There’s a longstanding mantra in sales: The more no’s we get, the closer we are to a yes. Well, not in my book. It’s time to retire and toss this worn-out way of thinking. 

Out With the Old

This sales mantra emanates from an old-school sales formula: Make 100 cold calls, talk to 20 people, set eight to 10 appointments, and get one client … if you’re lucky. That’s a lot of no’s—and a lot of wasted selling time.

In With the New

Why would you spend your valuable sales time talking to people who say no when there’s a proven way to get a yes? It’s not a secret. When you receive a referral introduction to a qualified prospect, you acquire a new client more than 50 percent of the time (many sales pros tell me it’s actually closer to 70 percent).

Referral selling means using your well-nurtured relationships to build sales. It’s like having your own private sales force working for you. Prospecting through referrals allows you to leverage your success instead of endlessly starting over by prospecting cold leads.

Your New Future

Don’t be hoodwinked: Stay away from the no’s. Go for the yes, get those referrals, and just say no to no! Your sales prospecting will never be the same again.

And don’t keep this to yourself. Share the “secret” with everyone on your team. Send it to your boss. Show everyone in your entire sales organization how they can improve their bottom-line results—starting right now.

P.S. Take a peek at another old-school sales mantra to avoid: Always Be Closing.

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What are some other old-school sales mantras and strategies that no longer work?

Generating qualified leads is the job of sales. When a qualified lead becomes a qualified opportunity, we’re really ahead of the sales game. And when our sales and marketing teams work together effectively, that’s an unbeatable combination.

Matt Heinz is a rare marketer who understands how marketing can really accelerate the sales effort.  In this month’s guest blog, he turns the tables on popular marketing strategies and explains what’s important, what’s relevant, and which metrics really matter:

“Cost per lead is not only the wrong metric to watch, but it could lead you to deprioritize or turn off lead sources that are helping you make more money.

Clearly, sales leads are important. But not all leads are created equal. You may have lead sources that generate low volume at high costs, but with high conversion.

The closer you get to the sale, the more important the metric. Cost per lead isn’t all that interesting. Cost per qualified opportunity? Now we’re getting somewhere.

Of course, cost per sale is what you ultimately want to measure and manage. But too many marketing organizations aren’t looking that far ahead. They’re focused mostly, if not exclusively, on their campaigns and what they deliver to sales teams.

Their month-end reports might look good, with higher lead volumes at lower per-lead costs. But if those leads aren’t converting into opportunities or sales, it’s a highly-inefficient spend.

Cost per lead is irrelevant. Cost per qualified opportunity is a much better metric to stand behind. But if you really want to be an effective modern marketer, you’re watching leads all the way through to the sale and optimizing your campaigns accordingly. This may seem rudimentary, but most marketing organizations aren’t yet operating this way.

So how do you measure that success? Which metrics do sales and marketing leaders watch on a weekly (if not daily) basis to determine the health of their combine efforts?

Although each respective team must watch and manage to a broader set of metrics, these three metrics should guide where they focus their attention:

1. Current selling period pipeline health
Whether you sell based on a monthly or quarterly sales cycle, how healthy is the current pipeline (qualified opportunities expected to close this period)? And based on that pipeline, how confident are you that you’ll hit or exceed your sales goal?

Most marketers claim there’s very little they can do to impact current-month or current-quarter sales. And in a world where marketing’s role is primarily about lead production, that might be true. But if sales and marketing are working closely together, there’s plenty marketing can do to help close more deals.

For example, if you look at the current pipeline, what could possibly keep those deals from coming through? Are there decision makers who need more information, assurance, context-building, or urgency to get the deal done? What messaging or validation tools can marketing provide to support the sales team?

2. Qualified pipeline for the next two selling periods
Most sales organizations focus entirely on the current selling period and don’t start looking at the next period until it begins. But if you wait that long, you’ll always be playing catch-up. If you sell on a monthly sales cycle, keep a watchful eye on the growth of opportunities 60 and 90 days out.

This might be one of the most important metrics for sales and marketing alignment. It not only combines short-term, outcome-oriented measures. It also provides very tangible, actionable next steps for each group based on what the numbers are telling you.

3. New opportunities created
This measure is independent of specific closing dates but is absolutely tied to your definition of what a qualified new opportunity looks like. It’s unlikely you’re setting up new qualified opportunities for nine months from now if you’re on a monthly sales cycle, but those opportunities will likely be spread out across one to four months in the actual sales pipeline.

This measure is more about ensuring that sales and marketing are working together to generate enough regular opportunities to keep the pipeline full. You can look simultaneously at how these new opportunities actually spread across close-date months, but your model should indicate how many new opportunities are required each month. Where should that production be month-to-date or quarter-to-date, and where are you currently?”

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Which metrics are your sales reps focused on? Which do you find to be the most important indicators of sales success—both in the short and long term?

President of Seattle-based Heinz Marketing, Matt Heinz has more than 15 years of marketing, business-development, and sales experience from a variety of organizations, vertical industries, and company sizes. His career has focused on delivering measurable results for his employers and clients in the way of greater sales, revenue growth, product success, and customer loyalty. Matt has held various positions at companies such as Microsoft, Weber Shandwick, Boeing, The Seattle Mariners, Market Leader, and Verdiem. In 2007, Matt began Heinz Marketing to help clients focus their businesses on market and customer opportunities, then execute a plan to scale revenue and customer growth. You can read more from Matt on his blog, Matt on Marketing, follow him on Twitter, or check out his books on Amazon.com.

Benjamin Franklin once said, “Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see.”

While social media can be a valuable sales tool, not everyone who hosts a blog or posts on social media knows what they’re talking about. Often the misguided opinions expressed about sales send me into a spin.

For example, I recently read a comment stream in which someone said that you can ask for referrals from anyone you meet and that it’s often easier to get referrals from new contacts than from existing clients.

That’s outrageous (and completely untrue) advice!

Earn the Right to Ask

Referral selling is the most personal selling you can do. Referrals are based on trust, which means you must earn the right to ask. This is why your existing clients are your best possible source for referrals, because with them, you’ve definitely earned that right.

You don’t even have to wait until your solution is implemented and producing ROI. You can ask:

• During the sales process when you’ve added value
• When your client has thanked you
• Those with whom you and your team interact during the implementation process

Existing clients are our best—and often most under-leveraged—source of referrals. Why? Because our existing clients:

• Know first-hand the value of our solutions
• Can attest to the ROI they’ve received from working with us
• Trust us (or else they wouldn’t do business with us)

There’s No Shame in Asking for Referrals

This so-called expert continued with this appalling statement:  “Don’t use the word ‘referral.’”

What other word would you use? This is a duplicitous, ingenuous, sleazy tactic. To hide your true intentions suggests that you’re either dishonest or that you believe asking for referrals is pushy, salesy, or intrusive.

Let’s clear this up right now: Asking for a referral is NOT asking for a favor. Referrals are positive, powerful, and upright. Referrals are built on truth and integrity. Think of all the referrals you easily and willingly provide.

When we refer, we help out everyone involved—including ourselves. We introduce a credible resource and save the other person valuable time. In addition, we are elevated in the mind of the recipient.

Don’t be coy or beat around the bush. When you ask for a referral with confidence, your Referral Source knows exactly the person you want to meet and gladly introduces you.

Ask for referrals from people you know and trust—including your terrific clients.

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Who do you find to be your best source of referrals? When do you feel that you have earned the right to ask for referrals? Share your best referrals stories here.

Batter up!

Baseball season is in full swing here in the United States—a sure sign that spring has officially sprung. Spring is also a great time to up your game and make the pitches that get your sales prospects on base.

Baseball is a long season with 162 games per team, played over approximately 30 weeks. It’s probably the only sport where you can have a success rate in the range of 30 percent and still be considered a star with a multimillion-dollar contract.

Let’s break down what it takes to be an all-star using an example from the movie, Bull Durham:

In baseball, what separates a superior hitter from an average hitter is only 30 more hits in a season. That’s all. While a .250 hitter is considered an average ball player, a .300 hitter is considered superior. If each of them has 600 at bats in a season, a .250 hitter will have 150 hits, while the .300 hitter will have 180 hits. The difference of only 30 hits equates to approximately one extra hit per week for an entire baseball season.

What’s Your Batting Average?

This is the same kind of analysis you need to do for your business. How many additional “hits” do you need to reach your revenue and profit goals? How many more referral meetings and referral clients will get you to your goal? How will you know that your referral-selling strategy is working?

Choose some or all of these metrics to manage your referral activity:

• The number of people you ask for referrals each week
• The number of referrals you receive
• The number of referral meetings you schedule
• The number of referral meetings you conduct
• The number of new deals you book
• Increase in revenue
• Increase in deal size
• Increase in new customers
• Increase in profitability

Draft Everyone for Your Team

Business referrals come from everywhere. Think about it. Identify all the people you know. Those people know people as well. And you don’t know who they know until you ask. You might get the perfect referral from your attorney, another passenger on an airplane, your fellow employees, your next-door neighbor, or even your family. Everyone in your network can be part of your sales team.

Ask for at least one referral each week, and you’ll hit the ball out of the park. You may not make millions of dollars, but you might help your clients do so. You’ll be at least a .300 hitter, and everyone wins.

Step Up to the Plate: Comment Here

There’s a saying in baseball that you’ll never get to second unless you take your foot off first. There’s a saying in sales: If you don’t ask, you don’t get. Are you getting at least one more hit a week? What are your referral-selling metrics? And how are you hitting your numbers?

Barry Trailer, managing partner of CSO Insights, makes the following bet whenever he speaks to sales audiences: “I’ll bet you my house that right now you’ve got good people working hard to get business you don’t want.” So far, Barry has been able to keep his house.

Would you be willing to bet your home that your company is not trying to attract poorly-qualified prospects? And are your reps wasting their precious selling time pursuing so-called “leads”?

Get Real

There’s so much wrong with the traditional sales funnel, and it’s gotten worse in Sales 2.0. In the past, we were schooled to throw as much stuff as possible into the sales funnel—including so-called leads from mailings, trade shows, advertising, networking, and newsletters. Now we can add those who interact with us through blogging, videos, e-books, free reports, social networks, press releases, affiliate traffic, and RSS feeds to that list of so-called sales leads.

I use “so-called” because these aren’t really sales leads. They’re inquiries, possibly names, or people just interested in free stuff. If we take the time to weed through all this trash, we might actually find a prospect. Some people call this “permission marketing.” But it’s just a prospecting system, not successful lead generation.

Unclog Your Funnel

Picture your sales funnel stuffed with weeds, rocks, and sand. These will clog the opening and prevent a steady flow of good business. If you try pouring water into a clogged funnel, the water backs up and nothing moves through. It’s not a pretty picture, and certainly not a functional business model.

Attracting the wrong clients to your business is like dumping trash into your sales funnel. A full funnel is only valuable if it’s filled with qualified prospects who fit your Ideal Client profile.

Do You Have Dead Prospects?

My client, Ben, told me he had four categories of prospects in his database: Suspects, prospects, clients, and dead. Suspects, he explained, were names from a list his company purchased. He was frustrated with this list, because even after six to 10 calls, he still couldn’t reach anyone.

Prospects were people who had been referred to Ben. When he called them, he got an appointment immediately. And calling on clients was a great use of his time. He reconnected, got more business, and earned the right to ask for referrals to other companies.

When I asked Ben why he spent so much time trying to connect with suspects when he didn’t even know if they had a need for his product, he didn’t have an answer. It hadn’t occurred to Ben that he didn’t need suspects at all. In fact, he might as well move them over to the dead column.

Change the Conversation

It’s time to change how we talk about sales leads. Inquiries are not leads. Neither are people wanting free stuff or anyone from those “coveted” lists of names. Calling these sales leads borders on insulting.

Leads are people who are truly interested in talking to you about your product or service. They match the profile of your Ideal Client, have budget, have a need, and are open to learning how you can help grow their businesses.

So unclog your funnel, and start filling it with qualified leads. Soon you’ll be generating more business from fewer leads.

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How do you ensure that your sales team is pursuing qualified leads with clients your company really wants? Share your stories and strategies here.

Social selling is no longer optional for salespeople. The good news is it’s all about doing research and building relationships—and you already know how to do that.

My colleague, Nancy Nardin, knows about every sales tool there is. However, as she once told me, “Unless a tool increases productivity, it’s a waste of time.” Great advice!

Nancy understands that social-selling tools can’t replace personal conversations. While social selling can plant the seed for a relationship, it’s the personal interactions that ultimately seal the deal.

In this month’s guest blog, she shares her thoughts on the matter:

“What’s all the hubbub about ‘social selling?’ After all, selling has never been anything other than ‘social.’ Sellers have, for the most part, relied on networking, referrals, and rapport as means to develop relationships—or, at the very least, to gain the credibility and trust needed to get an appointment.

What has changed, however, is the scale.

A Wealth of Opportunities

LinkedIn has greatly increased our ability to stay connected to former colleagues and friends, while expanding our networks to include others with shared connections and interests. But although LinkedIn is one of the best tools for professional networking, social selling isn’t just about using social networks effectively.

Social selling is a way to discover, engage, and interact with potential prospects. Sellers now have more opportunities to accomplish all three of these goals—with more prospects than we dared dream of in the past.

Prospects also have the opportunity to find us like never before. They can easily access information about us, our companies, and our products. They can also learn what their friends and co-workers, or even strangers, think of us.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Social selling is no longer optional for salespeople, nor is it a waste of time. Prospects expect you to have done your research so that you can make your interactions targeted and relevant. They also want you to know what they do, who they compete against, and what’s important to them.

However, the scale—both in terms of the amount of people sellers and buyers can interact with, as well as the information they can discover and access—is staggering. Factor in what many consider to be more B2C platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can quickly become mired down by too much of a ‘good’ thing.

Social selling can suck the life out of your selling efforts—if you let it. The key is to do it strategically and use smart tools. It’s imperative that you don’t drop ‘selling’ from the phrase ‘social selling.’ You’re not doing this to make buddies. You’re doing it to better serve prospects and to earn their business before your competitors can.

Getting Personal

Likewise, don’t forget what ‘social’ is all about. Social is personal. Prospects demand and deserve personalized attention. That means sellers can no longer get by with a dialer and a list. Listen to and learn about your prospects. Use the vast resources of the Web, and make sure they can find and learn about you.

Most importantly, remember that online interactions do not replace real-life, off-line conversations. After all, getting to have quality off-line conversations is the goal of social selling.

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How have you used social-selling tools to get meetings at the level that counts? What social-selling strategies have (and have not) worked for you?

Nancy Nardin is the foremost expert on sales-productivity tools. As President of Smart Selling Tools, she consults with many of the top sales-productivity software vendors as well as end-user organizations looking to select the right tools. Click to get Nancy’s What & When weekly digest with invitations to complimentary webinars and informative publications. Follow Nancy on Twitter @sellingtools or subscribe to her Sales Productivity blog. Nancy can be reached at 916-596-3035. To schedule a free 30-minute consultation, click here.

Did you know that adults forget 87 percent of what they learn without follow-up or reinforcement? Sales training is not an event; it’s a behavioral change. It takes time to learn new skills, practice those skills, and get comfortable applying them.

Many sales leaders schedule training sessions, pat themselves on the back for investing in their teams, and consider their mission accomplished. But for any type of training to be effective, it requires reinforcement and one-on-one coaching. Management needs to set goals based on the new skills, coach their people, and then hold them accountable.

Is Your Training DOA?

How often have you attended a fantastic training session and left with every intention of implementing all the great things you learned?

Then reality sets in. You go back to work, excited to practice your new skills, only to find that it’s business as usual. Managers hold you to the same sales activities as before.

I’ve had participants in my referral-selling program tell me, “I don’t know why they brought you in. They’re still making us cold call.” What a waste of time and money!

What’s the Problem?

Most managers are busier than ever before—balancing the needs of their teams with directives from higher up. They simply don’t have time to reinforce new skills—even if they want to do so. And in many cases, they haven’t received proper training themselves. That’s why most training fails. It isn’t linked to an overall corporate strategy, so it’s just an event.

It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way

If you want your next training session to be successful, stop and think through the changes you want to implement, plan your strategy to reinforce what your team has learned, and make the time to invest in your people. Otherwise, save your company some money and don’t even bother.

In a report by The TAS Group, “The Key Role of the Sales Manager,” researchers found that managers only spend 37 percent of their workdays on leadership activities like:

• Planning—15%
• People development—11%
• Proactive review—11%

Instead, they spend 55 percent of their time on counterproductive activities:

• Firefighting and reacting to urgent issues—23%
• Reporting to management—12%
• Administrative tasks—15%
• With customers—13%

Sure, all of these tasks are important functions of a sales manager’s job description, but nothing is as important for someone in a leadership role as leading. That means making time to invest in your most valuable sales asset—your people.

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Share your best and/or worst training stories. How did follow-up and reinforcement (or lack thereof) make a difference in your success at implementing what you (and/or your team) learned?

Yahoo recently ordered all of its virtual workers back to the office. Why is this technology giant prioritizing face-to-face interaction? Because recent studies show that while remote workers are significantly more productive, they’re not nearly as innovative or collaborative.

We certainly want our sales teams to be productive, but innovation and collaboration are also important. Sure, you can schedule video meetings and teleconferences. But as David Radcliffe—a civil engineer at Google—puts it, “You can’t schedule innovation.”

Game-changing ideas and strategies usually come from bumping into someone in the hallway or other impromptu conversations—and there’s no virtual water cooler around which your remote team can gather to brainstorm new ideas and collaborate to achieve them.

Yes, collaborate. We can think up one great idea after another and develop innovative strategies. But if we don’t have cohesive teams with whom we can collaborate and bring ideas to fruition, why bother?

Collaborating With Strangers?

Collaboration is the word of this decade, according to a 2011 report from CSO Insights. As business continues to move at an ever-increasing speed, successful sales teams are no longer made up of lone wolves. Teams who willingly share information and ideas, and who work together, can bring in bigger deals than any individual can. But when your salespeople have never been in the same room, it’s hard to develop the key relationships that enable effective collaboration.

Get the Gang Together

I have a virtual team. But I get everyone together in person at least twice a year. We strategize about everything from prospecting, to marketing, to how to add more value to our clients. We laugh and even argue. And more importantly, we get to know each other without all the technological barriers—so that we’re not working with strangers. We’re working with people we like and respect. And that’s the key to collaboration.

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Do you have a virtual sales team? If so, how do you keep them connected? What strategies and technology platforms do you have in place to foster an environment of collaboration?