Selling Power Blog

Three Ways Sales Technology Can Help Increase Revenue

Today's post is by Sara Varni, senior vice president of marketing, Sales Cloud, Salesforce.

 

Imagine a typical sales rep – let’s call him John Smith – who’s told by his manager to track activity in a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. John’s not too sure about this request. He believes that CRM tools benefit only sales managers and take time away from selling. “How is this going to help me meet my quota?” he thinks, worried about his productivity dropping.

Sound familiar? Many companies deploy modern CRM, but then fall short on educating their salespeople about how CRM can actually make their lives easier, increase their productivity, and close more deals.

The reality is that CRM and the use of sales technology is increasingly the difference between just so-so quarters and great quarters. Used effectively, CRM is a critical way to increase sales rep productivity and, ultimately, drive company revenue.

A recent survey by Salesforce Research of more than 2,300 global sales leaders highlights the following three best practices from high performing salespeople who are using sales technology to improve the bottom line:

1. They Use Analytics

When there’s analytics in use, there’s likely a winning sales organization. High performing sales teams are 3.5 times more likely than underperforming teams to use sales analytics. Why? Because, with sales analytics, John Smith can answer questions such as: Where should I focus my efforts to close my deals? Which lead sources have been most successful in the past? Do I need to reset my forecasts? Instead of having to hunt through disconnected spreadsheets, salespeople can quickly find the right information to stay proactive and nimble by using analytics that bring all sales data together.  

Additionally, analytics give sales managers powerful and actionable insight into how their teams are performing. Managers can use analytics to review pipeline trends, risk indicators, and forecast metrics to identify the behaviors of top sales reps and work to implement those best practices across their team.

2. They Love Mobile Apps

According to Coca-Cola Germany CEO Ulrik Nehammer, “The most dangerous place to make a decision is in the office. You need to make the decision where the customer is.”

A salesperson’s job is increasingly mobile – in fact, today’s field reps spend about half of their workday selling remotely. They need to be on the road with customers and have to keep business running while they’re on the go, and they turn to mobile sales apps for everything from lead management to sales forecasting. Nearly 60 percent of high performing sales teams already use or are planning to use a mobile sales app and are twice as likely as underperformers to use or have plans to use a mobile sales app. Productivity increases by 15 percent, on average, when sales reps have mobile access to CRM applications.

3. They Sell Together

Today’s sophisticated buyers aren’t only connected to a sales team – they have a relationship with sales, marketing, and customer service. Organizations rising to the top understand this and see sales as the responsibility of the whole company, adopting a team selling approach. High-performing sales teams are nearly three times more likely than underperformers to view sales as 100 percent the responsibility of the entire organization.

To achieve a holistic customer approach, top sales teams are using collaboration software that helps them communicate across established boundaries. Particularly in the context of complex sales with multiple customer stakeholders, John Smith may use an internal collaboration tool to branch out from the sales team and collaborate with marketing to learn as much as possible about customer needs.

Winning teams are also connecting with customers in more ways than ever before across a broad range of channels. High performers are 4.7 times more likely than underperformers to rate their capabilities in omnichannel sales interactions as outstanding/very good.

Will knowing about these best practices help reps like John Smith fall in love with CRM? Maybe not, but it’s a start. It’s human nature to resist change, so companies need to help salespeople embrace new habits by implementing a comprehensive user adoption strategy for sales technology. Companies should take the time to train salespeople on how to flexibly personalize their CRM system in a way that meets each person’s needs and expectations. By providing proper training and a purposeful action plan, companies can eliminate CRM skepticism and help sales reps achieve what they really want – to reach or even exceed their quota.

Can Gamification Really Help Your Team Win?

Today's post is by Scott Eidle, an evangelist for sales best practices, including sales process, enablement, and operations. He leverages more than 20 years of sales and marketing experience to share insight about the top trends in the software and technology sales space, and is currently a global sales enablement executive for an enterprise software company.

Sales leaders in every industry continue to look for the magic potion that increases the engagement of their sales teams. Tapping into the competitive nature of salespeople, the reasoning goes, can be used to improve their daily behavior –  leading to higher adoption of sales fundamentals and improving the overall performance of borderline reps who have potential but who just haven’t produced the results those leaders are looking for.

It’s a great theory, and one getting a lot of buzz – and funding. But the reality is that investing in gamification isn’t the answer. Here’s why:

1.  The only true way to drive lasting and meaningful engagement (and results) from your teams is to improve your sales culture, which doesn’t need a piece of software or an online contest system.  

Sales culture starts from the top down, and is something you just can’t fake. It starts with holding people accountable for best practices – something every salesperson agrees has a direct correlation to the end result: that salesperson selling more of your product or service and making the money they were promised in their OTEs (on-target earnings.) And it is reinforced by managers who hold reps accountable for core fundamentals they know will provide consistent and reliable results.  

Sales reps are who they are because they recognize the investment in time and effort they have to give their jobs in order to achieve those OTEs. They understand there are parts of the job that just aren’t any fun but need to get done. It’s the same mindset athletes have when they go from amateur to professional: pro athletes work harder than amateurs – even at the things they don’t like to do – because they know and commit to mastering the fundamentals in order to showcase the talents that make them superstars. Top sales reps have the same mindset. They know they cannot afford fundamental mistakes if they want to perform their best and reach their potential.

2.   If your gamification strategy doesn’t support your sales culture down to the letter, putting a focus on a gamification contest will ultimately turn off the reps who know they can’t win that contest.  

You’ll see this most from the veteran sales reps, especially those who experienced success before you implemented a computerized gaming system. Sure, they want to win – it’s in their competitive DNA – but, if they think they can’t, they’ll ignore the contest and focus solely on doing their own work and not worrying about scoring imaginary points to win prizes they might not buy with their bigger commission checks anyway. Veteran reps will have the confidence to ignore the promotional emails and the online leaderboards, and won’t give into the “rah-rah” atmosphere. (In fact, it’s also the best way to take a “Challenger” salesperson and turn him or her into a “Lone Wolf” when they start to feel the organization heaping a little too much praise on any gamification leaders that are not putting up the numbers they are.)

3.  In any competitive environment – especially with salespeople who thrive on recognition – reps will learn how to game the system and cheat to improve their results.  

Whether the point system is driven off of CRM entries or some other reporting system, you will get what you measure. But, unless there is an auditing system that holds people accountable for artificially inflating those numbers, you will get reps who are more focused on winning the contest than actually performing the fundamentals that are meant to lead to the ultimate goal of selling more.  

Having seen this first-hand, this is the kind of atmosphere that can cause unnecessary (and unhealthy) friction in your sales teams. In this specific example, a veteran rep raised the ire of her sales colleagues by boasting about her ability to consistently win the sales contests run by her division – even boasting, “Almost every new appliance in my house is from winning one of these stupid contests!” The rest of the team did some research on her past wins, figured out her “formula” for winning, and deployed those same tactics to pump up their own scores and effectively beat her at her own game. The results were both nasty and contentious: she started to raise allegations of cheating against her teammates until she realized her complaints might expose her previous results to scrutiny, and the team chemistry was damaged beyond repair.

Gamification as a practice is not a bad thing. It can keep a sales team focused on doing the right things – especially those who sell a product with a long sales cycle that requires dedication and engagement throughout in order to ultimately result in a sale. But the key to success isn’t in buying a gamification system but rather making the commitment to the culture that defines your sales organization.

The One Thing Your Sales Forecast Is Missing

Today's post is by K. V. Rao, co-founder and CEO, Aviso.

 

 

A sales leader’s life is a hard one, albeit with rich rewards if one can deal with the tremendous pressure and a million distractions from focusing on what is really important – killing the number.

There’s a never-ending pile of email, long sales, marketing and executive meetings, and, of course, tedious sales forecasting calls. That last bit, sales forecasting, is actually the most critical business process to ensure a credible and confident roadmap to making the quarterly number – but that process itself is broken.

“Happy Ears” (and Other Forecasting Challenges)

In many large enterprise organizations, it can take a sales leader’s operations team days to develop a reliable forecast. Often this process involves manually consolidating hundreds of spreadsheets that contain both estimates and complicated formulas trying to take into account judgments that are too often based on intuition and “happy ears” – and not tempered with data-driven analysis.

These are some of the reasons forecasts are not living up to their full potential:

• data is not real time,
• outlook is too optimistic late into the quarter,
• opportunities that are quietly at risk are overvalued
• hidden golden opportunities are missing because they weren’t recognized  (and resourced) in time to save them.

This is the stuff that keeps sales execs up at night, particularly when it’s nearing monthly or quarterly end. They are looking for smarter business insights that are really hard to extract looking in CRM alone.

There is no question the data in a company’s CRM is critical and valuable to the business. The CRM market grew 13.3 percent in the past year, from $20.4 billion in 2013 to $23.2 billion in 2014, and that number is expected to have grown in 2015, according to Gartner Research.

Of course, every B2B sales team relies on CRM, but, even after all of the investment in a CRM system, why does forecasting remain so difficult, time consuming, and – more importantly – unreliable in meeting and exceeding plan?

The Power of Data Science

Two words – data science. There’s a lot of buzz around this term lately, but do we all really understand what it is and what it can do for sales?

Early on, my co-founder, Andrew Abrahams (who led all quantitative research initiatives at JPMorgan Chase) and I understood that, if we could bring data science to sales, then we would really have something. It’s the closest thing to a crystal ball for sales.

One spreadsheet and one brain can process a few elements, but, when considering the performance of dozens – or hundreds – of salespeople, regional environments, seasonal trends, and a constantly fluctuating pipeline, it’s nearly impossible for one person to get to a reliable and confident path to making the number.

Every day, every quarter, sales executives bet their jobs on numbers – numbers that hold them accountable to the executive team, to the board, and sometimes to public markets. Easier said than done, unless you have Aviso. OK, that was a shameless plug, but I always like to have our customers talk for us.

Rickie Goyal, director of worldwide sales operations at Nutanix – and an Aviso customer – gets it. For one quarter, Rickie continued with his spreadsheet process and ran Aviso side by side to see how Aviso performed in comparison to his tried-and-true method. After Aviso predicted quarterly revenue within a 4 percent margin (and they could have actually hit the exact number), Rickie and the executive team were convinced. The spreadsheets are now gone and reps just input their numbers directly into Aviso and data science does the rest.

Rickie summed it up beautifully. “Aviso is our forecast. I’m not going to make a business decision just based on information from a guy who doesn’t want to get fired. I want to make a decision taking into account what the data science tells me is going to happen.”

And isn’t that what we all want?

What Are Your Motives as a Salesperson?

Today’s post is by LaVon Koerner, president and chief revenue officer of Revenue Storm.

 

In my view, U.S. presidential election cycles are nothing more than expensive and colossal sales cycles – creating an inviting landscape for learning which sales practices work and which do not.

As each candidate announces he or she is running for President, the question that comes to mind is, “Why are they doing this?” If the candidate does not state why, the voting population is left to deduct the answer from its own observations based upon what the candidate is saying. Does the candidate’s stated reason have the “ring of truth?” Do we deem the candidate to be transparent and well intended?

At the root of the U.S. obsession with knowing the candidate’s motives is a deeper and more relevant question – “Can I trust the candidate?” That’s why motives matter!

In the U.S. presidential campaign, as with all countries, the voters need to know if the candidate can be entrusted with their country and their future. That answer cannot be determined until it is known, at the very deepest level, what the candidate is trying to accomplish. To ascertain the candidate’s motives, we screen his or her answer through our cynical test question of – “What is in it for them?”

If the candidate’s answer is believed to be more about self-advancement, we are immediately disenchanted. If, however, the answer is the advancement of our country, we will be stirred to uncover the answer to the next automatic question – “Is the advancement of the country in line with our thinking and does it make intuitive sense?” 

If the answer to that question is also yes, we will go to the third round of questioning – “Do they have the plan and skills to pull it off?” 

If the answer again is yes, they have just passed the initial test, and we will then view the candidate as viable. Now, all we have to do is compare him or her to other viable candidates to make our selection. But the answer to that initial question of motive does not mean we will now vote for that candidate. It only means we consider him or her to be qualified – a viable candidate worthy of consideration.

What is so interesting about identifying  candidates’ motives to ascertain their viability is that it is identical to what takes place in every sales cycle in the marketplace. Motives matter – especially in those early moments of the sales cycle where the customer is qualifying you, not your product. This is the time when your personal feasibility and viability are being adjudicated.. If you pass the test, it simply means you are in the race. Now, we can talk about your solution.

This is borne out by science. In Revenue Storm’s large (17,000+) database of B2B sales professionals, it became indisputably clear that motives matter in all sales situations. The data gathered from our validated psychometric diagnostic instrument was revealing. The people with the highest and most intensive scores in the attribute cluster of “people orientation” consistently scored the highest in their individual ability to successfully navigate the perils of sophisticated sales cycles involving multiple calls on multiple people, at multiple levels, over multiple months. 

People Orientation Cluster
Client Oriented	The tendency to take a client perspective to anticipate and satisfy their needs and desires.
Socially Perceptive	An awareness of the appropriate behavior for a given situation because of a sensitivity to human dynamics.
Empathic	The tendency to relate to other people’s issues or environment and react with sensitivity.
Team Oriented	The predisposition to interact with others in a collaborative fashion in order to achieve a group objective.
Mentors	The inclination to spend personal time to help others develop their skills and potential.

A person who scores high in the attributes contributing to this cluster can be seen as an outward-focused individual who would be viewed as a loving and caring person with honest and trustworthy motives.

As an example, one of the attributes in this “people orientation” cluster is empathy, which is defined as a person who has the tendency to relate to other people’s issues or environment and react with sensitivity. Such a person would not advance themselves at the direct expense of their customer or voter. Whether you are running for President of the United States, or are a professional salesperson, your motives matter.

Any intuitive buyer and/or voter will be watching and making an initial judgment concerning you. And, if that judgment comes up negative, it may not matter very much as to what you are selling or saying. They won’t be listening – because motives matter!

What Are Leading and Lagging Indicators, and What Can They Do for You?

Today’s post is by Nikolaus Kimla, CEO of Pipeliner Sales, Inc., as well as the author of some 50 books on sales management and sales methodology. Find him on LinkedIn, or email him directly at nikolaus.kimla@pipelinersales.com. You can also join him at the Sales 2.0 Leadership Conference in Philadelphia on November 16. 

 

Sales management is often conducted using lagging indicators – KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that show what has already happened, such as:

• Sales
• Number of units sold
• Gross margin
• Number of different products sold

We definitely need these in order to see where we’ve been and how we’ve done. But managing only with lagging indicators means you, too, are going to be lagging. Why? By the time lagging indicators become clear, it is too late to change anything.

To look into the future, we need to be able to tell how our current activities are impacting those final figures.

Leading Indicators

Now let’s take a look at the other kind of KPI, called leading indicators. Leading indicators serve as a somewhat reliable index of how our lagging indicators are going to turn out, and consist of factors that can be monitored on a day-to-day basis, such as:

• Leads created
• Leads converted to opportunities
• Sales rep closing ratio
• Percentage of opportunities through each sales process stage

The Combination

A full, usable, dynamic picture of your operation comes about only through the combination of leading and lagging indicators. Only this combination allows you to catch errors and make changes well before your lagging indicators come into effect.

A skillful combination uses leading indicators in such a way that they connect directly with potential lagging indicators – allowing you to clearly see how they will appear if you proceed as planned. For example, if you add up the value of your opportunities in your pipeline, the percentage chances of their making it through, the ranking of each deal, and other leading factors, you see that – if all goes according to plan – you’ll have $1.5 million for the quarter.

If you add up all your leading indicators and see that you’re falling short of your target, you then have time to do something about it. For example:

• Get more leads into the pipeline.
• Take steps to raise lead-to-opportunity conversion rates.
• Coach and mentor your reps to raise closing ratios.
• Monitor your sales process to makes sure it is efficient.

Automation

Unless you assign one or more sales admin staff full time to the task (which would certainly not be cost effective), you’re going to have a tough time keeping your leading indicators updated. It’s best – in fact, it’s vital – that you have an automated solution that fully incorporates your leading and lagging indicators, and allows you to watch them in real time. It’s obviously best if this solution is also your CRM solution, so everything is in one place. 

So look over your sales operations. Do you have leading indicators that clearly show where your sales are headed and how you’ll get there, along with lagging indicators that show where you’ve been? Make sure these are both in place, and fully incorporated into your sales organization and automation, so you always know where you’re going.

Join Nikolaus Kimla at the Sales 2.0 Leadership Conference in Philadelphia on November 16. 

Do Your Reps Think You’re a Pain in the Neck?

Today’s post is by Michelle Vazzana, a partner at Vantage Point Performance, a global sales management training and development firm. Vazzana has more than 28 years of successful sales and management experience, and is also co-author of Cracking the Sales Management Code.

Conducting research for our book Cracking the Sales Management Code, we learned that sales managers can manage only the activities of their salespeople. They can’t manage their sellers’ revenue and they can’t manage whether or not customers buy from their salespeople.

This should be a valuable insight for sales managers and enable them to focus their efforts on identifying the things they can control in managing their reps. However, any discussion about managing other people’s activities always leads to a discussion of “micromanagement.” Many managers will reveal that they are uncomfortable measuring and managing their salespeople’s activities, because they don’t want to be perceived as micromanagers. They did not like being micromanaged when they were salespeople, and they do not want their sellers to feel that way, either.

Sales Coaching: A Hypothetical Conversation

While no one likes to be told what to do – and it might feel demeaning and cheat sellers of the pleasure of making their own good decisions – interest shown by a sales manager in a salesperson’s activities does not necessarily equate to micromanagement. It’s entirely possible to have an objective and productive conversation about a sales rep’s activities that does not demean or offend.

It’s called “sales coaching.” A well-trained sales manager can lead the seller to his or her own conclusions in a thoughtful and deliberate way by asking the right questions and guiding the salesperson to identify the right assumptions and reach the right conclusions.  Here’s a hypothetical conversation.

Sales manager: What do you think you could do to increase your revenues by 10 percent next year?

Rep: Win more new customers.

Sales manager: All right, so how many new customers would it take?

Rep: Two or three new customers each month.

Sales manager: What do you think you could do to accomplish that objective?

Rep: Make more prospecting calls.

Sales manager: That sounds about right. How many additional prospecting calls do you think it would take?

Rep: Five more each week.

Sales manager: Sounds like a reasonable number and an excellent plan. Can you try that for a month, and then we’ll get together to see how it’s going?

Not too directive. Not micromanagement. Just sales coaching.

Creating Confident Salespeople

Generally speaking, no one likes to be told what to do. However, most people do like to know what to do. If salespeople are confident that the actions they take will lead to more sales, they’re highly motivated to do those activities. And sales managers can play a pivotal role in helping sellers identify those activities. It’s not micromanagement if it’s done properly, and it’s unlikely that real coaching will be interpreted as nitpicking. Best of all, our research proves that a focus on activities will lead to greater salesperson productivity…which will make everyone happy.

If you’re still not convinced that measuring and managing sales reps’ activity is a good idea, consider the alternative – to let salespeople figure it out for themselves through painful trial and error. But nothing is more discouraging than doing something you think is the right thing to do, only to see it fail. Sales managers earned their positions because they know how to sell, and they know how to sell because they know the right things to do. Letting people do the wrong things seems like a bad management strategy.

So all you can do as a sales manager is influence the activities of your sellers. You can’t manage their revenue. You can’t manage their customers. So consider taking a more active role in managing the things they do. An enlightened rep won’t see this as micromanagement, but rather as good sales coaching. And good sales coaching is great.

Three Reasons to Ask Reps for Input about Their Quotas

Today’s post is by Lisa Gschwandtner, editorial director at Selling Power. Find her on Twitter at @SellingPower20.

 

 

What’s your process for setting quota? Do you allow your salespeople to provide input?

According to a report published by AON Hewitt Associates, only seven percent of companies set quotas based on rep input. And 45 percent of companies use no internal, bottom-up data at all to set and allocate quotas.

As a manager, you might be wondering, “Why would I involve my reps in this process? I just want them to hit the number I give them!” The reality is that getting reps to achieve quota isn’t as simple as handing off a target and sitting back to watch the revenue roll in. According to CSO Insights, only 48 percent of sales organizations achieved quota in 2014, and those numbers are not on an upward trend.

In a recent live webinar, How to Use 7 Simple Quota Practices to Skyrocket Sales, Selling Power publisher Gerhard Gschwandtner and CallidusCloud product marketing manager Poornima Mohandas discussed a number of issues sales leaders need to be aware of when it comes to setting quota. Here are three potential hazards they outlined for organizations that fail to take rep input into account when establishing target goals.

1. Salespeople become unmotivated. Sales reps want to know that their quotas are set using fair standards. They also want their quotas to be attainable. If you were asked to pursue a goal you felt was absolutely impossible, you’d probably have trouble mentally committing to the task. Salespeople are no different.
   
   
2. Your risk of turnover goes up. Not only do unmotivated salespeople feel less desire to perform, they also start looking for other opportunities. As Gschwandtner pointed out, the average rate of turnover in the U.S. is about 30 percent. In some industries, that average number is much higher. If you can avoid turnover simply by changing your approach to setting quota, it’s worth your time to explore those options so that reps don’t explore theirs.
   
   
3. Top performers get overburdened. Top performers love a challenge. But they may already be working at peak performance. Just because they hit a very high number one year does not mean they’ll be able to beat that number the following year. Everyone has good years and lean years, and all salespeople are vulnerable to external changes they cannot control (for example, territory realignments or market shifts). Do you want to frustrate your top performers by creating unreasonable expectations? 

If you’re thinking that getting input from reps would be too burdensome in terms of time and process, then you’re overlooking one key factor: data.

According to both Gschwandtner and Mohandas, data is currently the defining factor of success when it comes to setting (and helping reps achieve) quota. Gartner Group has actually estimated that, on average, enterprises will miss the equivalent of 10 percent of total sales in lost revenue that could have been captured with improved processes for defining, assigning, and managing territories, quotas, and compensation plans. Without data, territory mapping and quota calculations become subjective, favor certain sales reps, and often do not maximize the company's overall revenue potential.

As an example, here are the types of data Mohandas recommended tapping into.

Internal data: Use at least three years’ worth of historical data about each rep’s performance to inform your quota targets.

External data: This could include market data, penetration data, and data that reflects seasonal trends (this could be especially relevant for certain industries such as retail or insurance).

Forward-looking data: This data resides in your CRM system in the form of recorded pipeline opportunities.

Marrying all this data into a single stream can seem formidable. But there are applications available to allow sales managers to consume, digest, process, and leverage data to recommend quotas and optimize territories. In the final analysis, this can help you create highly motivated, loyal reps who feel empowered to meet or exceed their number.

For many more tips and insight about data and setting quotas, listen to the full recording of the webinar: How to Use 7 Simple Quota Practices to Skyrocket Sales. 

How to Sharpen Your Value Statement and Improve Sales Results

Today's guest post is by David Hibbard, coauthor of SOAR Selling: How to Get Through to Almost Anyone (The Proven Method for Reaching Decision Makers) and founder of Dialexis. Hear Dave speak on November 16 at the Sales 2.0 Leadership Conference in Philadelphia. For more information or questions about the event, email larissa@salesdottwoinc.com.

The other day I was on a call with a new prospect. I delivered my value proposition with clarity and professionalism. I asked questions and listened. The prospect asked questions and listened. The call was going pretty well, I thought.

Then the client told me no.

No? Are you kidding? I couldn’t believe it. I thought I had done a great job and the prospect still said no? What’s wrong with this guy?  

Then it hit me. As much as I wanted to blame the client for “not getting it,” I remembered that it’s my job to take responsibility for the results I generate from my value statement and strategy.

Hearing “no” is often a good signal to look at your value proposition and how you had delivered it. Here are a few considerations that may sharpen your selling skills and, ultimately, your results.

Rethink Your Value Statement

Like me, you probably feel your value statement is excellent. Most salespeople do. I have no doubt that you have spent time developing it, your training department may have directed you, and, ultimately, your sales manager had weighed in on what you should say. So, when you deliver it on one of your prospecting calls, it should go over pretty big, right? Remember this: you’re trying to create interest with the prospect – not someone in your company. Just because you believe your value statement is compelling doesn’t mean the prospect does.   

Talk about the Prospect’s Interests

So it’s simple; all you have to do is figure out what the prospect is interested in, determine if your organization offers a solution that aligns with the client’s interest, and there you have it! To understand what executives are interested in, you simply have to look for clues – and those clues are on every firm’s Website. The formula for finding the clues for large enterprise accounts is R + CI + C + D = VS (Research + Corporate Initiative + Connectors + Differentiator = Value Statement). Note: Connectors are simply anything you discover you have in common with the president or company. They then become talking points sprinkled in when dialoging.

Take a look on the Website of a company under “About Us,” then look at “Leadership Team,” then click on “President/CEO,” and then search for “Annual Report” or “Letter from the President.” This will usually lead you to the firm’s Corporate Initiative.

Initiative is not the same as the organization’s Mission Statement. They are significantly different. The Corporate Initiative is what the president is focused on now. It may be to increase revenue in a vertical industry or enter the market with an entirely new product. Either way, once you discover the Corporate Initiative, you can determine if you or your firm have a differentiator that can support your prospect to achieve their objectives.  

To discover what smaller firms are interested in, you have to understand fundamental B2B pain. Their situation may be quite different than that of the enterprise account. You may not find their corporate initiative on their Website; instead, you can look for “indicators” of corporate initiative or vision.

As a common denominator, you can make a fair assumption that most small firms are focused on “cash flow,” a common pain point. As a result, you can determine what your firm offers that will help your prospect generate top-line revenue. The formula for small firms is CP + I + C + D = VS (Client Pain + Indicators + Connectors + Differentiator = Value Statement). Indicators may be considered the “light” version of a Corporate Initiative.  

Take Responsibility

It’s not always easy, but – if you can learn to accept 100 percent responsibility for generating a “no” on your prospecting calls – you will have an excellent base from which to be introspective. By accepting responsibility (not blame) for the no’s you get, you’ll be able to move from frustration to creation. Every new prospecting call that didn’t go the way you wanted it to will provide you with the opportunity to re-tool your offer. You move from blame to gain. How great is that?