There’s lots of reasons movie sequels often suck—but regardless of the actual symptoms, the root cause is generally the same: the creators forget that the audience must have a reason to care AGAIN.
Characters have to evolve in new directions to remain interesting. Plots can’t just retread old developments. If we wanted to watch the same movie twice, we’d just watch the original.
There’s nothing worse than sitting through a sequel “retread” feeling like you’re being had—”This isn’t taking me anywhere, it’s a waste of time”—and if the creators screw up badly enough, it can damage the the entire collective experience.
Take, for instance, the generally reviled Star Wars Episodes I, II, and III. By all accounts they achieved financial success, but in some ways their blatant artistic failures demeaned the entire George Lucas enterprise. Episodes IV, V, and VI suddenly don’t look so “magical,” or meaningful, or worthy of praise.
So what’s the point of all of this?
Namely that in business contexts, customer support is the “sequel” to sales. If support teams aren’t “keeping the magic alive,” re-inventing value and connecting with the vision of the client, it casts a pall across everything that came before it (not unlike Hayden Christensen’s laughable acting) . . . .
Real Lead Generation Means Speed and Persistence—But Mostly It Means Doing It
16 February 2011 — Steve Watts
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It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything on this blog, mostly because I’ve been knee-deep in doing research, and working with a couple of clients. But I’ve decided to post today to talk specifically about one particular experience talking to a client about how much the InsideSales.com system had made a difference in their sales performance.
SEO business optimization experts OrangeSoda improved individual sales rep performance 300%, and started seeing three times the monthly number of account closes.
But just as much as the productivity gains (which I was naturally gratified to hear about), something else stuck out to me, which was that even before they started using the InsideSales.com system, they were doing a lot of things right. They had a good system in place to acquire leads and close sales. They had a great management team that had developed a scalable, repeatable process.
The problem was they simply hadn’t fully learned yet that most sales are won and lost at the top of the sales funnel, not the bottom. It’s not that their pipeline was non-existent or stagnant. They simply weren’t getting the results they could have been because they hadn’t put enough focus on the lead qualification process . . . .
Driving performance requires accurate and focused measures of performance. This is especially the case for account development and lead generation teams. I have recently been interviewing both InsideSales.com customers and non-customers (predominantly from the B2B High Tech/Services/Telecom industries) to identify the optimal metric to use when measuring the success of account development reps. I found that these companies are actually using a wide array of criteria that include talk time, dials per day, appointments set, appointments held, and opportunities set.
The most successful teams, however, are all using some variation of opportunities set. Specifically, the most common metric I heard is called TQO, or Totally Qualified Opportunities. A TQO is an opportunity that actually contributes to the sales pipeline and has a close ratio that is within the same ratio as the existing sales process. This metric provided much greater visibility than any of the others I saw.
Then I dug into the number of TQOs that an account development rep can reasonably achieve in one month. This number ranges from 16 to 28, and seems to vary due to differences in industry, maturity of rep, list type and source, and company/product brand. The […]
Lead Generation is Part of the Sales Department, Not Marketing
18 October 2010 — Steve Watts
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Occasionally we get asked by a new client implementing our sales management system, “So we’ve got our lead generation team set up and ready to go, but who should they be reporting to? The marketing people think it’s them, but the sales managers think they’ll get more out of it if they’re in charge. So who’s right?”
In our experience, the answer’s pretty simple: Sales is in charge of lead generation, not marketing.
I realize this is heresy in some marketing circles, but in B2B sales, it’s the truth.
There’s two primary reasons for this:
1. Marketing is passive and lead generation is proactive.
My boss Ken Krogue tells a funny story about this from a few years ago when they attended the Omniture Summit conference in 2008. They were in a group forum discussion, and the marketing people kept raising their hands and asking, “Aren’t you sales types being too pushy with your leads?”
The short answer is no. Branding, lead nurturing, media ad buying, and passive conversion from existing channels involve much different processes and mind sets than outbound lead generation. Lead gen is about active pursuit of new opportunities. The mind set of tip-toeing around prospects is counter-productive […]
Sales Metrics Not Just About Measuring Productivity, but Creating Motivation
4 October 2010 — Steve Watts
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Most managers will tell you that the primary reason to use good sales metrics and sales management tools is to improve performance.
Good processes and metrics, the old idea states, makes it easier to track productivity, accountability, and reward reps accountable for the work they do.
What’s not talked about as often, however, is the idea that having clear, consistent sales metrics also acts as a motivational force.
When sales and lead generation teams have to work with goals that are unclear and poorly defined, it leads to a psychology of paralysis. Time and effort are precious commodities in a sales organization, especially when agents have to constantly reevaluate and prioritize their activities. Sales reps simply don’t have the time to work on “stuff” that isn’t going to produce a real benefit for them and the organization.
But without clearly stated goals, reps are forced to guess what the most important use of their time is at any given point. Should they take that appointment, or get back on the phone? Is this product demo really going to be worth it, or should they be re-contacting that deal that got put on hold last month, but had a lot of potential?
Without a clear indication of how any given action is going to help a sales rep maximize their time (and ultimately the company’s), it leads to frustration and apathy, and most reps in this situation react by going with their gut instinct of what’s going to make them more money, regardless of whether it’s good for the company or prospect.
Good metrics and processes allow managers to be more effective, but don’t forget that a rep who doesn’t know how to get maximum reward is rarely going to give maximum effort.
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.”) . . . .
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 . . . .
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 . . . . ”
I had a conversation last week with one of our support reps that demonstrated with perfect clarity what I call the “Rule Zero Fallacy.”
If you’re a board game or card game enthusiast, inevitably you’ve run across a rule in a game somewhere that you simply didn’t like. And whether it’s pinochle, Rook, Ticket to Ride, or the Settlers of Catan, players usually create a replacement rule, or modify it to better suit their tastes. In some circles this type of “house ruling” is called “Rule Zero,” meaning, “No rule is ever broken because I can fix it.”
The problem is, “Rule Zero” is a fallacy, a contradiction in terms. The fact that you were willing to take the time to fix it yourself (and are generally satisfied with the result) doesn’t change the fact that it needed fixing to begin with.
But back to our real point:
A support agent came to me last week about a client who wanted to access a feature in one of our systems. Due to an admittedly poor interface design for this particular feature, getting access to it was problematic. It took navigating through a number of screens, hunting through the right links, and inputting some user-defined data . . . .
Yesterday we looked at how the communication medium of the telephone constrains the process and effectiveness of how we make contact on a sales call.
Today I thought we’d briefly follow-up and take a look at one of the other ubiquitous sales communication media—The Targeted Email. Understanding the “message” of the email medium can help reps write better email content, and reach more contacts.
In spite of the fact that hundreds of millions of them get sent every single day, we occasionally forget that an email is still, in its purest sense, a written document.
This is important, because a written medium carries a much different “sense” than other forms of media. It can be seen, referenced, re-scanned, reinterpreted at will, as long as it is front of the reader. Written text is generally perceived as more formal than other modes of communication. We naturally assume that it carries more weight—as long as it’s worth our time to begin with . . . .
