Sales Qualification, U2, and Making the Prospect’s Pain Yours
29 September 2010 — Steve Watts
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“Like a rhythm unbroken, like drums in the night … like sweet soul music, like sunlight … “
Anyone who knows me well can attest to my rabid fanhood of the band U2.
Not so rabid that I travel halfway across the globe looking for rare European-release-only singles on vinyl, mind you—but a huge fan nonetheless. I own every studio album they’ve ever produced, three concert videos, worn out five different t-shirts, and have a CD I created myself that is nothing but five different versions of their song “Bad” (to say I like the song “Bad” by U2 is like saying Bostonians occasionally like to watch baseball).
So when I ran into this story on sales consulting firm Blaire Group’s Web site, I had to jump at the chance of incorporating the music of the Greatest Rock Band of All Time into a blog post about the sales industry . . . .
If you’ve followed my blog or my company for any length of time, it’s likely you’ve heard me say that immediate response to sales leads is one of the crucial factors for creating new sales prospects (and that a good sales automation tool is about the only way to do it consistently and effectively).
But a few months ago, sales productivity guru Paul Castain had some interesting advice in a blog post entitled, “For Those About to Rock, Show Up First!”
If you haven’t read the article, you might think that the title follows along with what I’m espousing—that we need to “show up first,” be the first person on the scene, be faster than the competition, etc.
In reality the point of Paul’s article wasn’t about being the first person to show up—the point was to show up at all.
Too often we barricade ourselves into a place where we know we can be comfortable.
Comfortable and barely productive.
We tell ourselves stories about how “These prospects aren’t really going anywhere,” “That cold call approach will never work,” or “They’ve never heard of us, why would they listen to me?”
We come up with every reason not to put […]
Sales and Marketing Strategy – Creating “Three-Way” Sales Processes
27 September 2010 — Steve Watts
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Last week I overheard a conversation between one of our client implementation consultants and a former prospect who had just come on as a customer. One of the first things our implementation team does with a new client is hold a Business Plan Review, designed to identify a client’s key processes and value areas.
In a nutshell, the question this new client asked was, “How does defining all of these process steps directly benefit my sales reps?”
As much as we tout the benefits and productivity of a good sales process linked to a CRM software system, the short answer to this question is, “Sometimes they don’t.” . . . .
In business, we’re all familiar with the concept of the “Idiot Tax.” If I don’t want to take the time and energy to change my oil, I pay a price premium to have a service center do it for me. In some respects every restaurant on the planet preys on this instinct (“I don’t feel like cooking today”).
And in large account B2B, recognizing when a prospect puts out signs of engaging in these same types of “Pain Avoidance” tactics can pay dividends.
In Griffin-Hill’s Integrity Sales Model, “Pain Avoidance” is one of their classic “5 P’s” of identifying prospect need—Profit, Pleasure, Prestige, Preservation, Pain Avoidance. And though “Pain Avoidance” prospects aren’t as common as other types, in the right circumstances a prospect may be attracted to a product or service even if it’s twice the price and 3/4 the functionality of the competition—because they don’t have to think.
Prospects motivated by extreme “Pain Avoidance” have a much different approach to perceived value. They don’t ignore price and functionality, but it’s more important to them to let someone else handle as much of the process as possible. In their minds, money is a small price to pay to avoid the “pain.”
Sales reps […]
Sales Best Practices – Outsource Infrastructure, Not People
21 September 2010 — Steve Watts
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Businesses of all sizes have more options than ever when it comes to outsourcing basic services to save time and costs.
IT. Payroll. Shipping. Point-of-sale. Credit checks. Credit card processing. Legal.
I bring this up because at some point, a lot of companies ask the same question about their sales organization: “Can we outsource this?”
The reasons for asking are pretty compelling. For businesses without a lot of experience, building a fully-realized sales team—one that’s aligned with company goals, product, and marketing initiatives—is at best a challenge. At worst it’s Mission: Impossible.
The problem is so pervasive that at least once a month we get a prospect who expresses disappointment that we AREN’T an outsourced sales prospecting company (“Oh, you mean you just sell the product and consulting, you don’t actually make the sales calls? Shoot.”) . . . .
In two previous posts, we’ve identified that:
Sales and marketing come from different “cultural” perspectives.
Sales is results-oriented, marketing is human-interest driven.
In B2B, the needs of sales—i.e., getting good sales leads—overrides marketing’s impetus for branding and market research.
The question I asked at the end of Part 2 was, “How can you align a marketing team to produce sales leads without hurting, or challenging marketers’ deeply held beliefs about the need to create an emotional connection between a buyer and a product, a person and a brand?”
While I don’t know all the answers, I can offer the following advice, based on our own experiences here at InsideSales.com:
1. Make an explicit, hierarchical list of priorities that align your marketing production to your sales.
One of the first things I did when I sat down with our marketing team earlier this year was draw up a “focus list” for each of our daily activities. Any time we sign off on an activity, the global priority is established with it. Our list is provided below, yours may differ:
Remove barriers that cause drops in incoming leads (i.e., refining split test Web content that doesn’t appear to be working, Google Ad words / […]
One of the most common themes of the Sales 2.0 Movement has been the need for the upcoming generation of corporate sales people to be a value-add, not a value-drain to their prospects. Several weeks ago I quoted Selling Power‘s Gerhardt Gschwandtner about how technology isn’t just shifting the power structure into the prospect’s hands, it’s “displacing” the existing selling process entirely.
And a great blog article today by marketing experts Brains on Fire brought some perspective on one of the ways a sales rep can move in the direction of being a value-add instead of the alternative:
In the blog article, author Robbin Phillips demonstrates the concept with a story about a hotel, a round of golf, and a missing sweatshirt . . . .
In my last blog post, I discussed the fact that sales and marketing teams largely come from a different set of internal “cultures,” cultures whose viewpoints and and attitudes are often at odds with each other.
In Part 2, I want to take a closer look at this concept, because as sales and marketing teams continue to evolve, and move ever closer in alignment, at some point the “culture war” between the two will spill over into the corporate workroom.
In review: Sales “culture” is business- and results-oriented; marketing “culture” is connection- and human-interest driven.
The question becomes, when push comes to shove, which viewpoint takes precedence?
BNet Business guru Geoffrey James gives us the answer—and it’s based on a belief I’ve long held myself:
“In business-to-business (B2B) firms, the legendary conflict between sales and marketing stems from a difference of opinion about what marketing should be doing. Most marketing professionals believe that they should primarily be concerned with market research, building brand equity and creating marketing materials. Most sales professionals believe that marketing should be generating qualified sales leads.”
Very true. But the next part is where the article gets interesting:
“This is part of the blog where I’m […]
Aligning Sales and Marketing – It’s Not Just About Metrics, It’s Culture
14 September 2010 — Ken Krogue
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Having just re-read sales and marketing blogger Adam Needle’s 4 part series on the “Unspoken ‘Real State’ of Modern B2B Demand Generation,” I once again cannot commend enough the value of the data and analysis he presents. If you have any interest at all in B2B sales, marketing, branding, or sales management, this is a fantastic set of articles.
So go read them now, and then come back.
Welcome back.
One the biggest challenges of my current position with InsideSales.com is making the connections between sales and marketing more visible, repeatable, and cost effective.
And a key idea that kept pounding in my head while I reviewed Adam’s material was that aligning sales and marketing is difficult because employees on each side largely come from two different production “cultures.”
In a nutshell, sales are largely business types, marketing people are creatives—and getting the two to take a look through the other’s “lens” often sends them into foreign territory.
Most sales people are brought up through the ranks of business schools—or at least integrated into a business culture. Whether or not they actually finish a college degree, good sales pros typically show an interest in management, business, and corporate practices. Even […]
Sales Time Waster #15: Failure Can Produce Longer-Lasting Lessons than Success
13 September 2010 — Steve Watts
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Ken Krogue has been a force in the sales and sales management industries his entire career, having been president of inside sales at Franklin-Covey, founder of inbound call center service provider inContact (formerly UCN), and now President and CMO of InsideSales.com.
His “15 Time wasters of Inside Sales and Marketing” whitepaper presents outstanding advice for planning strategic sales initiatives, and today I wanted to focus some attention specifically on Time Waster #15—Not Knowing Your Wins and Losses.
We preach heavily to sales and marketing teams that understanding why a sale is lost can be just as valuable as knowing why you won—and a research study released August 24th by the Academy of Management Journal backs this up.
Quoting from the study, Science Daily states,
“While success is surely sweeter than failure, it seems failure is a far better teacher, and organizations that fail spectacularly often flourish more in the long run . . . . ”
