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.
The world is slowly climbing out of the great recession as companies around the world begin to increase investment and hiring. But for B2B sales teams looking to recapture growth during these early days, it’s critical to understand who’s really paying their bills and keeping the lights on–and guess what? It’s not your customer … it’s your customer’s customer. And if your sales team doesn’t deeply understand the business problems of these folks, then you’ll lose to competitors who do.
Before I get into the reasons why this is, consider some of the big, underlying changes happening in the market today. As companies start growing and investing again they are spending money, but they have fewer people than they had before. This means less time to accomplish key objectives and an even stronger focus on developing efficient strategies and processes to drive revenue growth ahead of the competition.
As a result, they are changing the way they do business, innovating in the vertical integration of their product lines and socializing their go-to-market, because if they can innovate and out-execute the competition in the way they serve their customers they can gain more market share as spending comes back.
To accomplish this, large companies are now talking about “business transformation” in their sales teams, “cultural transformation” in how they interface with their customers, and building a “social business” as a new way to look at their internal collaboration process.
With all these trends, the end objective is the same: How to better solve their customer’s business problem and so gain market share.
And so how do you solve your customer’s problem? Well like you, their challenge is revenue, profit and market share. So when your sales team understands their customer’s customer–and the business dynamics, competition and growth opportunities that their customer has–magic happens.
Here are the top 5 reasons:
1. You can focus on the customer’s business problem, not your products
It’s a cliché, but a true one: your customers don’t buy products, they buy solutions. But you can’t sell them a true solution unless you know what problem they are trying to solve, and understanding their customers will give you the insight you need to hold a useful conversation with your customer.
If you pitch product you become a tactical vendor; if you can discuss their customer and how they are serving their customer you become a member of your customer’s team. For example, is their customer driving price down on them – and so is your opportunity to help them take cost out of their operating expenses? Or are they focused on revenue and end user growth – and can your solution help your customer reduce their time to market?
Understanding the customer’s problem is sales 101 right? But it is surprising how many sales people still pitch product. It’s essential you provide your sales team with the intelligence and systems to stay on top of the customer’s ever changing end-business problem (see #5).
2. You can align your solutions with your customer’s evolving needs.
While the customer is always right, reality is they may not actually be asking for the right solution. Maybe this is because they lack specific knowledge of the options available, they have budget concerns or because internal politics are at work.
But consider a recent study by the Corporate Executive Board — buyers don’t contact vendors until they are, on average, more than half-way through the buying process. This means that by the time you are contacted as a vendor (if you are contacted!), it may be too late in the process to help your customer identify a better solution mix for their needs.
If, on the other hand, you truly understand your customer’s problems and challenges because you have studied their customer, and you are engaged with helping them meet these needs, then you can design specific solutions to meet the needs of their evolving business–before your competitors are asked to get involved.
3. You can design your marketing programs to address what you customer cares about
It is possible today to understand what an end buyer cares about in ways that have simply not been possible before. The Web and social media create an unprecedented level of transparency into a market, and can show you what’s top-of-mind at your end B2B customer. And it’s a noisy, Big Data world which means you need technology to do it.
There are millions of articles, blog posts and Tweets posted on the Web every day, but using newly emerging semantic analytics you can monitor intelligence in a very precise way. You can now analyze the intersection of three views of your customer’s business and so understand what the top issues are for them. When you can see the intersection of:
- the vertical market you are targeting
- the business line you are selling and
- the role which is going to buy your product (e.g. CIO, EVP Sales et al)
you can then target your marketing campaigns to speak to the specific issues the companies in a vertical market care about.
By monitoring what your target market is talking about you can ensure your messaging–and your value–speaks to their top-of-mind problems.
4. You find new customers.
Many businesses have triggers that drive new customer opportunity. It could be generic management changes, like a new executive being hired, but just as often businesses are driven by precise, industry-specific changes that create new opportunity for you. Is there a government RFP released that impacts your customer’s business? Has a competitor created a dislocation in your customer’s end market? Does your customer need to execute M&A flawlessly to execute their strategy?
When you understand your customer’s customer you can monitor the very specific events and changes in their business that signal an opportunity for you.
Automatically alerting your sales person on their iPad or mobile phone each time there is an industry-specific event which impacts their customer will win you new business.
5. The majority of your sales team can be as effective as the top 5%.
Most sales people don’t like to do research, but the top 5% –your rainmakers–do. They already do the work to understand their customer’s customer, they plan out a campaign, they do research every morning before they place any calls. They study the customer and understand the customer’s business and many will spend 1-2 hours a day doing it.
When you provide Enterprise Customer Intelligence to your sales team and teach them the Why and How needed to focus on their customer’s customer, you’ll raise every team member’s productivity. And when you integrate the intelligence into the CRM and social enterprise systems they are already using, there are No More Excuses.
Your Customer’s Customer is the real revenue engine behind your business, and the B2B companies who truly believe this, and are investing in the systems for their sales teams, are the ones who are already pulling ahead of the competition, even in this lukewarm recovery.
And now today is another big day at FirstRain—but it’s also a big day for the social enterprise platforms like Chatter, Yammer and Jive because now, for the very first time, Twitter is useful for B2B professionals.
For some time now, media and brand monitoring solutions like Radian6 have been tapping into Twitter so that companies can see what their customers are saying. If United Airlines loses your luggage and you gripe about it on Twitter, United can see that. But solutions that provide consumer tweet monitoring are hopeless if you are a B2B professional trying to find useful and breaking industry news in Twitter about specific companies, products or business lines.
We’ve now solved that problem, and are announcing FirstTweets today. This is the world’s first solution for extracting business-relevant Twitter Intelligence. FirstTweets™ is a part of our FirstRain Enterprise Customer Intelligence System. It is a technology breakthrough that solves the Twitter problem for business executives: how to get business value and intelligence out of the 250 million tweets that Twitter produces daily.
Our analysis shows that more than 99.9% of all Twitter is non-relevant to business professionals, making it effectively impossible to get to the still more than 200,000 tweets per day of daily business intelligence buried inside.
Now, by using FirstRain’s patented semantic analytics, our system provides the ability to easily and effectively access the business intelligence hidden within the Twitter stream. FirstTweets™ collects and organizes real time industry and customer-specific information to uncover revenue opportunities, including customer developments, industry trends, news, market analysis, emerging themes and so much more.
FirstTweets™ will be available to all users this Wednesday and will be included for FirstRain subscribers. It’s another exciting innovation by FirstRain, and I look forward to hearing what you think.
Today, Lead411 released their “Hottest Companies in Silicon Valley” awards for 2012. It’s extremely gratifying to be a part of this list, and we are honored to be among this exciting roster of cutting-edge companies. Thank you so much to Lead411 for their recognition, and congratulations to all of our fellow award recipients.
FirstRain was chosen from a pool of over 3,190 companies in the Software, Wireless, Internet, Hardware and Media industries after the Lead411 research team scoured through press releases and business articles, including venture capital financings, company launches, office openings, new customer press releases, etc., and used this information to select the list of Silicon Valley’s hottest, fastest growing technology companies.
This award comes on top of the KMWorld 2012 “100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management” award we received earlier this month, and the great press coverage we got following the release of our “Enterprise Customer Intelligence System”. It’s been a great start of the year for FirstRain and you can expect to see more exciting news coming from us soon!
Last week was a busy week – we held our Q2 sales kickoff at our San Mateo offices – but the day before we were invited to participate on a panel at the Symantec Vision 2011 Conference held at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.
The panel was titled “Competitive Testing Reports Got You Confused?” and it was set up to discuss the technologies and approaches that are best practices to gather competitive intelligence about products. Our panelist was Thomas Lai from our San Mateo office who has been working closely with Symantec on the deployment of FirstRain within SymBrain to provide competitive intelligence to the sales and distribution teams.
The panel tackled a range of best practices to evaluate and report on competing products. Consultants or analysts go through deep exercises to understand competing products – but any technique can be biased so the panel tackled how to be comprehensive enough to get a complete, unbiased picture.
One area that was a surprise to us is how vendors interact with the analysis on their products. For example, an analyst might review a product from McAfee using both engineering and qualitative techniques. They then send the report to McAfee to review, for a sanity check, to potentially correct – and yet many times the vendor (in this case McAfee) does not respond. What does this imply – that the results are reasonable? or not? You can imagine a healthy debate on a panel about the techniques to get to the report and then what the lack of response really means. (No disrespect to McAfee but in this context they are a primary competitor to Symantec).
The thread of the panel, in the end, was what types of techniques can be utilized so that test results and market results — when looked at together — make sense.
Our application is used to build competitive intelligence for the broad sales team (you can see a Symantec exec talk about this here), but also in this type of competitive analysis at the product level and Thomas was speaking about the best practices we see in our customers in this context.
The conference was a lot of fun for Thomas (and I gather not all of the fun was in the panel session – it was Vegas after all!)
Check out the article in the March issue of CRM magazine talking about sales reps, and whether or not companies were willing to expand their sales teams. The article refers to a study by CSO insights in which they showed that companies who gave their reps access to sales intelligence (SI) had significantly shorter ramp-up periods. Given that 78% of the companies they surveyed said they are planning to add sales people this year – sales intelligence and productivity is a big issue.
“… the level of insights coming from a new generation of SI companies, such as FirstRain, InsideView, OneSource, and ZoomInfo, has expanded dramatically. Today, employing Web-crawling and other data-gathering methods, SI solutions constantly gather information about the marketplaces into which reps are selling, the competitive landscape, and details on prospect accounts and key stakeholders.
Think of it this way: Each sales rep has his own digital research assistant constantly to track key news and events in his territory. Let’s say a new executive gets hired in a prospect firm you are targeting, or a company reports an earnings surprise (good or bad), or a merger is announced in one of the industries on which you focus. The SI system immediately would notify you about any of those developments. Then that information could be appended to contact and opportunity records in the CRM system you are using to manage your pipeline.”
CRM magazine maintains that it’s worth it to invest in such intelligence; the knowledge that it provides is invaluable—and in many cases, unexpected. So if you’re looking to shorten the ramp-up period in expanding your sales team, check out our products!
Great article in Information Week today. Seth believes “Data integration will be a top story in information technology in 2011″ – and his view is based on the emergence of the “beyond-ETL” approach. (note ETL is broadly used in data analysis applications and means – extraction, transform, load).
FirstRain is one of the paths Seth discusses – in particular our approach to time-sequencing the web. He quotes Marty – “The application of semantic analysis that is ‘business structure aware’ is crucial to be able to identify and deliver relevant business information that is scattered throughout [disparate] sources,” says the company’s technology vice president, Marty Betz. Also crucial is the ability to synthesize time sequence from pages found on the open Web.
- and I love that even in a simple examples you can quickly see the time issues that show up with Google’s popularity based approach: “Time sequence is important! Indeed, the number-three result returned by a Google search for “us senator pennsylvania” was now-former Senator Arlen Specter’s now-disappeared Senate Web page.”
In contrast – we analyze the flow of content through our pipeline and so our system can dynamically model and adjust its understanding of the market ecosystems around companies and industries – to quote Dr Betz again.
Betz describes the use of trending and anomaly detection, applied to unstructured narrative content from a variety of sources, to enable a different class of questions to be systematically asked, analyzed and answered via answers that require “connecting the dots.”
So in FirstRain we have broad-but-selective content acquisition and integration, with the application of goal-relevant organizing principles, to respond to a high-value business need: timely access to corporate developments.
We definitely agree with Seth that data integration area is an area of significant investment across multiple companies over the next year – to advance ease-of-use and increase the level embedded use and end-user specific integration capabilities.
I had the pleasure of meeting one of our customers a few weeks ago at a Selling Power conference – a sales rep called Samantha Barrett – and after she told me how much she loved FirstRain I asked her to describe for me how she uses it every day. It’s always helpful for me to listen to a user’s daily experience and make sure I understand what they like and how we can improve.
XL Group is in Philadephia and they provide sales and marketing solutions to the life sciences and automotive industries. Their products are software packages like SFA, data management, BI etc.
Sam uses FirstRain to both save her time, and help her develop her top prospects. As she says “I use FirstRain to solve four problems: how I stay current on my top 10 prospect’s businesses, how I understand key industry changes, how I find expansion opportunities in my existing customers and how I know what’s new for my competitors”.
Sam goes into FirstRain every morning to analyze what is new with her top prospects, and she also uses email monitors to track her major existing customers, her market and her competition. The unique intelligence she needs, when she needs it, in her daily workflow.
You can read a short case study of how she uses FirstRain here (download the XL Group case study).
As she says “With FirstRain I now save at least an hour a day monitoring the developments which are impacting my prospects, existing customers and competition.”
I am attending the Selling Power sales leadership conference in Philadelphia today – and just listened to a compelling talk by Michael Weening who is VP of Business Wireless for Bell Mobility (he’s on an erudite panel with sales development leaders from Xerox and Sophos as I type).
His main message was to focus on all the aspects of training and development that are not product – unlike many organizations that cram product knowledge into their sales guys but neglect to invest in career development, personal development and mentoring. How many sales organizations have you seen where the sales team is sped and fed by product marketing, but never have real one-on-ones with their manager beyond their latest numbers?
Some of the less conventional ideas Michael was espousing…
- he used personality indicators from a questionnaire with a sales person to facilitate development discussions between manager and sales person (not unlike the Myers-Briggs discussion I have with my team).
- he leads with a focus on the sales rep taking responsibility for their own development, and so (for example) set up a library of books on best practices both for sales and business, and anyone can take books home, and keep them if they want to. He, quite correctly, recognized that different people learn differently.
- he encourages his sales managers to take one of the selling skills books and lead a team discussion once a week on each chapter, where each week a sales rep would distill down the key lessons from the chapter
- and he talked about the critical importance that not only sales reps, but also the sales managers have personal development plans which are discussed and reviewed each quarter with each individual’s manager (whatever the level).
What was great to hear was Michael’s focus on how much he cares about the team. Obviously he cares about the numbers – of course – but his passion for how to help each sales rep have the training and support they need to develop their personal skills and business skills was great to hear.
Coming from my own experience of high growth technology companies in Silicon Valley, I have seen more development in soft skills than I think is typical in older, larger businesses. Whether you have 1 sales person or 1000, all but the top 10% of your superstars benefit from, and really appreciate, personal development.
There is just no part of the current economy that is about getting lucky – and sales people know this more than anyone. CSO Insights run a sales performance study and are (not surprisingly) picking up the significant drop-off in sales performance over the last year. They find one of the keys to success is account-focused intelligence – here’s their analysis.
What’s interesting about their analysis is how big a role sales intelligence plays in the sales rep’s ability to perform. For all three keys: Knowing there is a game, Getting in the game and Winning the Game:
“sales reps are finding…They need to demonstrate a value-add in terms of knowledge of the prospect’s marketplace… failing to do so can get them dropped from the conversation”;
and “it’s critical that the salesperson is able to quickly collect the information required to go beyond having a product conversation to having a meaningful dialogue about the customer’s business”.
The fundamental key is account-focused intelligence – the ability to “identify and understand the market trends and drivers impacting your customer’s business, their competitors and how they are faring against them, your customer’s customers etc.”
So no surprise – sales reps that are willing to do the work get better results – and those that succeed understand the impact of a) doing thorough research on a prospect account then b) integrating that knowledge into a strategic account plan.
CSO Insights segmented their 2010 survey based on firms that exceeded expectations, met expectations and needs improvement based on these two aspects of selling and as you would expect – those that do strategic research and use it in their account plans do better!
Today, 
