•Trish Bertuzzi: The Bridge Group
• Brian Carroll: InTouch
• John Coe: B2B Marketing
• Mary Dedrick: Performark Inc
• John Doerr: Wellesly Hills Group
• Susan Friedmann: Trade Show Coach
• Andrew Gaffney: Demand Gen Report
• Gerhard Gschwandtner: Selling Power
• Jill Konrath: Selling to Big Companies
• "Mac" McIntosh: Mac McIntosh Inc.
• Ruth Stevens: eMarketing Strategy
Click here to vote NOW. You only get five votes. And I'll keep my fingers crossed hoping you vote for me!
E-Marketing Strategies for the Complex Sale, the new book by Ardath Albee, offers fresh
perspectives and lots of meaty how-to advice on how to:
• Catch your
prospect’s attention
• Amplify your e-messaging
• Increase urgency, and
• Build a relationship online.
I highly recommend this much-needed book! It's totally aligned with my Selling to Big Companies strategies, so I know you'll get a ton out of it. Read 2 chapters right now.
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: Sales is really tough in today’s business environment. This isn’t a complaint; it’s simply a statement of reality.
But what worked for me in the past was no longer effective. People rarely answered their phones, all calls rolled to voice mail, and no one wanted to talk to a dreaded salesperson.Why should they? All the information they needed was available on the Internet with a simple Google search. And, as far as they were concerned, salespeople ate up their precious time—which had become their most precious commodity.
Yes, the game definitely had changed, and salespeople had to learn new ways to crack into corporate accounts. It was now taking salespeople between 8 and 12 contacts (via e-mail, direct mail, voice mail, or phone) before they reached a decision maker. In addition, every contact had to focus on the prospect’s critical issues, strategic imperatives, or business objectives.This was the new price of admission for sellers to get their foot in the door. It meant they needed to invest significant time in researching companies, crafting messaging, and implementing numerous account-entry campaigns simultaneously.
1. Traditional methods of sales prospecting are grossly inefficient.
2. New strategies were needed to shorten sales cycles and improve seller productivity.
3. By embracing new technologies and a thought-leadership mind-set, companies could transform sales results.
These things aren’t easy for me to admit. But the truth is that no matter how hard I work with my corporate clients to improve sales effectiveness, it’s just not enough anymore.
Download 2 chapters right now.
In the past few years, a number of new marketing automation companies (e.g., Eloqua, Marketo, Genius, and HubSpot) have appeared on the horizon. From the moment I saw their technology and their own implementation of it, I knew this was the solution I was looking for.I was drooling! This was exactly what sales needed. This perfect care and feeding of potential customers eliminated the time-consuming task from the sales force at the same time that it ensured the consistency and quality of the messaging. It freed the salespeople to do what they do best!But there was still a missing link! Technology was only the enabler. Contagious content was the key. I’m not talking self-serving marketing pablum, now. Prospective customers want answers to their problems, ideas for achieving their goals, and information on how others are addressing the same challenges they face. If you give the “state-of-the-art, leading-edge” blather, they’ll delete your message in no time flat.
There’s only one person I know who understands this implicitly—Ardath Albee. I first met her about five years ago when she was the president of a young technology company that was struggling to go to market the “old-fashioned way.” After hiring (and firing) three salespeople, she knew it was time to try something different.
Download 2 chapters right now.
That’s when she started blogging as a way to demonstrate thought leadership in her market space. Ultimately, her passion for “getting inside the customer’s head” and crafting customer-enticing content led her to set up her own consultancy in this emerging field—one in which she is the clear leader.E-Marketing Strategies for the Complex Sale offers fresh perspectives and lots of meaty how-to advice on how to catch your prospect’s attention, amplify your e-messaging, increase urgency, and build a relationship online. It’s exactly what marketing needs to focus on today in order to help the struggling sales organization.
Sales desperately needs marketing to take the lead and up the ante. No more “same old, same old.” It’s time for marketing to make a radical impact—and this book shows you how.
Get your copy of eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale today.
That's when I decided to write a book on how to get back to work faster. You see, job hunting is really about selling yourself. No self-respecting seller would ever send out a 1000 brochures and hope for prospects to call.
Yet that's exactly what job hunters do with resumes and job boards. They wait and wait for employers to call, but it doesn't happen. It's time for job seekers to stop playing the old job search game!
If you or your friends are out of work, check out my newest book, Get Back to Work Faster. It's filled with fresh new strategies that put job seekers back in the driver's seat of their career.
Also, I invite you to join me at my upcoming book launch:
P.S. In Get Back to Work Faster, you'll discover how to:
A well-managed pipeline helps to improve the consistency of results achieved and creates a platform for more accurate sales forecasting.
If pipeline management is not an integral part of an organisation’s sales process, this can result in a number of problems including: longer sales cycles, reduced forecasting accuracy, inconsistent and unpredictable sales performance, declining win-rates and an inability to pinpoint reasons for decreased results.
Key Performance Indicators
You can’t manage what you can’t measure, and if you can’t measure your pipeline, then you can’t improve your productivity. There are a number of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) that can be measured, monitored and managed to ensure achievement of sales targets:
If you weed them out early, you will give yourself so much more time to work on those that will happen.
This is an extract from Jonathan Farrington's Blogging Good Year - Volume 3. You can download it for FREE, when you sign up for the monthly “JF Journal” here: www.jonathanfarrington.com
Jonathan Farrington is Chairman of The Sales Corporation, CEO of Top Sales Associates and Senior Partner at The JF Consultancy based in London and Paris.
What happens when we make assumptions? The movie, The Return of the Pink Panther, provides a great lesson. Peter Sellers, playing the immortal character, Inspector Clouseau, sees a hotel clerk holding a dog on a leash and asks, "Does your dog bite?"
The clerk responds "no," and Clouseau reaches to pet the dog, which immediately bites his hand.
"I thought you said your dog did not bite!" he exclaims. To which, the clerk replies, "That is not my dog."In sales, how do we know if our prospective customers are answering the questions we think we're asking? How do we know if we're asking the best questions—or even the right questions? The Pink Panther vignette illustrates both humorously and poignantly what can happen if we take actions when there are incongruities between questions and perceived answers.
I can relate to Clouseau's not- entirely-self-induced folly, and I wondered whether sales questions I've used could be similarly entertaining fodder—or, at the very least, instructive.
So I reflected on my inventory of sales calls over 20 years and came up with two examples—one showing failure, the other success—that illustrate what can happen when you're asking questions in selling.
My conclusion: Getting to the right answers requires careful thought and constant practice. There aren't any shortcuts, but there are some best practices.
Using what he'd told me, I developed a proposal for a real-time, multi-warehouse inventory control system, including 200 handheld and mobile terminals and dozens of radio frequency access points. Inventory movement would be efficiently and accurately recorded with the simple pull of a scanner trigger. No more mistakes. No more manual data entry. No more paper. All this for $300,000—an excellent value considering the multimillion-dollar scale of the company's inventory and transportation costs.
Of course, I forecast my sales opportunity to close in the current fiscal year and received kudos from my district and region managers for having uncovered such a valuable lead. High fives were given all around, and we believed we couldn't lose. I sent the sales proposal to my prospect and awaited the affirmative response, which never arrived.
Why? The major reason was because I hadn't explored or understood the problem's impact on the enterprise. As the VP later explained, "We sell everything for a dollar. Our customers don't expect to see specific items in stock, so it's not a headache if the wrong truckload backs up to the store's receiving dock. They'll unload it and put it out for sale. We don't like it, but it doesn't really matter to us in terms of our financial performance." End of story. My opportunity was lost. My prospect eventually became someone's customer. But not mine.At a different company, I sold Oracle integration services to firms in the mid-Atlantic area. Our short-term objective was to sell services for installing the next version of Oracle's operating system, but my company's California-based staff and lack of local references made that challenging. Yet our consulting practice leaders were resolute on promoting such high-dollar, long-term projects.
Consequently, my initial prospect-qualification questions centered on whether the prospect planned to upgrade to Oracle 11i in the next 12 months. Most didn't. After a few weeks of cold calling, I finally obtained an appointment with the IT manager of a distributor I'll call XYZ Healthcare Products, though he was reluctant to talk about upgrading.
When I arrived at XYZ, I learned that the IT manager had invited eight colleagues from other departments to join our meeting. We began our discussion about whether there was a business case to upgrade to 11i. The more questions I asked about upgrading, the clearer it became that it wasn't necessary. The conversation began to trail off as people looked at their cell phones and watches. Was it time to end the meeting and check my Blackberry for the Next Opportunity on the way to my car?I didn't because something piqued my curiosity: Why were there were eight people assembled to discuss something that appeared all but decided? Although I didn't ask that question, I decided to ask a different one: "Assuming that technology and finances posed no constraints, what would you change right now about your business processes and operations?"
The IT manager shared that a significant unsolved problem was that the company needed to produce a customer-ready invoice that could be placed in the shipment box during final packing, and Oracle's "vanilla" software couldn't provide that capability, causing XYZ to delay invoicing. His response surprised me because superficially the problem seemed minor, but his comment elicited nods from his colleagues.
That answer meant that the massive consulting project I needed to close had just devolved into a few billable hours to provide this seemingly-prosaic modification. Considering how insistent my practice managers were about selling upgrade work, I could have lost my sales resolve.
Instead, I wanted to know more. What was it about this issue that created such visceral pain among these managers? As my mind filled with questions, I asked, "What does this limitation mean for your operations?" Their answers exposed issues ranging from customer service to logistics to receivables administration.
Probing the receivables challenges yielded insight into perhaps the greatest strategic challenge XYZ faced. The invoicing delay caused significant cash-flow problems. "Why haven't you fixed this already?" I asked. "We thought it couldn't be done, and, up to now, no one has taken the time to come here to meet with us."
I explained that providing the change they requested was not complicated. XYZ's president was then called to join the meeting, and he excitedly corroborated what his managers had told me. The company signed a contract for the modification and became a client.
What did I learn? First, my central qualification question, "Do you plan to upgrade to 11i in the next 12 months?" was based only on what I wanted to sell; it risked missing opportunities because it ignored uncovering the outcomes my prospects required. By asking the right questions, I was able to learn that the immediate burning issue could be located in an unexpected place, and by providing a solution to address that issue, I could create a new sales path toward my higher-dollar work: the 11i upgrade service package.In August, I performed a nationwide survey of sales professionals about how they use questions to discover customer needs. The answers revealed a wide range of patterns, techniques and favorite questions, suggesting that there are many pathways to successful discovery. The best idea I received was this one: "If I'm unclear about who, what, when, where and why, I keep asking questions."
ANDREW RUDIN has 25 years of experience enabling companies to sell information technology products and services. A specialist in sales strategy, he serves on the boards of three technology organizations and has published numerous articles on a broad range of sales topics. He holds a BS in Commerce, and an MS in the management of information technology, both from the University of Virginia
Today's blog post was written by Sharon Drew Morgen, author of the excellent new sales book, Dirty Little Secrets. She's also the author of the New York Times bestseller, Selling With Integrity.
What a waste - not only for sellers, but for buyers.
This doesn’t need to happen. Sales is just an incomplete model that we’ve accepted as the way to place our products. It works only at the product decision end of the equation (vs. Buying Facilitation, my model that manages the buying decision end of the equation), with no ability to guide buyers through their tangle of stuff’ that needs to get figured out before they can make a buying decision.
It’s where prospects go when they say, “I’ll call you back.” They have to make sure all of the people and policies that touch the Identified Problem are in agreement, that old vendor issues and relationships are handled, that historic problems are managed. Unfortunately for us, sales doesn’t help with this aspect of the seller-buyer equation and buyers need to do this on their own.
Unfortunately for them, buyers don’t initially know the route through all of their decisions either. And we meet them far too early in their decision process, leaving us waiting to close and not knowing what’s going on. After all, their need and our solution seem to be a match - but it takes so long for them to decide! What is the problem!
So we sit and wait. And 90% of the prospects don’t come back. Not because our product isn’t good, or because our solution doesn’t match their need. It’s because their internal issues haven’t been resolved, and buyers won’t buy until they are. They can’t: they must maintain the integrity of their environment even if it means they don’t resolve their need.
Sales doesn’t offer us the tools to help guide them through the route to all of those decisions: it's certainly difficult for sellers to understand the buyer's buy-in issues, management decisions, technology factors. But it's quite possible to have an understanding of the decision making process - the route that buyers must make through their unique decision criteria - and recalibrate our jobs to be not only solution providers, but neutral navigators - Buying Facilitators if you will - much like a buddy to a sight-impaired friend who knows where they want to go but doesn't know the exact route to get there.
By focusing on the buying decision end of the equation, sales can be closed in months rather than years, weeks rather than months, and sellers can stop wasting so much of their time. And failing so often. Imagine if doctors or baseball players had the same failure rate!
Imagine if we could lead buyers through all of their unconscious decision criteria, help them discover who needs to buy-in to a new solution, and help them build our product into their solution design. Imagine.
Read the first chapter of The Dirty Little Secret: Why Buyers Can’t Buy and Sellers Can’t Sell and What to Do About It.
This book has my personal endorsement. If you're serious about sales, you'll want to read it. Sharon Drew Morgen offers deep insight into customer decision making. Plus, she shares fresh new strategies to help you:
I've followed Sharon Drew's work for years now and I always learn something new from her. You will too.
P.S. Get the book between Oct. 15 - Oct. 21 and you'll get some excellent bonus resources too.
Not many sellers like cold calling. They may be forced into it but they go kicking and screaming, avoiding it with any excuse.
Unfortunately, they think it’s the only approach to prospecting, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
John was a managed services provider looking to grow his company. He created a cold calling plan to reach three different micro-segments that he’d identified as his hottest opportunities.
Together we put a strategy
in place with a dynamite approach. He learned how to tailor his message to
different companies, tips to get past gatekeepers and techniques for leaving
gripping voicemails.
John was excited! He spent weeks perfecting everything,
holding off on any calls until he felt he was fully prepared.
And then it was time to execute.
After two weeks of failed attempts, John fessed up. He didn’t want to pick up the phone.
He’d convinced himself that this was the right way to prospect. John assumed that all successful sales people did it, and if his business was going to be successful, he had to master it, too.
Not true.
Cold calling can be one of the most inefficient ways to find leads. Unless you have a list of specific contacts you want to reach, it simply isn’t your best technique to fill your funnel.
I’m a passionate believer in alternate ways of prospecting, especially when you’ve got a big region you’re attempting to cover and you’re strapped with a large number to sell. Instead, you need a plan that’ll bring leads in the door in a manner that’s comfortable for you.
It’s time to change your prospecting strategy. Here are some ideas for you.
Some people love cold calling. But if you aren’t one of those people, relax, breathe a deep sigh of relief and change your prospecting strategy.
Not only will you build your funnel, you’ll also create awareness for yourself and your company through consistent exposure. When your target prospects have a need, they’ll remember you and reach out. And isn’t that so much more inviting that interrupting their day with a cold call?
She's a frequent speaker at national sales meetings and
association events. To find out more about the author, read her latest
articles, or to subscribe to her newsletter visit www.klagroup.com or call +1 303.773.1285.
Kevin Writes: I have a long-standing client. One particular group asked us for a meeting to discuss a project and we prepared a fairly complex Statement of Work in just two business days.
We sent it, followed up with an email a couple days later, followed up with one phone call each week the following two weeks, and with another email last week. Finally, having heard nothing from the folks we were working with, I elevated to higher ups.
As you can imagine, I got a response from my Director contact, and of course, anger and irritation from the unresponsive project folks. Was I wrong to elevate? The logic of the project folks (my prospect) is that if we weren’t hearing from them, we should keep contacting them.
Where is it written that only sellers have to exhibit professionalism, not the client?_________________
My Thoughts: The game has changed in the corporate world today. But honestly, it's not that they're bad people. They are literally expected to do too much in too little time.
They're running so lean and mean that it's impossible for them to keep their head above water. I have chosen to have compassion for them. Personally, I would hate to be in an environment like that.
But that does mean that we need to change what we do. With every project you do, ensure you have full communications going at all times with multiple people in the organization.
Let the project people know that you're communicating with the execs. Be totally transparent about it - it's how you work. That way, it won't seem like you're going around them.
What would you suggest?
Have you ever noticed that some people find success in life because they care for and about others?
Today many successful people have discovered that money is the worst motivator but one of the best is to try and do something to help others. That was certainly the case for Lunsford Richardson.
In the 1890s patent medicines were everywhere. Lydia Pinkham tried to cure “female complaints” – and her financial distress – with her tonic of herbs and a heavy dose of alcohol. She succeeded. Later she made even more money marketing her pills and a “blood purifier.”His brother-in-law was a doctor, so Richardson arranged to borrow the doctor’s laboratory to do some experimenting. At first none of his experiments paid off but then one day he came across a little-known Japanese extract and mixed it with some ingredients he had on hand to create a salve. This he rubbed on his son the next time the boy had croup. It seemed to help.
Then he offered it to some of his neighbors for them to use on their own children. Again it seemed to help.
That is when Lunsford Richardson began to market his “Croup and Pneumonia Cure."
His motivation wasn’t to make money – although he did amazingly well at that – but simply to help sick children.
He did so well, in fact, that by 1909 he sold his drugstore and invested his life savings into building a laboratory of his own to manufacture and market the medicine.
By this time his son, Smith, was grown and working with his dad. Smith Richardson convinced his father that the medicine would sell better if it had a catchier name. They decided to name the product after Richardson’s brother-in-law and to call it something different.
They even changed the packaging to distinguish their medicine from all the others on the market. The brother-in-law’s name? Dr. Joshua Vick.
Yes, the product was “Vick’s VapoRub” which made use of the Japanese mint oil extract called “menthol” mixed with camphor and eucalyptus oil in a petroleum jelly base. It vaporized by body heat alone and was also safe on the skin. Today it is still doing pretty well.
The point in sharing this tale, however, is not to simply tell the history of a common product, but to point out that it is generally true that when a man or woman sets out just to make money, their story doesn’t often end well.
On the other hand, those motivated to make life better for others, even if they fail, find their lives have been successful in ways money cannot buy.
Many business leaders have studied what it takes to be successful.
Over and over again they have discovered that those people who are really successful are the ones who have altruistic motives. They want to make life better for everyone, not just to make themselves rich. There certainly is a lesson in that for all of us.
Think about it.© 2009 Larry A. Crider Enterprises, 2809 Mohawk, Longview, Texas 75605
How do you minimize the risk your prospects feel in doing business with you or even changing?
KEY POINT: You're working with prospects who have decided to switch from the status quo. All change involves some sort of risk.They're knowledgeable about their options as well as your own company's offerings.
I'm looking for ideas on what you're doing in conversations, meetings, presentations and proposals to differentiate your product or service and win the business.
If you can, please share an example or specific story.
KEY POINT: They've committed to making a change. There's money in the budget. Now they're deciding which option is best for them. They are NOT using you so they can get cheaper pricing from their current vendor. They're seriously interested and exploring several alternatives.
Also, any thoughts on what you're doing to make the decision process simpler for these crazy busy people.Rally Point helps clients build relationships, brand and business through online events.
Customer Loyalty Value Calculator
Ever wonder what the value of customer loyalty is on your business?
Then check out this Customer Loyalty Value Calculator to see how increasing customer loyalty can add profits to your company.
This tool, developed by Kevin Stirtz who's the author of More Loyal Customers, is for business owners who want to analyze the impact. It breaks out retention, repeat business and customer referrals so you can play with different scenarios.
________________________
Do you sell IT products/services to small and medium-sized (SMB) businesses?
Then check out this State of SMB IT research report put out by Spiceworks. Here are just some of their findings:
SMB Purchasing Intention
SMB Usage Patterns
Spiceworks has made the full report available for free. Click here to request your copy.
Corporate America is losing thousands of sales dollars to SADD - Sales Attention Deficit Disorder. Salespeople pride themselves on their ability to multi-task, however, don't realize they are multi-tasking themselves right out of relationships and sales.
Here are a few tips for decreasing SADD and increasing revenues:
1. Turn off your Blackberry.No, you don't need reading glasses. You read the statement correctly. Turn off the electronics. An old adage in sales says, “People buy from people they like.” And guess what? People like people that pay attention and make them feel important.
When people feel important they say things like, “I felt like I was the only person in the room,” “He made me feel so important,” or “She was listening to every word.”
Salespeople are starting to remind me of dogs on shock collars. The minute the PDA rings or vibrates, they feel compelled to answer or check it, regardless of what they're doing or who they're with. For example, a salesperson is calling on a prospect. The salesperson is doing a very good job of building rapport. The prospect is feeling comfortable and thinking that the salesperson really does care about his/her problem.
Until the salesperson's cell phone vibrates. The salesperson looks down to check who is calling him and rapport is broken because the prospect receives the real message: I am important, but not more important than an incoming call.
A colleague shares a story of a breakfast meeting with a possible referral partner. They were ten minutes into breakfast when the possible referral partner took a phone call. This was not an emergency call, just a phone call.
As my colleague sipped her coffee (alone), she made a mental note to put this possible referral candidate in the “just doesn't get it” category. My colleague scheduled an hour out of her busy day to meet this person and expected full attention during that hour. The phone-addicted salesperson lost an important opportunity to build a relationship.
2. Love the one you're with.The grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence. This selling scenario often occurs at networking events and looks something like this: ou are talking to an individual and throughout the conversation he/she keeps looking around the room to see if there is someone else more important they should be meeting.
Actions speak louder than words and the message is clear…you are important; however, the grass may be greener on the other side of the room.
Some salespeople still practice the crazy networking principle of speed networking. This salesperson's main goal is to meet as many people as possible in an evening. Quantity is the goal, not quality. They carry an invisible time clock that rings after two minutes (hey, they have a room to work). They politely excuse themselves and move onto “greener pastures,” (at which point their cell phone rings and they answer).
Speed networking or “working the room” is working yourself right out of a potential relationship. Savvy business people spot phonies and phony intentions. People that are serious about building business relationships take the necessary time to build that relationship. They know processes are efficient and people are not.
3. Listen, record and respond.
Harvey Mackay, author of “Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive,” and president of the Mackay Envelope Company, is a master at listening, recording and responding. Mackay knows that envelops are a commodity product; one that can easily fall prey to the price shopping game. He decided early on that he would not compete on price but he would compete on paying attention and knowing more about his clients than any of his competitors.
All of Mackay's salespeople are required to complete a questionnaire on each one of their customers. “The Mackay 66” customer profile asks 66 questions ranging from personal to business. With this data, the Mackay salesperson is equipped to make their customers feel important by remembering special anniversaries, asking specific questions about their children, or sending articles of interest on a hobby or passion.
Get rid of SADD. Turn off your electronics, be present, and be professional. Paying attention is a great selling skill.
Personal growth and change is a challenge for all of us. We all have strengths and areas for development. Mangers who decide who create a laundry list of areas for development will have little success.
It is too difficult for sales rep to make wholesale changes in how they sell. Development is about working on improving 1 or 2 things and once the sales person has demonstrated that they have acquired the skill or behaviour then you can move on to the next area.
From a sales reps perspective imagine getting a field report listing all of the things you do wrong? Some reps would not even read the report. Many will read and wonder where I start. Others may read it and be completely overwhelmed.