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.
(This is my response to an article written by David P. Wallace of The Wallace Management Group)
David,
I like the table approach you have used to try and illustrate the situations by which you decide to use inside sales versus outside sales.
I wanted to add my observations to yours. As the President of InsideSales.com, I have the opportunity to observe hundreds of companies as they are in the process of starting or growing an inside sales team. More and more we are finding companies with bigger ticket items and higher product complexity being sold effectively by inside sales or remote sales teams.
In fact, taking the definition of inside sales as remote sales, we are finding that a majority of the time spent by an outside sales person is spent actually doing inside sales, or selling remotely. In looking at the table below, you can see I have noted that Bigger ticket items still benefit with a face-to-face meeting, but there are far fewer of them in the sales cycle, with much more meetings facilitated remotely.
Here is how I would modify your table:
Item […]
Real quick:
Found an interesting research analysis by CSO Insight’s Barry Trailer that showed that sales rep quota attainment actually goes up when the ratio of reps to managers goes up.
In other words, sometimes we need to avoid the temptation to “over manage” and “over analyze” our sales people and simply let them do what they’ve been trained to do.
As Barry says,
“Any time taken from selling is reducing sales capacity. Coaching meetings, research and other value-added activities are valuable and important contributors to overall success. But standing meetings (e.g., every Monday morning at 8:30 am) are often holdovers from an earlier way of doing things. CRM reporting tools and dashboards can provide a basis for both managers and reps to communicate routine matters and to gain performance improvement insights.”
Ostensibly without the need to verbally re-hash each reps’ pipeline.
B2B, Demand Generation, and “Getting Real” With Social Media
16 November 2010 — Ken Krogue
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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:
Search engine optimization — use your key words and raise your presence on the web.
Find out who people are — learn about a person’s background and your connections.
Find out who people know — look for close connections that you can leverage.
Some salespeople tell me they actually get clients through social […]
Technology Tools (Besides CRM and Dialers) For Better Sales Performance
13 October 2010 — Steve Watts
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When people ask us the best technologies to use to get more leverage for their sales teams, our first response (purely out of self-interest, obviously) is, “A lead management CRM and a dialer.”
After laughing a bit at our shameless self-promotion, a lot of them will follow-up by asking, “Anything else?”
It’s not a comprehensive list by any stretch, but here are a few things our own sales team uses to increase their productivity.
- Docusign for e-document digital signatures http://www.docusign.com
We discovered a while ago that paperwork is a huge time-waster for most sales organizations (see Ken Krogue’s “15 Time-Wasters of Inside Sales and Marketing” for details) . . . .
Inside Sales Research – Departments Keep Growing Because It’s a Win-Win-Win
5 October 2010 — Steve Watts
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There’s been a lot of talk ever since our 2009 InfoUSA study revealed that the inside sales industry was projected to grow at 7.5% per year over the next five years, while outside sales industry jobs is stagnating at 0.5% growth.
bNet Business’s Geoffrey James even sounded off on the topic, questioning the reasons behind the slow obsolescence of outside sales when the sales process and buying cycle have become even more “touch” intensive and complex.
In my mind, however, the trend is significant, but hardly inexplicable. The Web has made one of sales’ primary functions—distributing information to prospects—a much different activity than before. Even for complex purchases, there’s a wealth of information about available products and services, and the average prospect has significantly less of a need to rely on a sales rep to provide actionable information . . . .
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 Metrics – Bridge Group’s SaaS Sales Survey Shows Orgs Take Their Own Medicine
4 October 2010 — Ken Krogue
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It hasn’t been released to the public yet, but Inside sales metrics gurus The Bridge Group, Inc. just finished their “2010 Inside Sales for SaaS Companies” report, and they kindly sent me an advance copy.
I’m not going to reveal too much about it, but like their previous sales metrics reports, my reaction can be summed up in a single word:
Awesome.
There’s way too much good stuff in terms of specific metrics, data analysis, and key insights to post here, so go pick up a copy when it becomes available, but there were two key ideas I gleaned from the report:
Idea #1—In very clear terms, the study demonstrates that SaaS vendors have better sales performance than their license software counterparts—and the analysis indicates that it’s probably because they know how to push and leverage their own product solutions to get the highest benefit.
The demonstrated benefits are real and significant. The study shows that on average, compared to licensed software vendors, SaaS vendors:
Have 20% more reps hitting quota (70% vs. 50%).
Have more scalable sales processes, with measurable, repeatable, metrics.
Have a nearly a 25% shorter sales cycle.
Have higher lead-to-prospect conversion rates.
Some of it may be the nature of […]
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 / […]
