Selling Power Blog

Why a Sales Demo Won't Win You the Business

Today's post is by Dave Kurlan, CEO of Kurlan & Associates.

 

Do you follow a sales process that’s largely built around getting a prospect to agree to watch a demo?

If so, then you’re following the herd. You’re probably also wondering why you can’t get prospects to take action after you show them your demo.

Part of the problem is that experts and thought leaders are not creating enough content that helps salespeople sell based on value. For example, when I look at what people are writing and speaking about, here’s what I see:

• Social selling (LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.)
• Inbound marketing
• CRM
• Lead nurturing

There's nothing wrong with these topics, of course, and some of the insight shared about them might even help you to become a better seller; however, I worry that experts have become too focused on addressing topics related to top-of-the-funnel issues. What sellers should be focused on is the fundamental of selling value.

Why? Selling value is the one thing that salespeople, operating without benefit of the lowest price, absolutely, positively must be able to do well in order to consistently earn business.  

Admittedly, selling value isn’t a simple equation; it's an outcome of a variety of actions and highly developed skills, including

• differentiating your offering;
• making purchases that are not based on price;
• being tolerant of higher prices;
• selling in a consultative fashion;
• easily discussing financial terms (e.g., return on investment, payback period, and net present value) with decision makers.

Unfortunately, selling value happens to be one thing that salespeople often do inadequately. According to Objective Management Group's statistics (close to one million salespeople assessed), most salespeople have as strengths or skills, on average, only two of the six most important factors required to sell value.

Gerhard Gschwandtner, founder of Selling Power magazine, and I discussed this topic in this five-minute video. As Gerhard noted, there are two ways to “slip on the banana peel” with customers today. One is having irrelevant conversations. The other is having obsolete conversations. Those conversations happen when sales teams rely on techniques and insight learned in previous decades.

If you want to read more about selling value, here are three of my favorite articles on the subject. They provide nice guidelines for selling value.

The One Thing Most Salespeople Are Unable to Do

Why There is No Value When You Provide Value Via Special Pricing

How to Add Value to Your Sales Offering

Do you think a demo hurts or helps your chance to close the sale? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Six Things You Need to Know about Millennial Sales Reps

 

Today’s guest post is by Josiane Feigon, president of TeleSmart Communications and author of Smart Selling on the Phone and Online. The insight in this blog post is taken from the “15 in 2015 Inside Sales Trend Report.”   

 

 

Millennials are taking over in the sales profession. In just five years, this generation will make up 46 percent of the entire US workforce. Here are six characteristics of Millennials that inside sales managers should know. 

1. They overshare.

Millennials value their community at work. That explains why the open-office phenomenon is so popular and why 88 percent of Millennials want their co-workers to be their friends. The flip side of this is oversharing. Too much or inappropriate information can destroy trust and a collaborative atmosphere. Don’t let oversharing tendencies run wild in your department. Establish the expectation that yours is a friendly office, not an overly social one. 

2. They value engagement with their parents.

Know that you might be competing with your Millennial sales rep’s parent for influence. Consider the following:

• Baby boomers were often helicopter parents for Millennials.
• Some high-profile employers have instituted “bring your parents to work” days.
• I’ve talked with sales managers who have noticed Millennial reps regularly consulting with their parents about career moves.
• I even have a few friends who regularly do their kids’ homework . . . in college!

As an inside sales manager, don’t play into the Millennials’ fear of failure by being an always-present authority figure ready to swoop in and tell them exactly how to get things done. Encourage a learning environment where their experience is valuable and their insight is welcomed. This will help as you push them to sell on their own. 

3. They can easily become confused about how they get paid.

According to Vorsight and The Bridge Group, three out of every 10 reps reported being unclear about their incentive compensation plan, which correlates to a 300 percent drop in employee engagement. Considering how motivation – or the lack thereof – is contagious on the sales floor, insides sales managers need to pay attention to this trend. Outline incentives clearly and make sure reps easily grasp the basics of how the incentive plan works.

4. They might blur the boundaries between employee and manager.

Pew Research revealed that, compared to previous generations, most Millennials have low trust in authority figures. The same study shows that Millennials prefer an environment that allows them to interact informally with peers and their bosses. A recent LinkedIn internal study also reported that one in three Millennials have texted their boss outside of work for non-work-related reasons, compared to only 10 percent of the boomer generation.

As a result, many Millennials find hierarchical relationships to be uncomfortable or foreign. Make sure you set the standard for what’s appropriate and what’s not. Be friendly, and be clear that you’re the boss.

5. They fear negative feedback.

I find that managers complain that they are constantly badgered by their team members to mentor more, coach more, acknowledge more, and reward more, but when they reach out unrehearsed and unplanned with some critiques, their reps panic. What’s the deal with these double standards? 

High-maintenance Millennials can be very fearful of rejection, fueling both 1) need for constant feedback and 2) a fear of rejection. In other words, they want to hear lots of encouraging things and few critical ones. This might be because helicopter parents prevented them from experiencing and bouncing back from failure.

Avoid this high-maintenance minefield by making sure you telegraph your feedback meetings way ahead of time and surround all criticism with positive messages. 

6. They can go quickly from little angels to little monsters.

“They interviewed so well, everyone liked them . . . and then after a few months, something happened.” I get this comment from sales managers a lot. Their young new hires seem to be starting out so well, then out comes their wrecking ball!

When high-maintenance Millennials experience something upsetting, such as a breakup or a lost deal, it can affect their work, possibly more so than with employees from other age brackets. With their “friends are co-workers” mentality, Millennials can have an impossible time focusing on work when they’re pouring out their feelings to their office neighbors.

These types of employees need to know that, when they’re at work, they must focus on work. If you’re calm, cool, and an honest – but tough – professional, the rest of the team will admire you for stepping in to reign in a bad influence without breathing fire and getting authoritarian.

 

How to Run a Sales Contest

Today's guest post is by Adam Hollander, CEO of FantasySalesTeam.

 

 

 

Over the last year and a half at FantasySalesTeam, we’ve helped companies run hundreds of sales contests. A few weeks ago, Joe Goss, one of our client success managers and our resident Excel guru, took it upon himself to examine data generated from 164 games among our 100-plus clients, mostly inside sales teams. The sales teams were as small as four reps and as large as 2,800 reps. What he found about motivation is worth sharing.

Lesson #1: Run your sales contest for one to two months.

Having spent my entire career in sales and sales management, I’ve participated in and run my fair share of sales contests. Some run for a week, others for a year. So what’s the average length for a sales contest?

According to our findings, the average game length was 44 days, while the median was 31, showing that most of our clients are running sales contests for one to two months at a time. We advise customers to reset periodically by stopping one game and then starting a new one with new metrics, goals, awards, etc. This gives players who may have fallen behind a chance to start fresh. Also, this cadence allows sales managers change metrics and point values to align with their most current and pressing goals and metrics.

Lesson #2: Balance activity metrics with results metrics.

We tell every FantasySalesTeam customer to balance games between activity/behavior metrics (e.g., calls, meetings, pipeline) and results metrics (e.g., revenue or percentage of quota). This helps level the playing field to ensure that traditional top performers aren’t winning every time. In our analysis, we found a fairly good balance, with 61 percent of the metrics being activity based versus 39 percent results based. 

The majority of our customers run inside sales teams, which are highly metrics driven. We found that many of our customers (15 percent) are measuring phone activity at almost twice the rate of other activity not related to the phone (8 percent), such as meetings or proposals. More importantly, pipeline is the top activity metric being measured (31 percent) and aligns well with our advice that pipeline metrics are the most important to focus on in a sales contest.

A number of our clients also incorporate bonus-point metrics into their games to increase the motivation factor. We pulled out some we liked best:

• Best Team Picture
• Random Acts of Kindness
• Sales on a Saturday
  And our favorite…
• Number of Songs Sung to Customers

Lesson #3: Reward reps with experiences (not cash or prizes).

Based on general feedback that we’ve received from reps over the last two years – and we’ve talked to a lot of them – we recommend customers focus on giving experiences rather than physical prizes. Experiences tend to be less expensive, and more importantly, reps tend to remember them a lot more than they do a new TV or camera.

When we broke down the 393 different prizes (grouping together items such as cash or gift cards), we found that 53 percent could be classified as experiences, while 47 percent were physical items. (By the way, 73 percent of the physical items were cash, allowing winners to choose their own reward).

Here are some other motivation best practices for sales teams to consider.

• Leverage team competition. Team-based games and incentives get players (reps) pushing and relying on each other and are far more effective than individual-based contests.
• Create multiple ways to win. When you have only one way to win the incentive, inevitably players fall behind or out of contention. Create multiple paths to win and succeed to keep the team engaged longer.
• Update results frequently. The more often you update the results from your contest, the more engaged your reps will be. Better yet, tie the contest directly to your customer relationship management or call-center management system so the results update automatically!
• Make results highly visible. Ensure that the contest results and updates are front and center. Send out regular notifications, and display leaderboards throughout the office, ideally on TV screens.
• Hold a proper kickoff. Don’t just launch the contest through an email blast. Get everyone together in a room or through a call/Web meeting and showcase the structure, prizes, etc. Make sure there’s real excitement on day one.
• Get managers engaged. If managers are paying attention to the contest results, they will make sure their reps are paying attention. Find ways to engage the managers and ensure they are invested in the reps’ success.
• Measure, measure, measure. The point of a sales contest or incentive is not just to have fun or increase engagement but to drive improved results and activity. Make sure you know how you’re going to measure success so you can prove the return on investment and have the ability to do it again!

For more information on FantasySalesTeam, visit www.fantasysalesteam.com or www.fantasysalesteam.com/video.

Three Practical Action Steps for Growing Inside Sales Teams

Today’s post is by Selling Power Editors. Subscribe now to Selling Power magazine to keep up with the latest trends, news, and best practices for B2B sales professionals.

 

 

What’s booming in technology sales right now? Inside sales teams.

A recent study, “Outside In: The Rise of the Inside Sales Team,” conducted by Reality Works Group and ZS Associates, found that 40 percent of large technology companies plan to increase their inside-sales head count by 2016. What will this mean for the sales profession? Here are three key points from the study that sales leaders can use as action steps for growing inside sales teams. 

1. Reduce high turnover rates.

Research revealed that the standard turnover rate for inside sales professionals in technology companies is 19 percent. Organizations should begin to think of the inside sales role as equally important as outside sales. Companies need to consider retention strategies, competency models, coaching, and career progression for inside sales, just as they do for their field sales teams.

2. Nail down policies for overtime pay.

A full 65 percent of organizations surveyed indicated that they classify inside-sales staff members as exempt and, while the Federal Labor Standards Act offers clear guidelines for classification of outside salespeople, the details for inside salespeople are not as clear cut.

Unfortunately, this vagueness has left some companies to find out the hard way that overtime laws don’t always apply to inside sales teams as they do to field salespeople. It is critical that sales leaders understand exemption laws and create transparent policies to ensure compliance with them. When you don’t know how to properly compensate the sales team, revenue suffers. As inside sellers gain more responsibility for generating profit and engaging clients and prospects, tying an inside salesperson’s quota and commission plan to an outside salesperson may no longer make sense. Organizations need to rethink their approaches to the drivers of sales force effectiveness, including motivating and rewarding their inside sales teams through sales-compensation programs.

3. Leverage the social skills of inside sellers.  

The Reality Works Group/ZS Associates study cites research, published by ZS in 2013, illustrating how IBM helped its salespeople leverage social channels to generate leads and manage account relationships. Early results included a 55 percent increase in Twitter followers and a significant increase in the number of high-quality inbound leads.

The lesson is clear: B2B buyers are increasingly becoming comfortable with collaborating, researching, and even completing the purchase cycle through online channels. That puts inside sellers in a powerful position to influence decision makers. With today’s tools, salespeople don’t need to leave their desks. They can usher prospects through the sales funnel virtually and create new clients.

As opportunities to reach, engage, and influence prospects increase, the number of touch points will increase, as well. Savvy sales leaders are enabling their inside sales teams with tools to engage clients and prospects via the channels that prospects prefer.

Want to learn more about the rise of inside sales teams? Download the full study, “Outside In: The Rise of the Inside Sales Team.”

 

Sales Reps, Stop Waiting for Marketers to Fill Your Pipeline

Today's post is by Joanne Black, America’s top referral sales expert. Visit NoMoreColdCalling for more articles, tips, and free resources. You can also find Joanne on Twitter: @ReferralSales.

If you depend on marketing to score your leads, you can forget about hitting your numbers.

Prospecting is not your marketing department’s job. It’s your job – and it’s your most important job.

You’re not entitled to sit back and wait for great leads to fill your sales pipeline, which has  become common practice in most sales organizations. Many salespeople complain that marketing isn’t providing enough leads and definitely not qualified leads. Following up on poor leads is a waste of your sales time, but that’s what happens when you let someone else do your job.

Marketing Is Great, But…

Don’t get me wrong. Our marketing teams provide invaluable support. They bring prospects to our Websites, nurture relationships, conduct research, create demographics, write case studies, and build social-media strategies. I have worked with and learned from some great marketers, and I have seen well-aligned sales and marketing teams do some great things together. But marketing should not be qualifying our leads. We are the only ones who should do that.

An Unexpected Point of View

Ken Krogue, founder of InsideSales.com, advocates for striking a balance between warm calling and inbound marketing. While many B2B companies stand to benefit from an expanded inbound-marketing presence, it’s not enough to score those big-name accounts.

Krogue says that, although his company uses inbound marketing extensively, it doesn’t generate the large-scale leads he needs in order to sell to large clients such as the Fortune 500. “If you look at a typical bell curve, 70 percent of all inbound leads that come in are small,” he explains. “To score deals with enterprise-class companies, we have to reach out and initiate conversations and then move to a Web-based type of nurturing.”

Quality Trumps Quantity

In most marketing departments, the focus is on lead volume when it should be on lead quality. They measure the success of inbound marketing by how many leads are generated, rather than on how many of those leads actually convert into new clients.

Matt Heinz, president of Heinz Marketing, suggests the following solution: “Start with a common definition between sales and marketing of a good lead. Then track lead performance through the pipeline to ensure your overall modeling on lead-opportunity-close is correct, but also to adjust resources and lead channel investments based on where the best conversions and lowest marketing cost per sale exists.”

Nurture marketing takes us only so far. It’s up to salespeople to nurture their own relationships, not just with marketing automation, but with a proactive, outbound, and disciplined sales-prospecting strategy.

How do leads that come from your marketing team compare with those you create through referrals and other business-development strategies? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Three Ways to Win without Your Sales Funnel

Today's guest post is by Jennifer Stanley, Associate Principal (Marketing and Sales Practice) at McKinsey & Company. Candace Lun Plotkin, Director of Knowledge, Marketing & Sales, at McKinsey & Company, also contributed to this post. Hear Jennifer speak at the Sales 2.0 Conference in Philadelphia on March 16, 2015.

Much has been written about the "death of the sales funnel," but if the sales funnel is dead, what is taking its place?

The answer is simple: mapping customer journeys. A "customer journey" is the path customers take to learn about, compare, and decide what they want to buy. But neither the sales funnel nor pipeline management actually go away; they just morph into processes that are much more nuanced and customer driven.

Instead of being sales-process forward like the sales funnel – generate a lead, qualify it, propose a deal, negotiate the deal, close –the selling approach needs to be much more tailored to the customer's needs and behaviors. Taking this approach has substantial benefits. Our Sales Growth study, based in part on interviews with more than 100 leading sales organizations and subsequent research on marketing-enabled sales, has shown that a buyer-focused selling approach yields 5–10 percent revenue growth and up to 30 percent improvement in customer loyalty, and it cuts the time from initial lead to deal close by 10–20 percent. How can you uncover needs, however, that aren't obvious? Start asking questions.

• How does the customer learn about you?
• Who are the influencers they pay attention to, and where are those influencers found (blogs, word of mouth, recommendations or likes on social media, trade shows, etc.)?
• How do customers compare your offers and the buying experience to competitive brands' products and services?
• How do they decide to buy (or not) from you?
• What motivates customers to buy after-market services?
• What makes customers want to renew their contracts (or not)?

Based on the answers to these questions, it is vital that the sales team figure out how to better work with marketing to convert and satisfy the customer and win the deal.

Here are three suggestions for surviving and thriving without the sales funnel.

1) Put yourself in your customer's shoes. It sounds so easy, doesn't it? Actually, looking at the world through their customers' eyes is often tough for salespeople. Have the courage to get your customers' unvarnished feedback about what it's like to buy from you – and from your competitors. Ask them where they get their information, whose information they trust, and how well you deliver insight. You might also ask them which of your competitors is really good at selling and find out what they do to leave that impression.

Do this for your top two or three customers to understand how they make buying decisions.

2) Map your own decision journey. For those same two or three customers, map where in the purchase process YOU as a salesperson spend most of your time and effort, and then ask yourself why you get stuck in certain spots. Chances are the answer is a combination of "I've just always done it this way," "It's just the way we sell here," or "I don't know." Now come up with actions you could take to unstick the journey.

For example, if you are always churning proposals but not closing, perhaps you are not proposing the right deals to the right customers with the right information at the right time in their decision process. Perhaps you need to deliver more targeted pitches, with customer data and insight from marketing.

3) Make friends with marketing. Ask for the marketing team's perspective and what could/should be done differently to better meet your customers' needs in their decision journey. Let marketing know where you often get stuck in the process. See what can be done to enable your selling:

• Can marketing help build a calculator app for comparing the total cost and benefit of your offering to your competitors'?
• Can you get help building the perfect pitch pack, with digital content, for a particular customer you are going after?
• Can marketing help build some interactive demos you can use with existing customers to drive awareness of your new product?

Marketing should be making your selling life easier – so tell them how.

How to Create a Knowledge-Based Sales Process

Today’s guest post is by Brian Dietmeyer, president and CEO of Think! Inc. and 5600blue.

 

 

Does your sales process provide salespeople with the knowledge they need to win the short-term competitive advantage?

The paradox of today’s world is that long-term growth is actually driven by your sales team’s response to rapid, short-term changes. In her book, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business, Columbia Business School professor Rita Gunther McGrath argues that the sustainable competitive advantage is quickly disappearing. Instead, business leaders learn to compete on a series of short-term competitive advantages.

Speed is the name of the game now, and most sales teams are not equipped to keep pace. Changes are occurring so rapidly that salespeople need rapid knowledge. Consider the following scenarios that call for agile responses and a real-time knowledge base.

1. Your value proposition changes due to a new acquisition, divestiture, or new product/service.

2. Your sales strategy changes, with emphasis on a new pricing or service model or ideal customer profile.

3. Your competitors’ value proposition changes due to a new acquisition, divestiture, or new product/service.

4. Your customers’ needs shift due to regulatory or geopolitical events. 

Legacy CRM, marketing strategies, and sales-training solutions do little to provide salespeople with real-time knowledge. For example, consider how these three tools are no longer supporting sales teams the way they used to.

MARKETING

American Management Association reports that 90 percent of what sales is getting from marketing is not being used. Marketing/product management needs to replace generic feature/benefit statements with real-time messaging and a knowledge base that reflects the rapid shifts in sales strategy, value propositions, and customer needs.

CRM

In this SlideShare presentation, “Improving Sales in a Brave New World,” James Rogers points out that 74 percent of organizations report low adoption of CRM. The fact is, CRM systems need to be turned upside down. Instead of using technology to ask salespeople to fill out forms, use technology to deliver competitive knowledge that salespeople can use to stay ahead of rapid changes in the market.

SALES TRAINING

American companies spend $16 billion annually on sales training; CSO Insights reports that 70 percent of that learning is gone within 30 days. Make the shift from generic process and sales methodology to a knowledge-based approach that gives salespeople real-time data that allows them to compete at the speed of change. Salespeople also need to be trained in how to leverage knowledge in customer conversations rather than how to execute methodology.

5600blue has introduced the first-ever vertically integrated sales-enablement solution that builds a knowledge base that tracks with current changes at every phase of the sales process. The technology houses, distributes, and updates knowledge in formats salespeople can use (Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and email) and enablement in the form of sales training, deal coaching, and win/loss reviews.

This knowledge aligns with every step of the sales process and helps salespeople

1. qualify customers and make pursuit decisions in line with shifting management priorities regarding what an ideal prospect looks like,

2. understand market trends to gain access and add value to the executive- level customer,

3. lead the customer’s buying process.

This knowledge also enables salespeople to leverage value throughout the sales process. For example, we know from 12 years of win/loss reviews among deals collectively worth $20 billion that winners win when they show customers how they meet their needs at higher probability and lower risk than the alternatives. We also know from our primary research that more than 85 percent of companies say they can’t deliver that knowledge to salespeople in real time.

Similarly, we know that 97 percent of buyer negotiation tactics follow predictable patterns. 5600blue puts knowledge in the hands of salespeople in advance of the negotiation to change that conversation early on.

The biggest changes in selling in the last 25 years are occurring right now.  This shift is driven by the digital revolution, which puts much more information in the hands of buyers and competitors. Start taking steps today to equip your salespeople with the knowledge they need to compete in the short term so that your team can win in the long term.

 

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