A big pet peeve of salespeople is that they are given terrible leads by their marketing team. However, it may not be that the leads aren’t great, it may be how the salesperson is choosing to follow up on them. Think of it this way: Leads have a life cycle, like plants do. Just because a lead has peeked its head out of the ground doesn’t mean you can harvest it. Give your leads some TLC to see a maximum return on investment.
The buying cycle is changing
Buyers have already done their research before approaching a business. They could find a company through social media, search engines or other online channels. With the advent of content marketing, potential buyers could learn a lot about your company without ever having talked to you. You no longer need to seek out prospects. They’ll come to you. For this reason, prospective buyers are often at an early stage of the buying process during their first conversation with a sales rep.
A study from Marketing Sherpa Business-To-Business Demand Generation Summit found two different conclusions. Sales people need to:
1. Respond more quickly
2. Be more persistent.
Pounce quickly
Your leads are using the Internet to their advantage, and you should too. If you have data on when they were browsing, use it to make a call. The Marketing Sherpa study demonstrated that effective response times could be far shorter than most sales reps think. The likelihood of reaching a new sales lead drops 10 times if you wait longer than an hour after they first show interest. After an hour, the odds decrease another 6 times.
Be persistent
According to Michael Boyette for Marketo, about 45 percent of B2B leads end up buying. Out of 100 leads handed down by the marketing department, roughly 45 of them will be sales opportunities and about 15 of those will actually close.
The mistake is in thinking that the remaining 30 leads are dead. According to Boyette, they might just not be ripe enough. Depending on where they are in the buying cycle, they might just not be ready to commit. It doesn’t meant you should stop trying. Keep in touch with green leads. If you were gardening, you wouldn’t water plants once and then stop. If the apples were too green when you went out to pick them, it doesn’t mean they’re worthless – they just need some more time.
Nurture your leads
If potential customers aren’t quite ready to buy, they may not be ready to talk to a sales rep just yet. Keep building brand awareness for your products by sending them messages and content. Doing this can actually speed up the buyer’s timeline, making them likely to purchase more quickly. According to MarketingSherpa data cited by Marketo, lead nurturing can lead to a 45 percent increase in return on investment. Knowing your customers can help you determine when and how to approach leads when they are reaching fruition. Use customer research to determine what their buying cycle might look like before trying to close the deal.
By Ryan Warren
Sales and marketing departments often butt heads. Despite them working toward the same goal, the lack of communication between employees in these divisions can often lead to decreased efficiency.
3 things salespeople wish marketers knew
Sales can be a difficult job. If salespeople could put one thing on their holiday wish lists, it would probably be that marketers try to empathize with their position more. Instead of buying your sales colleagues ornaments or chocolates this year, try giving them something they really need: a little more understanding.
1. Selling is difficult
Salespeople love to sell, but it’s a hard job. Selling is personal, says best-selling author Seth Godin. When a salesperson makes a promise, he or she has to keep it. In a similar vein, selling is highly interpersonal. Sales is like a long conversation. The salesperson can’t always tell you when a prospect is ready to buy. Often, no one knows.
2. There’s a huge difference between inbound and cold calls
No one wants to be in a situation where they have to make a cold call. As Godin puts it, the marketer’s job is to prevent a cold call scenario from ever taking place. Given how rude people in the U.S. can be over the phone, it’s no surprise that salespeople would want to avoid cold calling. A recent poll from The Atlantic Monthly demonstrated just how foul-mouthed Americans tend to be on the phone, particularly Ohioans.
3. Salespeople enjoy a good conversation-
- especially with you, the marketer! Salespeople tend to learn from conversations with each other. In turn, marketers stand to learn a lot from the salespeople who are down in the trenches.
What’s on the wish list in your sales department?
It all boils down to one big wish, and that’s known as lead qualification, according to Jeff Kalter for Business 2 Community.
The job of marketers is to generate leads, which salespeople then follow up on. However, the marketer’s job shouldn’t be over as soon as he or she has generated some interest in a product or service. As Kalter notes, this situation is lose-lose. When marketers hand over too many leads, salespeople are only able to call a few of them. Panicked about wasting time, the salesperson then throws out the rest of the leads, confident he or she can save more time by just starting over.
Instead, marketers can work to alleviate the burden by talking to leads themselves.
Building the sales-marketing relationship
First of all, realize the two departments can learn together. Both sales and marketing can benefit from B2B market research. Market insights are invaluable to understanding the customer base. Both marketers and salespeople need this knowledge to maximize performance.
Schedule regular meetings to make sure sales and marketing are both in the loop. If you already have meetings, organize break-out sessions with small portions of each team, Brad Miller suggests in an article for Search Engine Watch. In these meetings, focus on the positives. Use the time to talk about which leads the marketing department provided actually led to a sale. It’s fun to talk about success, but it’s also beneficial. Figure out how both teams can reproduce these results.
The hyper-connected digital buyer has a greater knowledge base than ever before. Sales and marketing teams need to keep up. Consumers will probably have researched your product long before you ever speak with them. This is an area where marketers can really help out their sales teams.
The demo is a central part of the sales journey. The sale relies on this one moment of perfection - or does it? There’s actually more to a successful product demo than an hour-long presentation. A good demo should be conceived like a race. Anyone who took PE as a kid knows that you don’t just step onto the track and start running. There’s a lot of hard work that goes into preparing for that moment the gun goes off. The actual race is just a small part of a longer voyage. You can think of sales like a running race with three stages: the warm-up, the race itself, and the cool-down period. Nail all three stages and you’ll likely be on your way to forging a new client relationship.
Warming up
How you prepare for your sales demo may be even more important that the moment itself. When an athlete fails to stretch her muscles before the race, she doesn’t perform as well.
The big day
You’ve completed your training and warmed up, and you’ve got your strategy all planned. Now you’re standing at the starting block ready to go. Here are some tips to nailing the race:
Concentrate on getting your prospects excited about your product and maintain your energy all the way to the finish line.
Cooling down
The race is over, but if you don’t take careful steps now, your muscles are going to ache or risk damage. The sales journey is almost over.
Running the sales race can be exhausting, but if you envision the demo as a marathon with three stages - not just a sprint - you will have a more efficient journey.
Jordan Novet at VentureBeat, a Silicon based publisher that covers disruptive technologies, recently covered FirstRain in an article about how AppExchange partners like FirstRain are continuously providing value to salesforce.com customers, as they augment and innovative on the salesforce.com platform.
Writing about the need for analytics for sales users and some of the newer features that salesforce.com have implemented like Data.com’s Social Key, Novet writes:
“Those all sound like valuable features. But they haven’t stopped a company called FirstRain from drawing on a wide swath of online sources to provide the latest insights on a Salesforce user’s customers. Earlier this year FirstRain made it easier for Salesforce users to build applications that take advantage of the analytics technology, and in October there was word of “an expanded partnership” between the companies that more deeply embeds FirstRain information into Salesforce.
Take that as additional proof that Salesforce knows it’s wise to pull in data from the outside world and clean it up for clear presentation to sales and marketing people.”
Our customers validate this everyday and our continued success as a Salesforce Partner demonstrates that indeed Salesforce knows the value partners like FirstRain can bring to their customers.
Note: FirstRain has been a salesforce.com AppExchange partner since 2010 and FirstRain Customer Insights is available through the AppExchange.
By Ryan Warren, Vice President of Market Development
Understanding your customers has never been more important than it is today. Customers have greater access to information than ever before, which means they have more choices and it’s more challenging to build long-lasting loyalty. But companies need to do this to retain clients long term and generate more revenue. Being customer-focused has its benefits for you as well.
Customer-centricity has four main requirements: recognizing and understanding the differences between each of your customers, realizing the quantifiable value in each individual client, learning who your high-value clients are and how to retain them and utilizing customer data to create a highly personalized experience. Although every person in your organization is responsible for improving customer centricity, your sales representatives need to establish themselves as strategic consultants who play a vital role in your customers’ businesses.
Moving Past “Sales” to Be Seen as an Essential Partner
Sales professionals are usually extroverted and are great at closing deals. But what happens after the sale? Are your reps continuing to check in with clients, or is their contact information just sitting in your CRM? Customer-centric organizations know how to move past the strictly sales mentality to form lasting relationships with their clients. These reps aren’t just people who sell new products and services—they’re viewed as critical business partners who can advise and direct. But your team can’t accomplish this without actionable information.
“A successful salesperson knows how to strike a balance between the science of being a salesperson and the art to match their customer needs,” said Nima Niakan, FirstRain Fellow.
He added that FirstRain can help organizations embrace different methodologies, such as TAS and Challenger, to ensure any information that comes into the organization is analyzed and directed to the right sales rep—the most relevant information in the right platform, categorized under a particular selection based on the methodology. This allows the salesperson to quickly take action on this information.
“FirstRain ups the game for the sales rep and helps them be more efficient with that ‘science’ side of the equation,” Niakan stated.
Bridging the Gap Between Salespeople and Strategic Consultants
While actionable science may seem like a lofty goal to some, companies can’t become more customer-oriented without the right data. So how can salespeople transform their enterprise relationships into more of a partnership?
“By understanding their customers’ ecosystem, knowing what legislative, regulatory and macroeconomic issues are facing their customer and working backwards from there to see how to positions and time the deal to assure it matches the customer’s priorities,” Niakan said.
It can be challenging to establish this type of relationship with your customers, but it pays off in the long run. Being viewed as an essential consultant has benefits in the sales process after the relationship has been developed.
“Once the customer thinks of you as a key partner, now they will come to your first, before looking to a competitor of yours,” he added.
After this trusted status has been gained, the rep can leverage his or her knowledge of the customer to direct clients toward the company’s solutions. This allows customers to get where they want faster, more efficiently and have a desired impact by utilizing your products and solutions.
“The relationship will open a channel for the customer to ask for new features and products that put you in the lead and help you get more ingrained inside the customer’s organization,” Niakan stated.
By Ryan Warren, Vice President of Market Development
In sales, there’s been a lot of hype about the importance of knowing your customers. While it’s easy to talk about, the truth of the matter is companies are struggling to gain insights into their clients’ realities. Although there are a number of tools available to help make sense of all the disparate data sources out there, many sales teams are still getting bogged down with complexity, and that can negatively impact sales productivity. With disrupters entering the market more frequently, businesses need to know their customers and their customers’ market conditions. While this sounds like a daunting task, making processes simpler can improve revenue gains and customer relationships. When you focus on customers, it’s easier to design processes with them in mind.
Stop Using Complexity as an Excuse
New sales methodologies crop up all the time, and it’s pretty clear that some organizations are agile enough to adapt. Despite this, firms need to put customers first. But if companies hide behind the excuse of tricky market conditions, difficult-to-know customers or internal operations, a competitor can easily enter the market and snatch business away, according to an article by Dave Brock for Salesforce. Many organizations default to doing the things the same way they always have.
In fact, organizational complexity can make it harder to solve problems because sales teams or other departments are trying to approach them the wrong way. Some companies have a set way of approaching issues and are afraid to diverge, even when there’s a new opportunity. Brock noted startups are often better at solving problems and addressing clients’ needs because they aren’t stuck in the same rut of taking an established route. Startups don’t necessarily experience less complexity, but they don’t rely on the same approaches all the time.
Simplifying sales methods, processes and organizational attitudes isn’t always an easy task. Past habits and beliefs can prevent team members from seeing the big picture and maximizing productivity. But if your sales reps are spending more time arguing in internal meetings than serving customers, something needs to change. You need to consider things from your customers’ perspectives to make adjustments.
Putting Your Customers—Not Your Pitches—First Will Improve Sales
They say you catch more flies with honey, and your sales team may land more deals by catering to customers’ needs and preferences, rather than having a pitch ready at all times. Although your reps should absolutely know your product or service offerings back and forth, this shouldn’t be the information they lead with. If you want to boost sales, you should address customers first. Talk about them—their companies, their markets—and ask questions rather than just speak, Tom Searcy wrote for Inc. magazine.
In the past, salespeople would go to meetings and talk about why their products were the best, but now your team needs to be more subtle. Don’t be caught selling. Your team can be a lot more successful by focusing on issues related to your clients’ businesses. You can then offer insights into these problems by placing the emphasis on the context of the business, rather than the context of products you are trying to tell. Reps that take this approach wait to be asked to solve the problem. They do not push their own solutions. But expressing this concern about customer pain points helps establish a deeper sense of trust. These salespeople transform themselves into strategic partners and advisors instead of just a contact after the sale.
Market Insight Is Key
Without a firm knowledge of the conditions, competitors and geopolitical events in a customer’s market, your team can’t deliver this kind of service to clients or prospects. Although your customers are more informed about their options, you need to know what they are facing to meet them on their own terms and sell without selling.
By Ryan Warren, Vice President of Marketing
In today’s world of the empowered customer, it’s no longer an option to just tell people your organization is customer-centric. Your sales reps need to uphold this promise by tailoring their approaches to each prospect or client they meet, and this holds especially true for high-powered executive buyers. If your team is failing to cater to this particular group, your organization could lose business in the blink of an eye. Knowing your customers and meeting their specific needs has never been more important.
In fact, Mark Lindwall of Forrester quoted his colleague, David Cooperstein, in his blog, stating, “It’s no longer sufficient to say that you are simply ‘customer-centric’ or ‘customer-focused.’ The only successful strategy in the age of the customer is to become customer-obsessed—to focus your strategic decisions first and foremost on how your customers expect you to engage them.”
Failing to do so is a critical mistake for your organization. Customers have higher expectations than ever before and if your sales team isn’t meeting its clients on level ground, it can miss the chance to strengthen the relationship.
Are Salespeople Missing the Mark with Executive Buyers?
Your sales reps may leave every meeting feeling like they nailed the pitch, but there’s a good chance this isn’t the case. Forrester surveyed a number of executive buyers, and less than 40 percent said meetings with their representatives fulfill their expectations. Lindwall also noted that only 25 percent of salespeople even have access to executive buyers, which means there are limited possibilities for face-to-face meetings. This gap can cripple sales productivity.
Although companies are funneling money into sales onboarding, training and extra development, the missing crucial element could be empathy. Executives want salespeople to express genuine concern and understanding, and if they don’t, your team is losing opportunities by being out of sync.
Even though customers can empower themselves to make informed decisions, sales reps need to be able to walk in the shoes of their customers to be able to maximize every opportunity. You need to understand how each customer perceives value, risk and cost. At the end of the day, executives aren’t really interested in products—they want something that will solve their companies’ pain points. If your sales representatives go to meetings just to discuss key product features, they probably aren’t talking about the things that are truly important to the client and they may miss the deal.
How to Become Customer-obsessed
In two separate blogs for Salesforce, Alice Myerhoff and Matthew Cavnar listed the following tips for getting personal with customers:
1. Use Your CRM Correctly
The more information reps have when they enter the meeting, the more likely they are to deliver the experience the client wants. A simple step like ensuring CRM information is always up to date can make a big difference.
2. Be Responsive, But Keep It Short
Although customer-centricity involves more than just being there when customers need you, your sales reps can’t leave clients hanging. If they can’t respond right away, a short note detailing when they will get in touch can help build trust with executive buyers. However, if you’re getting in touch with these people on your terms, don’t ramble. Voicemails and emails should be short and to the point.
3. Represent Yourself as the Product
Since executives are more interested in problem-solving than products themselves, your salespeople need to create a positive association in the client’s mind. The executive may end up continuing the relationship with the rep for years, so it needs to start by meeting and exceeding expectations.
By Ryan Warren, Vice President of Marketing
Your sales team is the backbone of your organization. In some cases, sales productivity can improve with training programs, but people who are innately good at selling often have specific traits. As a manager, you need to maximize your team’s capabilities to improve sales productivity.
Characteristics of highly successful salespeople
Even though many people choose to make a career in sales, some have the personality characteristics that make them great at what they do and some don’t. According to an Inc. magazine article by Geoffrey James, the best salespeople are assertive, self-aware, empathetic and excellent problem-solvers. As sales becomes more customer-centric, emotionally intelligent sales reps will become more valued.
Passive salespeople won’t be able to close deals and aggressive reps could scare away potential clients by being too pushy. Being assertive is the happy medium, and reps with this quality may be able to take better advantage of sales opportunities. Empathy is also critical for a top performer because your employees need to be able to understand what your clients are experiencing, such as their unique needs and pain points. And problem solving capabilities can’t be taught. Your sales team can’t rush in and try to solve a problem for a customer before they really know what it is. Great salespeople can help their customers see how things will be in the future once they have solved their current issues.
Hiring for your company’s sales culture
Just because a candidate has an impressive resume with previous selling experience doesn’t necessarily mean he or she is a good fit for your organization. Depending on your industry and customers, the sales cycle may be different and the average deal could vary. Beyond these characteristics, the candidate may be used to a different corporate culture or target audience, according to an article in Forbes by Ken Sundheim. Especially for more complex B2B sales cycles, getting the right person in the position is important. Being good at selling is more than just knowing how to find business opportunities. Reps need to be able to understand their customers to sell effectively.
In some cases, you may be able to determine whether a potential new hire has the right stuff by asking certain questions in the initial interview. You can ask him or her to give a sample pitch, about the relationships they maintained with loyal customers and creative ways they have pursued leads to determine if the candidate would be a good fit at your company.
Giving your salespeople the right tools helps them succeed in various circumstances
Although some reps are bound to be better at selling than others—whether they are more competitive, better problem-solvers, more understanding or what have you—your sales team needs to have the right tools to succeed. In an infographic for Salesforce, Kevin Micalizzi reported that 95 percent of sales reps don’t even understand their employers’ strategies. If you expect your team to maintain personal relationships with your clients and they have no idea about their business, are your reps coming through? It can take a while for an employee to become fully productive, so sales managers need to start training early.
As companies become more customer-centric, it will be more important to hire and develop sales reps that know your customers and can maximize productivity. Organizations that boast a large number of engaged employees can grow profits faster than those that don’t. With the right tools, your team can take advantage of every sales opportunity.
By Ryan Warren, Vice President of Marketing
When it comes to selling, some employees either have it or they don’t. Top performers obviously have the best results, but in many cases, they can still improve sales productivity. Hiring the right employees can help any business stay profitable, but even the most highly motivated workers need to be given the right tools to succeed, especially when it comes to your sales staff. The best employees essentially pay for themselves because they deliver value to your organization. While hiring good people is a sufficient start to maximizing sales productivity, how can you motivate your team to deliver consistently great results?
Employees need goals, systems and processes to meet or exceed their sales quotas. No salesperson can achieve a maximum output in a poorly designed organization, according to an article by Matt Garrett in Entrepreneur. Even though top-performing sales people often go above and beyond the expectations, you may be able to encourage even more results with the right tools and processes. Here are some tips on maximizing employee performance to achieve sales optimization:
1. Tie company profit to each employee
In case you’re unsure, this can be a helpful way to determine your most profitable employees. Who has the highest sales figures? Highest revenue per sale? You can set minimum standards for quality and performance to measure who is doing the best, Garrett wrote. This kind of model can instill a healthy sense of competition among your sales team.
2. Take a blended approach to employee engagement
You can catch more flies with honey, but stay tough on employees for best sales numbers. Many studies have indicated that happy, engaged employees produce the best work. However, if you kill your team with kindness, your representatives may not achieve the sales you want, Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman wrote in the Harvard Business Review. It’s probably no surprise that sales teams with an ineffective manager tend to be disgruntled and disinterested in producing their best work. The article identified two main types of leaders: drivers and enhancers. Drivers can establish high standards and get their teams to reach for seemingly unattainable goals. Enhancers function as role models and stay in touch with the issues and concerns of their teams. They give regular feedback to help their employees develop to their fullest potential. While some managers want to act as a pal to their employees, as a leader, you need to stand firm in your commitment to holding the team accountable for performance.
3. Set high standards for behavior
You can’t expect great results from your employees unless you’re asking them to do the right things, according to Garrett. The same code may not apply to every employee in the organization because you probably already have workers who meet their quotas month after month. You should only judge your team based on things within their control, such as the number of calls they make per day or the deals they close. Since sales is largely influenced by incentives, performance should be appropriately tied to compensation for extra motivation.
You’re only as good as your salespeople
While you may have a great team of sales employees, your revenue productivity is tied directly to the performance of these workers. Although great managers and the right standards and incentives can motivate your team, they need the right tools in place to close deals and maximize productivity. Reassessing procedures and providing additional coaching can help, but sales reps also need to get a boost from technology to ensure they are following up with customers at the appropriate time.
By Ryan Warren, Vice President of Marketing
The yearly sales marathon is more than halfway done, so it’s that time of year when you may need to ramp up your sales productivity to hit end-of-the-year projections. Some reps are superstars at this; they’re able to push themselves all the way to the end-of-the-year finish line. Their secret? They’re in shape. They’re able to pace themselves throughout the year and gather sales intelligence early. Now, don’t think you can’t catch up—you can. The trick is to get out of your comfort zone, mentally zero in on your target and push yourself until the end of the year.
So here they are—five steps you can use to push yourself to hit your sales targets:
1. Determine What’s Holding You Back
There can be any number of things that are stopping your productivity. Is there one client that just won’t budge? Is your go-to sales approach just not working anymore? Identifying all your challenges can give you insight on your own sales productivity and help you realize the odds you’re up against. Pushing through to the end of the year relies on you knowing these barriers.
2. Use the Right Tools
Some of these challenges can be due to not using the tools at your disposal—or not having them at all. If you’re unable to connect with your customers, it’s probably because you’re not collecting customer insights in an efficient way. When running a race, you don’t put on sandals—you grab that pair of running shoes that fit your feet like a glove. Using the correct tools properly is one of the only ways you’ll be able to stay productive in the time you have left.
3. Do a Little More—On a Frequent Basis
According to the blog Time Management Ninja, creating daily goals that are larger than the day before’s can be a great way to start pushing yourself. Time Management Ninja suggested just taking an extra five minutes every day to finish a task or concentrating on making one extra sale a week can ramp up your productivity. Think of it as building your momentum so that you’re not struggling in the final stretch.
4. Rest
We all get burned out, so taking some time to yourself can help you recharge and refocus. In a piece for Harvard Business Review, Tony Schwartz, president and CEO of The Energy Project, recommended building up your productivity through intervals. Just like running a marathon, you can only push yourself for so long when you’re just starting something new. Try taking a longer lunch break to relax for a while so you’re more efficient when you return.
5. Know You’re Better Than You Think
Superstars often reach their targets because they know they can. Confidence is key in sales, so if you don’t think pushing yourself is a possibility, think again. Recognize that you’re stronger than you think, and all you have to do is tap into that power. Getting out of your comfort zone and pushing yourself relies on understanding you can be a sales superstar if you want to. You just need to condition yourself to think that way.
So get moving! Push yourself to make those sales and reach your goals, otherwise you’ll be kicking yourself later in the year. Take a cue from your rock star colleagues and leave your comfort zone—you’ll thank yourself when you succeed. It may seem cliché, but you can do it!
