The Sales Insider

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!

Innovative companies often begin creating products that solve a specific business need.  Early adopters experience those solutions through feature benefit demos that solve a particular business problem.  Early products tend to be less feature rich and therefore drive the discussion to business need and ROI benefit offered by implementing.  It works and they buy!

As products mature, so many features are added that the demo transforms itself into a sales training on product rather than what business needs it solves. Brian’s feedback was spot-on.  Effective salesmanship is when our solution solves our prospect’s problems.

We don’t sell software, we automate selling. I’ve upgraded my demo skills and those of my team to ensure that a good demo highlights the 2-3 core problems and demonstrates benefits of the PowerDiaer for Salesforce.

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 a summary of this research with a link to the original study.

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.)

You and your company have done everything right up to this point.

The marketing team created a compelling, targeted set of material that caught the attention of a potential buyer. They found your Web site and grabbed some information—a couple of white papers and a pricing list.

You followed up on the new lead quickly and effectively, using good lead management and nurturing tactics to make contact.

You feel like you’ve done your homework. You feel you understand their position in their industry. You’ve done a deep needs analysis, and feel you have a common ground with the prospect on how to address their pain. You get your best collateral and presentation material, tailored to the information you already have.

You wind up and give them your best 95-mile-an-hour fastball, the pitch that’s worked for you so many times in the past.

Yet contrary to evidence, against every sign you’ve seen to this point, you’re met with looks of confusion, or even worse, apathy.

The prospect doesn’t get it, or worse, doesn’t seem to care.

Now what do you do?

In baseball, the difference between a run-of-the-mill pitcher and an All-Star is rarely their “first pitch.” In the Big Leagues (and we’re assuming that’s where you want to be), everybody has a 90+ mile-per-hour fastball—but the best pitchers have a 2nd, a 3rd, sometimes even a 4th pitch that they can command.

While there are occasional exceptions to the rule (see Mariano Rivera and his un-duplicate-able cut fastball), in most cases the best pitchers win because when their primary pitch isn’t working, Plan B isn’t crossing their fingers and hoping for the best.

Sales is no different.

When your initial, carefully-prepped pitch is a “miss,” the answer is almost never to keep “winding up” and tossing something out there.

Stop, and figure out what happened.

Typically it’s one of three things:

• You’re not actually a contender and you didn’t know it.
• You’re in the dark about something going on inside the prospect’s company.
• You’re talking to the wrong people for the value prop you’ve presented.

If you’re just a “sounding board” for a competitor’s RFP and they’ve already locked in to another vendor, stop wasting your time and move on. Maybe the prospect just realized that your solution will require an entire technology platform overhaul—one they had no intention of making. Maybe your solution forces them to change a licensing situation with another vendor, and they don’t want to upset their current arrangement.

If you really are in contention, then clearly something has changed. There’s a management “realignment” on the horizon and your product/service is in the line of fire. A relocation is about to happen. A key budget or cashflow problem has reared its head.

Regardless, the solution is the same: dig back in. Who’s really in charge now, and who’s really going to make the decision?

Gather data, re-set your presentation, toe the rubber, and fire again.

One of the problems we all have with technology is that we soon forget that what is now commonplace was once rare or non-existent.

New technologies penetrate the market so rapidly that total market transformations can occur in the space of under three years (and some might say even less).

It’s barely been a decade since the Y2K scare and the Dot Com crash. Widespread broadband Internet access hasn’t been a reality since 2003 (and some could even argue since 2005). Smart phones, text messaging, YouTube, SmugMug and Flickr, convergence of mobile audio and telecom, “apps” getting added to the mainstream lexicon . . . all recent developments. 4G network access right through your telecom provider? Check. Streaming HD? Check.

Many businesses and universities barely got their WIRED infrastructures in place by the early 2000s. Now being forced to “plug in” to a network with an actual wire seems almost archaic.

But the real point of all of this is that we have to be careful not to look past the mark with our old sales and marketing standby, CRM.

Hosted CRM seemed revolutionary 10 years ago. Now it’s simply considered the norm for applications of its type. Fluid, mobile, always-on, cross-platform, multi-device ready, “The Cloud” is becoming exactly what industry giants like Mark Benioff of salesforce.com believed it could be.

But as the nature of professional sales has evolved, so too has the need for CRM to evolve with it. “Naked” CRM–i.e., a self-contained CRM application just for use by the sales team–is now just the beginning, not the grand end of sales and marketing intelligence.

InsideView proves that the value of social media increases exponentially when it can be applied directly to the sales/buying cycle. Marketing automation solutions like Eloqua manage opt-ins and content, all directly linked back to lead generation and sales acquisition costs. Dialer tools like the PowerDialer for Salesforce manage and predict call cycles for lead generation, pushing the highest-quality leads and data to the reps right when they need it.

All of this is designed for a single purpose–to close the gap from “old” sales to new. Getting attention through marketing channels is harder than ever. So when a company finally does “get some love” from a prospect, the tools have to be in place to make every opportunity count, to have the highest chance to contact and close the deal.

While I don’t totally agree with InsideView that cold calling is “bottom of the barrel,” the shifting sands of demand generation and sales intelligence in 2011 means that true “cold” calling will almost be a misnomer in the future. Our ability to “predict” who and when to call, what to say when we do, and the value proposition a prospect will most readily respond to will ever increase as the sophistication of the tools we use increases with it.

Saw a link to a Harvard Business Review article this morning on Twitter (thanks @abneedles) that had something interesting to say about the “sales funnel.”

“A global consumer electronics company embarked on a CDJ [Consumer Decision Journey] analysis after research revealed that although consumers were highly familiar with the brand, they tended to drop it from their consideration set as they got closer to purchase.”

A fairly critical warning note to those of us in marketing, wouldn’t you say?

A brand with high awareness, but low conversion.

In other words, awareness /= buying, and getting farther down the funnel before a prospect drops out isn’t a net benefit. It’s no different whether they drop out at the top (before they even begin their initial information search) or if you’re the last to get “cut” from the final decision.

I’ve heard in several places now that research by SiriusDecisions shows that today’s typical customer is 70% through their buying cycle before they’re ready to meet with a sales person. Sure, it’s good to be at the top of the funnel and to be considered at all, but “awareness” is only the first step to being considered in the decision-maker’s criteria.

After that, it’s not just about awareness, but consistent response, lead management, marketing automation, quality sales skills to maintain awareness once contacted, and providing useful information and content–all with the goal of educating the prospect to find a solution that is right for them.

Tuesday evening at Dreamforce, I got into an interesting Twitter conversation with Left Brain Marketing’s Adam Needles (@abneedles on Twitter) discussing marketing’s relationship with sales.

In Adam’s mind, he felt that the presenters of the Sales/Marketing alignment session were pushing marketing back into a sales support role, one that he felt didn’t align with the purpose of today’s Sales 2.0 demand generation strategies.

I’ve never met Adam in person, but having read some of his writing at Silverpop, Left Brain Marketing, and on his own personal blog Propelling Brands, he has always produced insightful, thought-provoking content related to B2B demand generation. Thus, I was intrigued by his conviction that marketing and demand gen were not “sales support,” but a holistic, integrated set of processes that speed and maximize business development.

In stark contrast to Adam’s ideas is an article I read several weeks ago from BNet’s “Sales Machine” blog. In it author Geoffrey James forcibly decries what he sees as one of the biggest failures of marketing departments — that they “turned from service functions into a ‘strategic leadership’ role.”

James goes on, “Marketing geeks started showing up in product design meetings, pretending that they understood the customer . . . The problem isn’t that two co-equal groups [sales and marketing] need to work together. The problem is that marketing got uppity and forgot its place.”

Hmm, so which is it? Marketing and demand gen as a strategic, holistic business practice? Or a subservient lackey to the sales team’s needs and imperatives?

As Adam stated in one of his tweets, “In a Web 2.0 world, #B2B marketing must become the leader of a holistic demand gen process — not just tactical lead gen.” Ideally marketing is about producing “closable” leads, but it’s also about branding, educating potential buyers, creating valuable content, and generating “thought leadership” in the market — all of which ultimately produces better quality leads in the future.

That said, having straddled the sales and marketing “Great Divide” for nearly six years now, Geoffrey James’ words carried some weight with me. Too often marketers get away with living in a “measurement vacuum,” and the C-level doesn’t hold them to the same level of hard metrics as sales. Marketers want to be “creatives,” with all of the associated “freedom,” without being tied down to “mundane” lead qualification rates and cost-per-acquisition.

Yet Adam’s vision of what could be ultimately seems to be the best long-term strategy. If marketing and sales need to align, it’s precisely because of Geoffrey’s point. Sales reps can no longer chase after marketing-generated “rainbow sunshine”; they have to maximize every lead they get, every minute of time they have. If marketing isn’t producing quality leads, sales reps don’t have the luxury of throwing good effort after bad, especially now. And a good demand gen strategy, based on quality sales intelligence, analytics, and processes, will absolutely provide more and better opportunities.

More than anything, the question boils down to, Who has the final say in what marketing should be doing? The CMO, or the VP of Sales?

“Subservient” might be too strong of a word, but I do think that ultimately if marketing isn’t producing quality leads for the sales team, it’s sales’ job to get the course corrected. When it’s all said and done, the buck stops in sales, not marketing.

Working for a strictly B2B sales company (caveat: many of our clients sell direct to consumers, but we ourselves really only target businesses), I’m constantly evaluating the differences between B2B and B2C selling — as well as the similarities as they arise.

Branding, connecting with the customer, sales approaches, creating demand, and so on, all have some crossover between the B2B and B2C worlds.

But I’ll admit I’ve had a hard time justifying investing lots of money into social media. In the B2B space, it just always seemed relatively unimportant in the scale of things, compared to other means of business development.

So I was interested to see a post on No More Cold Calling that affirmed my suspicions.

Author Joanne Black states,

“Social media is a powerful tool for three things and three things only:

1. Search engine optimization — use your key words and raise your presence on the web.
2. Find out who people are — learn about a person’s background and your connections.
3. Find out who people know — look for close connections that you can leverage.

Some salespeople tell me they actually get clients through social media. Well, maybe if you have a commodity business. Could it happen? Yes. Do I rely on it? Absolutely not. I only count on what I bring about-through a proactive, intentional, referral strategy with personal introductions.”

As Joanne says, are there absolutely zero direct marketing opportunities in B2B using social media? No, but the very nature of B2B demands working with multiple decision-makers, multiple levels of needs to address, and multiple tiers of implementation. The simple fact is, the “reach” necessary to make large scale B2B sales happen through social media is incredibly thin.

I recently bumped into a post by Escape Velocity’s Liz Strauss called “When Too Many Options Are None At All.”

Having “18 fishing poles in the water,” she suggests, leads to a lot of “unfocused work for little return . . . We spend all of our time running up and down the bank checking to see if something worked or whether we need to rebait the system.”

Wise words.

I’ve said it before: In today’s marketing world, narrow but deep, not broad but shallow wins the day. For most small- to mid-sized businesses, better sales performance means conquering one vertical or market at a time, rather than trying to “dip” into a dozen different markets at once.

At the same time, sometimes a net is better than a pole. We’ve discovered over the years that there’s frequently a lot of overlap between markets/verticals in terms of process and need. The terminologies are different, the products they sell are different, but the underlying need to help them connect with their clients and prospects is the same.

Thus, sometimes it’s okay to use a net to cover more than one overlapping vertical, instead of trying to catch them one pole at a time.

But when in doubt, stick with one market, dominate it, find the next one, wash, rinse, repeat.

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 often mis-identify “Pain Avoiders,” because their objections are interpreted as concerns about price or functionality, when in fact it’s the opposite. The prospect sees the value, they’re just highly concerned about what’s going to be required to get it.

On the phone, “Pain Avoiders” will often seem more concerned about how your product or service is going to disrupt other departments instead of their own, as a deflection mechanism against their desire to not deal with change. “Pain Avoiders” are generally highly attached to the status quo, and are only in the market for a new solution because their situation and circumstance require it. They often have a maddening ability to show interest in what you’re selling without particularly committing to anything concrete (because change = pain = something to be avoided).

In the consumer space, Apple is a classic example of targeting “Pain Avoidance.” While they frequently tout the functionality of their devices, one of Apple’s most compelling “value propositions” is Pain Avoidance—avoiding viruses and spyware, avoiding complicated interfaces, ease of setup, total interoperability between Apple devices. And a lot of consumers are willing to pay Apple’s price premiums (50-100% higher cost against comparably spec’d offerings) to get it.

In the same vein, if you find a prospect that seems sold on the product or service, but is exhibiting “Pain Avoidance” symptoms, do some needs analysis and think about restructuring the pricing and service levels. Typically this means that they’ll be paying a higher price premium for the assurance of the service they’re going to receive, but in the end they’re much happier with the perceived “value.”