I have been selling for many years. As the VP of Sales at InsideSales.com, I do not usually give demos of our PowerDialer for SalesForce software. Today, however, I took the opportunity to present to Brian Geery, Interim VP of Sales at Sustainable Minds and a managing partner at Sales Productivity Architects. Brian was a referral from a friend and sales expert, Trish Bertuzzi of the BridgeGroup. I have been evaluating what InsideSales.com can do to improve our game and increase our sales growth in 2012. I figured that doing the demo would not only clear my mind, but also get me close to our product and a prospect.
My demonstration was not as polished as one of my best salespeople, but it lasted the standard 45 minutes, and it covered in content and form, what a standard demo would include. It was also received favorably with the prospect requesting a formal proposal. It is good to know that an old dog still can do a few tricks!
At its conclusion, Brian offered a personal critique. Simply stated, “The demo was good, however, I think you could sell more, faster, if your demonstration was less about what your software does and more about how it solves my problems.” Brian was exactly right!
Like sports, travel, and Justin Bieber, Anchorman provides a nearly unmatched wealth of metaphors applicable to the sales industry (and I’m only half-kidding about Bieber. Hate the music, but give the kid some props—he definitely understands his target audience and their needs).
With salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff making it the entire focus of Dreamforce 2011, “social selling” is, in the immortal words of Ron Burgundy, “kind of a big deal” these days. In a world where attention spans are short, having an edge in connecting with prospects makes every step of the sales process easier and faster. Professional sales reps–particularly inside sales reps who sell remotely–seemingly can’t afford NOT to be connected to the various social platforms.
Inside sales expert Ken Krogue notes that a LinkedIn invitation with the exact same content as a marketing-generated email is 8x more effective at getting responses than the email by itself. Hubspot reports that companies that blog get 55% more Web traffic, 70% more leads, and 57% of organizations have acquired a customer through an interaction on their blog. In addition, companies with an active Twitter account get 2x as many sales leads, and organizations with 1000+ followers get 6x more traffic.
About three years ago we were analyzing the leads that come from our website trying to find out if some were better than others.
Everything we do at InsideSales.com is based on metrics. Instead of just hiring marketers, we hire math majors and economics majors in our marketing department because it is all about studying and testing and analyzing.
So we charted out our leads and we found that there were two obvious “clusters” of leads based on the types of offers we had made to generate them. I call them “Buying Signals” and “Tire Kickers” and we found there was an 8 to 1 difference in the results they generated based on overall revenue.
Buying Signals are just that, respondents to offers that clearly say I’m anxious to talk to somebody at InsideSales.com about making a purchase decision. I have “need,” not just “interest.” Anything product-centric, pricing-related, commitment-based, etc. We learned that even a toll free number is an “offer” somebody can choose to accept on a website (and is often the very best one.)
Tire Kickers want to learn something. They aren’t ready to buy, they have “interest” but not need. They may not know that have need yet. The way to […]
One of the most powerful things I have ever learned in managing salespeople is the power of posting results visibly. When I do that results go up 20% almost overnight. I don’t care what it is; dials, appointments set, demonstrations, closes. Now of course, depending on length of sales cycles, it takes time for more results-based numbers to show.
Why?
I think sales reps are extremely competitive. They are the competitive athletes, the warrior class of the business world. The most correlated measure when I hired top performers was a competitive resume in athletics in college or high school. They can’t stand to be beat, or to be second. (see my blog on “Hiring Athletes… A Great Bet for Inside Sales Jobs“.)
My friend and mentor Jeff Call taught me this principle when I was back at FranklinCovey managing the fastest growing department in what was then one of the fastest growing companies in America. He would have me post the individual and team stats every day. And our numbers kept rising.
Where did he get the principle of performance visibility? “Putting the One Minute Manager to Work” by Ken Blanchard. Ken was a guest lecturer and a bit of a mentor to us […]
Harvard Business Review says Sales is No Longer About Relationships
3 October 2011 — Ken Krogue
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A very interesting article by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, both of the Sales Executive Council, show recent research that selling is not just about relationships, but rather about teaching customers, tailoring sales messages to the customer, and taking control of the sale.
I have been following the Harvard Business Review (HBR) since the time we did research in conjunction with them in the March 2011 issue entitled The Short Life of Online Leads.
The Sales Executive Council did a global study in 2008 involving more than 6000 B2B sales reps from nearly 100 companies in many industries.
They classified these sales professionals into five profiles:
1- Relationship Builders: who focus on building strong personal and professional relationships.
2- Hard Workers: come early, stay late, make more calls, make more visits, and go the extra effort mile.
3- Lone Wolves: are very self confident and may break rules by doing things their way or not at all.
4- Reactive Problem Solvers: are customer-centric by being reliable and detail-oriented with strong follow-up and well executed implementation.
5- Challengers: understand their customers’ businesses to push their thinking and drive the entire sales conversation with themselves in control. They are not afraid to assert even controversial views with customers and bosses.
These […]
It isn’t often that a big company is able to respond quicker than hundreds of small companies, but Symantec walked away with the fastest phone reponse out of 3051 companies with a time of only 51 seconds.
I had the chance to personally deliver the Audit results to Symantec right on the Dreamforce show floor on the second to last day of the show.
Ken Krogue delivers ResponseAudit results to Symantec
This ResponseAudit broke the record for the most companies audited originally set at Dreamforce 2009 with 2875 companies audited. We also had 16 companies recognized as having responded in less that 5 minutes, which is the best practice, this is the same number of companies as in 2009. The average response time slipped from 41 hours 7 minutes in 2009 to 42 hours 18 minutes in 2011.
This is my favorite thing to do at a trade show because I get to meet everyone and I find that they are looking for me now when I come to share their audit results.
Dreamforce ’11 ResponseAudit shows the Lead Response Bar is Low as Ever!
4 September 2011 — Ken Krogue
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You would think after four years of doing a “Secret Shopper” on the attendees of Dreamforce the response times to fictitious leads submitted to their websites would get faster, wouldn’t you?
Not so.
In fact we dropped from 41 hours to 42 hours this year as the average time taken to respond to a lead. At least we are slightly more persistent with an average number of calls before giving up of 1.1, versus 1.07. The data makes me look like I’m being sarcastic, but I’m not.
Symantec has fastest Dreamforce 2011 ResponseAudit of 51 seconds
Some companies, like the behemoth Symantec, really get it. Their response time came in the best at 51 seconds. And companies like Treehouse Interactive demonstrated that they keep getting it because they were ranked #7 in 2011 and were also ranked in the top 100 back in 2009.
But not many others are seeing the low hanging fruit that they could grab if they just responded immediately and persistently to their leads.
How important is it?
Well the original study we did that was most impactful was with Dr. James Oldroyd.
Inc. Magazine just published […]
Dreamforce ’11-Day 3-InsideSales.com Having Best Dreamforce Ever!
1 September 2011 — Ken Krogue
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We are hearing that 45,000 people have registered for this Dreamforce and we have already talked with hundreds and are well on our way to giving away over 300 sweatshirt hoodies at the show!
Dave Elkington and I were at the show along with Thomas Oldroyd, our Sr. Director of Marketing, Michael Critchfield, our VP Sales and many of his team.
Thomas awarding ResponseAudit to #7 Best Response – Treehouse Interactive
Dave and I each gave 3-4 seminars in our meeting room that was packed to the ceiling with 450 hoodies and 8 nice leather chairs for folks to relax and learn about our Harvard research from Dave or 8 Best Practices from me.
RJ Tracy was busy giving live interactive demonstrations every half hour and worked circles around both Dave and I while the team answered questions from literally thousands of enthusiastic attendees.
RJ Tracy giving a live demo of PowerDialer for Salesforce 4.0
Scott Gardner, Mark Gaudette, and Brandon Byrge were moving full speed the entire time!
Sales and Marketing – “It’s Time to Ask Yourself What You Believe”
30 August 2011 — Steve Watts
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It’s been nearly three months since the Sales Insider’s last blog post.
I’ve been heavily involved with the new InsideSales.com Certified Administrator project, and various Dreamforce 2011-related projects, so other than an occasional tweet, and interacting with clients, time for our online presence has been in short supply.
However, a few weeks ago in a company meeting, we watched this presentation on TED.com. And I was absolutely compelled to write a post on its contents.
It’s 18 minutes long. The ideas presented within it are simple and easy to comprehend.
And I cannot stop thinking about it.
I just got off the phone with my friend Marge Bieler, the CEO of RareAgent. She has worked in the lead generation space for many years and has been having great success in promoting LinkedIn as a tool to connect with decision makers. She has written a wonderful white paper about what she has learned and I asked her if I could summarize here for my readers and friends and point them to her LinkedIn profile for full access to the original.
Here is a Ken’s Note summary of what she says:
Gather your professional experience, interests, and capabilities, and use the Top 10 Tips below to help you begin designing your profile.
1. Craft an informative profile headline: Your headline becomes a slogan for your professional brand, such as “Conversations to Cash Creator” or “Automated Social Media Methods.”
2. Upload an appropriate photo: Select a professional, high-quality headshot of you alone.
3. Boast about your education: List all the institutions you’ve attended, provide highlights of your activities. Don’t be shy.
4. Cultivate a professional summary statement: The first few paragraphs should be concise and confident about value, goals, how you solve a particular pain.
5. Use Keywords to fill your “Specialties” section: Phrases that an individual […]
