I keep reading this one: “buyers complete 75% of their sales cycle on the web before ever talking to a sales person”.

But just over the last few weeks of selling for our Internet start up I’ve found several examples where taking this data is best ignored.

I’ve been on a wide-ranging mission to get into new accounts – most of them in the Fortune 1000. This campaign has been going quite well [in my biased opinion because (a) I'm using Social Calling techniques and (b) we have an interesting product.] On meeting with some of these accounts, I found that some of them did in fact have needs and a few may indeed end up becoming customers.

But a big majority of them had not concluded “75% of their sales cycle on the web” before meeting with me. They had not defined their need formally. They had not gotten to that stage.

When we met they brought up something in their area of responsibility that they thought could be improved by something like the product we were discussing – the one I had brought to them. Some of them were then open to discussing this possibility from there.

So a group of companies entered our sales funnel without having completed their web research. They spoke to us first and put us in the driver’s seat. Sure they may decide down the line here to send someone out to do some web research on alternatives to our product but who has the edge then?

This happened because a sales person was proactively prospecting not because we have a great website, great SEO or a great blog.

OK, in some cases buyers have formalized their need and then they, or someone they delegate, go out and scour the web for solutions. This is when your SEO and inbound marketing needs to shine. This is the case where we sales people need great fellows in our marketing department.

The danger for sales people is interpreting this scenario where the buyer goes out looking for solutions as they only scenario. It’s the ultimate excuse to ditch cold calling. Very tempting. I mean it’s backed by fact, right?

But it’s not always true and I’m finding evidence that it’s most often false with the “whale accounts” we all strive to land. Every now and then, execs from these “whales” will find their way to your website but if you look at the statistics of business sizes out there you’ll see it’s one big “iceberg” with the huge majority of businesses being tiny. By pure statistics your website is likely to gather far more “sardines” than “whales”.

I’m no fan of traditional (aka dumb) cold calling. But I am a fan of smart prospecting. For sales people to rely on inbound leads to make their numbers is tantamount to professional suicide unless you work for an exceptional marketing company like a Hubspot where buyers flood to your website.

So sales people if you hear “buyers complete 75% of their buying cycle on the web before speaking to a sales person” you might want to stick in some ear plugs while you carry on prospecting.

Just been listening to Daniel Pink’s  book Drive.  Drive is about what motivates us. One of the key motivators Pink talks about is the pursuit of mastery. Of course that made me think about mastery in sales.

Pink describes research about how people view intelligence. The research found that people fall into two groups: one group thinks of intelligence as something that can be improved and developed much like a muscle. The other group thinks of intelligence as something you are born with. Something you have a fixed quota of. Something you cannot improve. Only something you can measure.

In my travels through the world of sales I’ve seen much the same divide in mindsets when it comes to sales skills. There are sales people and sales managers that believe sales skills can be improved and evolved then there are others that just want to find “naturally born sellers”. Their interest is not in developing their people’s sales skills but in measuring them. Their focus is in assessing the sales candidates they find and cherry-picking the rock stars.

In Drive, Pink makes the point that mastery is only attainable by those that believe that their skills can be improved, added to. Those that believe their skills are fixed, pre-ordained cannot obtain mastery as they do not believe improvement is possible. They believe they have what they have and that’s that. Pink says mastery is obtained through constant attempts to make small improvements. Through lots and lots (and lots) of repetition. Mastery is a ten-year journey at least. Anything less is not likely to lead to mastery.

But how many sales people and organizations believe in the development of sales skills this much? Do you try to improve your sales skills every day? Have you been trying for at least ten years? Does your sales manager coach you how to improve every month, every week, every day? Or do they just measure you? Do they just want to know what they’ve got? And if your score is too low get something (someone) else?

We’ve heard the sports stories of Michael Jordan making 500 free throws after practice or Tiger Woods or Vijay Singh hitting several hundred golf balls on the driving range. These are the examples of mastery we are familiar with but what about in the sales profession?

Do you make the extra calls last thing in the evening when everyone else has gone home? Do you try to improve your call/email scripts every day? Do search out new sales techniques from colleagues? Read sales books? Pay for sales training and sales training products out of your own pocket? Do you make the extra free throws after the work day is over? Hit the extra golf balls? Do your colleagues? Do your competitors?

So are you into mastery? What about your organization? What tips can you share for achieving mastery? What has worked for you? What can you tell others that are striving to master this profession of sales?

What’s your biggest competitor?

If you’re in IT sales is it IBM. Apple, Google, Wipro, some dudes in Bulgaria? Probably not. You’re biggest competitor is Status Quo Inc. Boy those guys are tough to beat!

The thing is a lot of the time our prospect will choose the status quo, aka do nothing vs. any super-cool company out there, including ours.

You thought you had this opportunity rolling. You thought you had a live one. But then nothing. No calls back. No reply emails. Radio silence. A good sign that may have lost one to Status Quo Inc.

Sometimes you hear about it. Sometimes not. “Hey don’t feel bad” says your prospect “you didn’t lose this. We just decided to keep things as they are for now”. Fat lot of good that’s going to do your sales #’s!

Is it hopeless? I don’t think so. Is it easy? Maybe not. But how are you going to beat Status Quo Inc. and get your prospect to make a change? How are you going to get them to take action?

How about understanding what doing nothing looks like for them? Do they really know what doing nothing will do for them and their business?

It’s always easier for us humans to avoid change.  Keep things comfortable. But what happens when you find out sticking to your way of being will have a seriously bad outcome for you?

If your doctor told you you had to eat better or you would be at high risk of heart disease and thereafter a heart attack, would you change your eating habits? Most people would, or would try at least (not all.)

So what does it look like for your prospect if they don’t use your product or service? If they stick with how things are today?  Have you asked all the questions to find out? Do you really know what your competitor, Status Quo Inc. is offering?

And if you do know, have you fed it back to your prospect in a way that is clear & easy for them to understand? Have you painted them a vivid picture of their reality if they go with status quo? Have you given them some numbers to show how sticking with how things are will pay off on their bottom line in their operations etc. (if they are the analytical type?)  Do they ‘get’ the difference between going with you vs. going with Status Quo Inc?

Does your prospect really know how doing nothing may turn out for them? Remind them that no-decision IS a decision. Keeping things as they are is not always the safe choice. Make it super-clear for your prospects. You owe them (and yourself) that.

photo by Loco Steve

Deals rarely slow down then close.

Deals that close have momentum. The pace of the communication accelerates as you get near closing. The prospect has questions. They are about to make a commitment. As they draw closer to making that commitment questions crop up in their mind. They want to be sure they are making the right decision so they ask questions. This is a good sign. These are buying signals. So the pace of communication speeds up. It’s more frequent. They ask a question about how your product works. You answer. Then they ask something else. And so on until it’s time to sign up.

What about those opportunities that go silent? Those are the ones to keep an eye on it. Why has the momentum slowed?

Sometimes it’s legit. Sometimes the momentum has not really slowed but you just can’t see the communication. Behind-the-scenes the buying organization is going through its buying process. The people you know in the prospect account may be talking to people you don’t know in the prospect account (remember there could be up 21 people involved in buying your product in there.) You’re not plugged into this internal communication. So you don’t see the momentum. But it’s there.

But often deals that go silent have really lost momentum. They’ve slipped OFF the buyer’s “must-do list” and onto the buyer’s “nice-to-have-someday” list. And guess when things on “nice-to-have-someday” list get done – usually NEVER. Or if ever, not this year. Certainly not this quarter. Essentially these deals have slipped out of the sales pipeline.

The best way to think of these deals is that you need to start again. That does NOT mean all the sales work you did is wasted but I’d take these out of your pipeline. Be honest. Start again. Your forecast will be so much more accurate if you do.

Take a close look at your pipeline. How many deals have been hanging out there for a long time? By a “long time” I mean for more than one sales cycle. By “sales cycle” I mean the average time it takes you from when you find a real opportunity to the time it takes to close it – based on your historical data on past deals that you end up closing (see this post for more on my definition of sales cycle.)

Take a look at the deals hanging out in your pipeline for a long time very closely.

If you’re a sales person, do you know for sure that your buyer is moving this deal forward? Have you spoken to them recently? Have they replied to your emails? Is there information in those communications that tells you definitively the deal is moving forward, taking the next step, building momentum?

If you’re the sales manager ask your reps about these factors. Can they show evidence that these aging deals are alive and momentum is building? If not, consider taking the opportunity out of the pipeline and put it into your nurturing process.

By the way, CRM’s can give you a handy-dandy report showing the age of your opportunities. I’d suggest you have at least one report that is sorted by the age of each opportunity in your sales pipeline. Take out your magnifying glass on the opportunities that are oldest. Ask some questions. Dig around. Convince yourself those oldies are alive or move ‘em out of the pipeline and into the nurturing process.

Deals have momentum. They don’t age well. They are not Merlot.

Most of us sales people these days use email a lot. I recently got to sit down with a bloke that knows a lot about how sales people do and should use email.

This is part 2 of my discussion with that bloke, Matthew Bellows, CEO of Yesware. Part 1 of the interview is here.

NE: Matthew in your research you found that sales people should NOT wait for a reply to their email? Can you tell me more about what you found?

Yes, we found that after an email had been sent, the chances of it being read decreased dramatically after the first hour and then fell incrementally lower from there. After 24 hours, the chance of business email being read is less than one percent. This really told us that salespeople should not wait for a reply if they haven’t heard back within 24 hours.   They need to be proactive about moving that relationship forward, and determine why that email may have not gotten an immediate response.

NE: Both sales and marketing people always seem hung up on this question of “WHEN should I send email? “ Your study suggests just before the weekend. I’ve seen research from Hubspot suggesting something similar. Do you think there IS a “correct” time or any time?

Our data found that open rates for emails were higher on Saturday and Sunday than during the actual workweek, proving that sending email over the weekend actually gives it a better chance of getting read.  We also found that while a lot of email activity occurs during “normal” 9 to 5 business hours, email open rates occur throughout the entire 24-hour day.  So, if you are sending out an email during the workweek, you don’t have to limit it to 9-5 hours.  It is interesting, certainly if you need to reply to a prospect or a customer you don’t want to wait to do it until over the weekend or if you have a very timely email to send you need to be sensitive to that.  But I think our data shows that sending emails out right before the weekend is a very good option for salespeople who are looking to increase the chances that the emails will be read.

NE: I noticed an interesting riddle in your study report. It said email subject lines should be 3 words or less. But that you should have value in the subject line, for example ‘Boot Camp Marketing Ideas’ – but that is 4 words! It’s not easy to add value in 3 words is it? Thoughts on how to do that?

If your subject line is over three words, on average your email open rate will be below average. But great subject lines like the one above are the exception to the rule. Keep your subject lines as short as possible, but make sure it adds value. The key is making subject lines punchy with a call to action or promise of something valuable to be learned.   Think about what gets you to open an email – if it’s very relevant to the subject areas that matter to you, and will provide some kind of value that will improve your work, your business, your profitability, your bottom line.   This is what you need to keep in mind when crafting email subject lines for your recipients –ask yourself what do they care about, what will capture their attention and offer real value to them.

NE: Have you any info about the effect of using phone in combination with email for sales people?

We didn’t include phone data in this research, but there’s lots of great data from InsideSales.com, Vorsight and others. It’s clear that most progressive sales organizations use a blend of both channels, but we need do dive deeper to recommend real best practices.

NE: An age-old question I’ve gotten so many times is “should I email first or call first?” Have you seen anything that points one way or the other on this?

There’s no definitive data on this. It depends so much on your prospect, your product, your company and your style. My main recommendations are to try new things and measure your effectiveness carefully.

NE: Have you any thoughts on using plain text email vs. HTML? And related should email have graphics like you typically see marketers using?

I’m not a big fan of graphics-heavy email. We’ve done internal research with our own sales email, and find much higher open and response rates when the email looks like it comes from me personally than if it’s a stylized corporate mailing. That said, most business people have switched over to rich text or HTML email readers now, so feel free to use links, bolds and italics (but sparingly).

NE: Can you tell me a little about Yesware? I have not used it yet but hope to soon. What does Yesware bring to sales people and sales managers?

Sure – Yesware (www.yesware.com) is a suite of productivity services that works where salespeople do – in their email and on their phones.  It’s available now for Gmail, and provides email analytics, customizable templates and CRM integration to help salespeople close more deals faster. We also provide Yesware Mobile that extends Yesware’s email analytics and reporting to salespeople in the field.

For sales managers, Yesware makes training, ramp-up and activity-based reporting more effective, and gives them better insight into their team’s performance.

I don’t know why you haven’t tried it yet! It’s free! If you have a Gmail and a Chrome browser, download it from here as soon as you can: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gkjnkapjmjfpipfcccnjbjcbgdnahpjp

And please let me know what you think – we’re always looking for ways to improve. My email is matthew@yesware.com and would love to hear your thoughts.

Most of us sales people these days use email a lot. I recently got to sit down with a bloke that knows a lot about how sales people do and should use email.

If you use email and sell, this is well worth a quick read (hint: he even did research!)

That bloke is Matthew Bellows, CEO of Yesware. Here are some questions I asked him and his responses.

NE: Matthew can you tell me a little about “your story”? I know you’ve been in sales and a sales manager and I think it gives a great perspective on what you are up to.

Yes, I’ve been a sales guy and sales manager for about 10 years.  Prior to Yesware, I was the Vice President of Sales and Consumer Strategy at Vivox, the market leader in voice for digital worlds.   One thing I really noticed, as a VP of Sales was how much time was wasted for salespeople on tasks like manual data entry into CRM systems.  Sales people don’t want to spend their time keying in data to a CRM system.  They want to be closing deals; they want to be connecting with prospects.

 There is also a lot of time spent sending out emails, without a lot of data or analysis on how effective those emails really are.  Are your emails reaching your prospects?  Are they being read or forwarded?  How many times are they being opened?  What’s the best time of day, best day of the week to send emails?  What’s your reply rate like – in other words, how often are you getting responses to your emails?  What subject lines are the most effective?

All of this information is invaluable to salespeople who can fine-tune their efforts if they have the information on how their emails are being received, and how and when they should follow up with their prospects.  For sales managers, knowing how their team is performing, and benchmarking individual’s sales performance is also critical to motivating their team, and increasing the company’s overall sales revenues.

The bottom line is salespeople and sales teams want to be much more efficient, they want to close deals as quickly as possible and have better insight into how effective their communications with customers and prospects really are.  So, our team developed Yesware to do things like provide customizable email templates for every stage of the sales process, provide analytics and tracking reports to know how effective their emails are, and easy synchronization to popular CRM systems to eliminate time-consuming, manual entry and ensure that the data in the CRM is activity based, not opinion based.

NE: Matthew you recently conducted a study on sales email. Can you give us an overview on that study?

Sure. Yesware conducted a study on email behavior; we studied 6,000 of our anonymous users during the period of December 8th to 23rd, 2011. Yesware found that the average open rate for sales emails sent via Gmail was 23.9 percent. While this open rate under-reports the number of people who may have opened emails, the sample size for this study of 20,000 emails provided sufficient data on ways business email communication can be improved.

Our overall findings showed:

• While most people consider the workweek to be the most active time to send and receive email, the data found that more work-related emails were opened on Saturday and Sunday than during the actual workweek, proving that sending email over the weekend actually gives it a better chance of getting read.
• Response time to prospecting emails is a critical factor in determining success. Yesware found that after an email had been sent, the chances of it being read decreased dramatically after the first hour and then fell incrementally lower from there. After 24 hours, the chance of business email being read is less than one percent. Therefore, salespeople shouldn’t wait for more than one day if they want to move the relationship forward.
• The longer the email subject line, the less likely it was to be opened. Subject lines longer than three words were opened at below average rates. And while ‘short and sweet’ is important in business email communication, subject lines that provided a promise to add value, gave people more motivation to open the messages.

NE: Is email the new phone? What do you know about sales people’s usage of phone vs. email today? And how has it changed over the years?

Email is certainly a very efficient way to communicate your message, and send to several parties simultaneously.  In fact our study above also showed that having additional people on the recipient list significantly increases the chances of the email being opened.

Email certainly doesn’t replace the phone or that need for a one to one verbal conversation.  But it is a great, efficient tool for getting all of your points across in a clear, concise way, providing links and interesting research to customers and prospects, and giving them a chance to digest that information and ideally forward it to others.

And there are other social media tools like LinkedIn and Twitter that salespeople are certainly using for communication, but email is still critical for salespeople.  I call email the “original social network” and is something even social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn rely on to make sure your message gets to your recipient.

[The second part of this interview to come next week]

Photo by delphaber va Flickr

I’m not that keen on banging my head off walls.

But some sales people are. Mostly sales people that have been trained in “old school selling techniques”.

The ”old school” maintains that “sales is a numbers game” and the numbers that matter are all about effort. All about volume. One of the key indicators of success is the number of cold calls you can make.

Unfortunately the way “more” comes out for many sales people is more calls to the same person.

Many sales people have been told that they should “call high”. That they should figure out who the decision-maker is for their product or service and call that person — A LOT

I’ve seen many sales people that take this advice as sacrosanct. They call and call the one “important” person in the target account. They’ve heard it takes seven attempts to reach this person. They’ve heard most sales people give up after one or two tries but it takes seven. If you just keep going to seven you will get through.

I have had sales people in my own teams call the CIO of a major account thirty (30) times and never get through. But they kept trying. They wanted to do good work. They wanted to win. But they never advanced the sale one iota.

Things have changed. What might have taken seven calls now takes 30, 40, 50 calls. Certain types of people in large companies, like CIOs, are bombarded by overeager technology sales people all day. They hardly ever pick up their phone unless they know for sure that  that caller ID is someone important to them. They hardly ever answer a cold email or even read it, unless they recognize the sender as someone they care about.

They are screened from all this. They simply don’t have time. They have WAY too much to do to deal with these cold calls.

Research by Marketing Sherpa conducted for several years asked buyers how many people are involved in buying a technology product over $25,000 in value? The answer: 21 (twenty one.)

Twenty one people involved in buying your technology. So why sell to ONE?

There are twenty other ways to get a real conversation about whether that company would buy your type of solution.

Over my years in sales, I’ve observed getting that first real conversation, getting that first bit of inside information about what’s going on in the account, is one of the key inflexion points in the whole sales cycle.

So speak to someone in there that knows what’s going on. Find out if the account is a qualified target for you right now. Find out about trigger events (such-and-such project is funded, such-and-such department is getting a new SVP etc). Get in one of the twenty one doors available to you.

You can always call high once you’re armed with information. In fact this is the only way you should call high. You need to be informed. Execs have ZERO time to mess about. They have no time for uninformed sales people. You need to have done your homework.

Think about ALL the people in your target account you can speak to. Not one.

Don’t head bang. (Unless you love heavy metal.)

I don’t care how many proposals you have out.

Truth be told you probably don’t really care either. What you care about is how much money you are going to put in your bank account this month, this quarter and this year.

Proposals are not going to get you there. Deals are. Closed deals.

Once you’ve got a signed contract you’ve got a shot at sending out invoices and after some duly annoying amount of time getting a check back that with some good fortune will clear and finally you reached your goal.

The problem with proposals is they are all about proposing.

Proposing is a lot about you guessing what your prospect wants. You go to a sales meeting. Ask a bunch of questions and somewhere near what turns out to be the end of the meeting the prospect says “Sounds good. Why don’t you send me a proposal”.

Problem is this one meeting with one person in the prospect company usually does not give you enough information to document everything you need to know. — everything you need to know to pull together a document that will look good to everyone that is involved in the buying process. That is everyone that may see your document.

Maybe it will look good to the one  person you met with. Maybe you asked all the right questions at that meeting. Maybe you listened acutely and noted down every nuance of every response – even though you were not focused on the goal of writing a proposal when you went into the meeting. Maybe.

But even then what about the 6-20 other people that are involved in the buying process. The 6-20 other people that were not at this meeting. How do you know what they want? How do you know what they would want to see in this document?

You need to talk to them. You need to ask them questions. You need to record their answers. They may not all agree on the content of the document (happens when you write something in your company with your colleagues, no?).

You can’t get rid of documents entirely from the sales process but when you write them realize they don’t have to be proposals. Proposals in the traditional way are largely a guess.

When you develop documents understand their context. Develop a short document with that first buyer.  Keep your time investment down. Use outlines. Develop documents that are a couple of pages long. Documents that don’t require a day’s investment to produce the most beautiful tome.

Have your first prospect’s colleagues add details/change the document. Get it “co-authored” as much as possible. Get you buyers involved in writing it. Get them to take ownership. Make it their baby.

And when you’re confident enough people over there have seen, touched it and approved it, you can finally write a longer document…a contract…

Write up what everyone at the prospect account has agreed to as a statement of work. Attach it to your usual legal mumbo jumbo and you have a contract. Return it to your buyer to be signed.

From my research and analysis of thousands of prospecting calls, I’ve found the three biggest factors that super-charge your chances of getting into a busy prospect’s office are:

• Prospect profile: who to call
• Triggers events: when to call
• Relationships: how to use your relationships to get in by referral or affinity

But at the end of the day if I had to take only one of these to a desert island, I would take relationships.

Because relationships are the biggest factor of all. Nothing beats social capital and the fact that someone wants to help me. I can do the most bang up MBA (and I am one you know) job of segmenting my market down to the exact companies and dudes that should really want to buy my product…but…if those dudes (or dudettes) don’t know me, or don’t know someone that knows me and can vouch for me, they don’t trust me. And when they don’t trust me I’m in the sticky stuff.

So recently when I’ve been faced with penetrating new markets, as I seem to be faced with often. (Ya, it’s like the hardest thing to do so that’s what I seem to gravitate to). I’ve started breaking down my prospect lists in a different way. a non-traditional way and a way that still feels a little odd to me.

Instead of doing the classic what size companies, what geos, what industries routine to define my ideal prospects. I’ve been backing into my prospect list with a much broader definition of target companies and then going straight to an overlay of my social graph – aka who do I know and who do they know. Then making my prospect companies ONLY the ones I can get to via referral or with some kind of common link (in my case my alumni connections.)

It seems awkward and somewhat ill-defined but I know now from many (many) scars that the fastest way to sell (and hence save my bottom) is going to be to go through my connections not through my amazing MBA market-segmentation.

What you say? Make sense? Ever done an exercise like this?

Just interviewed by Kevin Gaither on his ThisWeekIn Sales web TV show.

I talk about my definition of Sales 2.0, where I created it and why I came up with it. Then I drill down into the three key components of Social Calling that can boost your prospecting results eight times.