The Sales Insider

A Common Mistake from a VP of Sales

Michael Critchfield — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 00:40:19 +0000

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.

The Social Selling Catch-22

Steve Watts — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:35:01 +0000

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.

Yet that’s more of a marketing than sales perspective; what about front-line sales reps? What do they get out of social media? How about insight into prospects’ “inner workings,” business dealings, company culture, and management? Social media can help reps discover product development and launch dates, personal connections and shared hobbies with contacts. All told, social media makes it significantly easier for reps to find a niche where they can create value–when handled correctly.

Sounds great, right? So what’s the “Catch-22″ (referring to the title of this post)?

It’s those three simple words at the end of the above paragraph: when handled correctly. What too many “social” sellers forget is that social media amplifies both the positive and negative traits they display during the sales process. When a rep actively provides real value to the customer, social media can make those efforts more visible. Conversely, when a rep is acting in their own interest, and not the client’s, the consequences (and backlash) are equally visible.

Simply put, social media forces the rep to commit to and engage in buyer-focused behaviors, or it will bite them in the butt, period. Social selling means your reps’ professional demeanor becomes even MORE important when no immediate transaction is forthcoming.

As much value as social media can provide, a “social” rep who cannot or will not commit to following buyer-centric principles is wielding a very dangerous two-edged sword. Aggressive, self-interested, “Sex Panther” tactics (“60 percent of the time it works every time”) are amplified ten-fold in a social sales environment–and the only thing worse than connecting with a prospect then acting shabbily, is connecting with a prospect and acting shabbily in front of thousands of other companies and peers linked to your social media accounts.

The bottom line is, before hooking your reps up to every social media platform and sending them off into the wild, you MUST have a strategy and process in place. Do your lead generation reps have a mandate to use social media? Do you bonus reps more for self-generating leads through existing social media contacts, since the cost of acquisition is much lower? Is social media considered part of your active marketing matrix?

Most importantly, what supporting materials will reps need to effectively leverage social media, who will be providing them, and how does the nature of the medium itself alter introductions, value propositions, and closing techniques (if they should be used at all)?

Inside Sales Tips: Sort Tire Kickers from Buying Signals

Ken Krogue — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 04:01:12 +0000

About three years ago we were analyzing the leads that come from our website trying to find out if some were better than others.

Everything we do at InsideSales.com is based on metrics. Instead of just hiring marketers, we hire math majors and economics majors in our marketing department because it is all about studying and testing and analyzing.

So we charted out our leads and we found that there were two obvious “clusters” of leads based on the types of offers we had made to generate them. I call them “Buying Signals” and “Tire Kickers” and we found there was an 8 to 1 difference in the results they generated based on overall revenue.

Buying Signals are just that, respondents to offers that clearly say I’m anxious to talk to somebody at InsideSales.com about making a purchase decision. I have “need,” not just “interest.” Anything product-centric, pricing-related, commitment-based, etc. We learned that even a toll free number is an “offer” somebody can choose to accept on a website (and is often the very best one.)

Tire Kickers want to learn something. They aren’t ready to buy, they have “interest” but not need. They may not know that have need yet. The way to turn a Tire Kicker into a Buying Signal is with compelling information and education. Our research shows that a Tire Kicker is 8 times less likely to buy than a Buying Signal.

I was reminded that interest is the counterfeit of need. Interest belongs to the marketing department, whose job it is to educate. And need belongs to the sales department, whose job it is to build value and close to fulfill need.

Kinds of Buying Signal leads:
Free trials, demos, product overviews, contact us, product slicks, pricing requests, proposal requests, toll free phone numbers.

Kinds of Tire Kicker Leads:
Company overviews, white papers, research papers, webinars, on-demand webinars, how-to’s, forums, blogs.

So what did we do?

We cut out most of our Tire Kickers and focussed on Buying Signals. We even scaled back our well-known research papers like the paper that Inc. Magazine recently quoted.

What happened?

Things went great for about two months. Our sales went up, then they went down. And our leads started drying up. We couldn’t figure out what happened until one day we looked at previous leads and found that people typically downloaded 2-3 Tire Kicker offers before moving to the Buying Signal leads. It was a “lead funnel” and we had stopped the new leads from entering the funnel.

So immediately we put back all of our Tire Kicker information leads and expanded them.

It was almost a disaster, but it turned out to be one of the most important things we have ever learned.

Hope it helps!

Ken

Inside Sales Tips: Post Reps Results, and Results Go Up!

Ken Krogue — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 09:28:54 +0000

One of the most powerful things I have ever learned in managing salespeople is the power of posting results visibly. When I do that results go up 20% almost overnight. I don’t care what it is; dials, appointments set, demonstrations, closes. Now of course, depending on length of sales cycles, it takes time for more results-based numbers to show.

Why?

I think sales reps are extremely competitive. They are the competitive athletes, the warrior class of the business world. The most correlated measure when I hired top performers was a competitive resume in athletics in college or high school. They can’t stand to be beat, or to be second. (see my blog on “Hiring Athletes… A Great Bet for Inside Sales Jobs“.)

My friend and mentor Jeff Call taught me this principle when I was back at FranklinCovey managing the fastest growing department in what was then one of the fastest growing companies in America. He would have me post the individual and team stats every day. And our numbers kept rising.

Where did he get the principle of performance visibility? “Putting the One Minute Manager to Work” by Ken Blanchard. Ken was a guest lecturer and a bit of a mentor to us at Franklin during those days. His other book “Raving Fans” had also been a recent hit.

Thanks Jeff. This is one of those gifts that keeps on giving!

Harvard Business Review says Sales is No Longer About Relationships

Ken Krogue — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 03:36:01 +0000

A very interesting article by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, both of the Sales Executive Council, show recent research that selling is not just about relationships, but rather about teaching customers, tailoring sales messages to the customer, and taking control of the sale.

I have been following the Harvard Business Review (HBR) since the time we did research in conjunction with them in the March 2011 issue entitled The Short Life of Online Leads.

The Sales Executive Council did a global study in 2008 involving more than 6000 B2B sales reps from nearly 100 companies in many industries.

They classified these sales professionals into five profiles:

1- Relationship Builders: who focus on building strong personal and professional relationships.

2- Hard Workers: come early, stay late, make more calls, make more visits, and go the extra effort mile.

3- Lone Wolves: are very self confident and may break rules by doing things their way or not at all.

4- Reactive Problem Solvers: are customer-centric by being reliable and detail-oriented with strong follow-up and well executed implementation.

5- Challengers: understand their customers’ businesses to push their thinking and drive the entire sales conversation with themselves in control. They are not afraid to assert even controversial views with customers and bosses.

These five profiles are almost evenly distributed among typical salespeople, but only one stands out for performance… The Challenger.

In fact, the Challenger makes up 40% of the high performers.

What makes them different?

1- They teach their customers. They focus their sales conversation not so much on features and benefits but on providing unique insight on the customers business with new ideas to make and save money. They help customers see things they didn’t know existed!

2- They tailor their sales message to the customers needs. They are deeply tuned in to the objectives and value drivers of the customer and position their sales pitch to each different stakeholder within a customers organization.

3- They take control of the sale. They are assertive, not overly aggressive, but comfortable with tension and rarely give in to a customer who doesn’t know their solution like they do. They can press customers to make a decision, even on price.

If the Challenger is the winner, who is the loser?

The Relationship Builder. In fact, they account for only 7% of high performers in standard sales situations.

Why?

The data seems to say that relationships have changed. Challengers push for better decisions, while Relationship Builders give in when the customers push back to preserve what they think are relationships. They are likable and generous, not competent and valuable.

The study goes deeper, Challengers dominate the world of complex solution selling by making up 54% of the stars, while only 4% of Relationship Builders make up the stars in more complex sales.

Restated, Challengers win because they have mastered the complex sale. This fact is extremely valuable when considering the future. With a down economy, this looks like an even more valuable trait. In other words, the Challenger looks to be the profile skill most desired for sales results well into the future.

Wow, lots of things are changing, BANT, relationship selling, what next?

Click here to see if you are considered a Challenger or to see a graphical summary of how the Challenger stacks up against the other profiles.

I’m looking forward to their new book “The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation” which goes on sale at Amazon on Nov 10, 2011

Top 20 Articles on www.KenKrogue.com (with total views)

What is Inside Sales? Our Definition of Inside Sales | Ken Krogue – 16,115 Views
Inside Sales Best Practices - 1,623 Views
Inside Sales Tips by Ken Krogue - 1.026 Views
KPI – Key Performance Indicators – 867 Views
Inside Sales versus Outside Sales – 542 Views
Is Leaving a Voicemail Worthwhile? – 456 Views
6 Reasons Salesforce Users Need Hosted Dialer Technology - 382 Views
Behind the Cloud – Ken’s Notes – 310 Views
Inside Sales Tips – No Vacations Last Week of the Month – 298 Views
Funny Inside Sales Videos – 290 Views
Inside Sales Tips – Skip to the Beep – 273 Views
Demand Generation Tactics and Strategy – 258 Views
Inside Sales Tips – Interest is The Counterfeit of Need – 252 Views
Inside Sales is Top Method of Lead Generation – 231 Views
Inside Sales Training – 214 Views
Inside Sales Tips – How LinkedIn Gives you 3 Free SEO Backlinks - 206 Views
Inside Sales Tips – Specialize – 174 Views
Marketing B2B 4 Quick Email Tips – 168 Views
Leadscon East Vendors Need to Drink their Own Medicine - 137 Views
What is Lead Response Management – 137 Views

Symantec Wins the 4th Annual Dreamforce 2011 ResponseAudit

Ken Krogue — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 22:58:00 +0000

It isn’t often that a big company is able to respond quicker than hundreds of small companies, but Symantec walked away with the fastest phone reponse out of 3051 companies with a time of only 51 seconds.

I had the chance to personally deliver the Audit results to Symantec right on the Dreamforce show floor on the second to last day of the show.

Ken Krogue delivers ResponseAudit results to Symantec

This ResponseAudit broke the record for the most companies audited originally set at Dreamforce 2009 with 2875 companies audited. We also had 16 companies recognized as having responded in less that 5 minutes, which is the best practice, this is the same number of companies as in 2009. The average response time slipped from 41 hours 7 minutes in 2009 to 42 hours 18 minutes in 2011.

This is my favorite thing to do at a trade show because I get to meet everyone and I find that they are looking for me now when I come to share their audit results.

Ken Krogues brings the good news... You've Been Audited!

Here are the other company times (and by the way, we excluded ourselves, but InsideSales.com responded in 22 seconds!)

Rank	Dreamforce ’11 Attendee	Time (M:SS)
1^st	SYMANTEC CORP.	0:51*
2^nd	MIR3	0:54
3^rd	MEGAPATH	1:20
4^th	CPI SECURITY SYSTEMS	1:22
5^th	NOVATION CAPITAL, LLC	1:36
6^th	INTACCT CORP	1:56
7^th	TREEHOUSE INTERACTIVE	2:00
8^th	INTERACTIVE INTELLIGENCE, INC.	2:32
9^th	AVI-SPL	2:38
10^th	DIGIUM	3:22
11^th	AMCOM SOFTWARE	3:32
12^th	WORKSHARE, INC.	3:47
13^th	APAC CUSTOMER SERVICES, INC.	3:50
14^th	MARIN SOFTWARE	3:59
15^th	WEALTH ENGINE	4:51
16^th	RAPID ADVANCE	4:52

Dreamforce ’11 ResponseAudit shows the Lead Response Bar is Low as Ever!

Ken Krogue — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 21:47:18 +0000

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.

Dreamforce ’11-Day 3-InsideSales.com Having Best Dreamforce Ever!

Ken Krogue — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 23:04:46 +0000

We are hearing that 45,000 people have registered for this Dreamforce and we have already talked with hundreds and are well on our way to giving away over 300 sweatshirt hoodies at the show!

Dave Elkington and I were at the show along with Thomas Oldroyd, our Sr. Director of Marketing, Michael Critchfield, our VP Sales and many of his team.

Thomas awarding ResponseAudit to #7 Best Response - Treehouse Interactive

Dave and I each gave 3-4 seminars in our meeting room that was packed to the ceiling with 450 hoodies and 8 nice leather chairs for folks to relax and learn about our Harvard research from Dave or 8 Best Practices from me.

RJ Tracy was busy giving live interactive demonstrations every half hour and worked circles around both Dave and I while the team answered questions from literally thousands of enthusiastic attendees.

RJ Tracy giving a live demo of PowerDialer for Salesforce 4.0

Scott Gardner, Mark Gaudette, and Brandon Byrge were moving full speed the entire time!

Michael, Mark, Scott and Brandon with our friends from ActOn Software

Sales and Marketing – “It’s Time to Ask Yourself What You Believe”

Steve Watts — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 18:05:29 +0000

It’s been nearly three months since the Sales Insider’s last blog post.

I’ve been heavily involved with the new InsideSales.com Certified Administrator project, and various Dreamforce 2011-related projects, so other than an occasional tweet, and interacting with clients, time for our online presence has been in short supply.

However, a few weeks ago in a company meeting, we watched this presentation on TED.com. And I was absolutely compelled to write a post on its contents.

It’s 18 minutes long. The ideas presented within it are simple and easy to comprehend.

And I cannot stop thinking about it.

(Having watched the presentation, as well as catching a recent replay of an action movie classic on AMC, the title of this post felt infinitely appropriate.)

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

As Simon Sinek mentions, all of us are great at saying what we do.

“We provide consulting services to sales and marketing teams”; “We fabricate pin screws for construction and industrial design”; “We provide legal services to commercial real estate brokers.”

But:

Very, very few people or organizations know why they do what they do. And by “why” I don’t mean “to make a profit.” That’s a result. It’s always a result.

By “why” I mean: what’s your purpose? What’s your cause? What’s your belief? Why does your organization exist? Why do you get out of bed in the morning? And why should anyone care?

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

The interior of our brains, the limbic region, is responsible for all of our feelings, like trust and loyalty. It’s also responsible for all human behavior, all decision-making, and it has no capacity for language.

When we communicate from the outside in, yes, people can understand vast amounts of complicated information like features and benefits and facts and figures. It just doesn’t drive behavior.

People don’t buy what you DO, they buy WHY YOU DO IT.

Not Getting Lost in Our Own Museums

Simon Sinek says we talk about the “What” because we don’t know, or don’t understand our “Why.” As salespeople, when we don’t know the “Why,” the natural result is to talk about what we do know—our product.

The result? Endless streams of seller-oriented drivel. Useless “Just Checking In” emails and voicemails that do nothing but annoy the prospect. Over-long presentations that don’t address buyer needs.

As Dan Waldschmidt said on his blog several months ago, “Start every conversation with the word ‘YOU’ and stop communicating unless you are delivering new value.”

Understanding “Why” is a massive step forward in working from a buyer-centric, rather than seller-centric mode, because it naturally imbues conversations with purpose. Delivering your “Why” lets prospects know up front, with zero ambiguity, if you’re the type of organization they’d like to work with. Once they recognize that, your job is to be respectful of their time, their buying process, and deliver value.

If you understand your purpose, your conversations will more naturally turn to providing solutions that fit your prospect’s vision, and not simply rehashing benefit statement lists.

10 Tips to Getting Your LinkedIn Profile Found in Google

Ken Krogue — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 19:32:56 +0000

I just got off the phone with my friend Marge Bieler, the CEO of RareAgent. She has worked in the lead generation space for many years and has been having great success in promoting LinkedIn as a tool to connect with decision makers. She has written a wonderful white paper about what she has learned and I asked her if I could summarize here for my readers and friends and point them to her LinkedIn profile for full access to the original.

Here is a Ken’s Note summary of what she says:

Gather your professional experience, interests, and capabilities, and use the Top 10 Tips below to help you begin designing your profile.

1. Craft an informative profile headline: Your headline becomes a slogan for your professional brand, such as “Conversations to Cash Creator” or “Automated Social Media Methods.”

2. Upload an appropriate photo: Select a professional, high-quality headshot of you alone.

3. Boast about your education: List all the institutions you’ve attended, provide highlights of your activities. Don’t be shy.

4. Cultivate a professional summary statement: The first few paragraphs should be concise and confident about value, goals, how you solve a particular pain.

5. Use Keywords to fill your “Specialties” section: Phrases that an individual might type into a search engine to find a person like you.

6. Update your status on a weekly basis: Stay on other people’s radar.

7. Show your connectedness with LinkedIn Groups and badges: TIP: when searching on group, leave the group search area blank, and hit search, the groups with the highest memberships will show on top.

8. Collect third-party-recommendations: Get at least one recommendation associated with each position you have held.

9. Claim your exclusive LinkedIn URL: Include your LinkedIn URL in your email signature.

10. Share your work: Share your templates, blogs, and showcase your writings, design work, media interviews or other accomplishments by displaying URLs or adding LinkedIn Applications.

You can download the full version by going to Marge Bieler on LinkedIn.

Great info Marge!