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.
Looking Backwards and Forwards From 2011: Predictive Sales Intelligence Will Redefine CRM and the Sales Process
29 December 2010 — Ken Krogue
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One of the problems we all have with technology is that we soon forget that what is now commonplace was once rare or non-existent.
New technologies penetrate the market so rapidly that total market transformations can occur in the space of under three years (and some might say even less).
It’s barely been a decade since the Y2K scare and the Dot Com crash. Widespread broadband Internet access hasn’t been a reality since 2003 (and some could even argue since 2005). Smart phones, text messaging, YouTube, SmugMug and Flickr, convergence of mobile audio and telecom, “apps” getting added to the mainstream lexicon . . . all recent developments. 4G network access right through your telecom provider? Check. Streaming HD? Check.
Many businesses and universities barely got their WIRED infrastructures in place by the early 2000s. Now being forced to “plug in” to a network with an actual wire seems almost archaic.
But the real point of all of this is that we have to be careful not to look past the mark with our old sales and marketing standby, CRM.
Hosted CRM seemed revolutionary 10 years ago. Now it’s simply considered the norm for applications of its type. Fluid, mobile, […]
“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 you’re not on a call with a prospect or client RIGHT NOW, put down the phone, and stop what you’re doing.
And get off Facebook and quit fiddling with your iPhone too.
Pop Quiz, hotshot.
Here’s the rules: Without looking at your CRM system, think of your highest-probability deal in the pipeline right now, and answer these questions.
1. Name the specific title of the last person at the account you spoke with on the phone, and the department they work for.
2. Give the name and title of the person that the Person in Question #1 directly reports to.
3. Give the name and title of one of the people that reports to Person #1.
4. Give the name and title of the person that’s going to write the check/drop the corporate credit card/put the final signature on the PO when your prospective sale closes (if you’re lucky, the answer will be the same as Question #1).
5. When was the last time the Persons in Questions #1, 2, and 4 met […]
I recently bumped into a post by Escape Velocity’s Liz Strauss called “When Too Many Options Are None At All.”
Having “18 fishing poles in the water,” she suggests, leads to a lot of “unfocused work for little return . . . We spend all of our time running up and down the bank checking to see if something worked or whether we need to rebait the system.”
Wise words.
I’ve said it before: In today’s marketing world, narrow but deep, not broad but shallow wins the day. For most small- to mid-sized businesses, better sales performance means conquering one vertical or market at a time, rather than trying to “dip” into a dozen different markets at once.
At the same time, sometimes a net is better than a pole. We’ve discovered over the years that there’s frequently a lot of overlap between markets/verticals in terms of process and need. The terminologies are different, the products they sell are different, but the underlying need to help them connect with their clients and prospects is the same.
Thus, sometimes it’s okay to use a net to cover more than one overlapping vertical, instead of […]
Every semester for two years while teaching college composition, I used an excerpt from the movie script for Jerry Maguire to emphasize the key point of writer ethos.
Classically defined, ethos is the persona, or appearance, of a writer or orator to their audience—the words they chose, the emotional voice and tone, the sense of authority the speaker projects.
Parts of the film haven’t aged well since the mid-’90s, but there’s an essential essence that still resonates, a part of the human experience that it manages to capture. The movie at its heart wasn’t a story about sports, or even love; it was a story about a human being coming to realize the power of humility, self-actualization, and integrity.
The metaphor for the entire film becomes Jerry’s journey to Kinkos at 3:00 AM to make a hundred copies of a mission statement he had just written because he knew, KNEW that it was that damn important, and that he’d never be able to look himself in the mirror again if he didn’t do something about it.
The story rings true because we recognize something about the character in ourselves; the person who sees that the real path to success lies in everything that they aren’t.
And for some reason, even in the midst of the Digital Age Sales 2.0 world, we still haven’t gotten the message . . . .
Sales Qualification, U2, and Making the Prospect’s Pain Yours
29 September 2010 — Steve Watts
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“Like a rhythm unbroken, like drums in the night … like sweet soul music, like sunlight … “
Anyone who knows me well can attest to my rabid fanhood of the band U2.
Not so rabid that I travel halfway across the globe looking for rare European-release-only singles on vinyl, mind you—but a huge fan nonetheless. I own every studio album they’ve ever produced, three concert videos, worn out five different t-shirts, and have a CD I created myself that is nothing but five different versions of their song “Bad” (to say I like the song “Bad” by U2 is like saying Bostonians occasionally like to watch baseball).
So when I ran into this story on sales consulting firm Blaire Group’s Web site, I had to jump at the chance of incorporating the music of the Greatest Rock Band of All Time into a blog post about the sales industry . . . .
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 . . . .
Inside Sales Best Practices – The Web Marketing “Mass Disconnect” Continues
16 August 2010 — Ken Krogue
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Sales industry researchers CSOInsights stated recently that after a “flat” budget year in 2009, marketing budgets are increasing in 2010 and beyond, and that the top three items for additional budget allocations were:
Web site design/content (65% stated they were increasing budget allocation)
Email marketing (54%)
Web search optimization (51%)
Great news, right? Good to hear that the economy is picking up, and that smart companies are following current trends in effective Web lead generation.
So why did my “Massive Disconnect” alarm start going off almost immediately?
Here’s why: because indicators show that the majority of companies are terribly, horribly un-optimized to take advantage of the leads their Web marketing activities generate.
Even though the article states that 75% of sales organizations now use a CRM tool of some kind to track and monitor sales activities, MIT research shows that most of them still aren’t following good lead management practices to get the most from their increased marketing spend.
For example, how many of the companies surveyed are currently responding to their incoming, “hot” Web leads in 10 minutes or less? Because if […]
Sales 2.0, Hollywood, and the Death of the (Outside) Salesman
5 August 2010 — Steve Watts
3 Comments
Yesterday I talked a little bit about the coming Inside Sales revolution, and the impact it will ultimately have on sales organizations, sales culture, and the companies that rely on them.
And I realized that there’s a much larger comparison that can be made between Hollywood and the current sales industry.
Like many sales managers, Hollywood likes to think of itself as “innovative,” “pushing boundaries” and “creating something” where there wasn’t something there before.
And like many “old guard” sales managers, Hollywood is deluding itself . . . .
