Just when you think the business world is changing for the better, that marketing and sales professionals are starting to “get it,” that a new age of enlightened prospecting is on its way, based on serving the customer and truly providing strategic value to them, rather than just pushing product . . . you have a meeting like the one I sat in on last week.
Well, to be honest, calling it a “meeting” is a bit disingenuous; a live-action comedy of marketing errors is a bit nearer the mark.
I can’t reveal names or the organization involved, because it would be a blow-up embarrassment for them. But let’s just take you through
the last bit of our collective conversation . . .
On a recent guest post at the Bridge Group’s blog, author Henry Bruce brings up some research by Marketing Sherpa that states that 75% of all sales leads generated are going to buy at some point in the next 18-24 months.
Think about that for a minute.
A. Only 1 in 4 leads is ever totally non-productive. They may not convert now, or in the time frame the rep wants, but contrary to popular belief, it’s relatively rare for a sales lead to be total garbage. 75% of the active leads in our CRM systems RIGHT NOW are going to buy a product or service in our sector from somebody, somewhere in the next two years. So why not from you/me/us, if we’re the right fit?
B. It also seems to indicate that the need to intelligently score leads is now more critical than ever to prevent waste. 18-24 months is a long time, and no sales rep in their right mind is going to try and keep a prospect “on the hook” for a year-and-a-half. If they’re not buying now, stop wasting effort, the thought process goes, and use a long-term lead nurturing strategy . . . .
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, […]
“Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools and yesterday’s concepts.” -Marshall McLuhan
New Year’s Eve, 2010, will mark 30-year anniversary of the passing away of someone you’ve probably never heard of, a scholar by the name of Marshall McLuhan.
Many academics consider McLuhan, a Canadian who taught the majority of his life at the University of Toronto, to be one of the foremost pioneers in the study of media and communications, and the effects of media technologies on the social and cultural makeup of society.
The concept of “the global village”—an always-on, totally connected society, linked by electricity and wires to move information—was first posited by Marshall McLuhan in 1961, 30+ years before the public Internet and World Wide Web would make his vision a reality . . . .
If by some serendipitous circumstance you were allowed to hang out at the InsideSales.com offices for day, you’d discover pretty quickly that we are passionate about the power of immediate lead response.
We help businesses get better sales intelligence, and effectively manage their sales and lead generation processes in a lot of ways. But we focus a lot of our efforts on immediate lead response for one simple reason:
It’s the #1 way to increase Web-generated leads’ contact and qualifying rates–and thus lead to more productive sales pipelines.
And the other reason we’re so zealous about it is that 65-70% of the business world frankly, well, sucks at it. (see our research with Dr. James Oldroyd, SKKU, Dreamforce ’08, Omniture Summit, and AA-ISP for proof).
In summary:
The aggregate data between the Dreamforce ’08, Dreamforce ’10, Omniture Summit, and AA-ISP Boston research studies shows that approximately 40 percent of all companies NEVER RESPOND A SINGLE TIME to a Web generated lead of any kind. Not “Follows up slowly and ineffectively.” Simply doesn’t do it at all.
Average response time for a first contact attempt OF ANY KIND (phone or email) for a Web-generated lead: 43 hours (when the MIT research shows […]
As the founder of top-level consultancy High-Yield Methods in Minneapolis, Dick Lee has worked as a sales and customer process guru for over three decades, doing VP- and C-level consulting with companies like Boeing, 3M, and Microsoft.
In an outstanding article entitled “Sales Lead Programs—Another Inconvenient Truth,” Dick tears apart bad lead management practices with a metaphorical sledgehammer, but in the process brings up a just-as-critical side effect: “We now have and have had innumerable clients dying to hire good, experienced salespeople, but the well has about run dry.”
Sales people get paid a lot of money, and perform “hard, essential work,” but in Dick’s mind are often treated as “Joy Riders. Parasites. Necessary Evils.” Sales is the “corporate whipping boy,” he states, because “anyone having that much fun deserves to be punished, eh?” If the well is running dry, it’s because professional sales reps are “treated so badly that most up-and-coming business professionals won’t put up with those levels of disrespect . . . . “
Sales Metrics – Bridge Group’s SaaS Sales Survey Shows Orgs Take Their Own Medicine
4 October 2010 — Ken Krogue
1 Comment
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 […]
If you’ve followed my blog or my company for any length of time, it’s likely you’ve heard me say that immediate response to sales leads is one of the crucial factors for creating new sales prospects (and that a good sales automation tool is about the only way to do it consistently and effectively).
But a few months ago, sales productivity guru Paul Castain had some interesting advice in a blog post entitled, “For Those About to Rock, Show Up First!”
If you haven’t read the article, you might think that the title follows along with what I’m espousing—that we need to “show up first,” be the first person on the scene, be faster than the competition, etc.
In reality the point of Paul’s article wasn’t about being the first person to show up—the point was to show up at all.
Too often we barricade ourselves into a place where we know we can be comfortable.
Comfortable and barely productive.
We tell ourselves stories about how “These prospects aren’t really going anywhere,” “That cold call approach will never work,” or “They’ve never heard of us, why would they listen to me?”
We come up with every reason not to put […]
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 . . . .
Though published back in 2002, author John Warrilow’s book Drilling For Gold presents a fascinating take on the tried and true (some might say cliché) “80/20″ rule of sales and marketing—namely, that when it comes to small business selling, the rule should closer to 98/2.
Using a chart that breaks down accounts and prospects into a series of “buckets,” he demonstrates a process for evaluating the current profit levels of customers and prospects, and each account’s potential growth.
While Warrilow states that good qualitative research should back up the basic “Profit/Potential” profile, generally speaking the trick is to expend the highest levels of time, energy, and money not with the top 20 percent, but the top 2 percent of clients and prospects—the ones who are currently highly profitable, and have a high potential to remain so.
