Step 1: Segment your clients

The industry field in your CRM system provides value, but what other information do you have that will help prioritize your efforts? Some key questions you should ask are:

• Are your accounts stratified by amount of business generated?
• Do you look at client size to determine potential opportunity?
• How many contacts and relationships do we have in an account, and how high up are they?
• Do you monitor or overall client satisfaction in your CRM system?
• Do you have renewal dates fields and triggers to initiate action?
• Are some clients not worth the effort as they are already in serious financial distress?
• Do you know which clients have up sell opportunities, and if competitors are pitching to them?

Most companies rate leads and opportunities in CRM, however have failed to properly segment and rank customers. Also, some companies have made the mistake in just doing a basic segmentation, and immediately barraging that customer with whiz bang cross sell communications or super saver discount emails. Due to the economic climate every buyer is overwhelmed with these communications, and if we are not careful, this can alienate buyers more than build a relationship.

Kimberly Collins from Gartner was recently quoted in an interesting article on ZDnet, stating “Too many companies try to jumpstart revenue with CRM but cross-selling doesn’t work if you focus on it too soon.” She points out that “if customers aren’t happy they are less susceptible to cross-selling.”

Step 2: Deploy a Strategy

The next step is to leverage the segmentation to help decide a strategy aligned to specific client needs, and optimized based on internal resources. The goal is to solidify the relationship before a call takes place, similar to those at the beginning of my previous blog. First of all, who are the players who get involved internally? What are the triggers and cadence for meetings? What is our value proposition for cross selling stickier, higher margin solutions to offset discounting on existing business and ensure renewals in the future?

Essentially, many clients create a Playbook (view my Sales Playbook Blog) of how to interact with existing business. For example, one client I know saw a serious issue losing Financial Services clients in this economy, and created a strategic team of industry aligned sellers and experts to target this group. They put themselves in the shoes of their clients and actually looked at opportunity cost of leaving themselves, and created a value proposition and campaign to stay. Who, what, when, and how you interact with based on the segmentation of clients is key to ensuring effectiveness, avoiding duplication of efforts, and that you’re not blindsided with a loss in business.

Step 3: Access data around proof points and differentiation

There is a lot of information about your clients that you can leverage to justify and potentially grow your relationship. For many clients this exists outside of CRM, and could reside in a reporting tool, data warehouse, or ERP system. Data on previous purchases, projects, billable hours, savings, ROI, and many others can be the make-or-break point in retaining the relationship. For a shipping company it may be on time delivery, for a media company click through rate, and in a wealth management firm I just spoke with this week it was investment performance statistics on a portfolio. If possible, try to consolidate this data down to one location, so that it is accessible for the meetings and easily analyzed.

Even with all of this data, many times a seller is not ready to present a review with this client. Have a discovery call with your champion(s) understanding the client’s key initiatives in 2010, and additional data points internally calculated that are not in your systems. A best practice is to create supporting discovery guides, ROI calculators, letters, and value quantification tools for this.

Step 4: Automate the data with a targeted message

If you ask a seller, a business review is one of their most time consuming and painful experiences of the quarter, however an executive will say they are the most valuable and strategic moves a company can make. Our clients have done studies on the effect these meetings have on their revenue, and it leads them to the conclusion that they must do as many as possible, and with more than just their largest clients. The challenge is each of these can take days if not weeks to put together. Taking data and turning it into a presentable story with charts, graphs, cross sells, and definitive proof can be a herculean effort. Start by harvesting your best examples, and put together a blueprint for the perfect story to tell.

Clients in numerous industries work with us to automate the creation of this content using our proprietary Data Driven Asset (DDA) framework integrated with the Microsoft Application Programming Interface (API) for documents. Each client implements the configuration and customization of this content a bit differently; we’d be happy to share some examples with you.

I’ve been in sales for the majority of my career and although I’ve worked for different companies, the challenges of a salesperson are mostly the same.  Current customers want you to know their industry, their business and what they’re trying to accomplish in their position, both personally and professionally.  Armed with that information, sellers can make suggestions that add value to their clients, rather than making random suggestions that may or may not be relevant.  The more you can show that you’ve been thoughtful in any recommendation you make, the more helpful your clients will find you, and the better your ability to build relationships.

In my last job, I was used to dozens of different marketing managers ‘pushing’ out materials via email or a website of marketing content they built that I could never find again.  After a few years I had a hard drive full of marketing materials and 47 bookmarks of intranet sites that might have been built with an industry focus, or around specific products, or in 1992. I had no idea when they’d been last updated or by whom.  Sometimes I would find marketing brochures for services or products I had no idea the company sold, only to find out that was because we stopped selling it 5 years before.  It got frustrating because I either couldn’t find or couldn’t trust the marketing materials on the web.  I eventually just relied on asking other salespeople or SMEs that I had worked with before whether they had anything on their laptops that they used and trusted.

Then my company implemented SAVO and things changed immediately.  I was skeptical about a new tool at first, because at my old company we seemed to have a million tools, none of which were that helpful to me, but when I logged in to SAVO the first time I was amazed at how easy it was to navigate , how quickly I could find materials that were helping me give my client’s better recommendations, and how easy it was to comment and rate things to help my colleagues find the best stuff or let marketing know when they wrote stuff that was great…or not so great.

Suddenly I had a tool where I knew who wrote the material and I could ask them questions directly. I could find what I needed for my clients’ specific situations at the right time rather than what marketing  happened to have published that week.  When my fellow sellers would call and ask “Do you have any whitepaper on our X product?”, I would tell them to go look in the new tool , and they’d come back to me an hour later saying, “When did we get that? It’s awesome.” I know.

And so I am thrilled now to have the opportunity not only to use SAVO every day, but to help others make the most of their implementations.  A salesperson’s job is infinitely easier if they have a true passion for what they are selling.  I know firsthand how empowering it feels to be an enabled seller and I get to look forward to helping my clients feel that way every day.

By now, most of us are familiar with blogs. By their design, blogs are fast to scan for key information, present the newest information first, and invite further clarification, correction and expansion from their audience. Blogs provide an excellent way for a reader to cherry-pick the best, and most current information in a topic important to them.

Within the four walls of a sales organization, blogs are a great way to equip sellers to relate their product or service to customer needs.  Some of our customers are using blogs in very specific ways already. For example, an objection-handing blog, populated by ‘posts’ from actual sellers or by sales managers, provides specific techniques, words or phrases to share with a prospect in response to a specific objection.  A competitive intelligence blog authored by Competitive Intelligence experts in marketing, or even field sellers, can bring to the surface the newest competitive features, and most importantly, competitive tactics–and the sellers counter-tactics.  Lastly, customer segment or product-related blogs harvest information gained on countless sales calls to provide specific points related to specific customer issues.

With the enhanced blogs within SAVO 11, we’re further demonstrating our meaningful approach to incorporating the best technology in service of specific seller needs, all in one place. We’re also making it even easier for salespeople to find information based on the multiple ways they search, which increasingly, includes blogs. If you’d like more information on the SAVO 11 Release or the SAVO product roadmap, please feel free to email marketing@savogroup.com.

We’re headed out to support the SAP Insider event in Orlando. It will be an exciting week and allow us to build on the momentum of our partnership announcement with SAP. SAVO Sales Enablement application is now integrated with the SAP® Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application.

There are a number of ways to connect with us at the show: at our booth, in sessions, with a demo or via Twitter:

SAVO Booth #940: We’re sending some of our most senior team members to connect with participants of this CRM event. Peter Caron, SAVO’s VP Product Management, will be in our booth and available to personally talk with customers and prospects. Make sure you pop in to see the latest developments in SAVO.

Attending CRM Sessions? There are so many tracks to choose from; we’d like to recommend a few:

• CRM General Assembly

Dr. Volker Hilderbrand, VP CRM Product Management | SAP | Wednesday Feb 24 8:30 – 9:45

• Combine SAP CRM and SAVO Sales Enablement to Deliver Mission Critical Information to Sellers

Peter Caron, VP Product Management | SAVO | Break out session | Thursday Feb 25 8:30 – 9:45 | Room Europe 1

• A new and comprehensive guide to SAP functionality for sales force automation (SFA)

Rob Seaman, Director CRM Product Management |SAP | Thursday Feb 25 2:45 – 4:00

Interested in a 1:1 meeting? Just email us to secure schedules in advance, this way we can be sure you have the most appropriate person available to speak with you. And finally, look for updates from us throughout the show by following us on Twitter

We hope to meet you there!

Gary Mitchiner, VP of Marketing for CVS Caremark, put it this way:

“The new SAVO Sales Enablement software will be a critical tool for sales and marketing to achieve our goals of presenting a current, consistent, and accurate message in the marketplace. We expect a sales productivity boost in 2010 and beyond as salespeople find it easier to access and prepare for critical selling conversations.”

If you’d like to read the full press release announcing our results, please click here.

Why this uptick? Well, one reason is that the Sales Enablement space is growing. More and more companies are identifying a need for Sales Enablement – we keep hearing again and again from our customers that the old ways of preparing their customer-facing people no longer work, nor are those ways efficient. We’re also seeing an increase in coverage by key analysts who likewise are witnessing companies impacting their revenue pictures through Sales Enablement. Joe Galvin, VP and Research Director at SiriusDecisions, has been covering Sales Enablement for several years now and recently had this to say:

“Transferring knowledge from all sources to sales and helping a rep share that knowledge with customers and prospects is the mission of Sales Enablement. The shift from information overload to knowledge access is a top priority for enablement teams focused on improving sales productivity. Increasingly, organizations are investing in Sales Enablement technologies to address this year’s most pivotal challenge. SAVO continues to lead some of the largest sales organizations in solving these critical objectives.”

While we’re pleased with our ’09 performance, anyone walking our halls every day will tell you that we’re not resting on our laurels. This year is going to be an exciting year for SAVO and for the Sales Enablement space, and we are thrilled to continue to bring to market the most innovative technology, strategies, and people to help our customers achieve their very real revenue goals. The only way to continue the momentum for our customers (and inside our own hallways) is to continue to innovate. We have known this for years, and we love that challenge.

Without exception, the friendliness and professionalism of every person I’ve met at SAVO has been impressive and refreshing. The SAVO team has restored my faith in the fact that companies can be both profitable and fun! The two need not be mutually exclusive.

Can Dev, err SAVO Labs, and marketing folks really collaborate in a friendly way – and with mutual respect – with the sales team, and vice versa? Not in a million years at most companies. I’m thoroughly impressed.

The SAVO team members I’ve worked with so far have been genuinely interested in the welfare and well being of their peers. I’m sure there are strong differences of opinion on lots of things. Fair enough. That’s a good thing. Differences allow the best ideas to rise to the top. In fact, I’m looking forward to my first “fierce conversation” with chief SAVOite John Aiello (well, okay, not until I’ve closed at least a few big sales and have a modicum of credibility). Allowing differences to become personal, however, is not usually a helpful dynamic. I haven’t seen that yet, and that’s refreshing.

It’s been a great start, and I’m looking forward to a successful future here at SAVO. With that, I’ll extend an open invitation to all of my SAVO teammates as well. If there’s anything you need from me, or if I can be helpful in any way (cough, cough), by all means stop by and let me know. If sales, marketing, Labs, and everyone else can successfully work with each other under one roof, that’s a huge affirmation that SAVO is doing a lot of things right. Congrats to everyone who has made that possible so far, and keep up the great work.

Thanks again for the warm welcome, and my best to everyone for a terrific 2010!

Ryan
Midwest Sales
Team “Ras”

What exactly is changing? First of all, one thing you’ll notice right out of the starting blocks is that things are happening faster! The movement through the custom page creation process is even more intuitive, and also has a new interface for adding widgets that uses familiar drag-n-drop methods, as well as new Java-based controls. Translation: Speed! We’ve also changed the ‘look’ of the editing screens on custom page creation/edit, adding many more user customizable options, such as tab show/hide, several direct links to the Edit function, and the ability to check comments, usage, or ratings from single links in several locations during the process.

Additionally, we’ve added many new little features that have been based upon our users’ feedback. For example, all widgets can now be minimized during the Edit phase, for easy movement and placement on the custom page. That’s just one example of how we’ve taken your suggestions and put them into practice: SAVO listens, responds, and then comes across with things that you can really use. Unlike solutions that look great, but don’t add incremental value, SAVO is committed to making each user’s experience one that will be remembered for its consistent speed, ease of use, and more importantly, relevance of content.

Experience the Bigger, Faster, Stronger SAVO starting with SAVO 10!

All things being equal: Custom is king.

Next Time: RSS Feeds and RSS Widgets

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