Selling Power Blog

The New Lead Qualification

Today's post is by Anthony Iannarino, author, speaker, and award-winning blogger.

 

Lead qualification used to center around BANT (budget, authority, need, and time). This was easy for salespeople and sales managers to understand. Did the client have the budget? Were you dealing with someone who had the authority to bind your organization to a deal? Did the prospect need what you were selling? Was there a deadline by which the prospect would need to make a purchase?

Selling has changed dramatically since BANT, and lead qualification needs to change in an equally dramatic fashion.

The following two statements are very different: Your clients do not have the budget for what you’re selling. They don’t have a budget, but they do have the money. Unless you can tie what you sell to one of your prospect’s major initiatives, you’re going to have a tough time getting your prospect to part with any money. Even if prospects may not have a budget, they may still be qualified.

Let’s deal with the authority issue: more decisions are now made by consensus. There is no longer a power sponsor; there are power sponsors. There is no longer an economic buyer; there are economic buyers. There is no longer an authority; the person with the ability to bind your client organization to a deal will likely look to his or her team to advise as to whether or not to proceed. The question now isn’t whether someone has authority, it’s whether or not a person can build consensus.

The most pernicious problem today for sales reps is that their prospective clients don’t believe there’s a need. These prospects have latent dissatisfaction. They have problems, challenges, and opportunities that they have not yet recognized, and they won’t likely recognize those needs without the help of a salesperson with the business acumen and situational knowledge to help them understand that better results are available to them. If you disqualify every lead for not being able to state a need, you’re going to have a very empty pipeline. The question isn’t whether or not your prospects have a need they can express, but whether or not you have the ability to help them recognize a new need that’s worth a war with the status quo.

As for the issue of time, if your prospective clients don’t have a stated need, they don’t have the time constraint. This is also a challenge for salespeople as they qualify leads. Can you build a case for something differentiated and compelling enough to help them commit to a time? For clients, the more compelling the opportunity, the more money that’s being left on the table by not acting, the more opportunities they miss, the greater your ability to lock in a date. You need the ability to be compelling.

So what does this mean for lead qualification? If not BANT, what then?

Does your prospective client have a challenge around which you can create massive value? If so, then he or she will find the budget.

Do you have a sponsor who will introduce you to all the other sponsors and help you build consensus within the organization? You’re not looking for authority; you’re looking for someone with deep influence in the organization. You’re looking for someone who will help you with access.

Finally, consider engagement. Don’t mistake engagement for receptivity – receptivity alone is not enough. Look for a group of stakeholders who feel so strongly about improving results that they will help you build the case for change – a group that will go to war with the status quo. 

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How Should You Qualify Each Sales Lead?

Today's post is by Donal Daly, CEO of The TAS Group. 

 

 

Effective qualification, as an integral part of the sales process, is a supremely valuable tool not just for the sales organization but for the company overall. Remember, there are really only two reasons why you lose a sale: 1) you shouldn’t be there in the first place, i.e., this is a deal you should not win, or 2) you were outsold. If marketing and sales are aligned when outlining the profile of the ideal target customer, then a lot of the pain associated with the first reason goes away. You’ve targeted the customer correctly; so, yes, if there is an opportunity, the salesperson should have a good chance of winning it, unless he or she is outsold by a competitor. But winning the sale is not about just identifying the right customer profile. We also need to understand whether there is really an opportunity to win. (This is one of the four key questions that are part of TAS from The TAS Group.)

Unless you have a crystal ball, you cannot forecast accurately if you don’t qualify properly. Poor qualification leads to missed numbers and surprise sales losses. If internal resources are allocated based on your pipeline, your credibility is seriously damaged, and your customers will slip down the priority list when internal resources are allocated. Then neither sales nor marketing knows where to spend time.

Link precise qualification with your sales-process stages and pipeline management, and then you know what’s going on. (If you need to create a new sales process, or optimize the one you currently use, you can create a customized sales process for free at Dealmaker Genius.)

Depending on the questions you ask and the information you glean, you can determine how likely the sale is to close. Consider the following list of questions. Depending on how you structure the interaction between sales and marketing, whether you use inside sales or telemarketing, and how you define a qualified lead or opportunity will all help you determine whether these questions should be asked by marketing or sales.

• Does the customer have an identified project?
• Is budget allocated?
• Do you know the compelling event that will motivate the customer to buy?
• Are all of the influencers identified?
• What roles do those influencers play?
• Have you won this type of business before?
• Can you win this one?
• What’s your source of information?
• Are there any competing projects?
• Is there a date by which this project has to be completed?
• Is this a competitive opportunity, and what is your competitive advantage?
• Do you fully understand the buyer’s needs?
• Can you meet those needs competitively?
• Does it matter if the project slips a few months? (If so, you might question whether it is worth the time now.)
• What’s the downside for the company if it doesn’t proceed with the purchase of a product such as yours?

Qualification is not an event. It’s an ongoing process. As buyers evaluate you, you must continue to qualify them. If you are a value creator during the evaluation, you’ve earned the right to probe deeper into the opportunity. The qualification process involves establishing the rules of engagement and laying the groundwork for control of the sales process. You must make sure that you question for objective and accurate answers. Ask the same question of different influencers in the account, and you will be surprised at what you learn about the perspective of each role. You need to be sure that you’re working on a real opportunity.

One of the main benefits of disciplined qualification is a pipeline that’s credible and a forecast you can stand over and deliver, and this is where sales and marketing need to be totally aligned.

When does a target become a qualified prospect that warrants extensive sales effort? Marketing can put in place a rigorous lead- or opportunity-qualification process, agreed with sales, so that the salesperson is truly motivated to quickly pursue targets that marketing identifies.

How many qualified prospects do you need at each stage of the pipeline to meet your quota? When you know sales quota and the rate at which deals progress through the funnel, examining the current value of each stage in the funnel can provide indicators of when a shortfall exists.

What is the specific evidence you need to determine whether a deal is likely to close? Marketing and sales need to work together on the verifiable outcomes in each stage of the sales process, and marketing must consider what sales tools are required to help the sales team achieve those outcomes.

As you are getting to that final negotiation stage, what’s the impact of poor qualification on your ability to strike a good deal? What sales and marketing effort do you need to make to ensure that risk is minimized at this stage of the deal?Qualification is a shared function between sales and marketing, and that recognition tends to focus the activities that marketing undertakes beyond just throwing a lead over the fence.

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Phone Conversations: Do They Still Play a Role in B2B Selling?

Today’s post is by Jeff Kalter, CEO of 3D2B, a global business-to-business telemarketing company that bridges the divide between marketing and sales. 

 

 

 

When leads are qualified, it’s a win-win for the supplier and prospect, because the prospect has a need that the supplying company can fulfill.

Marketing has to generate leads that fill the sales pipeline, do so in a way that is acceptable to the customer, and assure that leads are qualified for sales calls. If leads do not meet sales requirements, prospects won’t be ready for a sales call. In this scenario, prospects would likely feel that a sale is being pushed on them rather than that a company is simply helping to solve a problem.

If you’re doing things right, your leads will be valued by salespeople, and customers will feel as if you’re there to help. Simple telephone conversations can help this process, but only if you handle them in the right way.

Are your leads valued by sales?

It’s clear that many sales representatives do not feel they are receiving high-quality leads. According to American Marketing Association’s Marketing News, a stunning70 percent of leads generated by marketers are never acted upon.

Do your customers feel you are helping them when you call?

Customers have been exposed to excessive telemarketing for many years, from mass surveys to single-product promotions, and they often fail to see how they benefit. That’s because prospects are often expected to interact with unqualified telemarketing agents who don’t know much about the products they represent beyond their scripted questions. This shows little respect for a busy businessperson’s time and, as a result, companies erect barricades to protect managers from unwanted calls.

Get around the defenses with a well-planned offense.

So how do you get around the defenses? Today there are a variety of noninvasive methods to track prospect interest. By digging into the data and observing how a customer has interacted with your online ads, landing pages, blogs, social media, and more, you can identify prospects with the highest interest levels and what they’re interested in, and then you can integrate these leads into a series of marketing-integrated activities that include informational emails, event or Webinar invitations, phone calls, and much more.

Lead qualification breeds trust between sales and marketing.

Marketing departments tend to provide salespeople with more leads than they can handle; however, many of those leads do not meet salespeople’s needs. The challenge, therefore, is not to generate boatloads of leads but to produce sales-qualified leads. Don’t expect your salespeople to separate the wheat from the chaff. When qualified and unqualified leads are shuffled together, high-quality leads become tainted by association and are left untouched.

A good conversation is the heart of lead qualification.

Despite the number of lead-generation options available today, there is still no better way to find out about a prospect’s situation, needs, projects, intentions, timeframe, and potential budget than a good old-fashioned phone conversation. Calls need to be made by people with a deep understanding of the products, market, and typical issues facing your target market, otherwise decision makers will find little benefit in sharing their time with the caller.

Integrate your lead-generation and lead-qualification activities, filtering leads through presales calls to learn which leads are qualified for your salespeople. Once your sales representatives know that they will receive only well-qualified leads, they will naturally be eager to follow up on them.

Qualifying leads on the phone is the key to increased conversions. If a lead is lukewarm, marketing should nurture it early in the buying cycle until it’s ready for a sales call. This system will serve both the customer and the vendor, and because customers interact with the vendor only once they are qualified, it helps build trust in the vendor. 

The Evolution of Incentives

Today's blog post is by Christopher Cabrera, CEO of Xactly Corporation, the industry leader in sales compensation automation.

 

Throughout history, incentives and rewards have driven human motivation and behavior. Here are a few examples taken from my forthcoming book, Game the Plan: Every Sales Rep’s Dream; Every CFO’s Nightmare,of how incentives have evolved throughout the decades.

The 1920s

During the Roaring Twenties, companies began manufacturing new machines (including cars and appliances) on a massive scale. These companies needed droves of salespeople to court customers. Such large companies as Coca-Cola and General Electric assigned territories, set quotas, and began to measure salespeople’s success. To keep up with the competition, they also began to focus on professionalizing their employees and rewarding them with cash bonuses and induction into elite clubs.

Eventually, an imbalance between labor supply and demand, coupled with the Great Depression, put incentives and bonuses on the back burner – but only temporarily.

The 1940s

In the forties, organizations moved beyond the idea of using incentives to drive only better behavior in general and focused instead on how they could be used to drive specific behaviors, such as selling a certain number of units in a set time period. Companies shifted away from the large “gift” bonuses of the ’20s and instead used a new structure in which bonuses were paid out in three to five years, when specific long-term goals had been reached. These types of incentives were created to help employees focus on the long-term prosperity of the company rather than the immediate gratification of cash bonuses.

The 1950s

Salespeople in the 1950s wanted a comfortable life with status symbols to spare. This decade introduced perquisites, commonly known today as “perks.” Due to changing tax laws, companies needed a way to motivate the work force that didn’t involve money. Perks were just the answer they were looking for. Salespeople in the ’50s were motivated by the promise of fancy company cars, country club memberships, private secretaries, and the use of vacation homes.

The 1990s

Before the boom, dot-coms were cash strapped. Thus, stock options were seen as a great way to attract and keep talent (at least until options vested). In addition, stock options contained a built-in incentive: eventual payout was tied to company success, which guaranteed that employees would work hard to make sure the company was thriving. Imagining the possibility of an IPO like Starbucks (with market caps that grew at an astounding rate) was enough to incent employees to work as hard as possible.

Today,many companies are doing it right by

• fostering improved quality of life by offering free food at lunch and dinner, massages and yoga, and backup child-care assistance (Google);
• helping employees juggle work, family, and a social life by offering such services as dry-cleaning pickup and car servicing (eBay);
• encouraging fun by offering Ping-Pong tables, Hackathons, and scooters in the office (Box.com);
• providing unlimited vacation days to enhance employees’ desire for freedom and autonomy (Netflix).

For a more detailed account of how incentives have evolved, check out my new book, which will be released on January 28, 2014. Find out more at www.GameThePlan.com.

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The Crystal Ball for Sales: Find Your Best Prospects Faster with Predictive Scoring

Today's post is by Jamie Grenney, VP of marketing at Infer.

 

 

Salespeople do not want to spend valuable time weeding through questionable leads or following up with prospects who will never convert. How can you reduce the grunt work needed to qualify leads without risking pipeline opportunities? And wouldn’t it be nice if your best leads magically bubbled to the top?

There’s a new crystal ball that forward-thinking sales teams are using to accelerate the process of finding qualified leads. It’s called predictive lead scoring, and it helps sales managers figure out where to focus the team’s energy so that the best reps are pursuing only the best opportunities. If good reps can typically work 100 leads in a month, predictive lead scoring can help ensure that every prospect they call is a good fit for your product.

What Is Predictive Scoring?

Imagine having a search box where you could enter an email address, and it returns an accurate prediction of whether or not that person’s company is likely to buy your product. That's what predictive lead scoring is all about. It works like this:

1. First, it looks at historical information from your sales and marketing applications (data on, for example, converted leads, wins and losses, account profiles, and purchase history) to understand what a good customer really looks like.
   
   
2. Next, it adds to any information you already have about your new leads (inside Salesforce or any other system), by grabbing from the Web valuable data points about the individual and the organization for which he or she works, e.g., relevant job postings, employee count, patent filings, social presence, Website traffic, and even the company’s preferred technology vendors.
   
   
3. Then it uses sophisticated techniques such as data mining, statistical modeling, and machine learning to make sense of all this information about prospective buyers and assigns each lead a score that indicates likelihood of converting.

Rather than just rely on human intuition to weigh hundreds of variables, predictive scoring automatically creates the optimal model for your product and continuously returns accurate predictions to your CRM system in a format that’s easy for anyone to interpret, not just data scientists or IT people. 

Keep Up with Your Data-Driven Competitors

The value that predictive scoring brings to your top line is mind-blowing. You can gain major lifts in win rates and lead conversions by predicting outcomes, prioritizing your flow of leads, and focusing on your best prospects. It lets you put your resources where you’ve got the best shot at winning and eliminate wasted energy at each stage in the sales funnel.

What percentage of your time is currently spent on prospects who don’t convert? Fifty percent, maybe more? And on the flip side, how often do you give up on a prospect one touch too soon? Whether you’re selling to existing customers, prospects, or a totally new market, predictive scoring will uncover opportunities you may never have seen otherwise.

One of the coolest things about this method is that folks like us at Infer can use it bring the power of predictive data science (think Google PageRank or Amazon recommendations) to all companies, so anyone can operate with the same data-driven intelligence as Google, Facebook, or Amazon. Instead of looking in the rearview mirror and waiting to see which leads convert, with predictive scoring, you can place the right bets and get to qualified prospects faster than your competition.

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Test Your Sales Team's Negotiation IQ

Is this new 2 ½ hour interactive video training course for you? Find out by taking this test.

1. Do your salespeople know how to deal with buyers who are liars?
   Yes is + 10 points. 
   No is – 10 points.
   
   
2. Are you confident that your salespeople will never cave in to price pressure, eroding your margins with discounts that make you cringe?
   Yes is + 10 points.  
   No is – 10 points.
   
   
3. Is it easy for you to teach your salespeople to become better negotiators?
   Yes is + 10 points.  
   No is – 10 points.
   
   
4. Do your salespeople know how to manage the emotional climate in a negotiation?
   Yes is + 10 points.  
   No is – 10 points.
   
   
5. Have your salespeople mastered the art of discerning nonverbal communication so that they can positively influence the buyer’s state of mind? 
   Yes is + 10 points.  
   No is – 10 points.

If you answered "no" to even one of the above questions, it's time to take action. I believe that most salespeople leave a lot of money on the table when they negotiate deals with tough, smart customers. That’s why I’m excited to announce the new Selling Power Sales Negotiation Course. It will leave your salespeople eager to close more deals at better margins than you ever thought possible.

The course’s 45-page leader’s guide and 20-minute video show you step by step how to get your salespeople to take ownership of the content. In fact, every salesperson will walk away armed with a complete sales-negotiation worksheet to use immediately after the training. 

After only 2 ½ hours, you will see, not only a shift in your team members’ attitudes, but you’ll also notice that their negotiation skills have been elevated to a much higher level. Your salespeople can and will improve, and you’ll achieve a significantly better bottom line. 

The Selling Power Sales Negotiation Course is available for the introductory price of $595. This rate is available only until December 31, 2013. 

To order your course today at the preferred-customer $400 savings, call (540) 752-7000, or visit www.sellingpower.com/negotiation. This course also includes a 10-minute free coaching and consultation session with me to ensure your success. 

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Why the Holidays Are a Great Time to Prospect

Today's post is by Marc Wayshak, sales strategist and author of Game Plan Selling: The Definitive Rulebook for Closing the Sale in the Age of the Well-Informed Prospect and Breaking All Barriers: Insider Secrets to a Limitless Life.

 

“Jingle bells! Jingle bells! Jingle all the way! Oh what fun, it is to ride…”

Just the thought of that song makes most of us want to run away from work and go play. The holiday season is the time of year when most salespeople tell themselves that nobody is answering the phone, making deals, or buying. Most salespeople give up on prospecting during the holidays and instead focus their energy on closing a few remaining deals in the pipeline or heading home early. But if you’re one of my savvy, sales-minded readers, you may be asking, “If everyone is kicking back, then couldn’t there be an opportunity to actually get through to those hard-to-reach prospects?”

Yes. The reality is that the holiday season is one of the best times of the year to prospect. (Of course, take off Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, you workaholic!) During the other 11 months, prospects are bombarded by your competitors, busy as can be and protected by those oh-so-mean gatekeepers. During the holiday season, many of your top prospects will be experiencing the opposite. Let’s explore the key reasons why you and your sales team should consider doubling down on prospecting this holiday season:

1. Your competition is kicking back. Your prospects are being contacted in every way possible. They are spending more than a quarter of the day just responding to email. By prospecting during the holiday season, you are far more likely to reach a prospect with his or her guard down.

2. Your prospects aren’t as busy. Have you ever called prospects, only to hear in their voices that they are overwhelmed with the 10,000 other things going on? We’ve all been in there. The average corporate employee has a boatload of work to do on any given day. But during the holiday season, things slow down. Since many people are on vacation, not much work is getting done, and your prospects are often playing catch up. This creates a tremendous opportunity to snag your top prospects when they aren’t distracted by the chaos that surrounds them during the rest of the year.

3. The gatekeepers are off duty. In my surveys regarding salespeople’s biggest sales challenges, getting past the gatekeeper is always at the top of the list. Most of the time, a CEO of a major company is protected by a wall of people whose job is to ward off distracting salespeople. During the holiday season, however, those gatekeepers are off spending quality time with family and friends while the boss is staying in the office. By prospecting during the holiday season, you can often bypass gatekeepers altogether.

Overall, the holiday season provides the perfect storm of prospecting opportunities, allowing you to prospect more effectively than at other times of the year. Not only is your competition often not prospecting, but your prospects are less busy, and their gatekeepers are on vacation. By spending more time prospecting this holiday season, you will find that, yes, some of your prospects are actually on the ski slopes with their families, but many are still at the office with very little going on and nobody to keep you away. Try making prospecting calls the weeks before and after Christmas.

How do you get through to those hard-to-reach prospects? Please share your strategies in the comments section below.

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