Selling Power Blog

A Billion-Dollar Sales Idea You Can Steal from My Local Handyman

Today’s post is by Noah Fleming, a globally recognized customer loyalty expert. He works with companies in a broad range of industries with revenues ranging from $5 million to $2 billion per year to create dramatic results. He is the author of the new book, The Customer Loyalty Loop, and the Amazon number one bestselling book in sales, marketing, and customer service categories, Evergreen: Cultivate the Enduring Customer Loyalty that Keeps Your Business Thriving.

I needed some work done at my house. I talked to ten contractors, and nine of them were awful. But the one who ended up getting the business…he was incredible. Let me tell you why –  but here’s something to note: if he were in professional service sales, he would be making the company he was working for $5 million/year extra in a bad year.

So you might be wondering what made this buying experience so special?

Here are six key things I noticed.

1. He returned my call promptly. This only happens 60 percent of the time with companies in the $100 million+ range and considerably less in other companies. I’ve been testing the response times from a variety of businesses in a variety of formats, and the speed of follow-up, for the most part, is horrendous. 
   
   I recall a story from Brad Stone’s fabulous book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Amazon Age. During an executive meeting, Bezos asked a VP how long it took to get a live human on the phone. The VP said he was positive it was under a minute. Jeff said, “Really?” He picked up the phone, dialed on speaker phone and started timing. It took four minutes before a human got on the phone.
   
   But let’s get back to my contractor.
   
   
2. He showed up and was charming, knowledgeable, and helped me understand not just what was wrong, but what my three options were – and which one would be the best value. He was dressed well and his truck was clean cut.
   
   
3. He offered me a variety of options and didn’t always just push for the most expensive. Instead, he asked me questions and helped me pick the one that made the most sense and offered the most value (the fact that it was the most expensive was a bonus for him). He didn’t use high-pressure sales tactics.
   
   
4. While he was doing the work, he let me know about three other things he had noticed that were outside the scope of the work he was doing – and gave me recommendations on who could help me get those fixed.
   
   He told me that, if I picked the people he had recommended, he’d get a bonus from them, I’d get a discount, and the work would be top notch (otherwise, he wouldn’t recommend them).
   
   

5. He did a great job. The work was completed as promised. He walked me through the finished work to show me exactly what had been done and thanked me for the opportunity to do the work for me.
   
   

6. He followed up with me three months later to thank me for doing business with him, to ensure the repair was still holding, and to ask me for a testimonial, which I happily gave.

This contractor had a sales process that blew away what I’ve seen in billion-dollar companies, and he had developed it himself – and, most importantly, he.

It amazed me.

Now I’ve worked with some incredibly talented people in some extremely successful companies, but I’ve had to fight tooth and nail to implement even SOME of these desperately needed changes into their sales cultures. But, when we do get them to execute even a fraction of what’s needed, the results are always dramatic.

Large companies often get stuck in internal politicking, inability to second guess some departments, or paralysis by analysis (I’ve talked about the cost of doing nothing before on my Website), in that they don’t know how to look objectively at the entire customer experience from initial contact to happily ever after.

You might be big. You might be small. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that this story serves as a great reminder to all of us that – whether you’re a giant or a one-man show – the basic structure of successful sales and marketing is all the same. In this case, the contractor understood the power of having a clearly defined sales process, a customer experience process, and both retention and referral processes in place, which he stuck to as he delivered a remarkable experience.

Look at your sales process and entire customer experience and ask yourself this one simple question: Is it as good as this contractor’s? If not, you’ve got some work to do.

Ten Keys to Prospecting Success

Today’s post is by Mark Hunter, CSP, “The Sales Hunter.” Mark is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results and High-Profit Selling: Win the Sale Without Compromising on Price.

 

Ask salespeople what their number one issue is and they’ll say, “getting good prospects.” It’s simple fact – you can’t close a sale until you have someone to sell to.  

So what does it take to prospect successfully? Having worked with thousands of salespeople and written the book High-Profit Prospecting, I boiled it down to what I call the Ten Keys to Prospecting:

1. Have a dedicated time on your calendar to prospect and don’t allow interruptions. This is absolutely essential! The most successful salespeople are those who commit time to prospecting and stick to it. Saying you’ll start prospecting as soon as you’ve taken care of everything else is not a strategy – it’s an escape tactic to avoid prospecting!
   
   
2. Don’t start what you can’t finish. Prospecting is about following up. Reaching out to a bunch of people and not following up with repeat contacts is never going to result in any type of success.
   
   
3. Believe 110 percent you can help others. If you don’t believe in you, why should anyone else believe in you? Top performing salespeople are successful regardless of what they sell. They know their objective is to help others, and what they sell is merely the means to do that.
   
   
4. Qualify quickly. Nothing is worse than having “prospects” in your pipeline that are taking up your time but never become customers. I’m a firm believer in having a prospecting pipeline that is fast moving, allowing you to spend more time with fewer prospects. Yes, that’s the exact opposite of what many sales managers are pushing. We have to think quality, not quantity!
   
   
5. Have a prospecting process and stick to it. My rule is you won’t know if your process works unless you’ve executed it for a period of time that is two times the length of your average buying cycle. For example, if it takes three months to move someone from a lead to a customer, then you need to run your process for at least six months before you’ll know if it is working. Too many salespeople give up on their plan far too soon.
   
   
6. Don’t rely on social media as your primary means to generate leads. Social media is great, but don’t over-rely on it. Use it as one of your sources. Social media has a long lead time, and too many salespeople starve to death because they’ve put too much emphasis into social media, thinking it’s all they have to do. Use it to create awareness and confidence. The leads you get are purely a bonus.
   
   
7. Follow up promptly. Sounds simple, but more opportunities are lost due to the failure of the salesperson to follow up fast when leads/prospects give an indication of wanting to move forward. Countless opportunities are lost because the salesperson is afraid they’ll be seen as a stalker. If stalking helps me close more deals, sign me up!
   
   
8. Use the telephone. Don’t fall for the myth, “The telephone doesn’t work because nobody answers it.” Sure, the telephone isn’t as effective as it used to be, but don’t give up on it. The telephone allows you to have conversations with leads and prospects, allowing you to qualify them more quickly and ultimately help them far beyond what they initially expected.
   
   
9. Don’t rely only on the marketing department for leads. It’s always great to have leads supplied, but top performers know they have an obligation to get leads and prospects. Relying on the marketing department is merely an excuse for not taking control of yourself.
   
   
10. Make the prospecting process about the other person. It’s not what you sell; it’s the outcome you can help the prospect with that will get you the high-value prospects you need. If all you’re doing is telling others what you do and what your product features are, you’ll be doomed to failure.

Have you bought my new book High-Profit Prospecting? You need to, as it’s full of proven strategies to help you succeed.

When Is a Sales Proposal More than Just a Sales Proposal?

Today’s post is by Stu Heinecke, the best-selling author of How to Get a Meeting with Anyone and host of Contact Marketing Radio. He is also the co-creator of NASP’s “The Power of Contact Marketing” training program, a Wall Street Journal cartoonist, hall of fame-nominated marketer, and founder of Contact, a first-of-its-kind contact marketing agency dedicated to helping sales teams connect with their most important prospects and assigned accounts.

Clearly, I don’t know enough about making proposals.

I mean, I do a good job producing a readable document that can be easily shared, covers all bases, and makes a visually appealing presentation of what I want to do for a client. And they do result in business.

Still, I know I should be including an e-signature feature from DocuSign or Adobe in my PDF proposal documents. I know it makes it easier for the client to accept the terms of the proposal – and data seem to indicate that e-signatures greatly speed that acceptance. I know I should be doing it, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. Sound familiar?

Then I recently listened to a year-end episode of Barb Giamanco’s Razor’s Edge podcast (listen in at 14:49). The compilation includes snippets of her interviews with Anthony Iannarino, Mark Hunter, me, and James Muir, author of The Perfect Close. As I listened to Barb and James discuss their best practices for proposals, I realized there are simple changes that would allow me to create a far greater level of connection through my own proposals.

Barb makes the point that the way the proposal is presented makes a big difference in the outcome. She never sends a proposal without scheduling a meeting to go over the whole document. Even then, the proposal doesn’t go out until just a few minutes before the call.

James presents his first-version proposals as a scope document – and, again, doesn’t send it until a few minutes before the meeting. He walks the client through the whole document. He purposely makes the scale of the proposed action larger than the clients expect or want, leaving room to scale back to what he actually wants to sell and what the client actually wants to buy.

Presenting your proposal live creates several advantages over the method of sending it, waiting for a reply, and endlessly following up – a method that may or may not result in a sale.

But no one does a proposal quite like Curtis Brooks. I interviewed Curtis on my Contact Marketing Radio show, to learn how he uses proposals as contact devices to gain access to Fortune 1000 C-suite executives.

His proposals are always unsolicited – never the result of previous meetings – and always audacious in their scope. The documents follow a seven-page format, always produced in PDF and printed form – the former delivered in an email, the latter by mail. They’re carefully researched to reflect a direction the company needs to take to realize a strategic goal, and produced as quick-read, graphic-intensive storyboards.

Executives usually respond by initiating meetings, saying, “I like the way you’re thinking, but we should meet to adjust some of your assumptions.” And bingo – the proposal has done its job.

Listen to my interview below and think about what you can do to improve the outcomes of your proposals.

How to Help Buyers See the Value of Your Solution

Today’s post is by Brian Stahlhut Christiansen, CEO and cofounder of Milestone Selling – a Salesforce® Partner enabling proactive pipeline leadership – and author of Accelerate Sales: The Seven Golden Keys and The Sales Manager’s Milestones. Follow @BscStahlhut.

Picture a frog on a frying pan. You turn the heat  on to 1 and the frog starts to think, “This is nice and warm.” You raise the temperature to 2 and it starts asking you to turn down the heat. At 3, it gets drowsy. At 4, it starts to fall unconscious. At 5, it dies and, at 6, it’s completely fried.

You might be thinking, “What a weird story,” but stay with me…

You throw the frog out and let the frying pan stay heated at the highest possible temperature. After half an hour, the pan is red hot – and you put a new, living frog onto it. The frog jumps off immediately.

But why didn’t the first frog do that? It had time to get used to the heat. It wasn’t ideal, but it stayed where it was. Its body kept adjusting to the temperature changes and, all of a sudden, it was too late.

In much the same way, your buyers have

• Gotten used to the way things are
• Tacitly accepted all inconveniences
• Always thought it had to be impractical that A paid far too much money when B thought it was normal to have problem C

The core purpose of sales is to challenge these assumptions – to make buyers imagine what the world would look like if those assumptions were overturned. Make them think about what they would get out of buying your solution.

You have to do this – they can’t do it for themselves. If they could, you would receive calls like these from companies every single day:

We are experiencing problem A,
are tired of impracticality B,
and it costs too much to C.
If your solution can help us,
we would like a presentation
as soon as possible!

But you don’t.

That’s why you need to use your abilities to ask questions that activate buyers’ needs. Here’s how.

Map Selling Points

Map your unique selling points to the situation in your prospect’s reality – what happens if they need your product, what problems they would experience if they need your solution, and what issues would occur if they are not buying a service like yours?

Ask Obstruction Questions

For each of the selling points, write down questions that will let you know if the selling point is relevant. We call them obstruction questions and here are a few examples:

• How do you handle ABC?
• How often does XYZ occur?
• What is your process for ABC?

Notice how these questions are neutral and interview style – you are not selling or pitching anything.

Ask Results Questions

If (and only if) your obstruction questions have uncovered a need or relevance for your selling point, you ask results questions. Here are a couple of them:

• So what happens when…?
• Who fixes that?
• How long do you spend on…?
• What is the cost of…?

Ask Expressed Need Questions

If the consequence or cost related to having the problem or issue you have uncovered is tangible, all you need to do now is ask expressed need questions. You simply want your prospect to confirm you have built a case for your product, solution, or service. Here’s how:

• Would it be something you would like to look into?
• Is that something you want to discuss further?
• Would you be interested in how we can solve this issue?

That’s the simplest way to make your prospect see the value of your offering and actually consider buying it. Just like making the frog react to the heat rather than get used to it.

Download our free e-book at www.freesalesguide.com to find more inspiration on better sales questions.

The Powerful Sales Metric No One Is Measuring

Today’s post is by Jason Jordan, a founding partner of Vantage Point Performance, a global sales management training and development firm. Sign up for Vantage Point’s newsletter to stay up to date with the latest sales manager research and best practices.

As someone who has long studied the management best practices of sales forces, I’m often asked my opinion on the most powerful sales metrics to track. While there are many useful metrics, there’s one measure that has the potential to revolutionize sales performance around the world. And no one tracks it.

This magical metric is: Percentage of Sales Reps Receiving Effective Coaching.

This number gets right to the heart of what drives sales. The most important role in any sales force is the sales manager – and the most important responsibility of the sales manager is to coach. This metric makes sales coaching highly visible inside the sales force and holds managers accountable for delivering it consistently and effectively. If you carefully monitor whether your most critical people are doing their most critical activity, you will see your revenue skyrocket.

How can you determine whether your salespeople are receiving sufficient coaching? Well, what you can not do is ask their managers. There is always a large disparity between managers’ and reps’ perceptions when it comes to coaching – and, frankly, the rep’s opinion is the only one that matters here. One of our largest clients once surveyed its managers and reps to understand how much coaching was taking place. The result: 93 percent of sales managers said they were doing more than three hours of coaching per month per rep. Great! But only 44 percent of their reps agreed. Ouch! This kind of gap is typical. But the rep is always right. No matter how much managers think they are coaching – or how well they think they’re coaching – if your salespeople don’t perceive it as impactful coaching, then it isn’t.

The source of this disparity in perception is shockingly simple to explain: Sales coaching is typically undefined. So sales managers think any time spent with their reps is coaching. If a manager tags along with a rep for four hours one afternoon, the manager usually perceives that they just coached for four hours. But the salesperson knows that, in reality, they were just interrogated for four straight hours. No coaching took place. Reps need to receive value in order to perceive an interaction as coaching. This is why it is so important to ask your reps, not your managers, whether effective coaching is the norm.

The best way to do this is with a one-line survey, sent every quarter or every six months, asking:

Did you receive effective coaching from your manager this week? [Yes/No]

That’s it. Keep it simple. The longer and more complex you make the survey, the less likely it is you’ll get an answer from busy sellers. This one question, sent at regular intervals, will provide a powerful picture of how much effective coaching takes place in your sales organization. The results should be prominent on your performance dashboard.

Don’t be surprised if your results are shockingly low the first time you send out the survey. You’ll probably have some work to do, starting with clearly defining what coaching means for your team. But to radically change sales results in 2017, start tracking whether your frontline sales managers (your organization’s most important role) are performing their most important activity (coaching salespeople), and if they’re doing it well. It’s a single metric, based on a single question for sales reps. There’s no other metric that is so simple, so important, so powerful – and so absent. Let’s make 2017 the year sales organizations awaken to its power.

Six Big Sales Predictions for 2017

Today’s post is by Kevin Temple, who leads the Enterprise Sales Group and is a pioneer in the development and application of agile methodologies to enterprise sales. Formerly, as VP of sales for Cadence Design Systems, he used the underlying principles of agile selling to increase revenue by 30 percent and deal size by a factor of five. After leaving Cadence, he founded one of the top 20 sales consulting and training firms in the country.  

One of the joys of our business is that, each day, we get to work with some of the smartest sales and business leaders on the planet.

While our job is to train their sales teams, we often learn as much as we teach. With this in mind, there are a handful of themes that gained traction in 2016 that we expect will have an even greater impact on enterprise selling in 2017.

Prediction #1: More salespeople will focus on the skill of differentiating their offering. Customers are more empowered than ever. Buyers are in control – and they know it. This isn’t new, but it’s accelerating at an increasing rate. The implications are more and more clear, with some enterprise sales leaders reporting that buyers are as much as 90 percent of the way through their journey before they ever talk with a sales rep. Data sheets and solution briefs are no longer starting points for sales conversations, and the salespeople who fail to adapt to this dynamic are simply not going to make their numbers. Salespeople need to become masters at reframing the problem set to differentiate their offering in the face of often unknown competition.

Prediction #2: CEOs will increasingly abandon incremental changes in favor of big shifts. A 2016 study by KPMG says that four out of 10 CEOs expect to be running significantly transformed companies in as little as three years. Our clients tell us market, competitive, regulatory, and pricing challenges are forcing them to adapt quickly – and that leaders no longer have the luxury of time to see how their strategies play out. In short: the race will be won by those who adapt and move fast.

Prediction #3: Tech spending will slow and the fight for budget will intensify. Gartner predicts sluggish growth in IT spending through 2020. Gartner also predicts that, in 2017, the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO – yet another indication that technology spend is shifting from the IT organization to lines of business. Sales organizations will need to adapt to smaller budgets by getting stronger at justifying the need for their solution. And they will need to develop the skills to navigate across customer organizations, new buying stakeholders, and budget centers.

Prediction #4: There will be more turnover of senior executives as CEOs look to spark growth. The average tenure of a CMO in Silicon Valley is about 18 months, far less than for B2C companies. We’re betting the axe won’t be limited to marketing, with leaders in sales, IT, product development, and other areas on a short leash as well. Sales professionals are used to the perform-or-perish model in their own careers, but will need to learn to adapt faster to a changing landscape of buyers, competitors, and influencers.

Prediction #5: New roles and functions will become the locus of power and budget in the pursuit of growth. Old titles and portfolios are giving way to a new C-suite populated with executives responsible for revenue, digital transformation, privacy, and security. Old customer entry points and buying processes are likewise being replaced by new centers of power and budget, which will vary from customer to customer. Sales professionals will need to become adept at understanding and managing the new buying landscape.

Prediction #6: Sales leaders will demand even more from salespeople. It’s true – the goalposts have always moved – so why is this a prediction? We see a new urgency driven in part by the need to capitalize on recent investments in sales force automation, sales performance management, sales enablement, and related technologies. Our clients are telling us they will be placing more emphasis on change management and skills development to drive more productivity and effectiveness from their teams.

Are Informational Silos Hurting the Productivity of Your Sales Team?

Today’s post is by Mark Hammer (@markmhammer), chief operating officer at Bloomfire. He has over two decades of product, management, and strategy experience at software, education, and energy companies. He has held senior management roles at SmartBear Software, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, CompassLearning, Green Mountain Energy Company, and Sagebrush Corporation, among others.

 

Your sales leaders and sales A-players are asked the same questions, over and over. This isn’t just a waste of time. If your sales reps lack the information – and the ability even to access critical information – it impacts every aspect of the sales process. This experience indicates that informational silos in your organization are blocking knowledge living in the heads of your tenured sales reps from flowing freely across the organization. This lack of collaboration may be costing you hours, or even days, of productivity each week.

Signs of informational silos reveal themselves in the functionality of your sales team. Your sales representatives require information produced and held within all departments at the drop of a hat. Sales representatives are often the first impression prospects have of your organization, and you want that impression to be as positive as possible.

If your sales team experiences the following productivity-killing symptoms, you are most likely suffering from informational silos.

Too Much Time Spent on Repetitive Questions

Sales reps spend an average of 20 percent of their time searching for company information – often from the people who keep that information in their heads. That’s a lot of time spent not talking to prospects. So why is it that reps spend so much time looking for information that already exists?

Informational silos not only exist between departments; they exist between members of the same team. In this case, sales reps’ questions are answered verbally or via email – methods of communication that prevent others from learning the answer or even knowing the question. Although multiple members of your team are likely experiencing the same confusion, the only way for them to solve the problem is to ask…again.

A knowledge sharing solution with a Q&A feature means that, once a question is answered, that information is accessible to every member of the team. Then, the time spent asking and answering repetitive questions can be spent training sales reps, making calls, and closing deals.

The Wrong Content Gets Created

You probably have a set of commonly asked questions from your prospects. But what happens when commonly asked questions never leave the sales team to reach the departments responsible for producing the content reps need to close the deal – like marketing? You never close the loop.

By improving the flow of information across departments, the teams responsible for creating content can ensure the content that is produced is what sales reps really need.

Reps Aren’t Keeping Up with Product Releases

This symptom is a direct result of a lack of internal communication across departments. When sales reps are disconnected from the rest of the organization, the result is outdated or limited product knowledge, a lack of resources necessary to answer the questions of customers and prospects, and an inability to access the information they need, when they need it.

By implementing knowledge sharing software that fosters ongoing formal collaboration between sales and CS, marketing, IT, and development, teams within your organization can work to empower each other with the information they need.  

Putting It All Together

Recognizing that your team experiences these symptoms and that they negatively impact your performance is the first step to breaking down silos and opening communication within your organization. With the right tools, your sales team will overcome silos, improve collaboration, and increase productivity in no time.

The Number One Barrier to Prospecting (It’s Not What You Think)

Today’s post is by Tom Stanfill, co-founder and CEO of ASLAN Training & Development. Tom has more than twenty years of experience consulting and developing training programs for the sales organizations for some of the largest and most respected companies in the world.

 

I think we need to hit the pause button on prospecting. It’s not working.

Here’s the source of the problem: In sales, we were taught to make plausible arguments for why our solution benefits the customer. The flaw in that strategy? Decision makers aren’t avoiding a solution – they’re avoiding a sales call.

Most everything we’ve learned about selling sabotages our chances of engaging a new decision maker. The number one barrier we face from prospects is emotional resistance. To succeed, we must shift from selling our solution to creating receptivity, from focusing on the message to creating receptivity to the message.

Principle of Receptivity

The real decision makers – the ones who control the money and strategy – avoid sales reps like it’s their job. They are emotionally closed. Here’s the principle most sales reps have missed:

When people are emotionally closed, the more you try to persuade them with logical arguments, the more closed they become.

Simply stated, if someone is emotionally unreceptive, the truth doesn’t matter.

A seed that lands on hard Georgia clay rarely germinates. If the soil isn’t fertile, the quality of the seed just doesn’t matter. In fact, we’ve learned during the past 20 years of studying sales conversations that the receptivity of the audience has more impact on influence than the most persuasive message.

We’ve simply missed a step. Creating a fertile soil always precedes planting.

Embracing this truth opens the door to a radically different way to engage the 90-plus percent of people who are unwilling to even consider your message.

Lead with Their Whiteboard: the RAS

Our brain has a built-in filter for sifting through more than 5,000 messages we receive every day. It’s called the reticular activating system (RAS). The RAS acts as a gatekeeper between the subconscious and the conscious, and it ultimately determines if we click “delete” or open the message. When the RAS is activated, we notice two types of messages:

1. Messages related to a perceived need.
2. Messages we don’t understand.

This explains why information about your solution is ignored – because the RAS only tunes into perceived problems or needs.  Prospecting needs to be about alignment, not selling.

The first step should be to shift our focus – from our whiteboard, agenda, and solution – to the prospect’s whiteboard. If you want to get the attention of a new decision maker, start by setting your agenda aside and articulate something that’s on his or her list of priorities. And the more specifically you articulate the perceived need, the more effective you’ll be.

Grow revenue, reduce cost, blah, blah, blah…Everybody says that and the message gets quickly labeled “marketing hype.” Delete.

Saying something specific to a decision maker’s pain point, in their vernacular, activates the RAS and moves your message to the front of the line.  

If you lack the information, your first assignment is to become a student of your customer’s whiteboard. Every time you meet with similar decision makers, ask about their most important initiatives and challenges. You will quickly see the commonalities and identify a handful of RAS-worthy pain points.

An option for strategic opportunities is to ask those who know the decision maker. “If I sent Sharon an email, what would get her attention?”

Once you get their attention by aligning with a perceived need, create curiosity by communicating an unexpected insight or benefit your solution offers. Offer just enough details to indicate further discussion is warranted.  

Drop the Rope®

As soon as the decision maker recognizes it’s a sales call, he or she feels the tug of war. You want a meeting; the prospect wants to avoid a sales call. You want to keep them on the phone; they want to dodge the call. And when they sense they are being pulled, they pull back.

Here’s the unintended consequence: when the decision maker perceives the rope is being pulled, the tension takes center stage, distracting them from the value of your solution. So, instead of upping our game and attempting to win the argument, Drop the Rope by communicating what you both already know is true:

1. You have no idea if what you’re selling is a fit for the decision maker.
2. They have permission to exit the conversation at any time.

If you pause and think about it, can you make a prospect stay on the phone or talk to you in the hall or stay in a meeting? Do you really know in the initial stages of the sales process that your solution is exactly what they need? Even if that’s true, the more you pull the more resistance you will encounter. So communicate that you aren’t sure if your solution is a fit.  Ask permission to continue the conversation. Find a way to take the tension out of the call or meeting.

Leading with the decision maker’s whiteboard (instead of your solution) and Dropping the Rope may go against every selling instinct you have, but consider this: If you do what no other sellers are doing, you might see prospecting results no other sellers are seeing. 

The New Sales Development Model and Why You Need It

Today’s post is by Jon Miller, CEO and Co-founder of Engagio, an account-based platform that orchestrates outbound interactions across departments and channels. Previously, Jon was a co-founder at Marketo (Nasdaq:MKTO), a leader in marketing automation.

 

Account Based Sales Development (ABSD) is a huge step forward for the world of sales development. It’s much more sophisticated and effective than “hitting the phones” or blasting out emails. However, it isn’t always the answer for every B2B company or every challenge.

So, what exactly is Account Based Sales Development?

ABSD is a coordinated strategy that combines personalized, multi-channel, multi-threaded, outbound activities to create high-value opportunities in new and existing customers.

“The new Account Based Sales Development leaps ahead of yesterday’s siloed sales development.” – Kristina McMillan, sales development practice leader, TOPO

How do you decide whether ABSD is the right strategy for your business?

If the following are true for your business, ABSD is probably your best bet.

1. When big deals matter

If big deals are 10-20 times bigger than average deals, ABSD is a no-brainer. These big deals don’t just justify the effort; they demand it. With longer sales cycles, more complex buying committees, and the need for a consultative sales process, bigger deals require a different strategy.

2. When you can identify your ideal prospects

If you don’t yet know which accounts might buy, you may not be ready for ABSD. If you do, and can name them, you’re ready. According to the 2016 AskForensics B2B Sales Analysis, selecting your target accounts (the most important step in the process) is a mixture of art and science, – both intuition and logic.

“There’s still a place for what we call greenfield [not account based] sales development. If you can sell to a broad range of customers, it can still make sense. But, as soon as you’ve got a focused ideal customer profile, account based is the way to go.” - Craig Rosenberg, co-founder and chief analyst, TOPO

3. When your deal sizes are six figures

ABSD is required for $100k-plus deals. And it’s a really good idea for $50k-100k deals. Deals below $20k are probably too small.

According to Craig on the Funnelholic blog: “Today’s sales development teams must be smarter and more targeted in their outreach to produce the same amount of pipeline - particularly in the Enterprise.”

4. When you need sales efficiency

Account Based Everything requires a new look at metrics. While leads, opportunities, pipeline, and revenue are important and even necessary metrics, they are not sufficient to measure account-based strategies. This is a fundamentally different approach that requires fundamentally different metrics.

If boosting your opportunity-to-close rates would make a big impact, you want ABSD.

What has changed? 

This is much different from traditional demand gen and sales development. Today, for most B2B companies, sophisticated measurement of customer acquisition costs and lifetime value economics runs the show. For enterprise organizations, big deals are worth 10-20 times more than the average deal size. These are company-making deals and they’re worth building a sales-and-marketing strategy around. If you haven't already, check out the Clear and Complete Guide to Account Based Sales Development. ABSD is a huge step from the original telesales “boiler rooms”:

1. It’s targeted – aimed at select named accounts – not huge, undifferentiated lists
2. It’s personalized – based on relevant, crafted conversations instead of standard, one-size-fits-all scripts
3. It’s researched – driven by systematic insight generation (not two minutes on LinkedIn)
4. It’s multi-channel – maximizing reach by using all channels, not massive spamming campaigns
5. It’s integrated – a coordinated effort supported by marketing – not another silo
6. It’s patient – with less emphasis on short-term calls to action such as demos and more on high-value engagements such as meetings to share insights or trends

TOPO Research, one of the pioneers of account-based thinking and the new sales development discipline, puts it this way: “Unlike ‘batch and blast’ outbound sales development - in which SDRs send large volumes of template-based messages - Account Based Sales Development is personalized to the account and person receiving the message.”

According to their 2016 benchmark study,

• 45 percent of sales development teams today are already account based (even if not fully evolved)
• 27 percent are partially account based
• 28 percent are “greenfield” (reaching out to the whole market)

Three years ago, these numbers would have been reversed.

“Account Based Sales Development is today’s most effective account-based tactic. Rather than rely on the high-volume process of outbound prospecting, organizations now strategically define a smaller, more targeted set of accounts and run personalized buyer-centric campaigns against those accounts.” - TOPO

ABSD is the new sales development. It’s more sophisticated and effective than “hitting the phones” or blasting out emails. It never sits back and waits for opportunities; it goes out and creates them. It creates big deals that fuel hyper-growth. It’s just as powerful for customer success as it is for acquisition. It targets the entire buying team as a team, not as isolated individuals. It’s built on relevance and value for each individual on the team, and it’s all about the orchestration between marketing, sales development, and sales.

For more information about ABSD, read the Clear and Complete Guide to Account Based Sales Development.

Three Ways to Wow B2B Buyers with Account Support

Today’s post is by Rick Reynolds, a co-founding partner and CEO of AskForensics, which uses a forensic science approach to uncover the truth about why Fortune-level companies win and lose prospects and customers. Follow @AskForensics on Twitter or visit www.AskForensics.com.

 

While the latest product line or newest technologies are compelling sales tools, when it comes to securing new and repeat business in the business-to-business (B2B) space, new data shows that B2B buyers make their decisions based on more human elements.

In fact, according to the 2016 AskForensics B2B Sales Analysis, 64 percent of buyers ranked account support as the top influencer when making a purchase. These results are based on data collected between 2013 and 2015 from 137 Fortune-level accounts, totaling more than $2.3 billion in total contract value.

As B2B purchases tend to be long-term and complex, the relationship is not only about an individual sale, but also about ongoing usage and consistent quality. Buyers want to deal with people who can guide them through the sales process and champion their needs with the vendor.

So what does stellar account support look like in today’s world? How can companies build a team that inspires the buyer to commit? What actions can they take and in what training should they invest to ensure their teams are prepared? Below are three ways your company can go above and beyond to impress B2B buyers with account support.

1) Train Your Executive Team

Support for customers is multifaceted and needs to come from two key angles: the customer-facing team (sales and account support) and the corporate team. The sales and account teams are the face of the company, so their preparation and involvement are obvious.

The corporate team, however, should also be thoroughly prepared and brought up to speed on the client’s requirements, your company’s commitments, and the personalities of all executives involved in the decision. It is important to make sure they are in sync with the sales team so their responses complement the sales teams’ overall positioning of your company. Alignment throughout the company is critical so the customer experiences consistently excellent service and prompt resolution – regardless of their point of contact.

2) Assign a Quarterback

B2B sales and customer support tend to be complex. It is easy for things to fall through the cracks – especially for long-term contracts spanning years.

One way to ensure your account support stays on track is to assign an account leader to serve as a quarterback who can guide all customer-facing and internal teams to use the same playbook and move toward the same goals. This internal quarterback can oversee all interactions that arise between clients’ team members and the corporate office, ensuring the client receives the information or resolution they requested. This member can also help connect the corporate and sales teams – guiding their overarching goals, aligning their efforts, and making sure proper communication takes place with the client.

3) See around Corners

Today’s B2B buyers expect excellent support, but that is the baseline. To wow customers you have to go beyond just providing excellent service.

The next level of account support is to proactively offer suggestions and best practices to customers. If your account teams have not proactively offered suggestions and best practices to customers since the initial proposal, make this an immediate priority. Failure to establish your company as a thought leader that can provide new and innovative solutions is the first tipping point toward moving from a strong account to a vulnerable one. Incorporate this practice as a consistent part of your account management processes to maintain strong accounts.

This effort to improve the buyer’s business positions your company as an innovative thought leader that cares about the client’s bottom line. It shows that you are action oriented and that you are moving their business forward, making you a valuable partner to their success. Rest assured that your competitors are on the sidelines waiting to share their innovative ideas with your client to win the business from you. Don’t let them take this initiative.

Competition in the B2B space is fierce and, while there are many factors at play, providing consistent, quality account support can be the factor that sets you apart. Invest the time and resources required to create an experience that lets your client know how important their business is to your company.