The Sales Insider

Here is a strategy to find the highest level of rapport or trust you can use to increase your results on a prospecting call. Using the Trust Ladder allows you to use your first few seconds so people are open to letting your conversation continue to where they find out enough about you to listen with an open mind.

Climb the Trust Ladder to Increase Rapport

Imagine a ladder with twelve steps leaning up to a destination you are trying to go. The destination is a relationship of trust with the person you are talking to. You are the salesperson standing at the bottom of this ladder that represents levels of inherent trust.

There is one important thing you better realize first…

They don’t trust you.

You are at the bottom of the Trust Ladder; you aren’t even on it. The person they trust the most is themselves. They are on the top of the Trust Ladder and there are many steps in between. The higher up you go on the Trust Ladder to begin a conversation, the more inherent trust you have and the better your conversation will go.

Each step up the Trust Ladder incrementally increases the inherent trust.

(This is a small excerpt from the book Dave Elkington and I have written – soon to be released.)

The message of Monday’s blog this week is short and sweet:

If you’re a B2B sales organization, it’s more important than ever to have a dedicated lead generation and qualification team.

The Bridge Group’s Matt Bertuzzi showed recently that 43% of organizations surveyed by CSO Insights were increasing their sales team size by at least 10%, and 24.7% were increasing there sales force by 20% or more.

Our own research in 2009 showed that inside sales hiring in B2B was going to go up 7.5% a year through 2015.

In the same vein:

The Funnelholic recently provided a list of 54 things to do when building a lead qualification team.

Marketo’s Jon Miller provides Seven Ways that Sales Development Reps Drive Revenue.

Green Leads’ Michael Damphousse demonstrates that the “actionable” activity rate of phone vs. face-to-face prospecting is much closer than any of us think.

The point of all this is simple: inside sales and lead qualification teams drive revenue, period. As much as I respect and admire the work of marketing automation technologies, inbound marketing companies, search engine marketing, and the like, it’s becoming ever more clear that direct outbound prospecting, and fast, immediate response by a qualification team to inbound inquiries are a critical strategic advantage to get leverage in the B2B Sales 2.0 era.

In some ways, this article by Josh Bernoff at Forrester is nothing we haven’t already heard: “In the Web/Sales/Marketing/Customer 2.0 world, the buyer has all the power.”

But I was interested by his particular take because it pits “customer engagement” against traditional competitive advantages: “A customer obsessed company focuses its strategy, its energy, and its budget on processes that enhance knowledge of an engagement with customers, and prioritizes these over maintaining traditional competitive barriers.”

The forces of disruption mean that unless you’ve got a huge competitive advantage in a critical market area—and maybe not even then—at some point during its life cycle, your business will have no other true value differentiation other than:

1. customer satisfaction, and
2. the processes you use to create it.

It’s very similar to something Guy Kawasaki mentions in this interview with Brian Solis. Customer “enchantment,” he states, comes from the recognition that traditional competitive advantages are incredibly difficult to attain, and even more difficult to keep—and thus customer engagement becomes a critical factor for success.

For example, Guy states, Apple’s real competitive advantage isn’t “engaging” with customers, at least not in the “social media/customer feedback” sense. Based on his first-hand observations working for the company over the years, Guy feels Apple’s corporate approach is actually kind of stand-offish and aloof. The difference is that their competitive advantage—integrating the best possible user experiences into their products—is so far ahead of everyone else they don’t need to be as outwardly “engaging.”

Josh Bernoff echoes, “You think the iPad came out of [customer engagement] surveys?”

No, it came out of Apple’s clear understanding of an “unarticulated” customer need: the desire for a smaller, lightweight, mobile, Web-enabled device with 85% of the functionality of a laptop, yet with a more intuitive, easily accessible interface. Apple has maintained its competitive advantage to this point out of sheer momentum, existing loyalty, and great product.

Why has Wal-Mart’s brand started to erode from its 1990s position of power? Because its competitive advantage—depth of distribution—no longer carries the weight that it used to. We no longer care that Wal-Mart has everything (cheaply) under the sun; we can get that sitting in the living room in our pajamas (and not have to deal with dank, underlit stores, crowds of people, ignorant customer service reps, and slow checkout lines).

The increase in customer buying power has exacerbated competitive pressures on businesses (Josh particularly mentions Harvard’s Michael Porter and his Five Competitive Strategic Forces). When customers exert more control on their markets, businesses must in turn increase responses to other competitive elements (rival organizations, threat of new entrants, bargaining power of suppliers, threat of replacement/substitute products).

Ultimately those pressures manifest themselves in different ways for different organizations.

It’s your business, your decisions. You know your executive team, your suppliers, investors, customers, employees, distributors, artisans, detractors and (hopefully) evangelists.

The question is, which of them really, deep-down, gets the most attention?

For the past 3 or 4 years, “Zappos” and “incredible customer service” have been essentially synonymous.

Bring up the the little ‘ole online shoe retailer that Amazon bought for a cool $1.2 billion, and invariably someone starts spouting stories of the company’s legendary customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The 365 day return policy. Pre-paid shipping of shoes both ways. Service reps spending 4, 5, 6 hours on the phone getting an order or a return right. The empowerment of front-line service reps to take care of problems on the spot (including issuing credits/refunds without management approval).

I bring this up because late last week, Robb Young, InsideSales.com’s Director of Operations and I got back from a visit to Zappos corporate headquarters just down the dusty road of I-15 in Henderson, Nevada.

The visit was nothing short of a revelation.

Are the stories true?

Most of them. Here’s my 3 Biggest Takeaway’s from the visit:

Takeaway #1

Customer service is a culture, not an action item.

If I could convey one thing from the visit, it would be the feel, the atmosphere in the building.

This was a company with an identity. The culture from top to bottom intrinsically reflected leadership’s values. Conversations, employee activity, even the physical space design reflected the deep commitment to the customer.

Takeaway #2

Their employees self-police for metric variances.

Like any business, Zappos has certain hard and fast metrics that are non-negotiable. But many are entirely fluid, based on employee discretion.

The 6-hour service call stories about Zappos are the stuff of legend, and a huge PR boon for them. But it doesn’t necessarily mean Zappos wants their reps taking one of those calls a week.

Interestingly, Zappos trusts their employees to make the distinction. They review certain cases to see how certain employee actions were done, and if things deviate too far from the norm, they certainly address the issue. But the front-line employees are empowered and expected to create their own collective process of customer care.

Takeaway #3

The process determines the metrics, not the other way around.

Here’s one example: Zappos does not want to leave clients on hold. They’re intensely interested in getting callers off of hold, and talking to a live agent.

Once they’re talking, however, there’s no set time frame for how long it takes for the rep to resolve the issue.

By default they follow the “80/20″ rule: 80% of calls need to be answered in 20 seconds or less, but after that, it’s entirely up to the rep’s discretion how to keep the customer satisfied. There’s no time limit, no urging support agents to get off the phone as quickly as possible. Take care of the customer in front of you, then worry about what’s next.

“Resolving issues as fast as possible” takes a back seat to taking care of the customer, period.

No business is perfect, even Zappos—but watching a company this focused, this committed to their own vision inspired me, and gave me a glimpse of how we could better transform InsideSales.com.

Everyone goes through sales slumps. If you haven’t yet, you’re either too new to the profession . . . . or you just haven’t been doing it long enough.

We’ve got some sharp sales reps here at InsideSales.com, so I thought I’d talk to them about what they do to get out of their personal pipeline woes.

1. Separate the real opportunities from the fluff: “When I hit a slow period, sometimes I’ll throw some stuff overboard and just start over. When your pipeline sucks, it means you’re wasting time chasing stuff you can’t really close. Focus on generating better deals instead of chasing garbage.” — R.J. Tracy
2. Focus on “touch” quality, in addition to quantity: “Our software [the InsideSales.com Lead Response Management Suite] has built-in safeguards to make sure we do enough follow-up, but let’s be honest, not all follow-up activity is created equal. A call is a call, as far as your numbers are concerned, but being ready and engaged when you call is another story. The prospect knows when you don’t care.” —Dave Boardman
3. Get an easy win or two to rebuild momentum: “Sales is so psychological. When you’re at the bottom of the leaderboard for a month, it becomes this total mental drain. Now you’re not only NOT closing, you’re hurting your chances to do it even more. I’ve found if I can get a couple of quick, easy closes, even if they’re relatively small opportunities, it gets me back into the flow.” —Erik Chapman
4. Treat your leads like gold. Follow-up to new inquiries faster, with more relevance: “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten a hold of someone who was surfing a competitors Web site just after they requested that we contact them. Because we follow-up immediately on all of our Web inquiries [see the InsideSales.com ResponsePop Inbound dialer], we have a lot of live conversations with people while they’re still in the search process, and I feel like it allows us to influence the conversations for our closers.” —David “Davie” Warren
5. Reevaluate how well your technique aligns with how the customer actually buys: “I remember one deal early in my time here where I sent the prospect literally every piece of collateral we had, yet he still kept asking for more information. Turns out the main decision maker was attached at the hip to his IT people. Here I was, this “newbie” sales rep trying to ‘Wow!’ them, and a five minute conversation with Thomas [Purdy, InsideSales.com's Director of Product Development] moved the deal forward more than I did in a week.” —Steven Foster
6. Track your losses as hard as your wins: “There’s almost always a reason a rep loses a string of deals, a pattern behind it. If I see a rep struggling, I’ll go back into their last 4-6 opportunities, and work with them to piece together the process.” —Danny Gardner, InsideSales.com Director of Sales
7. The most obvious answer, take a needed break: “Taking a week off to recharge is obviously ideal, but it’s not like you’re closing anything while you’re gone. Sometimes taking a random Thursday off to go do something you like is just as good. Sometimes it’s 20 minutes to make a doughnut run, or whatever, just something to get untracked.” —Ben Richardsr