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.
Two quick hits on some stuff I found interesting:
I.
Craig Rosenberg is generally a pretty smart and insightful guy. As the self-proclaimed “Funnelholic” and Focus.com VP of Products and Services, his extensive background in B2B sales and marketing gives his voice some weight in our space.
So when Craig (@funnelholic on Twitter) recently posted that “Being a B2B buyer sucks,” I snapped to attention.
All four of his points were excellent, so read the article, but I was particularly taken by Point #4:
The ‘contact us’ box sucks. I see that, and I just think black hole. The dropdown you provide doesn’t make me feel like I am going to go in the right direction. When you walk into a good store, someone asks, ‘How can I help you today?’ How about taking that methodology to the ‘front door’ of your buying process?”
Craig, you have no idea how true that is–and the Harvard Business Review proved it.
According to the HBR article, 26% of all online “Contact Us” Web form requests go completely unanswered (our own internal studies show the number can range from 25% to as high 40%). It’s as if the business believes you don’t exist.
Another […]
Real Lead Generation Means Speed and Persistence—But Mostly It Means Doing It
16 February 2011 — Steve Watts
2 Comments
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 . . . .
(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 […]
A couple of years ago we hired what we thought was going to be a stellar sales rep. He appeared to be smart, well-spoken, and had the individual charisma that we thought was going to make him a star.
So when the numbers came back after six months, I was surprised that he was nowhere near hitting quota.
“Hmm, that’s interesting,” I thought. “I figured he’d be a star, let’s give him a little more time.”
End of the next quarter, same results. Now I was panicked. How could he have possibly been failing? What had I done wrong? What was wrong with our sales process? If this “superstar” sales rep wasn’t hacking it, surely we had to fix something, right?
I talked to the front-line sales manager about ideas. We went over sales collateral. We reviewed pitches and product demos. We mentored.
And what we discovered was that in spite of his evident natural talents, they never really translated into the rigors of his daily work. There was an intellectual laziness, an assumed air of success–”This is going to work simply because I’m the one doing it.”
Now of course some long-time sales professionals might argue the point. […]
At some point every sales organization that engages in outbound prospecting has a debate over whether targeted sales voice messages make any real difference in results.
The primary complaints of those who don’t like using voice mail as a prospecting tool:
1. It doesn’t work
2. Even if it does work, it’s too time consuming.
I’m here to debunk both of these myths.
The Reality: voice mail works, and it works well.
On any objective level, this complaint is a straw man argument. Inside sales industry insider Ken Krogue has created and nurtured two $1 million+ a month sales teams in two different industries—business development at Franklin-Covey (now Franklin-Qwest), and telecom with inContact, formerly UCN. Every piece of data he’s ever compiled from his teams shows that direct prospecting voice mail averages a 4-6 percent response rate –and it’s often much higher, depending on the product, vertical, and targets chosen . . . .
It’s pretty simple: In three and a half years doing client services in the sales software space, here’s the Top Five Things I’ve found that will kill even the most promising sales automation purchase.
1. The true value of the system is never made apparent.
Forcing people to use new software or systems is certainly a management right, but an effective sales tool must appeal to the reps by solving immediate pains, and by making it easier for them to stay organized and keep promises to their customers and co-workers.
It has to provide better sales intelligence (data), improve speed and efficiency (automation), or heighten overall employee impact (training and process development), or employees simply tune out . . . .
SaaS and B2B Sales – Bessemer Venture Partner’s 10 Laws of being “SaaS-y”
18 October 2010 — Ken Krogue
0 Comments
I recently bumped into a compelling article on Sandhill.com about the 10 Laws of Being “SaaS-y”.
Though written in 2008, the piece is a brilliant strategic blueprint for long-term management of an SaaS company, written by Byron Deeter, a key executive with Bessemer Venture Partners.
Byron has worked in the SaaS space since it first came on the scene, and serves on the board of a number of current SaaS companies, most notably Eloqua.
The Ten Laws:
Key metrics are Contracted Monthly Recurring Revenue (CMRR) and cash, not “booked” sales like with premise-based software solutions.
Keep the sales team small (3 or fewer) until reps are consistently hitting $100k in MRR.
Separate “hunters” and “famers.”
Creating active channel sales partnerships is difficult. You’re going to have to sell direct for a long time.
Stay local (a.k.a., North America) until you hit $1 million in MRR.
Don’t use multiple data centers until you absolutely have to.
Tenant-based installations = a big no-no (there’s one production code base, and you control it. Period).
Savvy online marketing is vital for leads and sales.
Cash on hand vs. growth is going to be a constant trade-off.
SaaS generally requires a 4-year allotment of “growth capital” to get off the ground, so pace spending and […]
Tuesday’s Sales Performance Thoughts:
1. Don’t get too cute in your sales presentation.
Your product and value proposition should largely be enough to get a close. If you’re having to get “creative” to “find the pulse” of your prospect, take a hard look at just how qualified they are. If your marketing team is generating leads that consistently require a song and dance just to get an appointment, it’s time to start evaluating some new lead sources.
2. It’s better to make a decision that’s “good enough” and go with it than to agonize (and waste time) over making the perfect one.
Like most things, “careful thought and analysis” is useful in moderation, not in excess.
This concept has served me well over the years. You can always adjust plans on the fly, but it’s pretty hard to accomplish much with your backside stuck to the bottom of your chair.
3. There’s ultimately only two obstacles to success: stuff out of your control, and stuff people do.
Budgets are out of your control. Either a prospect has the money or they don’t. But what if you could get a prospect to rethink how the budget funds are allocated based on the […]
Inside Sales Research – Departments Keep Growing Because It’s a Win-Win-Win
5 October 2010 — Steve Watts
2 Comments
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 . . . .
