FirstRain is revving up for Dreamforce 2013, and to make sure we’ve got all the latest information, we’ve been watching The Road to Dreamforce on Salesforce Live. It’s been really informative and has helped get our creative juices flowing—except they stillwon’t tell us who the band is! Come on, guys!
The best part is that anyone can participate. If you have a question, you can easily ask in real-time: just go on Twitter and use #salesforceLIVE during the session. You might even get an on-air shout out and be famous like Justine!
If you missed yesterday’s episode, don’t worry. You can watch it here.
Every aspect of the business needs a standard methodology, but nothing requires an official set of procedures more than sales. With generating revenue being central to the business’ success, sales reps need a specific process to follow to optimize their interactions with clients. Even if your team already uses a set sales methodology, if it’s not focused on gathering and employing customer intelligence, you’re not going to see all of the sales opportunities you could be. Creating a customer-focused procedure that is standard to your team can boost your sales and improve client relationships.
Understanding What “Sales Methodology” Means
According to sales training firm Richardson, your team should think of sales methodology as “the system a sales organization follows to win business.” Now, this can include many things, such as documenting the process of pitching a sale, to the tools the team uses to conduct customer intelligence, but for sales teams to be successful, each aspect of the methodology it uses should be client-centered.
Yet it’s much easier to develop a customer-focused sales methodology than it is to alter an existing one. However, teams can revamp their standard procedures by taking a look at each aspect of the selling process. Does the first contact with the client focus on how your team can help them, or on what their issues are? If you can’t answer that question with a client-centered answer, it may be time for you to overhaul your outdated sales methodology.
Steps that Work
According to Salesforce, the Budget, Authority, Need and Timeframe (BANT) methodology is no longer applicable to today’s customers. They say BANT doesn’t work anymore because 70% of all purchasing decisions are made before the sales rep is even present.
Unique selling proposition: Determine your product’s unique selling point
Compelling event: Understand what is driving your customers to you
Champion: Designate a mid- to senior-level employee who approves your company’s strategies
Key players: Examine which workers will interact with the client
Aligned purchasing process: Provide options for budget-tight clients
Suster calls this process PUCCKA. Each of these steps answers part of the customer’s question, “why should I buy from you?” Clients are continually focused on what you can do for them, so your entire sales methodology should be compelling your whole client contact team—including those in customer service—to always be interacting with clients in a regulated method that is centered on their needs.
The Key: Gathering Customer Intelligence
According to Suster, outdated sales methodologies are the biggest reason most sales don’t close; many don’t focus on providing a solution to client needs. A customer-centered methodology is essential to today’s sales team, and every procedure relies on one main tactic: how you gather insight into your customers and their market.
With a customer insights tool that allows you to research your client’s markets, you’re able to identify what is driving your customers to seek out a solution and determine the right champion for the sales team. Conducting customer intelligence allows key players in the sales process—most notably, the reps—to understand how to interact with the client and even identify if there is leeway in pricing. You’re able to understand the challenges they are currently facing—and may face in the future—and develop a unique selling proposition centered around that information.
Often, sales reps forget that everything comes down to what a product can do for the client. It’s so easy for sales professionals to get caught up in identifying sales opportunities for the business and creating the perfect pitch that they lose sight of matching the right client with the right product. Sales intelligence software can get you halfway to closing the sale, but the rest comes down to remembering that clients interact with sellers all the time, so you have stand out. But how do you do that? You take your market research, start a dialogue with the client and actually discuss how the product will benefit them specifically.
Let the Product Speak
In an interview with Inc. Magazine, Kristin Zhivago, author and revenue coach, advised sales professionals to take a few moments to question if they are actually discouraging customers from purchasing the product without even meaning to.
Zhivago suggested reps take their customer intelligence research—since, let’s face it, we can’t get a look into our client’s brains—to identify what aspects of the product are actually right for them. The customer wants to be wooed by what you’re selling, so communicate the product’s results and features.
Go beyond the benefits that are easy to see. Showcase how this client specifically can smoothly transition to using the product and the immediate results of doing so. You can center your efforts on one result or feature and work from there.
According to Salesforce, speaking with the client directly and genuinely about the product can ensure you close the sale. Michael Kassan, chairman and CEO of MediaLink, told Salesforce’s director of social content marketing, Jennifer Burnham, that successfully selling a product is all about communication.
“Communicate, communicate and communicate,” Kassan said. “You have the opportunity today as a company and as an individual to have the highest level of direct communication with your customer [...] Utilizing that capability to its fullest is the key to success in business today.”
So, focus on the product: how its features have produced marked results and why it is perfect for them. You may begin to see a dialogue form between you and the client in which the product basically begins to sell itself—and all because you did your market research and kept your eye on the client.
The art of selling a product relies on getting the customer interested in what you have to offer, but many times sales reps get too excited themselves and botch the sale. Making sure your client is first enthusiastic about the product before asking for them to commit is important to closing the deal. In fact, knowing your customers and gathering sales intelligence are both integral aspects to making the product memorable. Customers want to feel they can trust the credibility of their sales rep and that the product will make a difference to their productivity. Here are three things to keep in mind to get clients on board with a product and close the sale:
1. Become a Dependable Source
In an article for Inc., sales expert Geoffrey James suggested reps ask themselves if their claims about the product are reliable. When you are speaking with a new customer, the first few minutes are important to sowing the seeds of a trustworthy and beneficial relationship. Ensuring each of your claims are credible and showcasing your expertise of the product can help inspire the customer.
This is where gathering market insights is key in the sales process. Assembling reliable testimonials from authoritative sources or speaking to how an expert in the field uses the product can help customers understand that you can back the claims you’re making about the product. This can also help clients be aware that other companies or professionals in the industry believe in the item or service, and they should too.
2. Speak to Results
Talking about the product’s features is often not enough—you need to be able to show its measurable results.
Gregg Schwartz, a sales and marketing profession, wrote in an article for Young Entrepreneur, an online entrepreneur community, that sales reps can lose a sale by being too evangelical about a product. This can be anything from depicting your product as being the greatest new invention to giving the customer unrealistic expectations about the product. So talk about how the product, service or solution will benefit the company, but be careful not to promise too much.
Entrepreneur also suggested reps bring along market research to the meeting so customers are able to see results firsthand. Allowing clients to read as well as listen to how the solution will help them can be crucial in getting customers energized.
3. Watch Your Wording
Perhaps one of the most important tips is to be cautious about the words you use when speaking to a client. While a document you may bring along uses the word “excited,” saying the word is not going to help the client feel enthusiastic about the product. Employing buzz words, like innovative or guarantee, may alarm rather than inspire. Customers are aware of which words or phrases may be rehearsed, or what Schwartz calls “mental spam.”
Making an effort to avoid overused words can help you be more creative with your sales approach. For example, instead of saying a product is new and improved, speak to its previous limitations and how the latest version is the answer to those challenges. One way to do this is by making a list of words you think may put off the client and stay focused on avoiding them during a meeting. Later on you may notice one or two instances where the word is applicable, but exciting the client is about showing them something they may not have seen before.
Last week I had the pleasure to head down to Boca Raton, Florida for my first cross-country business trip. Since I earned my demo stripes at this year’s FirstRain Dreamforce booth, I am now part of our team that is deployed to customer events—yay for frequent-flyer miles!
One of our customers, Ciena, had their annual sales meeting and invited FirstRain to participate. The meeting took place at what my seasoned FirstRain sales colleagues call a typical sales conference: a “fancy-smancy” hotel with a perfect ocean view, beautiful weather, non-stop great food and one happy sales team!
Attending and participating in sales orientation/training events and annual kick-offs is something that FirstRain offers as part of our customer success program. As one of our customers, Ciena invited us to attend in order to showcase FirstRain as an important new tool for the team within their CRM system. All of their sales users are encouraged to take advantage of FirstRain intelligence within their CRM and it was evident that FirstRain is already acting as their carrot! In fact, for this event our booth was right next to their CRM team’s station, and we were pretty busy giving lots of demos and answering questions for interested reps. We were really delighted by the amount of positive feedback we received during our 4 days on the ground with this great team.
From individual sales reps, to team managers, to the head of sales himself, we had an overwhelming number of people expressing the value FirstRain is bringing to their business. Our own team is certainly aware of the benefits and usefulness of FirstRain for companies like Ciena, but hearing from actual sales users telling us how we are making an impact is extremely cool and rewarding. You can’t ask for anything better than that, can you?
I had a great time talking with people from all over the world, and it was very exciting to hear how different teams are using FirstRain daily. Sure, the “fancy-smancy” hotel and delicious food, we’re a great perk for all, but the best part was coming back to California knowing that FirstRain is delivering the customer intelligence they need, where they need it, and that their sales teams are WINNING with FirstRain!
The Semantic Technology and Business Conference takes place from October 15th-October 17th in New York City. The conference will host numerous sessions from diverse experts in many industries, as well as an expo hall exhibiting the newest semantic and big data tools and developments. For more information, email me at jlevi@ignite.firstrain.com.
The past few weeks have been extremely busy and exciting as we prepare for Dreamforce, which is now only a week away! But today, I have some other exciting news to share, the launch of our new solution—the FirstRain Performinator!
Performinator is our newest solution for delivering strategically tuned customer intelligence for major account sales and marketing teams right into their existing CRM, social enterprise platforms, smartphones and tablets. Performinator helps your entire team of sales and marketing pros understand their customers’ business as well as your superstars do. And for the thousands of early-adopter users who are already getting FirstRain Performinator today, it’s the ‘carrot‘ that gets your people engaged in and drives value from your CRM and platform investments. Don’t YOU want to ‘Be the Carrot‘?
Most sales and marketing teams don’t have the time to gather the deep knowledge of their customers and end-markets that’s needed to really challenge their customers, uncover opportunity and spot risks. FirstRain already delivers the right intelligence to help solve this challenge, but with Performinator we make it so easy, and so well-tuned to your customer markets that each of your users are transformed (no phone booth required) into your company’s go-to experts on your most significant customers.
In fact, at Dreamforce next week, leaders from GE Capital and FirstRain will be discussing the new solution and how they are embracing the carrot. If you’re interested in attending the session and learning more about Performinator, you can do so here.
Superman may use his super powers to fly, but Performinator uses its powers to transform your sales and marketing teams!
I must be a horrible target for a sales person. I don’t listen to cold call voicemails, I delete 99% of the spam emails I receive and, if a sales person is lucky enough to get me live, they have about 10 seconds to catch my attention before I tune out.
But I am not unusual. My short attention span and company-selfish interests are typical of the busy exec. And this is something too many sales people don’t take into account. They talk about their products and their needs, not my company’s needs.
82% of senior executives said they ”almost always” or ”frequently” experience
sellers who are uninformed about the executive’s needs and the
executive’s company — and
and there is simply no excuse for this any more!
In the recent report on Sales Intelligence the Aberdeen Group not surprisingly found that the types of intelligence that are most useful are the higher level ones — company and competitor, not the basic contact data most sales teams get equipped with. [Note: Image removed from this post by request of Aberdeen]
We see this need again and again. If you want to get through to an executive (like me) you need to understand my business. What drives my business, what I am trying to achieve, and what’s impacting my customers decisions.
Having my social profile, while cute, can actually make a salesperson annoying. Just because you contact me on Twitter or send me an Inmail is not going to make me respond— in fact if it is a cheesy message without substance I am not going to pay any more attention just because your message is on social media. On the very rare occasions an email gets through my filter it’s because it speaks to my business needs.
The solutions exist today to equip your sales team with smart customer and competitor intelligence right in their workflow. Within the CRM, tailored to the market the rep is in, configured to make it easy for the rep to review the customer intelligence and so be knowledgeable about how he/she can impact the customer’s business—and so talk about the customers need first!
So if you want to sell directly to executives, do your homework about their business first or you are wasting your time as well as theirs.
Last Thursday I had the opportunity to participate in a panel discussion on digital privacy in Palo Alto hosted by the Business Association Italy America (BAIA), a network of entrepreneurs, managers and professionals focused on innovation. Personally, an event like this is always a bit of a stretch for an introvert like me, but I’m very glad I was coaxed out of my shell to engage on this important topic.
On the panel with me were two fascinating people, Professor Alessandro Acquisti and Andrea Vaccari. Andrea was a hot commodity that night, as he is co-founder and CEO of Glancee. Glancee had just been acquired by Facebook, and Facebook was going public the next day. Alessandro is a true expert in the field of Information Technology and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon.
As panel moderator Mary Trigiani put it, we were two Digital Immigrants and One Digital Native coming together, representing diverse perspectives. And the difference in perspective on on digital privacy issues between the Digital Natives in the room, who were more comfortable with their persona, behaviors, and lifestyle being out there and accessible on the Web was noticeable that night. The Digital Natives were not necessarily pushing the boundaries, but more were either unaware of the boundaries being pushed or not at all bothered by them, seemingly confident that things would be okay. The Digital Immigrants, on the other hand, expressed much more concern about how acquired data can be used by Companies for great good and great evil.
Alessandro shared his thought-provoking experiment, where he and a team of research analysts constructed a mobile App to generate a person’s social security number from a snapped photo of a stranger’s face. All based on freely available software, online databases, and statistical processing.
Andrea pointed out that we all leave “digital footprints”—data that is left behind, collected, and available for use. As an example, he related a story from Business Insider that told of how Target got into some hot water when they used observed shopping patterns to indicate women that are likely pregnant, and then used this statistically derived information to send coupons to those theoretically pregnant women. The technology proved to be so good that it exposed a teen girl’s pregnancy to her father when he found the coupons that had been sent to her.
In my view, this technology is still way ahead of the law. Living and working in Silicon Valley, every day we see analytics technology being applied relentlessly to redefine business and the way businesses work, online retailers challenging the way states levy sales tax, and online shopping experiences getting more and more targeted. Digital Privacy law requires legislation, and legislation is the purview of governments, regulatory bodies and advocacy groups—in other words, it’s not a speedy process. Structurally, legislative timelines will always lag the incredible pace of technology adoption, with the result being that most of what is technically feasible has not only not been regulated, but probably isn’t even being thought about yet in our legislative bodies.
In this digital privacy environment, many companies simply state they are “in compliance with all federal and state laws…”, but what does this really mean? Given this known lag, companies should be responsible for operating at a higher standard when deciding how to best to manage and protect information from inappropriate use. Setting internal privacy boundaries and codes of behavior proactively mitigates the negative effects of overstepping the mark and the subsequent consumer backlash. At FirstRain two of our core values are “Act with integrity at all times” and “Take ownership for the company’s success”. For us, keeping these values at the forefront helps maintain the balance between ethics and profit.
FirstRain provides our customers (B2B sales and marketing professionals) with relevant customer and industry information to increase revenue and strengthen relationships. Our users are business professionals who want to quickly and efficiently access only the information they require to drive revenue in their businesses. Now, the more we at FirstRain know about each customer, the better an intelligence solution we can then offer. But often they do not have the time or patience to enter a boat-load of personal preference information—and therefore the tension between relevance, business objectives and customer analytics. In this case, I believe the use of a thoughtful combination of “self-declared” information, combined with “observed” behavior (e.g., likes/dislikes, click-throughs, etc.) and “inferred” statistics can make a massive difference. The key is using the information with integrity and only for the intended purpose of delivering an improved customer experience.
I am concerned about digital privacy, and the lack of tools for consumers to access, verify and fix incorrect or inaccurate information out there. I am also sure that in the years ahead we will see businesses continue to push the digital privacy boundaries. There will be some notable scares, subsequent backlashes and regulatory adjustments. However, I am personally also looking forward to a massively improved user experience.
A big thank you goes to our hosts Giorgio Ghersi and Mary Trigiani at BAIA, for being wonderful hosts, and our own Daniela Barbosa, here at FirstRain, for her tireless focus on making sure this introvert turned up and participated.
Today’s Facebook’s IPO although a more consumer focused interest story then what most of our customers are interested in, brought a huge amount of tweets on the subject as expected. (I would even venture to say that it was more then a ‘consumer interest story’ but rather a ‘human interest story’). None the less, being that FirstRain is a Silicon Valley based company, the buzz is also being felt strongly outside the digital world for those of us that live here and have friends and acquaintances that are being directly impacted by facebook’s IPO. Exciting times.
Yesterday, prior to Facebook’s IPO we ran some stats using our FirstTweets™ technology and then redid the same exercise at the close of the market today. FirstTweets™ uses our patented FirstRain technology to uncover and deliver only high-quality, business-relevant tweets to sales and marketing professionals across the enterprise. Our analysis shows that less than 0.1% of daily tweets contain quality, business-related content, yet this still represents more than 200,000 tweets per day of business-focused intelligence.
The picture painted by the stats that we captured, aren’t surprising but are interesting and illustrative on why our customers are seeing value in our FirstTweets- as YY Lee our COO tweeted this morning allowing them to “cut through the frenzied roar to net out the actual business discussion…”.
On the day before Facebook’s IPO:
At the close of Market on the day of Facebooks IPO:
