Successful salespeople are very goal driven determined to achieve their distant star and beyond. Further defining the personality and deep within, the successful salesperson does soul searching to understand their motivating forces and then prioritizes which to accomplish first. This becomes a forever commitment to education to do one’s best. And the competitive salesperson strives to be the best.

When unusual ideas are presented, this type is not quick to dismiss but instead possesses an open mindset to consider possibilities. The attitude is, anything is possible, with the right plan in place. Intuition is never ignored as the sixth sense is rarely wrong.

Positive thought is a common thread among the successful. Belief in forthcoming success is very strong. But note, the determined sales professional will not attempt just any project. A distinguishing factor is the intended goal will be in alignment with priorities and desires. The goal itself becomes a motivating force to implement all that is required to achieve and implement correctly. Doubt never enters the picture. Instead, the goal is held in mind almost 24 hours per day until accomplished.

Should positive thought be a struggle, as negativity is quite common, here is an exercise you might try: When speaking or thinking a negative thought, take note of it and do your best to turn it into a positive. Record your results over an entire quarter as you practice turning the negative into positive thought. Most likely, you will see greatly improved results in your accomplishments. Once on this path, it becomes stimulating to do even more.

Obstacles are regarded as learning points and game challengers to see if one will make it to the finish line as a champion. While most salespeople prefer getting the sale rapidly, the more successful will pace themselves while balancing their commitment to education, as well as trial and error. Both of these components will leapfrog the student over those who are too anxious to put in the required time.

Perseverance is the keyword for turning goals into achievable actions.

Rather than talking much, the better salespeople question, listen and clarify for keen understanding. An open dialogue with clientele encourages long lasting relationships for improved business. The more successful walk away from grumpy potential clients to seek the compatible in order to find joy in the work about to be started.

When new opportunities in the forms of joint venture partnership or unusual requests for services are presented, the successful circle back to priorities and commitments already in place. The reasoning is two-fold:

First, the successful are determined to ensure excellence in service is always delivered. This almost guarantees the possibility of repeat business, referrals and testimonials. Second, the consistency seen builds a formidable personal brand.

This personality type is typically of high energy and uses the words Thank You prolifically and offers to be available when questions arise. In the end, both sides of the table are appreciative.

Incorporating these traits will put you on the wave of the Smooth Sale!

Author:

Elinor Stutz, CEO of Smooth Sale, (800) 704-1499; just released “INSPIRED Business A New View for Building Business and Communities”. Other titles: “Nice Girls DO Get the Sale: Relationship Building That Gets Results”, and “HIRED! How to Use Sales Techniques to Sell Yourself On Interviews“. Elinor was designated as a “Top 25 Sales Influencer for 2012.”

In fact, the latest research from the CEB suggests that the typical B2B buying-decision process is 57% complete before a salesperson is even actively involved. By that time, the prospect is a long way down the path of scoping their needs, establishing their priorities, defining their requirements, and short-listing potential solutions.

Today’s Typical B2B Buyer’s Journey

Faced with this irresistible shift of information power towards the buyer, B2B sales and marketing organisations are having to get smart and work together to improve the quality of engagement with the prospect. If there ever was a compelling catalyst to drive sales and marketing alignment, this is it. Put simply, if you’re not aligned, you’re being left behind.

It’s no wonder that this is a hot topic for many CEOs, and it’s a theme I’ll be addressing in my contribution to the Sales 2.0 Conference in London on 3rd June on “Making the Connection between the Buyer’s Journey, Your Pipeline and Your Revenue Goals” – but I’d like to give you a flavour of my presentation in this article.

Getting ahead of the curve

My first recommendation is not to treat the “57% complete” statistic as something that is inevitable, or over which you have no influence. Whilst the number is directionally correct, it’s only an average, and some of the best B2B sales and marketing organisations and sales people are clearly managing to successfully influence the prospect’s decision-making unit from a much earlier stage in the buying cycle.

These organisations are doing it by having something interesting, relevant and different to say, and by being seen and heard in the forums the prospect is using to conduct their early research. They are doing it by positioning themselves as experts in the issue that needs to be addressed, and in the most effective way in which the problem can be solved.

Customer-relevant content: the sizzle not the steak

Above all, they are doing it by creating a stream of compelling, customer-relevant content that they are making available through as many as possible of the trusted sources that their prospects rely on for their information. They are seeking to answer the questions “why change” and “why now” before they move on to answer the question “why us?”

But they are not always sharing the whole story: they are cleverly holding some of the detail back in a way that encourages the prospect to reach out to them earlier in their decision-making process than they would otherwise have done. To use a phrase that was popular in a bygone era of marketing, they are “giving them the sizzle but holding back the steak”.

Smarter marketing leads to smarter sales conversations

And it’s not just about smarter marketing: top sales teams have become smarter about the nature of the sales conversation. They are building on the issues raised by marketing with sharp insights and compelling anecdotes that are encouraging the prospect to think differently about the issues they are facing and how they can best be addressed. And they are showing how their approach is different before going on to prove how it is better.

Is the effort worthwhile? The figures seem compelling. Aberdeen Group recently reported that highly aligned organisations grew revenues more than 30% faster than their laggard peers, and that marketing generated more than three times as much pipeline value.

Get aligned – or get left behind

This is all very impressive, but it can only be built on solid foundations. Sales and marketing first have to develop a consensus around what an ideal prospect looks like, what issues are likely to cause the prospect to take action, and what the typical stages in the prospect’s buying decision process are, and how they might best be supported.

But most of all, they need to share common goals and work together to systematically identify and eliminate any obstacles that might derail the buying process. Are your sales and marketing teams doing all that they could to achieve this?

Note: An edited version of this blog was originally published on the Sales 2.0 Conference website at http://www.sales20conf.com/blog/connect-to-the-buyers-journey-and-reach-your-revenue-goals/

1. Foster communication. Constant transparency is essential. During regular meetings, create an agenda item for an open forum that facilitates discussion between both departments. For example, sales could give marketing feedback on how qualified their leads are, and marketing could give sales feedback on how to build their personal brand. In any leadership situation, the wheels turn smoothly when everyone feels that their opinion has been heard.
2. Align to the customer. Both sales and marketing should work through a customer persona process, targeting who the ideal customer is in terms of the business’s size and revenue and who the ideal buyer is in terms of the person’s title and decision-making ability. Both departments do work with the customer, even if they’re rubbing up against the customer in different ways. Christine Crandell on Forbes wrote that sales and marketing alignment begins with the customer. In fact, she wrote that customers prioritize relationship and trust over product and price. By aligning to the customer’s own priorities, both teams will remember that it’s not about them – their MQLs or their W-2– it’s about the customer.
3. Use the same tools. Both departments should utilize the same sales enablement tools, such as Salesforce or HubSpot, which shouldn’t be too complex. Sales reps should want to input the data that marketing needs, and to do that they need to see the marketing process. Once they do, they’ll understand how it will affect them, and they’ll do what they need to do to improve the system. In the same vein, marketing should help sales by delivering messaging, and if appropriate, presentations that are highly targeted to the buyer. Every buyer is a bit different; it makes a significant difference if you are “speaking their language”. The one size fits all message is a thing of the past, the more specific the better.
4. Work together. Sirius Decisions uses the term “small-net fishing,” to describe a process where salespeople focus on developing their pipeline through their own prospecting efforts. While this approach is primarily driven by the sales rep, it still requires marketing support. Marketing should help facilitate the process by helping the rep focus on new lead development with defined targeting criteria, touch sequences and messaging. With this approach both marketing and sales work together; the sales reps own a subset of the corporate campaign, while the marketing team focuses on penetrating the broad target market.  Additionally, marketing should ensure the data from the top of the funnel to the bottom is accurate. Sales should also work with marketing by working to generate leads through developing their own personal brand on social media sites such as LinkedIn. Marketing can also sit in on sales calls, and sales can watch a social media campaign, so that everyone is part of and understands the entire process. When both teams have the same succinct focus on target markets and have precise communication between them, revenue and harmony flows.
5. Agree on a philosophy. As well as having the knowledge of who your ideal customer is, both sales and marketing should subscribe to the same business philosophy, which should focus on the customer. The last thing we would want is the marketing team subscribing to a “customer-centric” philosophy and the sales team subscribing to a “sales-centric” philosophy; that’s just counter-productive. Instead, have your teams read a book and talk about a chapter a week, constantly learning together. It might also be a good idea for both sales and marketing to come up with a written service-level agreement that determines an end goal for both departments to work towards and puts in place a plan to attain that goal. As long as both sales and marketing are subscribing to the same philosophy, alignment will be easier.
6. Share accountability. To stay away from the blame game, have both sales and marketing share accountability. Make sure their is time allotted in each meeting for constructive feedback, to ensure both the marketing and sales teams are constantly improving.  A compensation plan that ties marketing into sales, where the focus is on the quality, not quantity, of the sales is also very helpful.  Marketing reps may have a comp plan based on the conversion rate of MQLs to SQLs, and SQL’s to stage one forecast. Sales reps may have a comp plan based on the conversion rate of their own “Small Net Fishing” campaign as well as their reaching their quota.

Hope this helps foster community between marketing and sales in your business!

Think Of Lead Generation Like The Great Wall Of China – A Great Failure

Despite its name, it is actually a commonly known fact that the Great Wall of China never actually served its purpose. It was scaled by northern invaders several times and it took several dynasties before construction reached to what currently stands today. That can sound like your lead generation campaign if, despite all your efforts and the resources you pooled, it failed to deliver in the end.

Does that mean future lead generation campaigns have no hope? Should you stop the one before you waste any more? Going back to the Great Wall, there were still merits to its construction despite the failure to fulfill its initial purpose. The whole thing was still an impressive feat of engineering for its time. Its construction may have been a dark side but not even that coupling with its failure was enough to deny the legacy it left to today’s Chinese. You can use that same reasoning to keep going forward with your lead generation campaign and ultimately lead to its redemption.

• Focus on the impressive – Suppose you are looking for qualified sales leads but you decide to use traditional B2B marketing methods like telemarketing and business conventions along with online lead generation. A combination like that has become increasingly popular of late but that does not make this lead generation strategy less potential to connect with more prospects. Utilizing different channels is a capacity that should be honed, not discarded!

• Make use of other purposes – Despite the failure of any main objective, your lead generation campaign has still benefited from the engagement with prospects and you now also know what it takes to get them qualified. Many in the B2B software industry think in a similar way and not just stick to the achievements of singular functions. The most sophisticated systems focus on streamlining multiple business tasks.

• Fill the holes – And of course, you cannot forget the simple act of knowing what not to repeat again. If something has clearly been a significant factor behind a failed software lead generation campaign, deal with it as a top priority. If insanity is repeating the same lead generation error expecting different results, learn to do things differently all the time! (It is certainly what many emperors did with the Great Wall).

The above measures are just some of the many tried-and-true responses to great mistakes. It is not the end of the world, much less the end of your lead generation campaign. Focus on what lets you generate business software leads, like erp software leads, in a big way. Make use of what other information acquired in your lead generation campaign. Avoid making the same error twice!

Job satisfaction and complacency don’t have to be one in the same. Salespeople who are continually challenged in the right way can be happy in their careers, work to continually improve their sales, expand their territory, increase their margins, retain their clients, and so on…

Read on for some things to keep in mind to keep your workplace a place where striving to meet and exceed goals becomes part of the culture.

Hiring

Asking the right questions can be helpful in the interview process. This can help you be sure you’re not hiring people without enough motivation to help your business grow. It can also help you avoid hiring people simply looking to leech from your company without giving much in return.

Looking for people who believe in ongoing improvement, continuous education, and who look forward to the future will help you staff your company well.

Of course you don’t want someone so keen on continuous change that they won’t stay long enough for you to reap the return on investment after investing in them but you do want people who aren’t looking to get in on the bottom of the corporate ladder and stay there forever. Be selective in your hiring process.

Ongoing Human Resources Management

• Will you manage your sales force in a way that will help them continually move forward?
• Will you offer new sales tools and enough resources to help your staff boost their success?
• Will you regularly review goals and objectives and manage your team in a way that demonstrates that complacency is not an option?
• Are you prepared to hold people accountable when they don’t meet their goals?
• Are you prepared to incent and reward your team so that they are motivated and empowered to go beyond the call of duty?

Ongoing Development

Career development can help a team continually evolve and can help you continually grow as a business. Setting up sales training and ongoing career development for your staff — even your senior staff — will help. Don’t forget to keep your own skills sharp, too. Don’t let your own complacency at being at the top of the ladder result in your becoming a dinosaur! Whether you’re a leader of a large or a smaller organization, never stop fine tuning and expanding your own skills.

The Right Lingo

Some people can feel trapped by their title. An account manager might begin to feel they are to react to the clients that are given to them rather than to continually hunt for new prospects, too. The way you talk around team members will help them understand the way your company thinks and will help them continue forward fluidly in their careers.

Relationship management, business development, and not only goals and objectives but stretch goals and rewards for exceeding expectations will help. A company mindset that’s helpful and that steps outside of job descriptions creates a growth-oriented culture.

Is there a career path for junior sales people? Are your staff titles the sorts of titles that make them look at their position as a career with growth potential?

Leading by Example

Although you might be talking the talk, make sure you talk the talk, too. The best leaders are inspiring to their team members.

Recruiting and keeping the best talent will help you continually appeal to your target customer. It’s something that requires ongoing effort but is also something that can pay off, too.

What a concept! Like all desirable outcomes that sound streamlined and utterly rational, getting there isn’t so easy. We’ve got a new white paper for you, “Best Practices for Sales Enablement,” that does in fact address the specifics of how to get from here (could do better) to there (all buttoned up). The highlights:

1. Hire the right people

Modern sales enablement strategies and disciplines require professionals who are more flexible and teamwork-oriented than in decades past. The paper defines three steps to hiring salespeople who are able and prepared to help their customers dream and achieve.

2. Observe, evaluate, and understand your reps

Approaching the sales enablement process with an open mind and inclusive attitude will help avoid common pitfalls, such as focusing too much on process automation, or forcing the entire sales staff to follow overly rigid scripts.

• Sales reps with strong sales skills may be less inclined to get to know a product in intimate detail because they work by getting to know the essential details and then applying their stronger selling ability.
• Sales reps with stronger inclinations toward the technical side of a product will be inclined to spend more time getting to know those little details which, hopefully, will offset their, perhaps, weaker sales skills.

3. Provide continual product, competition, and buyer training

Make it easy for people to understand changes in the competitive landscape – as they occur. You can deliver competitive intelligence, product briefs, buyer profiles and other training resources in digestible portions, without taking sales reps off the phones or out of the field.

Create talk tracks that will help reps have the right conversations, with the right vocabulary for each buyer. Just as reps must understand the problems faced by buyers and the capabilities they seek, they must also learn the keywords and terminology their buyers use. For example, the controller of a small logging company speaks a different language than the office manager of a large corporate law firm. Sales enablement should identify buyer personae, along both vertical and organizational lines, and help reps understand how to communicate clearly with those buyers.

4. Use your own crowd to crowdsource sales enablement tools

Observe what your top sales performers do and what materials they use at each stage in the buying decision process. Uncover the stories and anecdotes they use to help make their point. Encourage them to share the tools and tips that have worked best for them. Refine the ideas as necessary and share them with the rest of the sales organization.

5. Align content and tools to the buying cycle

Sales must become more astute at communicating with buyers using the communications means that best enables buyers along their buyer journey. Maybe that’s email; maybe it’s social media. Whatever it may be (and it’s likely more than one channel), enable sales with content that they don’t need to rework to fit the communication channel.

6. Be vigilant over time to ward off fragmentation and drift

As organizations grow, expand, seek new audiences, merge, and spin off, disconnections and inconsistencies crop up. Products have different names in different regions. Pricing tables seem arbitrary because the CFOs who tried to reconcile them left after the merger was complete. Territories are drawn along gerrymandered lines. The sales enablement process can help you discover and weed out many of these anomalies and vestigial artifacts.

7. Integrate sales enablement across the business

Effective sales enablement not only brings the sales department’s reps, managers and leadership to the same table, but includes voices and input from the entire organization.

In the end, sales enablement is first and foremost about attitude. It’s a team approach to sales that gives everyone in the organization a support role in aligning resources to make the right sale to the right customer. Marketing plays a key role, ensuring that the right information, tools, and subject matter experts can be delivered in a way that is relevant to each unique selling situation.

Read more in the new white paper, “Best Practices for Sales Enablement,”

Got a super strategy for sales enablement? How about for other departments? We’d love to hear it!

But the latest research from CSO insights suggest that 3 out of 4 companies are taking the wrong approach to sales coaching – an approach that is clearly holding back both individual rep performance and overall revenue achievement.

Three approaches to coaching

In the research that formed the basis for their recently-published 2013 Sales Management Optimization report, CSO Insights asked sales leaders to characterise their approach to sales coaching into one of three categories:

• The sales coaching process is left to the individual sales manager (ad-hoc)
• The company has an informal sales coaching process most managers use
• The company has a formal sales coaching process managers are expected to use

You can see the breakdown (with simplified labels) in the chart below. The most common response was that the sales coaching process was left to the individual sales manager. The next largest group had an informal process. But only a quarter had established a formal, company-wide process.

In other words, formalised coaching is the exception, rather than the rule. But it gets really interesting when you compare actual sales rep performance and overall quota achievement across the three sales coaching philosophies:

As you can see, there is a pretty dramatic difference between companies that permitted an ad-hoc approach to coaching versus those that insisted on a formal process. And even those companies that had an informal framework could do even better if they evolved it into a formalised, well-documented system.

High-growth-potential organisations can derive the greatest benefits

Actually, in the companies that I most frequently work with – expansion-stage companies that are typically seeking to grow revenues at a significant rate, and are as a result expanding their sales organisations rapidly – the gap between the informal and formal approaches appears from my experience to be far wider (by the way, this is my conclusion, and not contained in the CSO Insights report).

In fact, the ability to formally and systematically induct and coach new hires in a structured manner that reflects best sales practice often seems to make the difference between a successful hire and failing to get the best from recent recruits.

That’s not to say that coaching isn’t invaluable across the whole sales organisation – I have seen it proven to my complete satisfaction that you can, in fact, teach (or coach) old dogs to perform new tricks – but it’s particularly critical when sales people need to follow a rapid learning curve.

Train the trainers – and coach the coaches

The idea of “training the trainer” is well understood in most organisations – but I believe that many organisations also have a crying need for a formal “coach the coaches” programme.  I’ve been spending a fair amount of time with clients developing coaching programmes over the past few months, and here’s what I’ve learned:

• CSO Insights are absolutely right: formalised coaching programmes are dramatically more effective than ad-hoc approaches
• Sales managers need to follow a structured framework if they are to support their sales people most effectively
• These principles are best enshrined in a formal “coaches guide” that captures best practices, offers diagnostics, and includes coaching routines and role plays
• The coaching process must be continuously tested and evolved to reflect the latest learning and best practices
• Time must be set aside for coaching on an on-going basis, and managers must be measured on the amount of time spent on coaching

This might sound like an intimidating amount of work, but it isn’t. Even a simple, basic structure can deliver tangible benefits. Having shared diagnostics (so managers know where they should be spending their time, and on what), and shared best-practice coaching frameworks (so managers know how to maximise the learning from coaching opportunities) can be incredibly productive.

This is just as well, because as I’ve suggested, it’s the smaller, faster growing companies that in my experience can gain the greatest benefit from a formal sales coaching programme. Oh, and one final point: I’d strongly advise that any investment in formalised sales training be backed up by an equivalent commitment to on-going coaching and reinforcement. If you don’t, you’re almost certainly wasting most or all of your training investment.

I’d be happy to share some of the lessons learned. Get in touch if you’d like to find out more about how to establish an effective, formal sales coaching programme in your organisation.

If you are growing frustrated with your current efforts to improve your staff’s cold calling effectiveness, consider taking a different approach – consider helping your team adopt a new attitude toward the practice, and help them understand that knowing what not to do is just as important as knowing what to do during a call.

Cold calling training tip #1: DO help your team adopt a different attitude

One of the first steps in cold calling training is to do an attitude-check with your team. Is your team out to sell something? Are they trying to establish rapport by talking about last night’s game or build some sort of commonality? If so, they are setting themselves up for a feeling of rejection and failure if their call ends quickly without any lead generation.

Instead of approaching cold calling as a sales call – simply to sell a product, take a different approach. Coach your team that they are professionals, and their whole goal is to build a relationship. A professional who calls a colleague to find out about business problems and inefficiencies is a much different relationship than someone simply calling to sell something. If you begin with the attitude that you are there to listen, to learn, and then to offer solutions, you are no longer just a sales person making a call – you are a collaborator, a problem-solver.

Cold calling training tip #2: DO set up your call effectively in the first 30 seconds

Cold calling success can be made or broken in the first 30 seconds of a call. The way your sales representatives open the call, say who they are, and identify a potential problem that the prospect could be facing, can either lead to a longer conversation, or a very short conversation that ends with “no thank you.” When guiding your reps on cold calling training, make sure they know that they first have to understand the problem they are trying to solve for the prospect, and communicate this understanding at the very outset of the call. Your prospects are busy, and they don’t have time to chit-chat or spend extra time on calls for products they don’t understand the benefit of. Therefore, it’s imperative to lay the groundwork within the first 30 seconds of the call. If the prospect is struggling with the problem you mention – and they understand that your solution can help make this problem disappear – you have just begun a conversation based on solutions and collaboration, rather than selling.

Cold calling training tip #3: DON’T make the call all about your firm and your product

A second, and related point in effective cold calling training, is to make sure that your reps are not making the point of the call all about your company and your product. Again, the point of the call is to build a relationship and collaborate on solutions, so if your reps open the call talking about your latest innovation or technology, you’ve just lost the customer’s interest. Instead of focusing on what your company can do, focus more on what your prospect is needing to hear – what is the benefit of your product? Focus on the end solution instead of the tool. You can weave into the conversation the name of your product or technology, after you’ve captured their attention, but the conversation is not straight sales for what you have – it’s instead a conversation about what they’re needing (which happens to be the product you’re connected with). See the difference?

Cold Calling Training Tip #4: DON’T make the call un-prepared

Before the call even begins, make sure your sales reps have done their homework. In addition to researching the prospect and industry, an equally important step is to anticipate the possible objections from the prospect and write down the answers to these objections. Based on your particular industry, and past track record with cold calls, it should be fairly straightforward to come up with a list of objections and your responses to the objections. The main lesson here is to not be caught off-guard, but rather, to re-direct the conversation confidently and back toward your solution.

****

Cold calling and training your team to be effective cold calling lead generators need not be a dreaded task, if you keep in mind that above all, you are building a relationship and offering a solution. If you approach your cold calling training with this approach, your sales results will positively follow.

What I’ve found as a common theme is that without a proper process Marketing and Sales either lose track of these contacts or inundate them with too much marketing material.  I also find that often when these nurtured accounts fall into a “black hole” it’s due to employee turnover, or a change of territories and accounts.  And when they are over-marketed to, I find it’s mostly due to the fact that these contacts land into a general “marketing queue” so in turn they will receive all marketing correspondence.  A strong inside sales nurturing process would overcome these challenges.

From my experience working within Salesforce.com, we found an efficient way to capture useful information from our nurtured accounts and put it to use for our Inside Sales Reps.  Essentially, we’re identifying 4 key pieces of information from these types of prospects:

1. What technology/service are they using now?
2. When will they be reevaluating?
3. Who is the decision maker to reconnect with?
4. What is the title of that person?

Capturing this information allows us to pull insightful reports for analysis, segment strategic lists for follow up or create customized email campaigns around this bucket of contacts.

On top of creating a personal follow up task within the CRM for the inside sales rep, we mark the completed date for when we gathered this critical account information so we’ll have an understanding for when follow up needs to take place.

In the event that the account changes ownership, these critical account intelligence fields will not be lost and will carry over to any new record owners.  What it comes down to is developing a process that includes effectively using your CRM to work for your organization.  I’ve seen many salespeople not log critical information regarding their accounts and in the long run it will be detrimental to sales numbers because either that person could leave, and their knowledge on the account leaves with them, or it changes hands and the new owner starts from square one trying to gather the same information that had already been attained months before.  Measures have to be put in place to ensure your sales team consistently logs the required data.

For an inside sales person one of the biggest challenges is that they are starting at square one at the beginning of each month with a fresh goal to hit.  Having an effective lead nurturing process helps ensure you don’t miss out on a opportunities that have been appropriately nurtured and are now ready to move to the next step.  What key elements of an inside sales lead nurturing process do you have in place that have been effective for you?

I cannot easily summarize the 2.5 days in 600 words, but I can give you a couple of core ideas.

I’ve been a Mike Bosworth fan since I read Customer-Centric Selling in January 2005, but I had not read his prior work, “Solution Selling” published nearly 30 years ago, based on his experiences at Xerox and involvement in the SPIN project. Mike was one of the most successful reps in Xerox history at the time and gained much experience in selling, managing and training salespeople before most of us started our sales careers.

While reading his latest book, co-authored with Ben Zoldan, entitled, “What Great Salespeople Do”, I could feel myself nodding as I could either see myself in the stories, or agreed with his ideas and training philosophy.

One of Mike’s startling revelations in the opening of the training course is that after nearly 30 years of sales training in both Solution Selling and Customer-Centric Selling (and most of the other mainstream sales methodologies), not much has changed for the bottom 80% of the sales force, who sell 20% of the revenue.

The outcome of these training courses was that the best salespeople got better from using the techniques and processes, but the core group typically stopped using the techniques within a month or two of the training and reverted to prior behavior. Mike points out that in fact the old 80/20 rule is no longer true in fact it’s now 13% of salespeople selling 87% of the business. (Sales Benchmark Index)

Why?

The answer to this question is not masterful use of the CRM system; adherence to the 9-box questioning model, or the number of connects per day or the ability to dazzle with presentation and demonstration skills. These are table stakes in the old process oriented, logical “left-brain” training paradigm for sales professionals.
It turns out that great salespeople are able to forge strong emotional connections with buyers, either through a natural or learned ability to quickly create rapport, listen empathically and connect emotionally with buyers, typically through story.

Top salespeople are able to connect emotionally with buyers quickly, which the Franklin-Covey organization refers to as “speed of trust”. This is one of the most critical skills in today’s buyer-seller relationship, where the salesperson’s “at-bat” opportunities are fewer and meeting duration is shorter.

Status-quo thinking with sales leaders is that right-brained empathy and rapport skills can’t be taught. “It’s too touchy-feely for our hard-bitten sales team” We are looking for sales leaders who are willing to challenge that belief, who understand that these skills are probably the most important and most underdeveloped in the core group.

Storytelling is as old as mankind and no one ever turns down an opportunity to hear a good story. When you tell a story and expose your vulnerability in the process, you invoke a reciprocal emotion in the listener and create an opportunity to tend (draw out) the other-person’s story and this is what builds trust. This is not a story about how great you are as a salesperson; how big your company is, or how wonderful your products are. These are the stories most salespeople are telling today to buyers who haven’t asked to hear them – most of the time.

Truly listening to the other person, reflecting their words and emotions, (without thinking about what you are going to say next, interrupting, mentally counting the commission, or trying to qualify in or out), is a skill and it can be learned and mastered with deliberate practice.

Mike used an expression “premature elaboration” to describe how salespeople – who are experts in their field and familiar with the buyer situation are too keen to tell the buyer what they need.

Neil Rackham created an expression that still holds true today as a result of his research in the SPIN project.

EXPERTISE + ENTHUSIASM = ENEMY.

The Story Arc

We created and learned to tell three stories in the workshop;

1. Who Ive helped,
2. Who I am,
3. Who I represent,

All stories we created follow a similar story arc and we used this story format to tend other peoples stories. On the evening of the 2nd day, our homework assignment was to call someone we love and ask them a question and tend their story using the skills we had learned in class and the story arc to help tend the conversation. I called my 17 year old daughter, Olivia and we had a conversation for about 40 minutes, unlike any we had had before.

We are looking for early adopters in sales leadership willing to pilot a Story Seekers Storytelling workshop for struggling reps who they would hire again (competent + character).

Ask any group of marketing communications managers, exhibits managers or even marketing managers and less than 40%, overall, know the quotas for the sales channel they represent. What world are they living in?

How can these people create demand, create a marketing plan, and create demand generation programs in a vacuum? They spend money, but against what metric? Unfortunately, it’s done every day. Go figure! The result is crocodile tears from Marketing when programs and people are chopped because nobody can answer the question.

Some people think marketers serve at the demand of potential customers. But what about the sales forecast? Don’t marketers ultimately serve at the demand of the people paying their wages, the company they work for, and the sales forecast? Of course they do. One of Marketing’s responsibilities is to create sufficient demand so salespeople can make forecast, the company can pay everyone’s wages, and the stockholders are pleased. That is why marketers are hired.

Marketing people are hired as gunslingers to bring in demand.

They’re hired as gunslingers to bring in results, not readership studies and golden statues from associations that award creativity and imagination, but avoid results.

Accountability and results measurement can be done only through sales lead management. Managing the response is ultimately as important as creating it. When inquiries are created, only half the job is done. Inquiries must be managed, and managing inquiries is a process; a systems-based process with a multi-step route, which if properly thought out and precisely executed will bring huge predictable rewards.

Has anybody solved the lead management riddle and created the “process?” I am not asking about firms and software that solve only part of the riddle. Thousands of companies say they are in the lead management business, but with few exceptions they’re found to be managing thin slices of the process. Managing the whole process requires systems thinking, with a system customized for each company.

CRM is a part. Marketing automation is a part. Qualification in its many forms is a part. Salespeople are a part. Marketing is a part. But to be fully productive, these parts have to come together into a whole “system.” Only a knowledgeable marketing manager can pull together the “parts” to create a workable sales lead management system. Is that you?

Personalizing Software Leads Requires Only Simple Responses

Well first off, the back of your mind is correct to a certain point. You cannot really have the time to really know everything from just your software leads. You have other business to concern yourself with. Still, it stops being right when it comes to the simple things that just make these software leads a little more unique and one good example are a set of responses they give you.

• Age of the business – Just like people, businesses have their own birthdays. Just because such information does not seem informative enough for B2B leads does not mean it will not add some value to your own response to them. Think of your qualified sales leads in the same way social media thinks of its users. Are not users reminded of significant dates like anniversaries?

• Industry of the business – While more general than business age, responding based on industry still makes it easier for you to organize your software leads. For example, marketing HR software to people in the construction business could imply something that is a little more in tune with the culture of their work place.

• Name of the decision maker – If you are selling HR software, then you would likely be targeting people who find your products most relevant. Do not be so formal that you are afraid to mention them by name. If your HR software leads should not be generalized then you should distinguish yourself by letting each prospect know that you are addressing them individually (even in just a small way).

You know you could even make the more unique simply by putting up all the above information together. As implied before, these might not be big indicators compared to information on explicit needs, budget, and available time. Yet they can complement the value of those indicators (and the value of your software leads as a whole) by personalizing your response to them in your software lead generation strategy.

I took the old blade with me to the hardware store to make sure I replaced it with a compatible blade. The first thing the salesperson asked was if I wanted to have the blade sharpened as it was perfectly good, just dull from exposure, wear and tear.

I was reminded of an important lesson from the Seven Habits taught by the late Stephen Covey. I had not used the Power Saw for a few years and I had expected it to perform to the same specification as the day I purchased it.

Last week I was talking with a business owner who was lamenting the poor quality of people applying for sales roles. If he offered a big guarantee he would get hundreds of applicants. If the sales person had to rely on their own skill set to earn commissions he might get one or two applicants. He made the bold claim there were only about 500 professional sales people in Australia who earned more than $250,000 and most never made more than their base salary.

Brian Tracy, in his program ‘The Psychology of Selling’, relates a recent study which outlines the sad fact less than 5% of full time sales people have ever attended a sales training course, read a book about selling, or listened to a tape or CD by their own choice.

Selling, the powerhouse of every business, is the most profitable and rewarding career. In fact, there is so much money to be made in a selling career failure to believe high achievement is possible is often the most significant limiting factor in a sales career.

The basic laws of business and selling are simple, well known and the foundation of all excellent training programs – it is just that so few people follow them! Here I have taken six core principals. If you can focus on just ONE and improve in that area you can dramatically improve your results

The more your client talks, the more they like you

I regularly hear comments like ‘He must be a good sales person – he can talk the leg off an iron stove’ or ‘John is a great sales person – but he just talks too much’.

I have never heard ‘Jill is such a nice person – but she just listens too much’.

People want to be heard and understood before hearing about us. To build a business and sales you need to be listening all the time. Developing your skills of asking the right questions at the right times is fundamental to listening – and listening is the foundation of success.

Professional sales people never make a sales call

Professional sales people make calls to be of service to their client. When you make calls for any other reason the client will know immediately and treat you like a sales person rather than the ‘consultant’ or ‘business advisor’ you may have built your reputation on.

If you’re making a sales call to meet quota, earn bigger commissions, move the “special of the month” or any other reason not arising from your clients needs you need to check your integrity.

One of the main reasons selling has a negative public perception is too many sales people sell for their own reasons, not their customers’ reasons.

A qualified prospect has the need, receives the value, has authority and power to buy.

Sales Professionals are born the same way as Doctors, Lawyers and other Professionals

Brian Tracy tells us that the average sales person lasts less than 90 days in this profession. As with every profession, highly skilled sales professionals have studied and learned their trade.

Top sales professionals pay for and attend training sessions every year. They read regularly and research their profession to be the very best all the time. Research reveals that regardless of age, race, gender or experience, a novice salesman with effective sales training can become as successful as his veteran counterpart.

The number one question is ‘What will it do for me?’

Before you pick up the telephone to talk to your client ask yourself the question ‘If I was the person I am calling what is it that the service or product being sold will impact on my world?’ If the definition of selling could be boiled down to a single sentence or question, this would be it.

Constantly put yourself in your prospects shoes by asking this question. It will help you focus on their needs and the appropriate corresponding benefits.

People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

Your client must believe that you will do everything possible that’s in his or her interest. Without this trust, all the facts, figures and discounts don’t mean anything.

Once you gain the prospect’s trust, however, you become much more than a supplier — you become a trusted business advisor, strategic partner not easily replaced, despite your competitors’ lower price, supposed faster delivery and so on.

People buy emotionally then justify logically

Contrary to what many salespeople believe, this reality actually works in your favour if you’ve done a thorough job of helping your prospect buy.

Your prospect, once they have engaged with you emotionally, find it hard to say ‘no’ as they are saying ‘no’ to someone they like and care for. Once engaged emotionally they will work hard to justify a purchase.

Discuss benefits related to your prospect ONLY

There are more than 1 million 8mm drill bits sold annually, but people don’t want 8mm drill bits. They want 8mm holes. Show your prospects the benefits of your product or service. If they want am 8mm hole discuss 8mm holes, not the speed of the drill.

Sell value, not price

I was shopping for clothes for my next sales training trip. I commented to my wife that there were a lot of very ugly clothes around. This got me thinking. At some stage these clothes will go on special and at some point, when the price has been reduced enough, someone will buy them. This is a Loose-Loose situation as there is no margin for the store and the buyer will wear the item only once.

Selling the value of your services or product to address business issues will win all the time.

Today’s question and actions

When was the last time you did anything about developing your business or sales skills? Here are two things you can do immediately to start sharpening your saw.

• Load up motivational, business and sales training audio files on you iPhone or in-car CD player. Listen to these every time you jump into the car – even if it is for just a few minutes.
• Plan to attend business building or sales skills programs on a regular basis. There are many good one or two hour skill based programs run by training companies which cost nothing more than a few minutes listening to their sales pitch
• When you find a good program take the plunge and make the investment in yourself

Selling and business building skills, the backbone of the economy, need to be learned, honed and sharpened just like any other professional skill. You are a valuable and important person and you deserve the best chance of success.

Have a great week!

I just returned from SAP’s SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando, where MY feet are tired from logging over 50,000 steps across the show floor; my Fitbit says that is 25 miles of walking! After any event like SAPPHIRE NOW, every small business or B2B sales executive should have a social selling follow-up strategy. Every event attendee can immediately impact their post-event business by using social media to follow-up and engage with contacts. Using social selling tactics as part of the follow-up mix will increase the Return On Event (ROE).

Here are ways to increase your Return On Event, whether you are returning from SAPPHIRE NOW or your small business trade event.

Social Selling: 5 Ways To Use Social Media To Continue The Conversation After The Event

• Read The Twitter And Blog Comments To Understand The Bigger Picture. Go to Topsy.com, Hootsuite or search.Twitter.com, type on your event hashtag (e.g., #SAPPHIRENOW) and read the comments. The Twitter commentary will check the good, the bad and the ugly customer sentiment. You can use this conversation to respond directly, prepare for follow-up calls or to help you collect your thoughts for a post-event blog post.

• Articulate Your Key Take-aways Or Summarize Your Collective Discussions In A Blog Post. Jupiter Research reports that 21% of decisions makers use blogs to help decide on a product. Another 19% use blogs to refine product and service choices. Use your blogging skills (don’t have them? click here or here) to summarize one key take-away or collection of key points from the event, such as SAP’s SAPPHIRE NOW. A blog is a great way to help you articulate your point of view, so you can point to it while you focus on the relationship building and moving the sales process along. It’s also a great source of content for your Tweeting, LinkedIn status updates and direct customer follow-up.

• Follow Customers On Twitter, LinkedIn & Blogs To Build Social Relationships. Now is the time to reach out with a LinkedIn request, follow them on Twitter (about 60% will follow you back) and follow their blog. Start to build the relationship while you are fresh in their mind. Start off your relationship building by adding a personal note to your LinkedIn invite request, sending an @ message to your new connection or leaving a comment on their blog!

• Collect The Best Content Created From The Event To Pass On To Your Social Network. Use blogs, videos, pictures and any other relevant assets from the event to pass on to your customers and new contacts. And, if you collected your own videos or pictures, upload them to your Instagram feed with the event hashtag (e.g., #SAPPHIRENOW) or pass them on to your company’s social media channel managers so they can upload them to the relevant platforms.

• Use Twitter And LinkedIn To Engage With Everyone You Met. Your post-event selling goal is to keep your new and established contacts engaged with your personal brand, even if they are not ready to buy. Social media is a great way to un-intrusively nurture customers. MarketingSherpa reports that only 5-15% of inquiries are not ready to speak to sales, so you need to develop a nurturing contact approach to keep in touch with these warm prospects. Using Twitter to follow, and likely being followed back, is a great way to stay stop of mind with relevant and informative content with your prospects. Why not keep everyone you have met, even if they are not a perfect fit, engaged with content that you deliver with social media? And, use LinkedIn to update your status and Group messages with event observations and content links to keep that network engaged!

Do you have a social selling success story about your post-event follow-up? If so, please share below. Or, contact me directly at MarketingThink.com. You can also Tweet me @GerryMoran.

If you just returned from your event, invest an hour now to increase your ROE (Return On Event). Your hour of time will increase your social selling skills and help set your future relationships and sales!

Salespeople – focus on the future, too

Today we are living and selling in a time of “compressed history.” Changes driven by the global market and advances in manufacturing technologies make the past a bad predictor of the future. As a result, competitive advantages that once lasted a long time now disappear quickly. In sales if you want to prosper thinking about the future matters.

We recently came across Mark McNeilly’s article in Fast Company – How the Most Successful Brands take a Peek into the Future. He points out “things are changing too fast to predict the future … if a person or firm comes to you saying they can predict the future you should turn and run as fast you can.”

However, McNeilly goes on to sharethere are ways to know and take advantage of the long-term macro trends that are happening. If you are in Sales this idea is relevant, important, and too often neglected

To focus these notions about futurism to the every day world of Sales, let’s examine it from the perspective of customer value. There are important defining characteristics of the notion of customer value. A fundamental one is the idea of Value Migration – that is, what constitutes value tends to shift over time driven by a set of trends that impact that market.

Whether you analyze it from the perspective of the individual, company, or an entire industry, the expectations about value are dynamic. History is rich with examples of companies that had very viable value propositions but failed to accurately judge the shift in the market’s value expectations, subsequently ending up with a business model and a product portfolio that were no longer responsive to their customer base.

So how does one get a handle on Value Migration in their market? Two requirements come to mind.

Early Warning. First, every day large B2B companies have hundreds of really smart salespeople interacting with really smart customers. We suggest that the sales team could be an early warning mechanism for value migration.

What if each sales person took just a little time to discuss with customers topics like: “What market trends will have the most impact on your future success?” or “What will be more important to you tomorrow than it is today?” or “What are the obstacles that are preventing you from doing what you need to do to adapt to the changes in your business?” or “As you look at the shifts in your market what could we do to help?”

Would you ask every customer contact – of course not? But all you need is a few exceptional people and every sales person has several. Plus we would suggest that such discussions might not only help you understand the future but also help differentiate you from today’s competition.

Sales Training. The second piece of the puzzle is getting Sales Training into the game. Salespeople cannot be expected to effectively and efficiently be an early warning mechanism for Value Migration without sales training. One cannot simply read The Futurist magazine every other month.

Now since we have been in the sales training business a long time, we realize that training salespeople to be an early warning mechanism for Value Migration, that is becoming futurist, is not on the short list of training priorities. As a matter of fact most often it doesn’t even make the radar screen.

But what if it did? What if you trained your sales team to not only uncover and develop existing needs but to also discuss where the customer wants to be in the future, how they want to get there, and how you might help? First of all – that type of sales training is feasible. Second, if you did do it, you might not have to worry about predicting the future because you could invent it.

If you found this post helpful, you might want to join the conversation and subscribe to the Sales Training Connection.

New research from CSO Insights suggests that the day may have come for sales. In their annual Sales Performance Optimization study of over 1500 companies across multiple industries, CSO found that the accuracy of sales forecasting fell to a near all-time low of 46.5%. Or as John Wanamaker might say; “Half of your sales efforts are wasted, you just don’t know which half. “

And since the forecast, defined in the study as near-term (30, 60 and 90 day), is an output of the sales pipeline, one could also conclude that half (or more) of the pipeline is “junk.”

With the wide spread adoption and utilization of CRM (84% of the firms surveyed), marketing automation, and analytical forecasting tools, the question is how can this be?

Here are some thoughts on why this might be happening, and five tips to help you improve your forecast.

Reasons for poor forecasting:

• Impurities in the System – let’s go after the big one first. “Garbage in, garbage out”…as they say. There’s a laundry list of things to look for — from reps putting leads in the system right before they close, to not updating opportunity consistently, and leaving in dead leads too long.
• Sales Optimism – yes, the economy seems to be recovering but it may not be moving at the “speed of sales.” Sales folks are an optimistic bunch; they want to believe things are better than they may be in reality. For example, the average length of the sales cycle. In a report earlier this year by BtoB Magazine, 43% of marketers reported that the sales cycle had increased over the last 3 years. Which is consistent with the CSO Insights report where 42% of Chief Sales Officers stated that the sales cycle had lengthened, in particular with new acquisitions.
• Incentives & Goals – take a look at how reps are being incented, and/or their sales goals. You may find the reason why reps leave opportunities in the pipeline too long, and/or are over optimistic with their forecast. Pressure to build and maintain pipeline can sometimes cause counter productive behaviors.
• Gut Feel – even if the troops in the trenches are putting in accurate and timely data, the generals may change it to fit the political environment and/or their own personal bias.
• Changing Buyer Behavior – recent research has shown that the buyer’s journey, and the typical sales process are not aligned. Buyers frequently start and stop the journey, or will cycle at a stage, and even move backward in the process. CRM systems are typically designed in a linear approach, progressing from a lead to a close. It’s an internal view, and increasingly out of alignment with buyers’ preferences.

How to improve:

1. Active Pipeline Management – The pipeline and forecast will never be 100% accurate. That said, you should have a feel for how far off it is, and what is needed to improve. For example, do you have an inspection process to keep the pipeline current? If so, consider doing it more frequently. Move quarterly reviews to monthly. Also, if everyone is responsible for updating the pipeline, then no one is responsible. Consolidate the “maintenance and hygiene” of the pipeline to one person. Others may be responsible for providing updates, but one person needs to police the system.
2. Discount Probability and Value – conduct a post-mortem on past forecasts over last year or two. Assess the difference between forecasted and actual results. Create discounted probabilities based on that delta for: lead movement (from stage to stage), and lead value. If implemented, evaluate the accuracy of your “pre-set” discounts. It should help bring forecasts more in-line with reality and ground “sales optimism” in a bit of reality.
3. Govern the Process – to improve the accuracy of “output”, focus on implementing and managing a standard process. Accenture’s Connecting the Dots on Sales Performance found inconsistencies among reps in using their company’s defined process and methodologies to selling. A quarter of Chief Sales Officers surveyed stated that sales reps used their sales methodologies 50% of the time, 31% said it was used 75% of the time.
4. Leverage Marketing – close the feedback loop with marketing to improve the quality of leads from campaigns and activities. In a report on Sales & Marketing Alignment by the Aberdeen Group, marketing accounted for 47% of the sales forecasted pipeline in the Top 20% of companies studied, compared to only 5% of laggard organizations (bottom 20%).
5. Utilize Business Intelligence Tools – high penetration rates of CRM may equate to high visibility, but doesn’t automatically mean that it provides the best insight. Despite high adoption rates of performance dashboard, few companies are using business intelligence or analytics tools according to the Aberdeen Group report on sales forecasting. However, the report found that 44% of the highest performing sales organizations were using predictive analytics to reduce “gut feel” in the forecast.

Of all the options, perhaps the best lever for impacting accuracy is the rep. As Ashish Vazirani, a Principal in the Hi-Tech practice of the sales consultancy, ZS Associates says; “A sales person needs to be coached, or apprenticed on how to discern and input the right information for accurate forecasting. Technology can make us lazy and reliant on the tools to do the thinking, we need to emphasize the importance coaching plays in keeping the garbage out of the system. ”

Helping the troops become better soldiers through coaching should help improve the accuracy of the forecast. As well as, implementing the tips mentioned above. But you may still find that half of the pipeline is wasted, but hopefully, unlike Mr. Wanamaker, you’ll understand which half.

Sheena S. Iyengar, a professor at the Columbia Business School, spoke about choice and one of her field experiments in a TEDTalk (Nov 2011 TEDTalk, “How to make choosing easier”). While a graduate student, Sheena conducted a field experiment at an upscale grocery store in California. During random times throughout the day, consumers were presented with one of 2 versions of a tasting booth: a selection of 6 flavored jams, or a selection of 24 flavored jams. You might think that having more choices would yield better results, but the results were surprising.

Although more consumers stopped to taste samples at the 24-flavor booth, consumers with limited choices were 6 times more likely to make a purchase. When faced with too many choices, “people chose not to choose” (Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice).

How can we apply the lessons from Sheena Iyengar’s studies on simplifying decision-making and choices? The recommendations in her TEDTalk are just as relevant to developing sales engagement processes and tools.

It’s tempting to provide your sales teams with all of the available information about prospects – firmographic attributes, finances, market share, leadership team, etc. A better option is to engage with your sales organization to find out what they look for in prospects and deliver insights accordingly. What are the key 3-5 metrics they use to begin the engagement process? What information is critical versus ‘nice to have’?

Where possible, apply visualization techniques to enable your sales teams to quickly assess options to move the sales engagement process forward. Use of color and varying sizes and shapes are preferable to tables or lists to highlight which prospects need attention, new areas of opportunity, or product fit.

Sales processes generally become more complex as prospects move through the buying cycle. In the initial phases, discussions tend to take place at a higher level. As decisions are made, the discussions go deeper and can become more technical. Supporting your sales teams by disclosing information only as it is needed prevents both your sales people and your prospects from facing choices before they are ready to make them. Tools that allow your team to drill down from high-level to lower-level insights present complexity within a simple framework.

Too often, we don’t spend enough time simplifying the decisions our prospects are being asked to make at the different stages in the sales process. This can then result in complexity in which it is easier for prospects to delay decisions than to make the choices that result in mutually beneficial solutions. By incorporating these recommendations into your sales enablement tools and processes, you can reduce the likelihood of stalling the sales process.

When Competitor Is Goliath But Your Lead Generation Campaign Is No David

At this point, you might try and cheer yourself up with stories like David and Goliath. Even if the reality of the situation looks grim, you could at least boost the morale of your lead generation strategies right? Although, perhaps the comparison to David may be far more realistic than you may think.

Look back to the story, in fact, take away any religious element to it. What did little David do that took down his Philistine foe? He used smooth stones. These stones were perfect for sniping down the head of the giant. Why can you not do the same with your lead generation campaign? Use something small to win! Do you really think your qualified IT leads have all been dominated by the shadow of your giant competitor?

• Look for those who prefer something less – If your lead generation campaign aims high but finds your competitor has already pursued your prospects, what harm is there in aiming lower? Do not look down on those who loosen their lead generation standards if it means getting a foothold in a larger market that your competitor has become too expensive for.

• Look faster – If it looks like you just cannot cater to a lower-budget market either, then you simply have to speed up generation web hosting leads, telecommunication leads, technology consulting leads and other IT leads. Sometimes the biggest disadvantage of being large is that you now move sluggishly due to increased size. Move quickly to find prospects who have yet to make their first purchase so that your lead generation strategy keeps you one step ahead!

• Look to support – If you insist that your competitor lacks something, then your lead generation strategy should position your company as the one that can fill in that gap! You do not always have to directly oppose their products but might even do better to offer additional support for them! This means you both have an equal share of the same market!

Your lead generation campaign does not need to feel dwarfed when that size gives you an unforeseen advantage! These days you do not generate sales leads by size but how you use that size to its best!

Different Lead Generation Tools Are Like Different Shapes Of Clay

Think of lead generation like a pile of Play-Doh. You can reshape into something as thin as a snake or something round and fat like a ball. Either way, the mass itself remains the same. Another comparison you can actually make is also software. Your software company may claim to do things differently from the rest of the market but does that necessarily mean you are better enough for qualified software leads?

The answer is: Not really. Just because your software is, say open source, does not mean it has features that can rival that of more expensive applications. (Most often, it has been quite the opposite). Put this together with lead generation and you will now see a problem that many business software vendors continue to ignore. Being different really does not guarantee that you are better.

Change though is necessary to avoid certain mistakes. It is also not an option to continue the madness of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. So from that, here is how your lead generation process can experience real improvement without the reckless attitude towards trying something different:

• Check mass – Going back to the example with Play-Doh, the mass can change if you actually put in more clay. Your lead generation strategy needs more mass if you really want an improvement. Try and integrate more than one form of lead generation. Multi-channel marketing may sound like an expensive, heavy-loaded approach but real improvement neither happens over night nor comes without effort.
• Handle greater mass – Having a large ball of clay can make it too big or tough to mold. Your sales lead generation arsenal should not let its increased size become an equally heavy burden on your strategy. Learn how to shape it as grows. The costs of improvement do not necessarily have to be paid in cash but in the investment of time towards learning more lead generation lessons.

• Keep reshaping – Handling a growing mass of lead generation tactics and tools should not just be towards one-shape. You have to make it more flexible (just like clay). Being able to take different shapes can still be a plus for your lead generation campaign provided you know how to fit it for your target market.

So again, if you lack the increasing mass and fail to handle that increase, your lead generation campaign will just stick to being different, not really just improved. See when it is still stuck that way, you cannot really expect to generate more medical software leads, manufacturing management software leads, or any software sales leads than you already are.

Why Is It Risky For Lead Generation?

Limiting your market in any shape or form comes with its risk. It is only advantageous when you do not want too many financial sales leads beyond the capacity of your financial company to serve. That does not mean there is no opposite extreme. Your lead generation campaign should not only qualify prospects who will demand a decent amount of work. Going the extra mile for a lot less actually has its benefits.

• They may be the only prospects left – No matter how confused it will leave you, there are ways that your target market will end up consider a competitor who offers less than you. They have a lot of lead generation tricks up their sleeves too. What is more important is that you need to learn how to settle with less when that happens. A prospect who will yield a smaller sale is still better than no prospects and no sale.

• They could really use your help – Making your services more affordable can be the answer to the prayers of many prospects who would otherwise not give you a second glance because you seemed so expensive. Never forget that financial lead generation is supposed to find people who are simply in need of your help. There is nothing wrong with making yourself good in the eyes of a higher-paying market but a willingness to help is still needed.

• Your work will be appreciated in other ways – Surely you cannot be so shallow as to consider sales and revenue as the only indicator of a successful lead generation campaign? A prospect might show appreciation in the form of growth. That growth might in turn transform your small prospect into the very high-paying one you have been looking for! See how you can use your lead generation tools to discover hidden potential in small clients.

To summarize, better a prospect who is just starting out and needs a lot of work than having nobody to work with and nobody paying for it (not to mention your current lead generation campaign). If you want limits, stick only to the limits of how much you need to work. There are times when the only important thing is to use lead generation for finding prospects who need help.

Understand The Impact Of Change Before Qualifying Sales Leads

If you cannot grasp the changes you will be making for a prospect, they might regret ever encountering your business. Fortunately, the process of acquiring information for business leads, like cloud computing leads or IT consulting leads can be your starting point in understanding how prospects operate on a daily basis. And once you know that, you can foresee just what needs to change and how they can get used to it.

• Is the change permanent or temporary? – Before they are considered qualified IT leads, details on a prospect require a mixed prediction of both permanent and temporary changes. Acquiring your IT products could take some form of transition process for instance. Your sales leads should also include time restrictions to understand how long that transition period is allowed to last.

• What are you disrupting exactly? – You should not be afraid of asking more out of your sales leads. Identifying what actual portion of your prospect’s regular routine requires changing allows you to teach them faster and that in turn lets them learn faster. And the faster they learn, the faster they can adapt when the IT sales leads turn into closed deals and implementation projects.
• What new habits need to be adapted first? – Habits are critical when using information technology. Everything from passwords to daily access should be outlined and arranged in terms of priority. Your sales leads though have the information necessary to help prospects adapt the ones they need to learn first and foremost.

Never forge that here is more to your sales leads than budget figures and free time. Both of those details are tied to whatever changes you need your prospect to adjust to. The next time you start and IT lead generation campaign, know that you are out to change everyone’s daily routine.

You may be asking yourself, what exactly is inside sales and why all the hoopla?

I’ll start off by explaining what inside sales isn’t: it’s not telemarketing. Those scripted phone calls are far from what inside sales professionals do. Referring to inside sales as telemarketing is like referring to Cirque du Soleil as Vaudeville. And it’s not outside sales – that traditional door-to-door kind of fieldwork is fading fast. So what is it?

In a word, it’s booming.

In a recent Forbes article, a study found inside sales grew at a rate 15 times higher than outside sales. In fact, inside sales is now the fastest growing industry in all of sales and marketing. Ken Krogue wrote the Forbes article and is the President and Cofounder of InsideSales.com. He put it best when he eloquently described the movement as, “… where the growth is and the cost isn’t.”

Now, on to the definition: whether you call it remote sales, virtual sales, or inside sales, it’s all the same industry. We, along with our network of professional salespeople, do our work remotely or virtually. It’s a sophisticated, multi-step process, and we use technology to our advantage. Online conferencing tools like WebEx, GoToMeeting, and Skype are now credited with defining the inside sales industry. Inside sales people are more fluent in using social media in the sales process and tend to get more things done faster and more cost effectively than their field sales counterparts.

That’s why more and more outside sales reps can be found spending up to half their workday selling from the friendly confines of their office exactly like their inside sales counterparts. The inside sales process works so well because buyers prefer it, too.

But here’s my favorite part about inside sales: it gives you the skills and experience you need to be successful in almost any position you encounter throughout your career. You’ll find out how to skillfully navigate the corporate labyrinth, steering clear of political land minds and red tape. You’ll learn to understand a client’s objection to a situation. Is it misunderstanding or misinterpretation? Training and experience will teach you to recognize an objection, work through it, then – most importantly – move that conversation to the next step. How many times will you use that process in your life?

Where will you end up?

I truly believe that inside sales is a launch pad for career success. Many people feel that sales offers the fastest track to becoming a CEO, and according to Forbes, about 20 percent of today’s Fortune 500 CEOs started out in sales and marketing. Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce.com, is one example of someone who started in inside sales. On a more personal level, I’ve had an Ivy League educated CEO of a venture capital funded enterprise software company tell me that he wishes he had a year or two of inside sales experience. (I quickly pointed out the irony because I wish I had a year or two of experience running a VC-funded enterprise software company!)

The point is that it’s difficult to lead a company without knowing how to sell your vision, your ideas, and your product.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statics, one in nine Americans works in sales. In To Sell Is Human, New York Times Bestselling author Daniel Pink argues “so do the other eight,” which reminds me of a recruiting event I attended at George Mason University. I was lucky enough to have lunch with their recently retired president, Alan G. Merten. It turns out that even in a higher education setting, Merten felt that a large part of his job involved sales. He explained that he was always lobbying political bigwigs, fundraising with potential donors, and attracting – then retaining – top-ranking professors.

Punctuating our brief time together, he shared with me how earlier in his career as a professor, his students would often seek his advice on which job opportunity to pursue. His answer was always the same: take the job that puts you closest to the customer.

Quality inside sales experience offers a strong foundation for most any career.

Find out how to make inside sales the launch pad to your career with a position and training at memoryBlue.

Combine strengths and talent for success

A strength is a strong attribute or an inherent asset. When a person uses their strengths, they have the ability to consistently provide a seamless performance in a specific activity. Your talents are innate and unique to you, and leveraging them can improve performance. Developing your natural talents to focus into strengths will take hard work. However, the combination of your strengths, skills, knowledge, practice, and natural talents will culminate in a greater all-around performance.

To be more successful in sales, we must put ourselves in challenging situations…

I strive to put myself in positions where I can continuously utilize and develop my personal strengths. I spent six years in higher education, receiving a bachelor’s in international business and a master’s in communication studies. During my undergraduate years, I focused on my strengths and what I was good at in order to be successful with exams and my presentations. While in graduate school, I further honed and leveraged those same strengths to be more effective in teaching freshmen. Each day in front of a classroom of 25 students, I would focus on my strengths in presentation techniques and communication styles to be a more effective teacher.

During the summers of my collegiate years, I sold books door-to-door in North Carolina and Tennessee for the Varsity Internship Program. My four summers of working 14-hour days for three consecutive months helped develop my talents and forced me to put my strengths into action. On those days when I was stuck outside in the summer heat and nobody would let me inside to make a presentation, I focused on positivity, which is one of my strengths. It was imperative to forget the past house where the man cursed me out and his dog chased me down the sidewalk. The next house offered another opportunity, but in order to be successful I needed a strong mental attitude and a positive approach. Because I persevered (another strength) and just kept selling, I became one of the top salespeople in the Varsity Internship Program, putting myself through school with a commission-only job.

Understand what kind of environment makes you thrive

Everyone is different. And finding the work environment in which you can grow is critical to focusing your strengths and increasing sales performance. Exceptional training, hands-on leadership, and the company culture at memoryBlue provide me with yet another opportunity to again use my talents to bring out my strengths. One of my strengths is being competitive and memoryBlue gives numerous opportunities for employees to compete individually and their coworkers. Company-wide competitions that reward the top performers with gift cards, iPads, happy hours, and tickets to professional sporting events are extremely motivating for people like me who live for competition. The training and hands-on leadership at memoryBlue provide an atmosphere for employees to hone their strengths and realize their potential.

Well-chosen opportunities have pushed me toward closing the gap between my actual performance and my true potential. Understand how you can bring your talents and strengths together to increase your performance.

Find out how you can focus on your strengths to boost your sales performance.

But all too often, I watch as a top-notch sales person is lured to a new position by that lucrative dangling carrot and then in three months he or she is wondering what went wrong. There is no way to guarantee that you will be happy at a new job, but there are some things you can do during the interview process to greatly increase your chances of landing at a company that is a financial, personal and career winner for you.

How Sales Friendly is the Company?

As a sales professional, you need to make sure the hiring company actually values their sales people. Many companies recognize the importance of the sales force and will orient the entire company around giving their sales professionals all the advantages they need to succeed.

On the other hand, I’ve seen executives who view sales people as a “necessary evil.” The degree of success you enjoy as a sales professional will hinge on how invested the company is in the sales force.

Here is a very telling question you can ask to get a feeling about the sales mindset at your prospective employer: What percentage of your salespeople hit their quota last year? If you hear 80 or 90 percent, dig deeper. A recent survey by The Bridge Group showed that only 68 percent of sales people actually made their quotas in 2012. If the hiring manager only brings up one successful person it could mean he or she is trotting out a “show pony,” someone who is consistently used as the example of success. If the show pony can crush quota – so the thinking goes – why can’t you?

Make sure that the show pony’s production isn’t an outlier and that the rest of the staff isn’t struggling.

Sales Resources Can Make All the Difference

In addition to the overall sales mindset, the resources provided to a sales person can make or break his or her success with a company. These resources will not only make your daily work easier, but also maximize your earning potential. Remember: the strongest reps are not hacking it on their own. They have access to the best resources, the best managers, and the best executives.

What to ask:

• Do sales reps at this company receive inbound leads? And if so, how many?
• Describe the sales engineering resources that are available when a salesperson needs help.
• What does the sales training program look like? Is it a program focused exclusively on features, benefits, and competitive industry information, or does it include specific techniques and tactics on how to sell their solution more effectively?
• Is sales training structured as an event (two days or two weeks at the beginning of the job) or is it ongoing?
• What type of marketing resources does the company provide?
• Does the company utilize a marketing automation solution? Which one?

Good Managers Make for Good Jobs

A popular Gallup study found that the reason people leave their jobs has a lot to do with the quality of the manager and little to do with the quality of the company. Those having trouble with their manager in an otherwise prestigious company were likely to leave their jobs. Conversely, those working for a great manager were more likely to stay with their company, even if it lacked the prestige of its big-name counterparts. Who will you be working for? If your conversations have all been with anyone other than your next potential direct manager, ask to meet him or her.

Due Diligence is a Two-Way Street

For most jobs worth having, hiring managers will thoroughly scrutinize you as a candidate. If you’re qualified and motivated, they’ll be simultaneously digging through your past while recruiting you for a job they hope you’ll take.

Many candidates will jump at the offer if it meets their financial expectations, but the smart ones will make sure that the company fits their personal and career needs, too. Use the Internet to research the company, its financials, and social media properties. Ask friends (and friends of friends) who have connections there about the atmosphere and culture.

Timing and Tact are Critical

Timing and tact are critical to getting everything addressed. Don’t fire off a list of pointed questions in the first 10 minutes of your interview. As a general rule, ask the tougher questions when you’re at the tail end of the interview process or after you receive a verbal offer and know that you’re the candidate. That is also the time to politely suggest to your potential manager that you’re thrilled at the prospect but that you’d feel more comfortable accepting if you had a few references from him or her. (You can also ask for references when the hiring manager asks for your references.) The names you want from your potential manager are people who formerly worked for him or her, either at this company or another. Think about it this way, you’re considering an investment of your most precious asset – your time – so you owe it to yourself to perform a little due diligence.

Also take this opportunity to ask other direct questions about sales resources and the company’s attitude towards sales people.

Questions to ask could include:

• How long do sales people stay in their positions at this company, on average? (Industry research from Topgrading for Sales: World-Class Methods to Interview, Hire, and Coach Top Sales Representatives suggests that only 40 percent of new hires will be in the same role a year from their start date.)
• What are the reasons that people have typically left their positions at this company? Did they receive promotions? Did they leave for better jobs? Or were they not happy or not a “fit”?
• What are the biggest initiatives for the company in the next six to 12 months and how does this position contribute to those initiatives?

Far too many sales professionals have been the victim of being oversold an opportunity. A post in Harvard Business Review reports that one of the biggest mistakes people make is not doing enough research about their potential employer. Avoid the same plight by asking a few more questions and making sure that all the resources are in place for you to succeed before you accept that offer.

Now that you’ve shed the lead gen label and established yourself in an inside sales closing role, you face your next hurdle: climbing into an outside sales role. Moving from inside sales to outside sales comes with increased freedom and earning potential, as well as increased responsibility. Hiring managers may be skeptical of your ability to move outside the office and handle your own territory as a field sales professional.

So how do you overcome inside sales typecasting?

You have to prove you can run your own show.

First, demonstrate that you can close by becoming a top performing inside rep with the numbers to back it up. ‘Nuff said.

Look for opportunities to meet face-to-face with your top prospects.

If you’re fortunate enough to have a local territory, make the case to your sales manager to go meet with your largest forecasted opportunity. If you handle a remote territory, lobby sales management for a quarterly barnstorming trip into your territory where you meet with some of your strongest prospects. Some sales managers will deny your request, citing the costs associated with business travel. On a couple of occasions, I’ve seen determined inside sales reps overcome sales management resistance by offering to personally fund the trip.

Closing these deals shortly after the trip will provide your manager with compelling evidence that you’re ready to elevate into a field role.

Be like Ike.

Dwight Eisenhower once said, “Plans are nothing; planning is everything.” Showcase your planning skills and present your manager with the most detailed territory plan he or she has ever seen. Make friends with someone that has managed a territory successfully, either inside or outside your company, and solicit ideas on what to include in that plan.

The good news is that once you crack into a field role, you’re basically behind the velvet rope. Assemble a highlight reel of sales accomplishments in the field and you’re typically set to stay in the field—the top rung of the high tech sales career ladder—for as long as you want to remain an individual contributor to the sales team.

The challenge is that most lead gen and inside sales reps are gunning for a limited number of field roles.

Economics teaches us that where there is scarcity, there is value. Elevating into a field role is difficult; however, it’s lucrative for those that do.