To view all of your recent tracking events, just click on the Yesware dashboard at the top of your Gmail inbox.  On the right of each event, you can see whether it was an external party, you, or a colleague  that opened or clicked  your email.  (Note: if you have an @gmail.com email address, colleague tracking is not available).

Hiding Sender and Colleague Events

Most Yesware users only care to track people outside their organization.  To stay focused, you can easily hide tracking events generated by you or your colleagues.  Just click “Stop tracking yourself” or “Stop tracking colleagues” in the yellow bar at the bottom of your Dashboard.  When you choose either or both of these, you’ll see a lot fewer notifications from Yesware

To change your notification settings, click the Yesware menu at the very top of Gmail and choose “Preferences”.  Under “Compose Options” you can change whether sender and colleague events display.  Regardless of these settings, your Yesware Reports will always filter out sender and colleague events from their statistics.

As we gain more experience in our careers, those quantities go down as we try to increase the quality of our approaches.  We spend more time digging into each lead and researching it before making the calls or sending the emails. We often abandon the phone and focus our efforts on email because we feel we can craft the perfect message in a safe environment. Many of us even stop prospecting altogether because our leads are given to us and we get comfortable.

Regardless of your role in sales, you should constantly be prospecting to keep a thick and healthy pipeline at all times.  A healthy pipeline solves a lot of problems at every other stage of the sales process.  For example, if you don’t like to discount, the best thing you can have is a big fat pipeline. When a client tries to squeeze an extra discount out of you at the end of the month, you can push back because you have a bunch of other clients who are willing to pay close to rate card.  The “walkaway” close is one of the best and most powerful closes in sales, but can only be done if you have the confidence that comes with not needing the deal.  This is just one reason why consistent prospecting is so critical.

So what is the right mix of quantity vs. quality? It depends on what your role is and how much prospecting you must do to hit your target.  Regardless, it should be a mix.  We shouldn’t do all quantity because we would quickly run out of people to call and most likely annoy the majority of them.  We shouldn’t do all quality because we may only get out a handful of emails each day.

To help with time management while determining which prospecting approaches work the best, we recommend a four-step process: Define, Focus, Track, and Measure.

1. Define your approaches

Write down a few different prospecting approaches you will try and make sure there is a mix of quantity and quality.  An example of a quantity approach would be to developavery specific value proposition to CFOs in the financial services industry, calling every one of them in your territory, and saying the same thing to see if the message resonates.  An example of a quality approach would be to research someone’s website and a trigger event you can tie the value of your solution to.

2. Focus on one approach for a period of time

Block off an hour of time on your calendar to focus on prospecting with one specific approach.

3. Track your results

For each approach you should track how many emails you send, how many of them were opened, how many were responded to, and how many turned into meetings.

4.  Measure to see which approaches work best

By comparing conversion ratios from different approaches, you should start to see some approaches working far better than others. So now you know what to concentrate on.

Call reluctance hits sales rookies and seasoned pros alike, and its impact is well documented. In The Psychology of Sales Call Reluctance, Shannon Goodson and George Dudley found that 80 percent of new salespeople fail because of call reluctance, while 40 percent of veterans stop prospecting because of it.

What causes call reluctance? How can you beat it? For answers, we turned to two experts. Connie Kadansky has coached salespeople in overcoming call reluctance for more than 14 years, while Todd Cohen, the author of Everyone’s in Sales, has 20-plus years in the training field. Here’s how they see and solve the problem.

Major causes of call reluctance

Your culture shames the salesperson. Kadansky says that in many cases, call reluctance stems from a corporate culture where salespeople are painted as the pushy, disreputable cousins of used car peddlers. She recalls a Las Vegas company she consulted where “the message was, ‘Get out and sell, but don’t be a salesperson.’ So the sales force started out with role rejection–and that’s a major source of shame.” It didn’t help that the gag prize for top salesman of the week was a foam rubber pink pig. 

You’re unprepared. Cohen emphasizes that memorizing a cold-call script isn’t nearly the same thing as preparing to meet the potential customer where their needs are. Many sales organizations, he adds, don’t provide the proper support. “You need the coaching from a peer or mentor,” he says. 

It’s not in your blood. Some people, Cohen and Kadansky agree, are simply more introverted than others. For them, initiating contact with a stranger may be intimidating. “It’s a personality predisposition, and it can be passed down through DNA,” Kadansky says. Still ,this type of person, she insists, can overcome call reluctance–and if they can, anyone can.

Here’s how:

1. Bosses must respect the salesperson. With the Las Vegas company, Kadansky had a strong message for the CEO: Ditch the Pink Pig Award and stop treating “sales” like a dirty word. The 20 people manning the phones went from high call reluctance to much lower levels. The pig, by the way, was replaced by a trophy. “It made the whole culture for sales more honorable and respectful,” she says.
2. Reframe fear of rejection into embrace of value. Fear of rejection stems from internal causes. But when salespeople focus outward–on how their product or service helps the person on the other end—they become evangelists. In a recent coaching call with an experienced-but-stuck salesman, Kadansky says: ” We drilled deep, deep down, beyond the financial benefit [of the product] to the emotional and spiritual benefits. Now he knows the value, and he has a responsibility to reach out and make that call.”
3. Use essential oils. That’s right. If call reluctance has a smell, it’s not that of your favorite dessert, or a scent that brings back powerful, positive memories. Essential oils can trick the mind into moving beyond fear and into a place of positive power. “We had a golfer who, when he’d hesitate to make a call, would smell the essential oil of cut grass,” Kadansky says. “It made him happy, he picked up the phone, punched that number ,and made that call.”
4. Don’t invest everything in the outcome. Some salespeople regard a call that doesn’t net a sale as a failure, but that’s exactly the sort of thinking that breeds call reluctance. Take positives where you can, Cohen says. “If every call results in something where the process takes a step forward–even if it’s a baby step–that gives you confidence to make the next call.”

To increase the ROI of training dollars, some companies are looking beyond traditional training formats to incorporate sales coaching into their budgets. It’s an area that’s hard to quantify: the CEB Sales Leadership Council considers determining the ROI of sales training almost “impossible” due to the myriad factors that influence closing a deal. Can small businesses identify a substantial enough ROI to justify investing in a training strategy that seems as subjective and intangible as coaching?

New research says yes … but that yes comes with a twist.

Sales Coaching, Performance, and ROI

Compared to traditional training formats, coaching can appear more like a subjective art than an exact science.  This perception can give some small businesses pause; isn’t it better to use limited training resources on “safe bet” strategies, like a commonly used curriculum?

Maybe not. Recent research conducted by the Sales Executive Council (SEC) indicates that there is a quantifiable ROI associated with utilizing coaches for sales training that gives traditional training a run for its money.

In The Dirty Secret of Effective Sales Coaching, Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson noted that their SEC study, which involved thousands of sales representatives, saw an up-to-19% sustained improvement in the performance of sales representatives who received quality coaching.  A separate 2009 SEC sales coaching study had indicated sales coaching could increase productivity and performance in sales reps by 17%.  As Dixon and Adamson note, “Often as not, [these increases] makes the difference between hitting or missing goals.”

Their research also highlighted an important caveat often missed in the dialogue about the ROI of sales coaching: the quantifiable benefits of coaching vary wildly. Dixon and Adamson found sales coaching as a training strategy had only marginal impact on top performers (A reps) and lowest-tier performers (D reps).  It was only mid-level performers (B reps and C reps) who experienced notable improvement from coaching.

The distinction of coaching’s impact on A,B,C, and D reps is important to quantifying the real ROI of sales coaching, as Dixon and Adamson reflect that “management targets the wrong reps all the time” for coaching, either focusing all their resources on the A and D reps or allocating equal resources to all rep levels, mistakenly imagining that “all boats will rise as a result.”

Strategies for Sales Coaching in Small Businesses

If hiring an outside sales coach to work individually with your sales representatives is cost-prohibitive, consider what Vertical Measures, a marketing agency based in Phoenix, has done to develop sales coaches internally.

Instead of reactively training when an issue arises, Vertical Measures has integrated sales training into workload through regular, peer-led meetings that highlight flexibility in the sales process, leverage individual expertise, and empower peer-to-peer coaching and mentorship among the sales group as a supplement to traditional management-led sales training. Kaila Strong, Director of Client Strategy at Vertical Measures, believes the ROI of this strategy is apparent in the fact that the company has more than doubled in less than a year.

Dixon and Adamson validate a similar approach, emphasizing the value of training sales managers in coaching as cost-effective and worthwhile, stating “no other productivity investment comes as close.”

Like quantifying the real ROI of traditional training methods, there are many factors that can influence whether or not sales coaching is effective for increasing your business’s performance.  However, while traditional, event-based training has consistently been proven ineffective, sales coaching – internal or external – continues to be generally validated as an effective tool that yields a return on investment greater than just dollars and cents.

How do you use sales coaching in your organization? What results have you seen?

Eliminating snooze-inducing online presentations isn’t just a matter of mercy for listeners. For salespeople, who increasingly pitch prospects from behind their computer screens rather than face-to-face, subpar screen sharing skills can seriously reduce the number of deals you close. So how can you buff up your virtual presenting skills and maximize your chances of selling over WebEx, GoToMeeting, and the like?

The first step, according to experts, is to get a bit of humility. Even if you’ve been in the business awhile and have impeccable in-person sales skills, if you shift gears and take on more virtual presenting, you’re probably going to need some training.

“It’s something that a manager needs to put effort into training around. It’s not given enough credit in terms of something you really need to teach someone to do effectively,” says Bob Marsh, CEO of sales gamification software company LevelEleven, and an 18-year sales veteran.

Experienced field salespeople often overestimate their screen sharing abilities as well, according to Tom Drews, CEO of WhatWorks, a virtual presentation training company. “A salesperson who has been around a long time has sales skills, which is a big bonus, but typically they’re so used to presenting in person that they get a little bit too confident and don’t feel like they need to learn the skills or the tools,” he says.

Still think you’re an expert? Drews actually trained the WebEx team themselves in virtual presenting. “That’s when I realized: if the experts of the world have a need for this, then so would their customers,” he says. Don’t take it personally, but you’re probably not a natural.

Engagement for Dummies

OK, you’re willing to admit that your screen sharing skills could use some polishing. What do the majority of sales people need to improve? Chances are, you’re not nearly as engaging as you think you are.

“Most of the time you can’t see your prospect so you don’t know what they’re doing — if they’re answering emails or if they’ve wandered off to the fridge,” Drews says, stressing that it’s your job to both gauge their level of interest and to make your presentation more compelling than last night’s leftovers or pictures of cats.

“A lot of salespeople talk too much,” says Marsh. “The best salespeople ask good, open-ended questions along the way. Don’t ever talk more than maybe three to five minutes before stopping and acknowledging, ‘Does this make sense?’ “Is this what you were looking for? What are your thoughts?’” Listen not just for any old answer but for genuine interest. “Yup” and “uh-huh” don’t cut it.

You shouldn’t just ask questions during the presentation itself. It’s also worth your while to phone up your prospect before you connect online to do a bit of discovery, asking them about their challenges and needs, and what they hope to learn in the presentation. “Get as much information as you can and then custom-design a presentation specifically based on their needs,” suggests Drews. “Often it takes so much effort to get the right audience in the room, you don’t want to waste it spending the whole time asking questions.” It’s more work, he acknowledges, but it’s usually worth it.

Adding Hollywood

Monitoring whether you’re being a motor mouth is a good start when it comes to engagement, but if you want to really excel, you need to add some razzle dazzle. “One of the big differences between presenting in-person and online is when you’re in person you really don’t need slides as much, but online the visuals become so much more important,” says Drews, who recommends that you have an average of two slides per minute.

“That scares a lot of people,” he concedes, but stresses that this sort of careful preparation can greatly increase your chances of making a sale. The slides should be plentiful but they also shouldn’t be boring or over-crowded. “I call it adding Hollywood. Add the entertainment factor: photos, visuals, graphics, multimedia, videos,” he recommends.

Once you’ve got your customized slide deck, make sure you’re getting the full benefit of all that extra work by ensuring your prospect knows where to look. Asked about his top screen-sharing pet peeve, Marsh complains about presenters who “assume that I know what they’re talking about.” When you’ve added Hollywood and there is lots to see, make sure you’re clearly indicating what you’re referencing. “Unless they’re grabbing their mouse and showing you, ‘here’s where I want you looking,’ I don’t even know what they’re talking about. You have to think about the movement of someone’s eye,” says Marsh. In other words, the best screen sharing salespeople are paying even more attention to their audience over the phone than they would in person.

Reminders will be available for all plan levels. You will now be able to set up reminders when you’re emailing a prospect to follow up at a future point. This is helpful to stay on top of your highest priority prospects and make sure you don’t forget about them once you’ve sent an email.

Calendar Sync will be available for Team and Enterprise users. You know about our Salesforce integration in Gmail, but you will now be able to Sync your Google Calendar events into Salesforce and your Salesforce events into Google Calendar. This means less manual data entry and easy access to all your meetings from your computer or on the go.

We are also proud to announce that we have gone over 200,000 users, thats right, 200,000 people have now used Yesware in order to make their lives easier and to close more deals. We look forward to the next couple of months and hearing how are users are using these new features to be more effective as sales people.

Let us know which feature your most excited about by tweeting…

I can’t wait to start using Yeswares new Calendar Sync #Yesware2dot0

or

Yeswares New Reminder Feature is going to be great #Yesware2dot0

We want to thank all of our users for helping us get to this point.

In 2010, American companies reportedly devoted $200 billion to large, short-term incentives (LSTIs), which almost equaled the total amount spent on media advertising for the same year ($241 billion).  Business owners like Michael Brunet, partner and director at Harry and Company, a financial planning firm, think of LSTIs as “the oxygen to your business.”

In spring 2012, a group of researchers from Carnegie Mellon, UMass, and Northwestern published a paper in the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management entitled “Breaking the Sales Force Incentive Addiction: A Balanced Approach to Sales Force Effectiveness.” It reported that LSTIs often created undesired organizational consequences that hurt overall performance, including myopic focus on short-term accomplishment, cultural damage, and a lack of adaptability to increasingly complex sales cycles.

The researchers included Dr. Andris Zoltners, Dr. Prabhakant Sinha, and Sally Lorimer; their conclusions were drawn from surveying over 1,000 sales leaders from companies around the country as well as an assessment of academic sales research over the last decade.

“We see sales leaders jumping to incentives as a primary solution for many sales management challenges,” the authors wrote, “from improving attraction and retention of the best salespeople to energizing and motivating complacent sales teams, to improving customer satisfaction.”  Sales managers are so focused on incentives, the authors note, that about 80% of American companies make major changes to their LSTI programs every two years or less.

Yet all this focus on LSTIs can compromise long-term company results: such a short-term focus on sales wins can mean there is too little time spent building longer term relationships with clients or prospects or improving sales skills.

While Mr. Brunet of Harry and Company can’t validate the researchers’ results, stating, “I don’t know why you would not offer bonuses or commissions to your sales employees…it just makes everybody happier when you get a bonus check.”

Deborah Sweeney, CEO of MyCorporation.com, can: “Sometimes, when traditional incentives are out of reach, our sales team members give up, which hurts customer service.” This is why MyCorporation.com, an online document filing service, blends traditional and creative incentive approaches. Over the years, Ms. Sweeney has found she gets the best balance of sales results and customer service through both traditional LSTIs and more creative incentives, or what Zoltners, Sinha, and Lorimer refer to as sales force effectiveness (SFE) drivers. She states, “We find that traditional methods give our sales team a predictable reachable goal.  But creative incentives can supplement traditional ones by adding a layer of excitement to the day-to-day sales goals.”

MyCorporation.com offers include trips, afternoon excursions for teams, group contents, and little luxuries like a free coffee for the individual with the highest numbers before noon.  The challenge about this strategy, Ms. Sweeney notes, is making sure “we’re not spending more on creative incentives than we are making. We don’t want to impact profitability.”

Incentivizing Sales Collaboration

As the complexity of the sales process increases across industries, so does the need for collaboration among salespeople; according to Zoltners, Sinha, and Lorimer, collaboration should be incentivized. Their data indicates that the industries with the most complex sales processes include customized high-tech products, consumer packaged goods (HQ), and specialty chemicals, followed in complexity by medical devices, investment for high net worth individuals, and some pharmaceuticals.  Lower complexity industries that, according to their research, may still find LSTIs alone valuable for increasing profitability include consumable office products, bulk chemicals, consumer packaged goods (merchandizing).

Ms. Sweeney notes that implementing creative incentives has helped MyCorporation.com leverage team sales more effectively, stating “[creative incentives] creates camaraderie and focus and often when they are team-based incentives gets the team working together.”  The result is an increase not only in sales but also in customer service and experience.

What do you think? Do traditional LSTIs help or hurt your business’s performance?

Traditional commission-heavy compensation for salespeople does a great job of stoking the competitive flames and egging on sales pros to meet or exceed their targets (too good a job, according to some), but it also makes sales a relatively lonely job.

Sure, your manager has a vested interest in helping you out and your coworkers probably aren’t monsters – they’ll lend a hand when they can – but as the month winds to a close, it’s easy for a sales person to feel like sales is an individual rather than a team sport.

But not at Fishbowl. The 100-employee strong, Utah-based software company has a very unusual approach to commissions – every single employee gets one. The effect, CEO David Williams told Yesware, is that sales becomes a team sport that the whole company plays together.

“For salesmen, knowing that the entire company is rooting for them is pretty powerful. You don’t just have this isolated sales team that’s trying to hit their numbers. They have a hundred people supporting them in revenue creation,” he says.

How Does It Work?

Together with president Mary Michelle Scott, Williams recently wrote a post for HBR Blog Network explaining all the details, but the basic gist isn’t hard to grasp. Every employee gets a base salary and then, depending on their department, a certain percentage of their compensation comes in the form of a monthly commission based on revenue. Ratios of salary to commission range from 10 percent salary and 90 percent commission for salespeople to 80 percent salary and 20 percent commission for engineers.

Taken together over a period of months or years, compensation is generally higher than market, but it’s lumpy. “We have a track record that shows over time our model yields overall higher compensation,” says Williams, but he concedes that, “we have months that are very, very lean and months that are fat.”

How did this unusual compensation structure come about? “It originated out of necessity,” explains Williams. Back in 2004 he was on the board of a company that was the majority shareholder in the firm that would become Fishbowl, which at that time had failed to produce a product or any revenue despite several million in investment. Williams was sent to shut the company down.

He had a look at the team and asked the board to give him a month to try and turn things around. There was no money for salaries so everyone ended up working on commission. Over 10 years this evolved into today’s hybrid salary-commission system. “I just love it. I would not change it,” Williams says, explaining that, “bonuses are up to the whims of those in charge” while his compensation model allows “everybody to see very transparently how we’re doing.”

The cultural effects are also huge, he claims. “What it’s done is close the gaps between departments, so you don’t have a bunch of developers building something that they think they should build and then throwing it over the fence for testers to test and that hopefully your salesmen like to sell,” he says. Everyone is focused on revenue creation from the get-go.

Preconditions

“I’ve helped many companies around this area move into this compensation model, so I’ve seen it work in all sorts of industries,” says Williams, but that doesn’t mean the idea is for everybody. There are some preconditions for successful implementation, including a culture of fairly radical openness. You can’t monkey with the numbers and expect this system to work. “You need to be completely open with your revenue. Most companies are but sometimes you tuck things here and there and revenue is not necessarily that which you see,” he says. Not at Fishbowl, which pays commissions on gross revenue with no massaging of the numbers.

Why It’s Particularly Good for Salespeople

If you have the sort of leadership that can stomach that level of openness and also accept that some potential hires may have reservations about the compensation scheme, commissions-for-all can have particularly beneficial effects for the sales team, Williams feels.

“We all get on the same boat every month. You get programmers coming over towards the end of the month asking if there’s anything they could do to help any of the [sales team's] customers with workarounds or anything particularly they could build that would take an hour or two,” he says.

That sort of responsiveness and understanding is bound to attract sales pros to the idea, but putting everyone on commission not only makes people more likely to help out sales, it also eases the stress of making your numbers by spreading it around, much the way locker room camaraderie can ease an athlete’s performance anxiety.

“Every day we send out our month to date that shows the revenue and what department the revenue came from, and the last two days of the month we show it every hour. It’s really fun. It turns something that’s stressful at the end of the month—making your numbers—into something exciting,” Williams says.

What have I learned? That the best salespeople are the ones who tell the truth.

That’s a notion at odds with what the culture says salespeople do: they are taught to do whatever it takes to close a sale, truth be damned. Alec Baldwin’s character in Glengarry Glen Ross is iconic because it embodies the conventional wisdom and amps it up.

But Baldwin’s scene in Glengarry Glen Ross, however memorable, misses a fundamental fact for most people who sell for a living: if they can’t get behind a product or service and imagine why someone else would want to buy it (without resorting to intimidation), chances are they won’t be able to sell it effectively. You can feel the struggle when you’re in the presence of an unconvinced salesperson. When you’re the person trying to make a sale and you haven’t been able to find a way to believe that what you’re selling will improve the life or the business of the person across the table, sometimes even the most visceral monetary motivation isn’t enough.

This can get ridiculous. You don’t have to be a child to sell children’s clothing or a religious person to sell bibles. What you have to be able to do is imagine the good those products can do for someone else. One of the prototypical fictional salespeople of the moment is Mad Men‘s Don Draper, this week starting his sixth season of enticing people in his personal and professional lives to make purchases better left unbought.

But there is a moment early in the series that underlines the power that comes with having sales talk that you can believe in. Draper and his team are pitching the film company Kodak on a new product:

Yes, this is manipulative. But it’s also presented as entirely honest. The story Draper is telling is his own story — that’s his family in those slides — and his closeness to the material is what makes the quality of his pitch so high and its success inevitable.

Granted, that scene is fiction, where everything is less complicated than it is in real life. And few of the salespeople I’m learning from would suggest you put your own family into your pitch. But they are telling me that if you can’t find a way to understand why others would want what you’re selling, it’s going to be a lot harder to sell it. Maybe they’re selling me stories, but they’ve done the homework and have seen to it that what they have to say persuades me and feels real. And we’ve shown recently what happens when you don’t do your homework.

So do let the truth get in the way of a good story. To make the sale, find the truth in your sales talk.

Wow, was that bad. I just had an in-person meeting with the CEO of a prospect that went so poorly it lasted less than 15 minutes. A good friend of mine joined this company as VP of sales and wanted me to train the team on prospecting skills. It was a small and diverse team, ranging from field reps who had been in sales for more than 20 years to newbies. The VP had been through the training before, so he knew exactly what it was about. He’s one of my biggest advocates. The CEO, who had never invested in outside training but believed in investing in the team, wanted to meet with me to review what I was going to go through with the team.

I prepped for the meeting as usual – did my homework, researched LinkedIn, reviewed their website, came up with some specific questions, and set my goals. The one thing I didn’t do was send a “shared agenda” before the meeting and ask the CEO what he wanted to make sure we covered during the meeting. 

I started the meeting as I usually do, reviewing what I knew about them and then asking something specific about his business. He immediately hit me back with “I could talk about that for an hour and we don’t have that much time. I was under the impression you were going to show me what you were going to go over with the team so why don’t you just tell me what you got.” It was very abrupt and direct and usually the response I expect when someone asks a stupid question like “tell me about your business.” I thought my question was a little better than that but I guess not. The meeting went downhill from there. I tried to get it back on track but nothing worked. He kept interrupting me and picking apart what I was saying even though a lot of what he threw at me was the information I was trying to gain from my initial questions that he didn’t want to answer. Needless to say, the meeting lasted less than 15 minutes and we walked away agreeing to disagree.

What do I want you to learn from this? First, regardless of how strong the referral you have into a prospective client, don’t take anything for granted. I may have been a little too comfortable walking into this meeting based on my relationship with the VP.  Second, align expectations before you walk into a meeting on what you are there to talk about.  If I had sent a shared agenda to this guy and asked what he wanted to review during the meeting, I would have known walking in that all he wanted was to was see what I had to offer.

Honestly, I’m fairly happy about the whole experience.  It had been a long time since I got punched in the face during a meeting with a prospect. It reminded me that you always need to bring your “A” game. You can’t miss any steps.