• What deals will close this month?
• What cover does the sales person have to meet their quota?
• How much of the pipeline is new business versus add-on?
• How does the pipeline feel relative to other months?
• Are marketing delivering on their demand gen targets?
• What are the next steps in the sales process?
• Is senior management from the prospect engaged?
• What is the average deal size?
• Where is the competition on individual deals?
• So on and so forth

Invariably most sales people, who are under pressure to deliver, will try to concentrate the discussion on marketing’s contribution to inbound leads. Whilst this may be a valid concern it can quite often hide the fact that the salesperson’s own management of their pipeline is poor. A good salesperson will generate their own pipeline in the absence of it from other sources. A bad salesperson will hide behind marketing and try to mask their underperformance by inflating their pipe with opportunities that are not likely to close.

So what is a good leading indicator of this, or where should the manager look? The place to start is the average age of pipeline for new business. If the average age of closed won business is significantly lower than the average age of open or closed lost opportunities, then it’s highly likely that the sales person is holding onto pipe that won’t close, instead of creating their own pipeline. The tendency to ‘beat the dead horse’ rather than cold call, is very strong in inexperienced sales people or those who are used to over supply from inbound. A simple view of the average age of the pipeline by sales stage will highlight if there is an issue. If the average age of open opportunities is say, more than one and a half times that of closed won deals then further investigation is required.

Encouraging/training the sales person that a better use of their time would be to do their own demand generation through cold calling or cold connecting in the social world is key, regardless. The salesperson will defend why different opportunities deserve to stay open, but ultimately if your company has a particular set of sales cycles/close rates/sales velocities then these are not likely to shift dramatically over time. The reality however, is that too many managers ignore age when reviewing the pipe.

Your B2B marketing department has done its job.  They’ve filled the funnel with sales leads.  The sales department followed through on the leads provided but somehow your close-ratios are dropping.  What happened?

This scenario isn’t unusual, sometimes leads fall through cracks or systems fail, but the important thing is to identify the weak links in your lead generation chain and avoid the blame game between opposite ends of the office.

If you are finding issues in your lead generation process, check these 5 reasons why you may be losing opportunities and what you can do to fix it:

1. Your Lead Scoring Is Off The Mark

The work you do on the front end has a huge impact on the back end of your sales process.  Nowhere is this more evident than in your lead scoring system.  If you don’t have a complete profile on who your ideal sales lead is, you’re basically throwing proverbial pasta against the lead generation wall and hoping it sticks.

Encourage regular meetings between sales and marketing to grade and adjust how your lead scoring is performing.  Make this a consistent part of your planning and you’ll not only stay on top of your fine-tuning, you’ll foster a stronger relationship between sales and marketing, as well.

2. Your Lead Nurturing Is Spotty

Once those prospects are in your sales funnel, they should be integrated into a well-timed, regular touch program.  If those leads you thought were hot are cooling down too often, then it’s time to examine how well you are continuing the conversation that started when they agreed to give you their email addresses.

Be sure you are covering these aspects of reaching out to prospects:

• Contact them within 5 minutes of when they subscribe
• Engage in at least 4 reach-outs to keep them interested
• Don’t have your sales department contact leads before they are sales-ready

The process of lead nurturing puts a spotlight on the communication between marketing and sales.  If prospects sense a disconnect within the system, they’ll be less likely to put their trust (and their dollars) in your business.

3. Your Message Doesn’t Compel

The ideal content marketing message is one that provides relevant information, educates and compels readers to act.  That thread must weave through every piece of content, whether on your website and social media channels, in your blog or throughout your email marketing.  Without a consistent message, prospects will look elsewhere.

Above all else, decide what it is you want prospects to do.  Do you want them to download a whitepaper or sign up for your newsletter?  Tell them!  While there is a fine line between pushing and motivating, there is no substitution for a call to action.

4. You Don’t Understand How Your Buyers Think

You may be skilled at collecting names but a stuffed top of the funnel does not equate to the same amount of sales.  Your dwindling results may be due to the fact that you don’t understand how buyers think.

You need to understand the differences between latent and active buyers.  Some come in as hot leads and flow through the funnel quickly to sale but leads that need more time must be followed up with differently.

This goes back to lead scoring.  Do you know if your lead is a primary buyer or a contributor?  What is the culture in their company that may keep them from pulling the trigger?  The myriad of details that go into your buyer’s decision making should be top of your mind as well, so you can create a message that brings them value and a series of reach outs that fit their schedule.

5. You’re Not Keeping Track Of The Numbers

Industry stats indicate that 40% of prospects become leads.  But as we know, not all leads are created equal.  If you don’t know why your conversion rates are less than impressive, maybe it’s because you haven’t really looked at the numbers closely (or often) enough.

Your metrics should take into account conversion rates over time by type.  For example, do trade show leads perform better than pay-per-click (PPC)?  PPC leads may cost more but if they convert more quickly they may end up costing less per customer.

Throughout the sales process, the foundation to success is sales and marketing alignment. When marketing understands the prospects they need to find and sales gives feedback to which prospects became the best leads, then both can benefit from future forecasting based upon on-going results.

If you are experiencing cracks in your sales funnel mortar, go back to the basics and get both sides of the office on the same page.  You’ll see conversion rates and ROI that prove collaboration is key.

Need assistance identifying the hottest sales leads?  We can help with that.

Sales Success with the Changing B2B Buyer

In this first clip, Bill reviews why it is important to know who your buyer is. Combine that buyer profile with a good product, strategic timing and a smooth cadence of team plus execution, and you’re well on your way to a powerful revenue engine!

Effective Ways to Evaluate and Generate Sales Leads

In this 2nd episode, Gerhard inquires about the importance of lead scoring. Here Bill provides examples on why it’s important to discover what lead scoring model fits your business. You’ll also hear why an executable lead scoring system is handicapped without the ability to adapt that system to the changing B2B buyer.

Drive B2B Sales and B2B Marketing Success

Get the answers to questions like ‘why use video?’ and ‘why do marketing and sales have to get along?’ in this final edition of Bill Binch being interviewed by Selling Power TV’s Gerhard Gschwandtner.

Be sure to check out more great B2B sales thought leadership at Selling Power TV’s site!

So it begs the question – should I (or our recruiter) coach and help prep the candidate before they come in? I’ve had this conversation and gotten both sides of the spectrum. Some firmly believe you should prep the candidate so they can target their message and bring their ‘A’ game. Others are aghast, think the candidate needs to be quick on their feet and react accordingly.

What do you think?

I’m not sure there’s a right answer, but thought it was worth testing. We recently initiated a new process for our job candidates. We feel the applicant needs to get through the screening process (normally done via phone) and demonstrate to us that they’ve done the basics of understanding our business without any coaxing or coaching. We want to see them “run what they brung” and align their background to the relevance of the role.

If successful at that mission, they proceed to the next step of onsite interviews. At this point, we recently starting sharing a Marketo Corporate Sales Values sheet with the candidate. This allows the candidate to get some insight to what we value and care about within Marketo. My hope is the candidate internalizes this and hones their message to show how they’ve exhibited these traits.

We’ve just started doing this so I don’t have enough anecdotal evidence to provide insight yet. But I’m curious about what other have done and what others think of this idea?

There are some smart tips and techniques to fulfilling a successful cold call campaign:

1. Target. Aim for the right industries. Seek out contacts at the right level. Get the direct line of someone that can make decisions on what you have to offer.
2. Research. Can’t make the connection? Use online resources. Information sources like LinkedIn, Data.com and ZoomInfo can be indispensible for making contact. This may also help you understand more about their business.
3. Strategize. Sometimes it takes some prospecting to find and talk to the right person. Once the right person is found, gatekeeper administrators can keep you away. Some great times to call in order to reach the right person are midweek and early in the morning, just before the top of every business hour or between 5:00 and 6:00 PM.
4. Include. Cold calling shouldn’t stand alone. It should be fully integrated into your marketing campaign, as it is often most effective when accompanied by email and direct mail communications.
5. Propose. Once contact is made, make an offer that is compelling. Address one of the major challenges your prospect is likely facing. Being capable of solving a problem can bring you half-way to a sale.
6. Relent. There is a fine line between persistence and annoyance. Once the line is crossed, it can be hard to get the prospect back. Before making another call or sending one more e-mail, put yourself in the prospect’s shoes. What actions would make you turn away from a deal?

Cold calling is an invaluable B2B marketing technique for businesses. Even if a prospect isn’t ready to buy, the phone offers a great opportunity to personally introduce your brand. By leaving a positive image, cold calling encourages and nurtures the possibility of a future sale.

What cold-call tactics would you add to this list?

The quota should be related to the on-target-earnings (OTE) of the salesperson. A quota can be somewhere between five times and ten times OTE. In smaller companies it tends to be higher, but in larger companies it may be lower because big companies are more likely to have a strategy to saturate the territory with salespeople.

So once the number is set, then comes the inevitable question ‘where are the sales leads?’. Most inexperienced sales people will look exclusively to marketing to solve their pipeline challenges. This would be Utopia if it was to happen, but it rarely does. Marketing does a great job with demand generation, building awareness, analyzing lead cost, lead sources, etc., but the salesperson who understands the various sources of their pipeline, will be ahead of the game. They will be better placed to achieve their number, but can also have meaningful discussions with marketing to influence demand generation tactics and maximize marketing’s contribution to their pipeline.

Quota will come from pipeline, a pipe-to-close rate will determine what pipeline coverage is required. A rate of 20% is acceptable, 40%+ is best in class. Too high is just as bad as too low, a sign that sales are hiding pipeline.

Now that you have established roughly the amount required, you need to determine what percentage is from new business and what percentage is from the installed base (add-on/up-sell/cross-sell).

The new business figure then needs to be deconstructed into its different sources, typically:

• Marketing (inbound demand generation)
• Partner or channel
• Telemarketing (outbound team if you have one)
• Self generated (salesperson’s own activities)

The percentages attributed to each of these four categories can vary dramatically from sales team to sales team. An SMB team may have a high figure for inbound and a low figure for outbound, whereas an Enterprise team may have a low inbound figure from marketing and a higher figure from outbound telemarketing.

With this understanding of pipeline composition, a sales person is in a much better position to start thinking of a territory plan that’s realistic for their own goals and those of your company.

How to engage customers more effectively? Authors Erik Peterson and Tim Riesterer, who run a consulting company called Corporate Visions, say rethinking your messaging to sales leads is key. One of Corporate Visions’ core services is to teach clients a technique called Power Messaging, which essentially is what Conversations that Win is all about.

Basically, with Power Messaging, a sales person concentrates on telling the buyer a story from the buyer’s point of view, rather than his or her own corporate message. By approaching messaging this way, Riesterer and Peterson say, you can create more compelling messaging that will close more deals faster.

One thing that grabbed my attention in the first chapter is the book’s message that acting on your best instincts is not always the best idea. In a field as interpersonal as sales this idea may seem almost counter-intuitive, but in practice it makes a lot of sense. As the authors point out:

Your instincts and intentions tell you to:
• Help your customers (good intention)
• Give your customers as much information as possible (bad instinct)
• Show your depth and professionalism (good intention)
• Use sophisticated language to reveal your depth (bad instinct)
• Build relationships with customers (good intention)
• Move from agreement to agreement with your customers and never challenge their point of view (bad instinct)
• Deliver your message in a memorable way (good intention)
• Play it safe and focus on being as polished as possible (bad instinct)

Makes you think, right? The chapter starts out with a story about Babe Ruth: how he was a decent hitter, but never truly hit his stride until he went against instinct to use a significantly lighter bat. This is just one example of how what seems like the best route to success isn’t always, well, what it seems.

Of course, that point is just the tip of the iceberg. To learn more about the book, check out our B2B Sales and Marketing Book Club review, or visit the book’s website for some quick Brainshark videos on what the book is about and how it can help with sales. And for more great sales and marketing books, browse our B2B Sales and Marketing Book Club!

Have you read Conversations that Win the Complex Sale? If so, what did you think?

First, let’s define “sales cycle.” The definition listed by the Business Dictionary is “The course of time between the initial contact being made with a customer, the identification of services or goods to be procured, the acceptance of the intended purchase, and the transaction that completes the sale.” As you might expect, shorter sales cycles generally lead to greater profits, since more deals are being closed faster. Conversely, long sales cycles tend to bring with them reduced cash flow and less-than-stellar revenue performance.

There are conflicting reports on how the recession has affected B2B sales cycles. Tight budgets, fear of making bad decisions and increased available options have delayed buyers’ plans and contributed to the length of sales cycles in many circles. However, for the few projects that are ready to go, sales have been closing at lightning speed.

Additionally, social media and user-generated content have really changed the sales process and cycle length. Prospects can find information, ask questions online and learn more about a brand than ever – sometimes before even seeing it, knowing where to buy it or communicating with the organization that offers it. By the time many leads make contact, they are already close to making a decision and require less marketing resources to clinch the sale.

For prospects who are undecided, though, early-stage lead nurturing is more crucial than ever.  If marketers don’t spend enough time working with the lead in the early stages of the sales cycle, it can end up dragging on or petering out. A sales professional who ensures that he or she has an understanding with the customer early on is much more likely to close the sale without having to retread part – or all – of the process.

Most organizations have a large number of sales leads that are of little or no value. Some say the typical salesperson spends an average of 150% of their time on deals that are eventually lost. Opportunities that fall through after long periods of time actually cost businesses money, due to time and effort expended on what eventually just becomes a dead lead. The true cost of these long “fail” cycles is misallocated resources, inaccurate sales forecasts and missed opportunities for sales to move on more promising leads. Successful lead management can help give direction on where these commodities could be better spent.

Carefully identifying your target audience can also help immensely. Once your brand has developed a compelling message, it should be aimed at those people or companies that are most likely to need the product or service offered. This may sound obvious, but far too many organizations are selling themselves short by trying to market to everyone. Clear, targeted messaging that lets the right prospects know exactly what your brand is, how it will benefit them and why they should choose it over the competition will generate demand and produces more sales.

Another way to shorten the sales cycle is to create compelling offers that provide incentives for prospects to take immediate action. Such valuable offers first attract prospects’ attention, then compel them to buy your product or service before time runs out. A special offer can not only shorten the sales cycle – it can energize a company’s entire system of revenue generation.

There are several factors that can contribute unpredictability to sales cycle lengths. However, armed with some knowledge about what may be affecting them, businesses and marketing teams can increase the quality of their leads and concentrate on prospects that are most likely to result in sales.

Interested in learning more about how marketing & sales alignment can lead to shorter sales cycles? Check out Marketo’s Secret Sauce to Sales and Marketing Alignment webinar.

Each of us has a war story about that prospect we chased for a year who finally answered the phone and agreed to a meeting.  While 3 out of 10 makes you a hall of famer in baseball, 3 out of 100 in cold calling makes you a sales legend.  CSO Insights has the average at more like 1 in a 1000.

When I’m interviewing candidates, the question most often asked of me, in one way or another, is “What percentage of opportunities are driven by Marketing?”  As Bill Binch, VP of Sales here at Marketo, points out, this is asked not just at the sales rep level but also during executive interviews. This raises the question of who is responsible for creating qualified leads.  Before I came to Marketo, I would have been satisfied with a list of the names of people who had showed up to a trade show booth. I once even had a CFO who suggested that the sales team start calling on other CFOs (he would later tell us that he never answers his own phone or checks his voicemail). 

Anyway, while there is no shortage of opinions within an organization on what constitutes a lead and who it should come from, we can all agree that sales reps work most efficiently when they are talking with prospects who are raising their hands and asking questions about your product.

A few years ago, I started seeing blog posts, books, webinars, and articles that said cold calling was a waste of time, or even dead. While a few of these publications were written by sales pros, most of them were written by marketing professionals. Of course, at Marketo, cold calling is considered a bit of a profanity.  Our VP of Marketing, Jon Miller, seems to genuinely dislike the practice and will often challenge reps who claim to have created an opportunity with cold calling as the lead source.  Jon knows that very rarely do prospects get interested, run an evaluation, and choose a product or service because of an impromptu phone conversation they had with an unknown sales rep.  In reality, that cold call was probably perfectly timed with some marketing message (maybe even from a competitor) and was the final straw that got the opportunity off the ground.  Naturally there are exceptions to this, but those stories are for Happy Hour with your sales buddies.

So is cold calling really dead?  Not quite…but if you’re cold calling the same way you did 10-15 years ago, then you most certainly are wasting your time.  As with everything else, the way prospects buy has changed; therefore, we, as sales people, are changing the way we sell.

With a slowed economy and more information than ever available to prospects, it is critical that sales pros become as efficient and effective as possible.  This efficiency will most certainly not come from smiling and dialing for dollars.  What will be effective is doing your homework, finding prospects that are a good fit, and confidently pursuing them with messaging relevant to their business needs.  It may sound obvious, but the rifle approach of pursuing prospects demands a lot more heavy lifting before you pick up the phone.  So many sales organizations preach the shotgun approach while going for quantity instead of quality. 

Your prospects are most certainly evaluating all of the information they can find about your company and its competitors. So before you call anyone, arm yourself with research about your prospect before that first conversation.  If you’re not convinced they need your product or service, don’t pick up the phone. If you don’t buy into the message, it’s unlikely that they will either. You also need to have realistic expectations.  If your goal is to connect with a decision maker and have him or her listen to your blind sales pitch, you will be disappointed 99.99% of the time (these are known as the four 9s of sales). 

While sales and marketing alignment is critical at the executive level, it is just as important for sales reps to align their efforts with those of marketing.  For maximum efficacy, cold calling or warm calling efforts need to coincide with nurturing campaigns set up by marketing.  This is the scenario where cold calling can and will actually be effective.  By doing your homework, identifying companies that are a good fit, adding them to marketing’s nurturing tracks and then following up with a relevant value proposition, you put yourself in position to get your prospect’s attention.  This also will allow you to build trust with the prospect by taking the time to understand their business. Only then can you effectively communicate where your product or service will add value.

One thing that has not changed over the years is that every sale starts with a call.  The Internet, email and web conferencing have all changed the way we sell, so why do we still use the phone? A better question is why some companies continue to use the cold calling practices of the past. Cold calling is neither dead nor a waste of time, but it definitely is not what it used to be.

People love a good story, especially if the outcome is something that would make their own lives more fulfilling. Brands can deeply and positively impact their sales leads by sharing their customers’ positive experiences.

Telling the story of a typical customer’s encounter with a brand is a potent method of persuasion that can overcome sales resistance and appeal to nearly any audience. From advertisements and infomercials to online product reviews and social media, prospects are always ready to hear personal accounts about life with your brand.

Find your audience and appeal to different types of sales leads with these storytelling techniques:

• Firsthand is best. Uncover your most satisfied, successful customers and ask them to share their individual stories publicly, whether it’s via an interview, social media or a blog post.
• Fiction is fine. But base your story on reality. Illustrate situations that let your target customer know you are aware of the problems for which they are seeking a solution, and how your product or service can fill that need.
• Focus on the prospect, not the product. Alhough the product is the heroic knight in shining armor that solves the problem and saves the day, in the end, the customer reigns supreme.
• Create some drama! It’s important to show the contrast between the customer’s current situation and the desired outcome that results after your brand provides the solution.
• Use familiar language. Speak in terms that are relevant to the prospective customer, rather than using jargon or buzzwords that might interrupt the quality of your story.
• Share surprise benefits. With true customer stories, one often finds that a brand had unexpected positive results that might not have otherwise been uncovered.
• Expand your repertoire. With multiple stories from which to choose, your product or service can be revealed as a solution for various problems different customers may have. For example, a CFO might rather listen to a story about how lead scoring software can help their business generate more reveneue, while a sales manager would love to hear about how it can make more effective use of their reps’ time.

The story doesn’t end here. Storytelling has benefits that go on and on – not least because one of the best things about a good story is that people like to share it.

So what’s your story? How have you used storytelling to drive sales leads?