific behaviour are finding things increasingly tough.
Effective modern sales leadership increasingly looks like a data-driven blend of science and engineering. If you don’t have the right data, it’s hard to identify winning and losing patterns of performance. But armed with the level of data that is now possible to extract from well-implemented CRM systems, you have the ability to look for patterns of performance, to identify what’s working well and what isn’t.
And that’s when an engineering-like focus on improving processes comes to the fore, and I think that data-driven cultures have highlighted the value of sales leaders having - at least in part - an engineering or process-driven mind-set. They are continually looking for systematic ways to improve performance.
I look for a handful of Key Performance Indicators. Firstly, it’s really important that we clearly define and track the stages through which the buying decision process evolves. I say buying process because what the sales person is doing is much less important than what the buyer is doing when it comes to accurately positioning opportunities in the pipeline.
Understanding the volume and value of opportunities at each stage in the pipeline is obviously important, but there’s a third metric that is equally important: velocity - the speed at which opportunities progress from stage to stage. Velocity turns out to be one of the most effective predictors of sales performance. Opportunities that move quickly are (depending on which study you read) 2-3 times more likely to close than deals that hang for around for ages without making significant progress.
Once you’ve got a handle on volume, value and velocity, you can slice and dice the data to learn a great deal about the health of your pipeline, the attractiveness of your various offerings and the competence of your different sales people. And you can judge the overall health of the pipeline by looking at the shape of the funnel.
Is it bottom-heavy, with lots of opportunities progressing to advanced stages but then being lost or abandoned? Or does your funnel slim down rapidly from the top, leaving a smaller number of highly-qualified opportunities to get the focus of your resources? You can probably guess which one is the more efficient.
That’s where identifying and encouraging winning habits is so important. What are the common characteristics of successful opportunities, and successful sales people? How can we use those insights to attract, engage, qualify and convert more of the right sort of prospects?
It’s critical. Organisations can’t afford for their marketing departments to be primarily or exclusively focused just on awareness and preference, or even on the volume of leads generated or the number of website visitors.
That top-of-funnel activity has to demonstrate a clear path to revenue. And sales and marketing departments must be on precisely the same page when it comes to identifying what an “ideal prospect” looks like, and knowing what really matters to those target customers and how they make buying decisions.
Sales and marketing alignment also requires a common agreement about how the organisation as a whole can systematically identify, attract, engage, qualify and convert more of the right sort of prospects.
Marketing’s responsibilities can’t and mustn’t be confined to “top of funnel” activities. Marketing has a vital role to play in sales enablement at every stage in the pipeline and in helping the sales team systematically eliminate the obstacles that might prevent an otherwise well-qualified prospect from turning into a customer.
I believe that the successful sales managers of the future will be increasingly data-driven and have a process orientated engineering mind-set, as well as retaining many of the traditional people-centric virtues of sales leadership, management and coaching.
Some traditional sales managers will struggle to make the transition, and they’ll find themselves replaced by people who can combine the virtues I’ve identified. Coaching will continue to be a critical sales management skill, but it will be better targeted and better tailored because the manager can draw upon much better data.
We’ll have a much better sense of the winning habits and behaviours of our top performers - driven by a much better understanding of what it is that makes them successful, and we’ll be better able to diagnose where people with potential need to help.
I anticipate that we’ll also see a greater use of simulations to develop skills - a series of linked role plays that can help sales people practice and develop the necessary capabilities. Just as we currently train pilots, we need to find better ways of exposing sales people to a range of situations (both predictable and unpredictable) and seeing how they react, without crashing the deal.
In summary, we’ll have smarter sales managers, equipped with better insights, helping smarter sales people to systematically and progressively improve their performance. And if we do it right, we’ll have fewer missed forecasts and more sales people over quota. What’s not to like about that?
What do you think? Did I hit the spot? Are there any other aspects of sales leadership, management and coaching that you'd like to share?
Someone asked me recently to go back to some easy basics about Twitter. I thought that would be too easy until someone on Facebook asked me what an avatar was, or how to choose a file for their bio. Because I don’t want this to be too easy, I’ll throw in advanced tips to help you optimize your bio.
WHAT’S A BIO, ANYWAY?
No doubt you’ve opened enough accounts at this point in your life to know what a bio is. A Twitter bio is no different, and completely different. Let’s deconstruct.
PROFILE PAGE (to get here, click on the gear button on the top right, then on Settings, then on Profile):
– Photo (aka, avatar): When you first set up your account, Twitter will suggest you upload a photo. If you’re an individual, not a business, I always suggest you choose a photo of yourself. It doesn’t have to be professional or fancy — in fact, I suggest something that looks most like how you typically appear in daily life. I’d avoid wedding or holiday shots — these often have other people in them and make it harder to see you clearly.
Tip: Some people feel strongly that you upload a picture and then never, ever change it. I disagree. As long as it’s not too much of a departure, there’s nothing wrong with mixing it up a bit.
– Header: Last year, Twitter added a header option, which allows us to upload a file, i.e., a book cover or a picture of some sort. You don’t have to add a header, but it is a nice way to get in a bit of passive promotion. Mine looks like this >>>>>>>
Tip: I asked my graphic designer to create something for me, so if you have someone you use, have them do the same. If you have the skillz, do it yourself. :)
– Name: Seems obvious, but use you REAL name where it says ‘name.’ Even if your Twitter profile doesn’t match your real name, that’s okay.
My Twitter handle for my author account is @RachelintheOC, because Rachel Thompson was already taken, so I created something catchy and easy to remember. Now that I’ve moved from the OC (Orange County, CA) after seventeen years there, it no longer applies, but oh well. It’s how people know me (you can change your handle and you won’t lose your followers, though I don’t recommend doing that unless you’ve just started on Twitter).
Exception: If for some reason you want to keep your identity private, I suggest using a pen name and a related picture (i.e., for an erotica writer).
Tip: Make your handle easy to remember. A combo of letters and numbers may have clever meaning to you, but it means jack to your followers and they’ll never remember it. Make yourself easy to find. Don’t be your own worst enemy here .
– Location: Some people are very specific about where they live, others like myself, aren’t (stalkers, etc. Long, boring story.). So, I realized I could use the space to add more detail to my bio (‘#MondayBlogs every Monday’ is my location now). Regardless, there’s no law that says you have to put your location.
Tip: It’s a good idea if you’re a local business and hope to attract more business.
– Website: Obvious.
Tip: Purchase your domain, i.e., I own RachelintheOC.com. If I didn’t, it would be much longer, with wordpress at the end (or blogger or Tumblr or Weebly, etc). You are limited by space in every aspect of Twitter (it’s not called ‘micro-blogging’ for nothing) so shorten it up.
– Bio: You have 160 characters (that includes spaces). Clever is good here. Show, don’t tell. If you’re funny, say something funny. Don’t say, ‘I’m funny.’ #snore
Use hashtags, no more than three. This makes your searchable. For example, #author, #bookblogger, #socialmedia, whatever.
Tip: Twitter now allows you to add a second hyperlinked website in the bio section itself. Shorten it using bitly.com, which allows you to make the most of the limited space, customize it (i.e., with your book title), and track clicks (i.e., clicks from Twitter to Amazon — this is a great trick since Amazon gives us NO information about sales).
Once you’re done here, click on DESIGN.
WHAT IS DESIGN?
DESIGN is all about your background. Your options here are fairly straightforward: Pick a pre-made theme, click on Themeleon (thousands of patterns and choices), or customize your own background.
Tip: Just as in your header, you can customize your background. I recommend keeping the header and background similar (though not identical). Mine looks like this:
Every opportunity you have to provide information to people, do it.
Many of us look at your header, bio, avatar and background before we follow you. Some of us even check out your tweets. I feel like a broken record, but if all you do is spam links to your own work, you will not sell books or gain followers.
Providing this type of info looks professional and allows you the advantage of selling without, well, selling. Got questions? Ask below!
When our research tracked 20,000 new hires, 46% of them failed within 18 months. But even more surprising than the failure rate, was that when new hires failed, 89% of the time it was for attitudinal reasons and only 11% of the time for a lack of skill. The attitudinal deficits that doomed these failed hires included a lack of coachability, low levels of emotional intelligence, motivation and temperament ~ Mark Murphy, Author of Hiring for Attitude, as well as the bestsellers Hundred Percenters and HARD Goals (quoted in Forbes Magazine).
The way many sales managers hire, they might as well be making random choices. To be frank —the results would probably be as good as what they are doing now, and possibly better.
If your hiring success rate is less than stellar, you may want to start hiring randomly as well. To get you started, here are three completely random ways to choose your next sales rep:
Of course, these ludicrous approaches would never work. But most sales job interviews aren’t much better, and they are lousy predictors of how the candidate will perform on the job. Stephanie Clifford reported in an Inc. magazine article, “The New Science of Hiring,” that standard interviews have only a “.2 correlation with predicting success.” What??
The price of failure is enormous (see What is the cost of a bad sales hire?), but there is good news: sales and hiring managers can avoid these costs. A study by Harvard University, showed that the vast majority of turnover can be directly connected to errors during selecting and hiring new employees.
Over the years, Peak has increasingly relied on scientific and behavioral techniques to assess candidates and their suitability for our customer’s open sales positions. The 90%+ success rates of our candidates speak to the value of our methods but there is also more broad support for leveraging science in the hiring process. CEB, the world’s leading member-based advisory organization, reports that firms that use assessment science to choose and develop sales reps get 16 percent better performance. In addition, employees are 50 percent more likely to continue working with the company rather than leave.
Why don’t sales managers make more objective hiring decisions using proven scientific techniques? Many times they interview with methods they experienced when they were hired, using archaic questions and cheesy challenges. In other words, they don’t know any better, nor do the other managers in the firm. They compound the problem when they add other errors as well, including:
It is a bizarre fact that the hiring process is the most important part of running a business, yet is the business process is most likely to be ad-hoc.
Finding great sales talent is like looking for a needle in a haystack – blindfolded!
Not that it is easy. It’s tough to find the right salesperson in the best of conditions. Only a small percentage of those applying for a job tell the truth about their relevant background and experience. Not only that, two-thirds of resumes had creative embellishments of some kind!
Despite these challenges, your current hiring practice can be improved significantly by using proven scientific and behavioral testing methods. See more of our sales hiring insights here > Sales Recruiting Insights
John C. Maxwell, author of the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, said, “Leadership is a lot like investing in the stock market. If your hope is to make a fortune in a day, you’re not going to be successful. There are no successful day traders in leadership.”
How about you? Are you a day-trader type of sales manager trying to make a big killing by focusing on your problems du jour? Or are you a long-term investor who is willing to wait for sustained team results?
A day-trading manager rarely has time for team development… Why? Because they’re busy responding to emails, dealing with unexpected problems, answering calls and texts, finishing work from the day before, etc.
I’m willing to bet that much of your time is spent on these same kinds of activities. But let me ask you this… Are there any of these activities that – if you did them effectively and consistently – would significantly improve your team’s sales results?
The answer is no. All those things may feel important or at least urgent in the moment, but none of them have a lasting impact on how well your team performs.
What does have a big effect on team results? Coaching! The goal of developmental coaching is to make your team stronger and more competitive in the future – it’s about empowering others. And the more empowered your people are the less stress you have. Reduced stress is a good thing, right?
Spending time on developmental coaching is what will turn you from a day-trader into a long-term investor. Begin evaluating tasks in terms of pay-off. Think of time as a return on investment. Every hour you spend coaching a rep to improve their skill, will, or habits will pay off hundred-fold or even more — because that rep will be more effective even when you’re not working with him or her. That’s the leverage of coaching.
Your mindset should be “What is the most valuable use of my time right now?” or “What can I do right now that will help one of my reps improve?”
Also, start learning how to proactively manage your schedule so you can eliminate all the timewasters — the things that get in the way of you spending more time on your important tasks.
One way to tell the difference between an urgent timewaster and a truly important task is who initiates the activity. Timewasters are almost always initiated by someone else… and in responding to them, you are automatically in a reactive mode. Learn to fight the impulse to automatically respond to every request that comes your way… the desire to answer every email, every text, every call… the instinct to fight every fire that you’re called in to fight. Become very deliberate about how you respond to tasks that others would have you do.
In contrast, a long-term investor is proactive — he or she initiates all the tasks that contribute to team development. That includes activities like one-on-one coaching, sales opportunity coaching, account development planning, and so on.
While it’s true that a day trader — whether in the stock market or in the management office — can occasionally have a big score, you’ll get more sustained results if you invest in developmental coaching. That’s how your sales team can continue to improve quarter after quarter after quarter. To learn more about developmental coaching download our 5 Sales Coaching Essentials report.
One of the perks of my job is that I get an opportunity to learn from some of the best people in B2B sales. There are so many great people that I wanted to write this blog post to share them with all of you. These people share so many great posts that you would have to dedicate an entire week just to get through all of it.
These people are in no paticular order but all should be followed if you want to learn how to excell in B2B sales. There are som marketing leaders included only because I believe that all great sales people practice marketing on some level. With this list of sales leaders you should be on your way to becoming an expert in social selling.
If someone is missing from this list add them into the comments below.
| Name | Twitter Profile |
| Barbara Giamanco | @barbaragiamanco |
| Kurt Shaver | @salesfoundry |
| Jill Konrath | @jillkonrath |
| Reality Works Group | @realityworksgrp |
| George Albert | @mysales4life |
| Richardson Company | @RichardsonSales |
| David A Brock | @davidabrock |
| Sales Benchmark Index | @MakingTheNumber |
| ZS Associates | @ZSAssociates |
| CEB News & Insights | @CEB_News |
| Jill Rowley | @jill_rowley |
| Craig Rosenberg | @fillthefunnel |
| Karin Bellantoni | @BlueprintSMS |
| Jim Domanski | @TelesalesExpert |
| Terri Dunevant | @wincourage |
| Gary S. Hart | @SalesDuJour |
| Social Selling | @SocialSelling |
| Mark Hunter | @thesaleshunter |
| S. Anthony Iannarino | @iannarino |
| Jim Keenan | @keenan |
| Jerry Kennedy | @jerrykennedy |
| Richardson Company | @RichardsonSales |
| Alen Mayer, CSP | @mayeralen |
| Paul McCord | @paul_mccord |
| Kelly McCormick | @KellyMcCormick_ |
| Nancy Nardin | @sellingtools |
| Andy Paul | @ZeroTimeSelling |
| Don F Perkins | @donfperkins |
| Lori Richardson | @scoremoresales |
| Kelly Riggs | @KellyRiggs |
| Steven Rosen | @StevenARosen |
| Richard Ruff | @saleshorizons |
| Todd Schnick | @toddschnick |
| Tibor Shanto | @TiborShanto |
| Irreverent Sales Girl | @iSalesGirl |
| Babette Ten Haken | @babettetenhaken |
| Robert Terson | @RobertTerson |
| Ken Thoreson | @KenThoreson |
| Dan Waldschmidt | @danwaldo |
| Mike Weinberg | @mike_weinberg |
| Koka Sexton | @kokasexton |
| Kathleen Steffey | @SalesJournal |
| Tamara Schenk | @tamaraschenk |
| HubSpot | @hubspot |
| Forrester Research | @forrester |
| Sirius Decisions | @siriusdecisions |
| McKinsey_CMSOForum | @McK_CMSOForum |
| B2B Lead Roundtable | @b2bleadblog |
| Jonathan Farrington | @TopSalesWorld |
| Jeff Ogden | @fearlesscomp |
| Anneke Seley | @annekeseley |
| Linkedin for Sales | @linkedinselling |
| Eyes On Sales | @eyesonsales |
| Sam Richter | @samrichter |
| Matt Heinz | @heinzmarketing |
| B2B Sales | @B2BSales |
| Josiane Feigon | @JosianeFeigon |
| Nancy Bleeke | @SalesProInsider |
| Colleen Francis | @cfrancisvoice |
| Colleen Stanley | @EiSelling |
Is your sales process slow or fast?
There are valid arguments for both sides.
I will state that fast will result in closing more deals, but slow will result in closing bigger deals.
Most salespeople subscribe to one style or another, and I believe the best approach is to subscribe to both and know when to use one or the other.
Selling fast works great because it gets you to a state of actually doing business with the client rather than merely talking about it. Down side is the customer can wind up viewing you as a one-trick pony or someone who can only do certain things.
Conversely, the person who closes slow has the opportunity to get the customer to see a bigger picture. In so doing, both the salesperson and the customer likely discover there is more opportunity for the salesperson to help the customer.
The style I’ve come to embrace and am sharing with others is one where we close quick around what I refer to as the “POE” — point of entry.
The POE is something you can get the customer to agree on quickly in the sales process — not necessarily on the first or second sales call, but much shorter than what your historical time has been for closing a deal.
Your POE should be something the customer will value and be one that allows for you to get more time with the customer and learn more about them. An example might be an analysis or testing process. Something like this can be an excellent POE, as it will expose you to more.
Having a POE that offers you more conversation with the customer is exactly what you want. You will learn more about the customer and they will learn more about what you do. This ultimately leads to a sales process that is longer (and in some cases slower), but can result in better sales.
What is your POE?
Develop 2-3 different points of entry you might be able to use with a prospect. Test the idea and see what the results are.
Nearly everyone I’ve trained on this idea has found it works and ultimately leads to not only more sales, but to better and bigger sales.
Copyright 2013, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog.
What marketing tactic is best described by the following statements?
If you answered “cold calling” you are wrong, and sadly may also be stuck in the 1990s. But, if you answered “automated lead nurturing” you are spot on! It is an understatement that lead nurturing is a key driver moving leads through the funnel, but how do you know if your efforts are impactful?
Recently at Marketo, we have placed more emphasis on the rate at which leads flow through the funnel and developed ways to accelerate the rate aka shorten the buying cycle. With this aggressive push strategy, we have to be extra careful not to overdo the outbound flow while finding a good balance of informative and promotional content.
I have listed 3 things to consider when pushing your leads through the funnel.
If you are too sales heavy in your content, leads will put their blinders up. But, if you are too conservative and completely refrain from hard promotions of your product/service, you may miss out on your end goal. At Marketo, we combined our early and mid-stage nurturing tracks in order to infuse more promotional content earlier in the decision making cycle. We leveraged the 4-1-1 approach from Twitter, familiarized by Joe Pulizzi and Tippingpoint Labs, in order to have a good balance of value and promotion. For every 4 educational or entertaining emails, we send one soft promotion (i.e. 3rd party report) and one hard promotion (i.e. demo request).
Another approach is leveraging accelerator campaigns to move leads along the buying cycle faster. If you give leads a reason to act, you can identify the fast movers from the tire kickers. These campaigns are sales-y in nature so be cautious to not overuse them.
When building content there is a fine line between saying what YOU want to say and saying what THEY want to hear. A fatal flaw is to forget what your audience cares about. Remember you need to engage them in a relevant conversation. An example of what we do to target our messaging to our audience is to tag behavioral attributes in what we call “topic of interest”. If you attend one of our webinars around the topic of email marketing, our immediate post-event follow-ups will be on the topic of email marketing. We will then drop you into an email marketing drip campaign, and for the next few communications we send out, you will receive information and assets on your topic of interest. We have seen great email performance success with this approach since the messaging is timely and relevant.
Another approach we’ve taken to be relevant is to leverage dynamic content in our nurturing emails. For example, we segment our nurturing tracks based on two variables: role (marketing, sales and exec) and buying stage (early/mid and late). If we wanted to add a third variable (let’s say size of company), we would have to create more tracks, meaning we would have to create more emails to put in those tracks. The more variables you add, the more tracks you would have to account for. With dynamic content, we can use the same email in the same track, but create multiple versions based on the size of the company. This has been super helpful when sending case studies and video testimonials.
To learn more about how to create engaging, relevant lead nurture campaigns be sure to download our new ebook.
Lastly, with all that the marketing team has done to push leads to the sales team, be sure to beef up the sales outbound efforts. Sales reps are expensive, which means that their time needs be spent focused on closing deals. But they won’t be able to close deals if they can’t connect with the leads. We provide our reps with marketing email templates that they can send out to their leads. They can track the email using our software, and automatically log an activity in the CRM system. The marketing team controls the message and branding, and the sales reps are able to cover more leads and not waste time crafting individualized emails.
We also created an automated drip campaign for our sales development representatives to use. If a rep is having trouble connecting with a lead or has an influx of leads and can’t contact each one within the SLA period (good problem to have by the way), they can drop their leads into an automated email campaign. This initiates a series of three emails across a three week span, which look like personal reach outs from the rep, asking for a few times to schedule a meeting. The key here is to put some dates and times to make it look authentic. The reps love this campaign – they focus on hot leads, while the automated campaign helps them get meetings on their calendars.
How are you pushing leads through the middle of the funnel? I’d love to hear about your strategy and tactics.
By Geoffrey James, INC - Sales Source
Image courtesy of Ambro at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Why are you wasting everyone's time telling your company's story?
Every day, I receive around a dozen press releases from companies announcing new products. Here's a real-life example (name changed):
"I'd like to introduce you to Acme, a new cloud-based call center solution. Acme asked the question, 'Why can't your CRM software easily talk to your call center?' and when they couldn't find a solution to do that-they built their own."
Okay, they're telling a story. I give them credit for that. It's better than blitzing me with a list of product features.
However, while they've told a story, it's a story about them. And frankly, nobody gives a flying squirrel's sphincter about your company's decision-making process, which is the corporate equivalent of "how I spent my summer vacation."
This "look at us! we're so smart!" style of marketing has become woefully common in the post-Facebook era. People--particularly young people, I note--seem convinced that business communication consists of telling people about YOU.
But in business, it's never about you. It's always about the customer.
Ironically, call centers are full of vivid customer stories waiting to be told:
Given that there's so much going on in this situation, why not tell a story that has real human drama? Like so:
Imagine you're calling a vendor for support and the call center guy has NO CLUE what you've already bought. Suddenly you're spending your valuable time providing information that your vendor should already know. So here's my question: how long before you start looking for a new vendor who has their sh*t together?
That took me two minutes to write that. I'm sure somebody really talented could up with something better, but that's not the point. The point is:
Tell the customer's story not your story.
Read our clients' stories here.
Need some help with your sales performance? Take a look at the sales training workshops available to you and improve sales performance.
Read more sales training articles from CustomerCentric Selling® - The Sales Training Company.
If you weren’t able to attend our live event on August 6, you can now view the recorded session covering best practices and insights from sales performance experts Tim Riesterer of Corporate Visions and Paul Hennessey of BayGroup International (a Corporate Visions Company).
In this webinar Paul and Tim provide actionable insights for leaders on how to get the sales team to:
We value your feedback! Let us know what you found most useful from the session by commenting below.
By Geoffrey James, INC - Sales Source
Image courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Customers get excited when you show them something to get excited about.
Sales messages always consist of a claim or a series of claims that you're making about yourself, your firm or your product.
For a sales claim to be effective, the customer must believe it, remember it, and want to take action based on it. Therefore, every sales claim must pass three hurdles:
1. Is it credible?
2. Is it meaningful?
3. Is it memorable?
Why 'Exciting' Isn't Exciting
In my recent post, 8 Words to Avoid When Selling, I pointed out that the word "exciting" wasn't itself exciting. That's because most companies use the word "exciting" in their sales claims like so:
"Our product is exciting!"
Let's run the claim through the criteria stated above:
1. Is it credible? Maybe, but only if the customer already trusts you. If you've got a long history with a particular customer, maybe that customer will respond. However, if the customer doesn't know you, all you've communicated is your opinion, and to a stranger your opinion means squat.
2. Is it meaningful? No, because the customer has no idea whether what you think is "exciting" is the same as what the customer thinks is exciting. As far as the customer knows, "exciting" to you might mean "I'm excited that we finally have a product that isn't total crap."
3. Is it memorable? No, because millions of companies have used the word "exciting" billions of times. The word is just mental SPAM, just like "new and improved," "innovative," "guaranteed" and all the other salesy words that no longer pack a punch.
Making It Credible
To excite a customer, a sales claim must be credible. The easiest way to add credibility is to attribute the caim to somebody whom the customer already trusts or respects. For example:
"This product is exciting!"
-- Joe Bigwig, VP, Major Company Inc.
"Exciting!"
-- Jill Smart, Reporter, HugeHighTechWebsite.com
Let's run the two claims above through the three hurdles:
1. Are they credible? Yes, assuming that the authorities quoted are real people who will stand behind their remarks.
2. Are they meaningful? Maybe, a little, but only if the customer does the mental heavy lifting to map the opinion of the sources into the customer's own experience. (E.g. "Joe Bigwig had a similar problem to mine, so maybe this is the solution.")
3. Are they memorable? No. The customer still doesn't know what "exciting" means in this context and the word "exciting" itself remains forgettable.
Making It Meaningful
The next step is to make the message meaningful, so that it's relevant enough to the customer so that the customer might take action. Two examples again:
"We saved $1 million in reduced cost overruns."
-- Joe Bigwig, VP, Major Company Inc.
"Acme's customers typically save around $1 million a year."
-- Jill Smart, Reporter, HugeHighTechWebsite.com
Let's go through the hurdles:
1. Are they credible? Yes, insofar as customers trusts the sources cited and they'll stand behind their words.
2. Are they meaningful? Yes, because reducing costs is always an important business issue.
3. Are they memorable? No, because nearly every B2B product on the planet claims to create cost savings.
Making It Memorable
To make a sales claim memorable, you must add emotion to the equation. Emotion comes not from adjectives (like "exciting" or "innovative") nor from financial figures, but from real events involving real people facing real challenges. Two examples again:
"Installing Acme saved us from bankruptcy."
-- Joe Bigwig, VP, Major Company Inc.
"I have never seen a product that saved people so much money so damn quickly."
-- Jill Smart, Reporter, HugeHighTechWebsite.com
The hurdles once again:
1. Are they credible? Yes, insofar as customers trusts the sources cited and they'll stand behind their words.
2. Are they meaningful? Yes, because reducing costs or avoiding bankruptcy are both important business issues.
3. Are they memorable? Yes, because there is real human drama both in avoiding bankruptcy (the first claim) and in the obvious amazement of the report (the second claim).
Please note I am NOT suggesting that EVERY sales claim be formed in the manner above. However, if you want "excite" a customer with a sales claim, it must pass all three hurdles. If it doesn't, it's not helping you sell.
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.
Here are six crucial questions to ask and answer, before you present your solution to the customer.
When you're asked (or allowed) to make a sales presentation, you want to be certain that whatever you say helps the customer make the right decision.
That's only possible if you understand the decision-making context, according to Dean Brenner, author of the book Move the World: Persuade your Audience, Change Minds, and Achieve Your Goals.
Therefore, before giving any sales presentation, ask yourself the following questions and adapt your presentation accordingly:
1. What's your firm's history with the customer?
If the customer has worked with your firm in the past and the experience was negative, you'll need to do damage control before even trying to convince them to buy from you again. ("First, let me explain what's different.")
If the experience was positive, however, you can't assume that the current set of decision-makers know about that, because it might have happened before their time. In this case, you'll begin by summarizing the successful relationship.
2. How does the customer views your industry?
Because they're a collection of human beings, corporations tend have a "group mind" that holds opinions about other industries. In many cases, those opinions will be positive, in which case you can build on the generally positive perception.
However, this is not always the case. For example, many companies are rightly suspicious of cloud-based computing firms who have cooperated with the NSA. If your industry is being tarred, your challenge is to show how your firm is different.
3. Where does the customer want and need to go?
This is the standard "solution selling" stuff. Presumably, before you bother to present, you've asked the customer questions and figured out where your offering can help the customer achieve their goals.
If you've neglected this, and you're thinking that you'll get the customer interested by presenting "spray and pray" list of features and functions, think again. This never works, because it forces the customer to think too hard about where your stuff fits.
4. What might to prevent them from buying now?
There are two general areas of concern here. The first consists of objections to your specific offering, such as "it costs too much" or "it doesn't do 'x'." You overcome these objections by emphasizing what's uniquely valuable in your offering.
The second area is more thorny: the customer's spending priorities. If the customer sees your offering (and the problem it solves) is less important than other spending, you must emphasize the negative consequences of not buying now.
5. What actions can this specific audience take?
In an ideal world, you'd like to get all the decision-makers into a single room and get them all to agree to buy everything you're selling and write you a huge check that you can cash immediately.
Since this isn't an ideal world, you're likely to be presenting to a combination of decision-makers, influencers, or seat-warmers? If they're decision-makers, know what decision do you want them to make. If they're influencers, know who you want them to influence. If they're seat warmers, well, don't bother to present.
6. How does your customer make decisions?
Every decision-maker has a slightly different style of decision-making. Some decision-makers need stacks of data, others need lots of handholding. Some need plenty of references, others like taking risks.
Early in the sales cycle--long before you present--find out how the customer has made similar decisions in the past. Then model your sales efforts, and your sales presentation, around those previously successful sales efforts.
Like this post? If so, sign up for the free Sales Source newsletter.
|
|
Don’t listen to the boo-birds saying “big data” doesn’t work. It does — if you have the right tools.
“The quickness to market is incredible,” Gregory Phillips, a senior web analyst at OfficeMax told me yesterday. “It’s literally hitting a button.”
I spent some time chatting with Phillips and a few executives from marketing optimization firm Monetate yesterday about a new product that Monetate is releasing in public for the first time today: LivePredict. It’s an automated web optimization service that identifies sales opportunities for an almost infinite number of dynamic customer segments and targets them instantly with customized offers.
And it’s boosting sales in beta tests by almost 30 percent.
“If you notice in LivePredict that a specific customer segment is performing really, well, it’s one click to get it going,” Phillips says. “In the past we could never do that.”
Big data, meet big sales.
The software-as-a-service package, which comes as part of Monetate’s full marketing and site suite, works continuously to identify large or small slices of the market that are responding well to a campaign, turning standard A/B testing into massively multivariate testing automagically. As a result, marketers discover demographics they never knew existed — and target them with tailored offers in real time.
In one campaign, OfficeMax discovered a huge response to a particular set of products from people 19 to 24 in just one region of the country. It was something “I never would have thought to go dig for,” Phillips says, but OfficeMax was able to immediately take advantage of it. In another campaign, an outdoor apparel company discovered that “married couples who work” was their single highest-performing segment, Monetate VP of engineering Tom Jonasky told me. Again, it wasn’t something they knew already despite having a few hints, but it enabled them to immediately begin his-and-hers campaigns.
LivePredict takes four broad sets of data and correlates them in real time: technographic data, demographic, data, geographic data, and a company’s own customer data, behavioral data.
The technographic data — devices, mobile versus desktop — gives marketers info on average orders on iPads versus Android smartphones, and so on. The demographic and geographic data supplies information such as region — fairly basic — but also up-to-date info such as weather, so retailers can target beach towels to the heat wave states and snowblowers to Minnesota, and not vice-versa. In addition, LivePredict integrates the typical demographic data points: age, education, income, and so on.
Add the company’s own customer, sales, and order data in real time, plus load-up marketing campaigns, and LivePredict is ready to start telling you where to sell what for the greatest return.
“Amazon changed the whole online experience for the consumer, nailing the personalization thing,” Monetate exec Mary Phillips says. “That was the promise of e-commerce: the right product in front of the right customer at the right time. People don’t want to be looking for women’s shoes and see children’s clothing … merchandisers should be adapting their site to what people want and need.”
That’s the kind of customization that could never happen without technology, of course. In the past, retailers would run simple tests with simple variables, according to Jonasky. A third would be heroes, a third zeros, and a third inconclusive.
But not any more:
“It’s really the logical next step for the combination of segmentation and testing,” Jonasky says.
|
|
If you were hungry and had a refrigerator full of fresh, just-picked fruits and vegetables delivered right from a local, award-winning farm, would you reach in and grab some of that goodness?
What if you were hungry and forgot to look in your refrigerator – you were just too busy dealing with issues that have come up, and helping existing customers, calling prospects, and looking for prospects?
That is what happens when it comes to sellers and even sales leaders.
You have incredible connections from over the past ___ years you’ve been in your industry or have been a business professional in multiple industries. You have built up trust, and people know and like you.
However, you don’t follow up with them in a planned manner. You run into these folks sometimes at an industry conference – you might drop a note if you see something they said in a social community you’re in online.
There is no rhyme or reason as to when you connect.
BAD business strategy, folks!
This week I talked to someone who has been in his industry for over 10 years. He told me he has a list of 300 consultants and people who know his industry. He hung his head and said to me that he never connects with them.
I told him that’s like letting the best food money can buy rot in your refrigerator.
We know that referral business closes better and faster than any other means of selling, yet we don’t have a planned way to execute a strategy to connect to these most important contacts of ours.
Here are ideas to help you grow your referral network and make it a vibrant, connected, interactive one:
Go through your LinkedIn contacts, your CRM, Twitter, and any other “container” you have where potential partners and referrers are. Create ONE list in one place that will be the best from here on out. For me, that would be my social CRM platform because as I add partners, all of their social media is pulled into their record.
Think about who is missing? Who are thought leaders in your industry or in business in general that eventually could be a mutual referral partner? Add them in.
Now find a way to break this group into manageable pieces. For me, that would be 10 of these folks per week to contact in the mode that I am most comfortable with – by telephone.
10 contacts per week equals 520 per year. If you have less than 200, you might try to contact 4-5 per week.
When you talk with them, ask them what is new with THEM, rather than focusing the call on what is new with YOU.
Have a good conversation and then update your notes on what IS new with them. Over time you can hone in on more and more that is important in their world and your conversations will be helpful and relevant.
Let them know what you are excited about – such as,
“We have started a new cabling program with amazing results – big name companies are working with us more and more, like __ and ___.”
Or
“We just installed a big project with ___. They didn’t know that we did __ and so it turned into a much bigger opportunity and what appears to be a fantastic reference account.”
Note that I am not “selling” my referral partner – simply informing them more about what we do without making it a laundry list – I’m focusing on my clients and what THEY say.
If you can create this list and keep contacting people down the list, you WILL grow your sales opportunities with easier, quicker referred business.
The cornucopia of business delicacies awaits you – get started!
Image credit: monticello / 123RF Stock Photo
This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
Lori Richardson is recognized as one of the “Top 25 Sales Influencers for 2013″ and one of “20 Women to Watch in Sales Lead Management for 2013″. Lori speaks, writes, trains, and consults with inside and outbound sellers in technology and services companies. Subscribe to the award-winning blog and the “Sales Ideas In A Minute” newsletter for sales strategies, tactics, and tips. Increase Opportunities. Expand Your Pipeline. Close More Deals.
The post Work Your Referral Network – It Is a Sales Bounty appeared first on Score More Sales.
The Senior Sales VP gives you a call. “Two of your eight sales managers have high turnover. One has had over 40% turnover for a year. Should we let this guy go?” You reach out to the head of sales operations. That SM’s numbers have been erratic and you want more data. He shares with you trends over the last 18 months. Turnover is high, win rate is low. And when this SM makes his numbers, the big deal saves him. You wonder if it is time to move on.
However, removing a sales manager causes sales disruption. You think ‘bad breath is better than no breath at all.’ Having an open sales manager forces you fill in for the team. Now you interview for his replacement, run the team and do your ‘day’ job.
Sign up for Making the Number in 2014: A Sales Strategy You Can Execute. It is an onsite session with you and your leaders. By signing up, you will get our Sales Manager Stay or Go Guide. The guide will:
- Help you evaluate your current team
- Point out the key indicators of systemic, poor performance
- Give you the top 7 signs your Sales Manager needs to go
- Provide solutions how to start fixing the problem
- Prepare to fill the position quickly
Removing a Sales Manager is no easy task. Not only do you have to part ways legally, lost sales usually happen.
Below are three of the seven signs indicating your Sales Manager needs to go. You can get all seven by registering for our Making the Number session here:
Everyone needs big deals to make the number. They make life easier. But a couple rules apply:
- Those sales usually come from a select group of sales people. These ‘rainmakers’ are needed in every company. But poor Sales Managers rely on them solely to make their number.
- Perform an analysis of Sales Manager team quota performance broken out by sales rep. This will tell you which SMs are being carried by a superstar.
- SM forecast is not very accurate. Forecasting big deals is tough at the end of the quarter. SMs who can’t be accurate in forecasting don’t have a command on their business.
Poor Sales Managers spend time reading on industry trends and customer behavior. Why? Because they are not in the field with their reps.
- They need to get caught up on what is happening.
- They need to provide coaching to their reps.
- They need to make the number from their desks.
- Reading about customers is easier then interacting with them. The problem is this never works.
A simple rule: your SMs should spend 75% of their time with their reps.
Are your sales rep leaving but your SMs are not? Just like sales reps, too low Sales Manager turnover is a leading indicator.
- It can be a sign of your team missing the number.
- Your SM driving out good sales people who haven’t been developed.
- Great SMs develop their team and make the number. Don’t miss this important point.
Still not convinced that a Sales Manager needs to go after noticing these signs? Do some further analysis as demonstrated below:
One of our customer’s Sales VPs was not convinced to remove his SM. The signs were all present. However, he brought the person into the company and wanted to stick with him. The sales operations leader analyzed all the sales managers to help. He looked at the value of the SM based on Gross Margin Contribution. This extra data along with the 7 signs provided enough information. The Sales VP transitioned the Team 12 SM out of the company.
Now get tactical with your Sales Managers. Your executive team is observing from a distance. They want to know if you can evaluate your talent. They want to know if you can recognize a poor SM. They want to know if you can make a move on someone. Be informed by accomplishing these critical actions:
Know when the time to let your Sales Manager go arrives. Notice the signs and move quickly. Your 2014 number depends on it. Get all seven signs by registering for our Making the Number session here.
If you enjoyed this post, never miss one again by subscribing your Email Here and/or subscribing to the RSS Here
