Selling Power Blog

Using Personalization to Break through to Prospects

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.

Personalization grabs attention and can be very useful when your mission is to make contact with an account or prospect.

I used the cartoon above recently to connect with T. Boone Pickens, to interview him for my next book. I’m proud of the drawing, of course, but it’s obviously the personalization that made the connection happen.

Personalization can be a powerful tool, but it can also backfire terribly if not used correctly. When I first started using it in direct response letters, the challenge was to make it read naturally, as though it had been written to a friend.

Of course, it was always obvious it was not from a friend, but from someone the recipient did not know. So it was always important to be restrained when using someone’s personal details. If the data set included more than a name and address, you risked alarming the recipient with something that read more like an invasion of privacy than a simple offer to save money on a magazine subscription.

My, how things have changed.

Today, we leave digital fingerprints everywhere we go on the Web – and there is a staggering amount of personal information on display on social media. We share our life’s events, our thoughts, our children, and travel. Our headshots are front and center.

Naturally, personalization has evolved, too.

Charlie Liang, director of marketing for San Francisco-based Engagio, recently launched a contact campaign using custom bobblehead dolls based on recipients’ LinkedIn profile pictures. The campaign produced a 22 percent response rate, two deals, and a lot of excited responses – including a thank-you video that generated more than 23,000 views.

Another marketer examined the Facebook profiles of a handful of influencers and assembled individual gifts based on personal interests found there. To one, he sent a carton of plastic eggs and chicks, highlighting the recipient’s interest in raising backyard chickens. To another, he sent a custom-embroidered Superwoman cape.

The question is: Is this going too far – actually getting to know something about someone before you reach out with a thoughtful gift?

Maybe not. Not too long ago, I would have criticized this form of personalization for its lack of scalability. After all, you can send millions of my cartoons through the mail or email – each seamlessly personalized with the names of each recipient.

But hasn’t the idea been about making one-to-one, personal connections all along?

How do you see it? Has personalization gone too far? Do you have a story about your own experience with personalization? Share your comments below.

Are you Selling Solutions or Outcomes?

Today’s post is by Sherri Sklar, CEO of GrowthTera, a consulting firm that helps organizations accelerate growth by elevating their performance to WOW. Hear her present “Sales Planning: Strategies that Leave Your Competition in the Dust” live at the Sales 3.0 Conference in Las Vegas on September 18 and 19.

 

Recently a sales leader asked me for some advice about selling business outcomes versus solutions:

Dear Sherri:

A customer is angry because she says her company is not receiving the perceived benefits of the solution we sold them. She said that, although we were very good at showing them how our solution met their needs, nobody from our team helped them track the business outcomes to make sure that they received the benefits we told them they should be receiving. This has impacted her ability to demonstrate measurable results from her decision to go with our solution. Our whole account relationship is in jeopardy over this. If we lose this account, even my job could be in jeopardy. What would you recommend we do?

Sincerely,

Sales VP in Jeopardy

This is becoming the new normal: there’s actually a disconnect between the value we say we deliver and what customers are actually experiencing.

Based on conversations with our clients, many B2B enterprises continue to struggle in two ways:

1. Building strategic relationships with customers that focus on business outcomes. Sales executives tell us one of their biggest frustrations is establishing trusted advisor relationships and competing at the strategic level. Reps have to be able to ask the right questions and understand what customers expect in terms of business outcomes and how they measure success. The problem is, many sales reps are not incorporating into their sales vernacular what truly matters to customers in terms of business outcomes.
   
   
2. Tracking and ensuring that the promised outcomes indeed happen. We all want to be treated with respect and honor. That’s a basic human need. So, if you promise something, you’d better deliver it. Delivering it means not just tossing the implementation over to your professional services or onboarding engineer. It means sales, service, support, and product development all need to come together to develop a shared understanding of how to deliver the business outcome expected by this customer.

We need to do a better job at making a difference – and it’s not going to happen by delivering “insights” alone. It’s not going to happen by delivering a great “customer experience.” It’s not even going to happen by delivering added value and being the “trusted advisor.”

Don’t get me wrong; those things are important but, today, they only get you to “meets expectations” on the buyer’s checklist. The company that is going to truly make a difference is the one that has figured out how to deliver business outcomes and not just solutions.

So how do you make the shift from a solutions-focused to outcomes-focused sales organization?

Here’s what I recommended to this sales VP:

1. Find out which outcomes your customer cares about and how they measure their business. Ask them what success would look like to them. According to an Oracle report, “Competing for Customers,” although 77 percent of sales believe they understand their customer’s business and how they are measured, in reality, buyers say only 7 percent of us truly get it. This backs up Salesforce’s finding that 82 percent of salespeople are still not aligned with the needs of their buyer.
   
   
2. Conduct joint planning with your customers to understand their environment and determine how much improvement they could actually achieve in the next three to five years. Can you make a meaningful difference to their business? Pay your people to not only hit their short-term numbers, but also to plan over a long horizon to truly make a strategic impact and achieve long-term business outcomes.
   
   
3. Engage and educate other parts of the company to focus on making your customer successful. Make sure key stakeholders within your company – including implementation, support, sales ops, and even finance and administration – are familiar with your customer and your customer’s environment and expectations. Create a cross-functional SWAT team inside your own company to proactively help your customers achieve their stated business goals with your solution.
   
   
4. Create a scorecard to measure and track the progress your team is making. Your goal is to WOW your customer – and you can only do this by measuring the impact you are having on your customers’ business and their experience doing business with you. By maximizing the value you deliver and making it easy to do business with your company, you can turn customers into brand advocates.
   
   
5. Foster relationships between your C-level executives and your customers’ C-level executives to communicate progress and identify new ways you can help deliver measurable business results.
   
   

Is focusing on outcomes something you should be doing? Absolutely. When Oracle analyzed the impact of shifting their customer relationships from purely a transactional relationship to one where the focus was on how to make customers successful, the incremental revenue rose by 110 percent. It makes sense: when customers see you are advocating for the business outcomes and not just how your solution solves a need, they are more likely to make investments at a higher, more strategic level. And that’s a WOW for them – and you too!

You Can Achieve Success through Strong Mental Habits

Today’s post is by Jamie Crosbie, CEO and founder of ProActivate. Jamie is a certified peak performance mindset trainer. Contact her at [email protected] or 214/720-9922 to learn more about how her training can help your sales team reach peak performance levels.  

 

Being in the jungle was bad enough. Being in a firefight with a foot caught in the wheel-track of a moving tank was worse. Sargent LeVane’s boot refused to budge, even as the tank moved closer and closer. Gunfire erupted all around. Completely unaware, the tank driver could not hear the sergeant’s urgent cries to stop. At the last possible second, LeVane managed to free his boot and roll away, just as the tank pushed through the trees. A second later would have meant certain death.

A highly decorated special forces vet, LeVane served three tours in Vietnam as part of the elite “Screaming Eagles” of the 101st Airborne Division. Like many other courageous soldiers, LeVane cultivated a strong mindset that allowed him to remain calm, focus on the problem at hand, adapt, and overcome the challenges of combat.

It’s a Jungle Out Here Too

While most of us do not face a literal firefight every day of the week, demanding careers and ever-shifting needs in our professional lives can create figurative skirmishes that can be quite daunting and get in the way of success. From insane turnaround times to sales meetings and paperwork blizzards, distractions and dilemmas can seriously derail your focus – clogging the wheels of your mental machine.

Successful people know that strong mental habits can make all the difference in business too. Here are some tips to help you go farther and fly higher.

Embrace Failure as a Friend: If you want to achieve success, you are going to need to get used to failing. A lot. Not only should you become accustomed to it; you should actively seek it in the sense that you are constantly improving and taking calculated risks. Successful leaders dare to look failure in the face and make calculated reactions when others fall to pieces because of pride or ego. While it is always pleasing to see the good in your work, do not waste excessive time when things don’t go as planned. Instead, be on the lookout for ways to refocus and reframe failed ideas into stepping stones.

Be Open to Change: When Gayle, a small business owner, bought a small movie theatre to hold community productions in, she found they had trouble drawing a crowd. The solution? For families, she added free movie nights that showcased old black-and-white films as well as a live comedy show where up-and-coming comedians could showcase their skills. Later she created a bookstore and coffee shop by knocking out walls and repurposing the space. Now she has a thriving business that serves local patrons looking for something different.

Save Your Mental Mojo: Ever wonder why Steve Jobs wore his famous turtleneck all the time? The answer is both simple and powerful: He wanted to reduce his choices so he could focus his attention on decisions that really mattered. Streamlining your choices and reducing decision making moments can save time and reduce stress. Whether you want to stick to a given breakfast or set up your inbox to optimize your time, taking the time to eliminate choices can pay large dividends in the end and help you achieve success.

The Biggest CRM Failure of All Time

Today’s post is from Jason Jordan, partner in Vantage Point Performance. This is a chapter excerpt from the new best-selling book, Sales Insanity: 20 True Stories of Epic Sales Blunders (and how to avoid them yourself), by Cannon Thomas and Jason Jordan.

 

In the 1990’s I was managing a team of process consultants for a mid-sized consulting firm. The phone call came one day from a major technology company that needed some process design work done to accompany new CRM software it was implementing. This didn’t seem so odd, except the implementation was already underway. Why were they just now asking for process documentation if they had already begun to build the system? Here is what I learned:

A year or two before, the company had elected to implement the “best of breed” CRM tool to automate its sales force’s key activities. Basically, this was the biggest and most robust of all the CRM applications on the market at the time. Simultaneously, the company had engaged one of the biggest consulting firms in the world to handle the customization and deployment of the new CRM software. So far, so good.  

Things first started to go wrong during the contract negotiations with the big consulting firm. The systems integrator had quoted a preliminary figure of $20 million to design and implement the new CRM tool. The company’s chief information officer, fancying himself a master negotiator, felt it was his sole job to reduce this nose-bleed figure, and he responded with a classic negotiating strategy. He simply countered that the price was outrageous.

This old-school, price-is-outrageous negotiating strategy can work okay when you’re purchasing a clearly defined product – like a car, for instance. You negotiate back and forth, and one party’s gain is the other party’s loss. However, consulting services are not clearly defined products, and there are at least two variables in play until the very end – the price for the work and the scope of the work. Savvy consultants respond to the price-is-too-high bargaining tactic by offering to lower the price along with the scope of work to be performed. Basically, the profit margin for the consultant stays the same while the amount of work decreases.  

The CIO in this case battered the systems integrator down to $12 million by eliminating all the business consulting around the technology: that is, the process definition, the business logic, the work flow, etc. – all the stuff the CRM tool was meant to automate. Unfortunately, the CIO’s negotiating stance had been based on a highly erroneous assumption – that all this “business” stuff either already existed inside the company or it could be quickly developed by the company’s own employees.  

Thus began the hiring of dozens of additional consultants as sales, marketing, and operations were now being asked by the systems integrator for all the business content to be automated – content which, of course, didn’t exist. Therefore, the consulting budget was effectively spread throughout the organization and quickly began to speed past the original $20 million estimate to fully develop the CRM capability.

To make matters worse, what had begun as a fairly contained scope of automating order entry and other basic sales tasks became an ever-expanding wish list of CRM features. They might as well automate the pricing process too. And add a product configuration tool. And integrate with ERP.  

The growing scope of CRM functionality and the consequent demands on the business to define the underlying processes spiraled out of control. My team and I were only one of many consulting firms there, and we worked on this project for over two years. You can see where this is going.

In the end, I was told that the company spent – get ready – $90 million on this CRM tool. $15 million went to the CRM vendor for software licenses and another $75 million went to technology and business consultants. $90 million! Just a bit more than the outlandish $20 million that had so offended the CIO.

Yet the most amazing fact of this story is that no salesperson ever used the system – because it was never successfully deployed. Several years, three CIOs, and $90 million later, the company gave up on the system as the economy slowed and the company’s finances went south. In fact, you won’t be surprised to learn that this company no longer exists. Nor the CRM vendor, actually. Only the consultants.

Here are two lessons you can take away from this epic CRM failure.

1) Technology Is Just an Enabler of Business Processes

Technology is too often sold as the silver bullet cure-all for any business issue. In reality, though, technology is just an enabler. It won’t solve any problems on its own; it will just help you do the wrong things faster. Take the time to define how you want your business to work before you set about automating it.  

2) When Implementing Technology, Think Small

“Big bang” system implementations are always tinged with insanity. It’s smarter to implement the smallest piece of technology you can possibly imagine and then add the bells and whistles. Otherwise, the sound you hear won’t be all the bells and whistles working in the background; it will be the sound of an oncoming train.

How SAP's Social Selling Approach Led to a 600 Percent Increase in Deal Size

Today’s post is by Arif Johari, Digital Innovation Manager at SAP.

 

 

Social selling is required to remain competitive in a vastly-changing world where people, processes, places, and things are – in some way – connected digitally. These changes have led to a significant shift in B2B buying behavior, where customers no longer need to speak to a vendor to solve a problem.  

Social selling responds to this by enabling marketers and sales reps to gain real-time insights of the buyer to help build trust and credibility from the moment a customer begins his or her journey.

Why is a social selling approach relevant? Often, up to 70 percent of the buyer’s journey and up to 90 percent of the purchase decision are completed before prospects speak to a representative from the company. In other words: We’re losing opportunities if we wait for the phone to ring or an online contact form to be submitted.

An enterprise-savvy social selling program requires three key ingredients:

1. Adoption
2. Retention
3. Continuous improvement
   

Change management quickly becomes relevant any time a norm is disrupted – and social selling has quickly become an industry-wide sales enablement disrupter over the past few years.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

A successful social selling program requires a symbiotic relationship between sales and marketing, across all levels of the organization (top-down and bottom-up). As SAP’s Global Commercial Sales COO, Tony Pante, said “Global marketing and global commercial sales, through close alignment, have helped create a social selling culture!”

SAP’s marketing team joined hands with sales stakeholders to run formal training and enablement initiatives across the company, and scale the program with a unique “train the trainer” program. This allowed people anywhere in the world at SAP to become a Social Selling Certified Trainer to help SAP’s workforce transform marketing and selling behaviors in greater magnitude. Today, SAP has more than 150 trainers worldwide that roll up to more than 30 regional program managers – 100 percent voluntarily! The result: more than 7,500 trainees and more than 10,000 LinkedIn Sales Navigator licenses have been issued.

Tools of the Trade: LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Grapevine6, and More

Starting with the initial connection point, marketing and sales reps engage buyers via social media – either through an InMail, an introduction request through TeamLink, a connection request, or a direct message on Twitter, WeChat, or Xing. With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, reps can follow leads and accounts, build camaraderie, conduct comprehensive account planning, and identify buying signals from shared articles, group discussions, etc.  

Once connected, reps can leverage tools such as Videolicious to humanize the experience by creating and sharing personalized videos (e.g., video business card, demo video of a solution, or “thank you” video following a meeting). Sales reps can also use the Virtual Studio technology to create an immersive and interactive meeting with the customer.

Moreover, sales reps can employ SAP Jam Social Collaboration technology to elicit sales expertise, serve up timely and relevant content for the customer, and provide a forum for two-way communication and customer engagement. Other social selling tools such as Grapevine6 help transform the way marketing and sales reps share content to their networks to build credibility and share relevant, engaging, and educational content with their audience.

Performance is tracked inside SAP’s CRM and C4C systems, where flags have been strategically integrated at all critical points of the funnel, allowing marketing and sales reps to attribute social-selling-accelerated activities.

Results: 60 Percent Increase in Sales Quota Attainment

SAP’s social sellers convert opportunities up to two percentage points higher, lift sales quota attainment by 60 percent, and increase opportunity ownership by 200 percent, resulting in deals that are 600 percent larger in revenue on average.

Social selling has become such a hot topic that Coffee-Break with Game Changers is dedicating an entire series to exploring its various facets and promoting best practices for salespeople. To listen to other shows in this series, visit the SAP Radio area of the SAP News Center.

How to Develop a Constant Flow of New Sales Opportunities

Today’s post is by Bill Wallace, vice president of Revenue Storm, where he helps sales and marketing organizations transform through the alignment of all key functional groups to a selected go-to-market strategy to accelerate sales and drive sustainable revenues. He is a proven executive leader who has excelled in both entrepreneurial ventures as well as a Fortune 100 organization. His experience encompasses all aspects of successful sales growth, account management, and marketing.

 

Creating new sales opportunities within accounts can be daunting. The fact is, it is relatively simple: it’s all about developing and sharing ideas with your contacts while helping their business and personal interests. Simple to state, perhaps, but the execution can be a challenge.

The good news is that there is a simple way of doing this: the “hotlist.” This is just as important to account leaders as it is to business development professionals. If you follow the steps outlined below, you will almost be guaranteed a constant flow of new sales opportunities.

First, what do we mean by “hotlist”? The hotlist is a list of the influential people in the target account (or accounts), including their segment, sector, geography, division, branch, practice, and region, as appropriate.

Step #1: Create the List

List the people within the account that you know have positions of potential influence or decision responsibility. If you have multiple accounts, you may want to prioritize your accounts to create demand with those that have not produced to the potential you believe is possible. If you do not know the names of these people, list their job titles so you can conduct research to find out who holds these positions. For example,  if you have 10 accounts – with six key contact titles per account – you have 60 suspects/prospects with whom you will need to share your ideas.

Step #2: Get Organized

Once you have the names, titles, and contact details, create a matrix or spreadsheet. List the names down the left-hand column and place the following at the top of the rows going from left to right:

• Business challenge
• Contact’s personal agenda (what they want to accomplish in their current role on a personal level)
• Your idea related to how you can help them
• What is your message to gain their interest?
• First contact date
• First meeting date
• Next steps

Step #3: What’s Next?

You’ve made and organized your hotlist, so now what? If, after you’ve made your matrix (say,  50-75 prospects), each of these people should have a compelling reason to talk to you. Remember, you are educating and sharing ideas. How many ideas can you “sell”? Multiply this by the number of accounts in your portfolio and you will very quickly understand how many conversations and meetings you are capable of having.

If you have a challenge reaching a listed person, can you rely on people with whom you are already working to provide an introduction? Always remember to leverage those who have benefited from working with you to gain access. Keep in mind that you are sharing an idea and working to get them to agree to take the next step in exploring it. Don’t be discouraged if you fail to gain their interest. Ask your client if you can continue to think about their business and come back to them with new ideas as you develop them. This helps your credibility and allows ideas to “take space” in their thinking.

Far too many sales professionals focus on closing business and only turn their attention to filling the funnel when they are experiencing lower-than-ideal forecasts. This technique will ensure you have a full funnel at all times from which to work. The only limitation is your imagination and creativity.

Your Intro is Actually the Most Important Part of Your Sales Call

Today’s post is by Lauren Bailey (“LB”), president of award-winning inside sales training and consulting company Factor 8 – best known for frontline training that puts reps live on the phones getting results during training. Follow LB or Factor 8 on LinkedIn.

 

We’ve heard for decades that coffee is for closers, right? Not anymore. That’s old school. It assumes you’ve got the (right) decision maker engaged, found the need, matched the solution, and scored the meeting to close. It probably also includes some kind of cheesy gimmick like rolling them a pen, right?

But you don’t sell like that. You make 20 outbound dials before you even get someone on the phone. That guy who filled out the lead form is never the actual decision maker, and it’s a 50-50 shot if the contact info is right. Are you feeling me here?

So when you’re done with your awesome James Bond-like investigating and you finally do find the right guy and the right contact info – and it’s your birthday and Christmas all rolled into one and he actually answers...

DON’T BLOW IT.

New selling is like moneyball. More at-bats that get to first base = more chances to score a run.

Most Sales Call Intros Suck

Sorry, can’t sugar-coat this one for you, my friends. We hear thousands of sales calls a year during our training courses, and 90 percent of them are seriously bad. In fact, we’ve come up with funny categories for the bad. Yeah, we hear them that much. So which one are you? (Correction: Which one were you? Because now we’re going to fix them.)

1. The “Show Up and Throw Up” Intro
   You’re so pumped they answer that you spew data all over them. Take a breath – your intro should be five seconds or less. And the goal is to get THEM talking ASAP, not the other way around.
   
   
2. The “Get Out of Jail Free Card” Intro
   Don’t make your first question, “Are you the person in charge of purchasing IT equipment at Factor 8?” Who wouldn’t take that pass and say, “Nope”?
   
   
3. The “Yeah, It’s My Value Prop” Intro
   Value props are great, but the intro is NOT the time to start selling. It’s the time to engage the DM and get them talking! Wait till they say, “Wait, who are you with again?” Now hit it!
   
   
4. The “Good For You” Intro
   It’s awesome – really! – that you’re excited to introduce yourself as their new account rep, but sales calls (and especially intros) shouldn’t be about you. It’s about them. What value are you calling to add in your new role?
   
   
5. The “Set Up” Intro
   This is when we try and back the DM into a corner with a question like, “If I could triple your ROI on your sales training, you’d be interested, right?” And when they get shut down (because who doesn’t want to verbally smack this guy in the head, right?) they’re right back up in the fight with defensiveness and indignation. Save it. Don’t set them up. Engage them instead…and sound less like a cheesy car salesman in the process.
   
   
6. The “Toucher” Intro 
   The best for last: please don’t call to touch my base. Please don’t touch anything of mine. Instead, let’s find a more compelling and value-add reason to call.

What Makes a Good Sales Call Intro

So what have we learned is a good intro to a sales call?

• Rule #1: It’s about them, not about you
• Your intro is five seconds or less
• You get them talking immediately
• You allude to the value you’re ready to add
  

How do we do it?

We call it a SWIIFT℠ intro. Typo there? Nah. It stands for

SO WHAT’S IN IT FOR THEM?

Try this:

1. Their name (gets their attention faster).
       Lisa?
   
   
2. Your name and abbreviated company (be “HP,” not Hewlett Packard Eastern SMB division)
       Lauren, calling with Factor 8.
   
   
3. A SWIIFT℠ purpose statement (this gets them to pick their head halfway up from typing by expressing your goal of the call and highlighting, So What’s In It For Them?)
       I’m calling to see if we can help increase your net-new sales revenue this year.
   
   
4. Two SWIIFT℠ questions (short, closed, rote-answer questions that get them talking before they realize they’re talking to a salesperson.)
       You have an outbound sales team there at ABC company, right?
   
       And are they all managing existing business or hunting for new revenue?

Bam. Done. Four seconds or less and they’re actually talking to you!

Yes, this Approach to Sales Calls Actually Works

Yeah, I hear you. Does it really work? Absolutely. We’ve seen business development conversion rates increase dramatically after training SWIIFT℠ intros – we’re talking 40 to 300 percent spikes in leads converted to opportunities. And it makes sense, right? If your intro can keep 10x the people on the phone longer, you get 10x the at-bats to sell.

Want a little more help? Check out our video “Building SWIIFT℠ Purpose Statements.” I’ll run down how to build a SWIIFT℠ purpose statement that perks their ear and give some tips on delivery. Find more blogs and video links on this topic and other phone selling topics by visiting www.factor8.com/blog.

Here's Why It's Time to Take Advantage of Sales Proposal Technology

Today’s post is by Kae Kronthaler-Williams, VP of marketing at Qvidian.

 

 

Writing RFPs and proposals has long been considered a tedious and manual process. Thanks to advances in technology, though, this is changing.

Businesses are embracing proposal automation software due to its proven ability to speed up the RFP and proposal process – by at least 50 percent, according to a recent Qvidian-commissioned, independent survey.

The survey was distributed to individuals who work on RFP and proposal writing teams – in sales operations, management, and enablement at large companies. It explored the link between proposal automation and the sales win rate, the role of collaboration, and top pain points within the RFP and proposal response creation process. Findings pointed to a widespread use of data analytics to inform the RFP and proposal creation process, and showed that effective collaboration is the key to success.

The data also drew a clear connection between RFP and proposal automation and win rates. Specifically, more than one-third of survey respondents said their win rate had substantially improved since they automated their RFP process – with more than half finding the win rate had improved at least moderately.

The Answers Are in the Data

The benefits of proposal automation software go beyond document creation efficiency. In fact, survey respondents cited a top benefit associated with automating the RFP and proposal process is the software’s ability to deliver valuable data insights on the process.

Companies are seeing the value in extracting data insights from their proposal automation software and applying it to their businesses, with 88 percent of survey respondents doing so to inform their internal processes and strategies.

Additionally, companies no longer need to rely on a gut feeling to decide which RFPs to answer. Knowing that it’s no longer cost effective to answer every RFP that comes in the door, 65 percent of respondents consider win/loss data from previous efforts at least most of the time when determining whether to bid on a specific RFP. Being more selective about which RFP a company responds to increases its chances of winning the right ones.

The Power of Collaboration Is Real

For RFPs and proposals, it takes a village to complete one document, and it’s impossible to complete the process without cooperation and buy-in from all the necessary players in the organization.

According to the survey, 75 percent of respondents typically work with at least four other people on a single RFP or proposal, with 78 percent collaborating with product teams and SMEs across multiple departments and remote office locations. With that many people involved, the process can hit time-consuming bottlenecks – a major pain point for proposal teams that usually face tight turnaround times and deadlines.

To help solve these problems, all members of the process must collaborate effectively – which, until recently, was difficult to do. But, with proposal automation software, collaboration bottlenecks are removed – allowing multiple individuals to weigh in on documents in near-real time. This eliminates multiple emails and phone calls, which can drag out the process and delay submission times – putting companies at risk of losing deals.

When collaborating effectively, the process is much simpler and easier, giving organizations the opportunity to secure more deals – a win for everyone involved.

It’s no secret that the RFP and proposal process can be a challenging and tedious one for many individuals across organizations. The research findings show progress against mitigating these challenges, with many businesses taking advantage of proposal automation and the data insights the              software delivers. As a result, companies are experiencing significant gains in terms of win rate, ease of collaboration, and document turnaround time – which is having a measurable impact on the bottom line.

When Should You Avoid Challenging the Customer?

Today’s post is by Tim Riesterer, chief strategy and research officer of Corporate Visions.

 

 

Salespeople in recent times have been under a mandate to always be challenging the customer. And that’s a fine piece of advice when you’re trying to acquire new business – a disruptive perspective is essential to overcoming buyer inertia. But it’s very bad advice when you’re trying to keep your customers and get them to pay more.

New research shows that challenging your customer during a renewal or price increase discussion is exactly the wrong approach – one that could make good customers susceptible to your competitors.

Recently, my company conducted research that revealed the downside of applying a provocative message to renewal conversations – or the “why stay” discussion. (You can learn about that study here.) Since then, we have turned our attention to a related conversation salespeople need to handle well: price increases (or what I call the “why pay” conversation).

Improving solutions and providing top-notch account service all wind up in the same spot: a post-purchase price increase conversation. The question is, how do you tell this story in a way that drives more revenue without endangering existing customer relationships?

My company, Corporate Visions, collaborated with Dr. Nick Lee, a professor at the Warwick Business School in the U.K., on academic research to answer that very question – and determine the best messaging framework for what I call the “why pay” conversation.

The “Why Pay” Study

For the study, which you can view in full here, we recruited 503 participants to take part in an online experiment that simulated a renewal and price increase selling scenario. Participants were told they ran a small business and that a two-year contract with a vendor they’d hired to promote their health and wellness plan (and retain employees) was coming to an end, and it was now time to broach a renewal and a price increase.

We tested six different approaches (you can view them in depth here). All the test conditions started by documenting business results to date and all requested the same 4 percent price increase for the next two-year agreement. Participants were divided into six different groups and placed into different experimental conditions. The range of conditions included:

• A message that introduced a new insight designed to challenge a customer’s current perspective and situation.
• An offer to extend certain types of price anchors and discounts (all ultimately offered the same 4 percent increase).
• Reinforcement of the status quo bias – (an approach our past research had revealed to be effective in a renewal context).

The Results

The experiment revealed that the “challenging” provocation-based message was the least effective in terms of communicating a successful price increase – by a significant margin across a bunch of key areas.

Participants in the provocative condition were found to have 18.8 percent less favorable attitudes toward the message. In addition, participants in the provocation-based message were

• 15.5 percent less likely to renew with their current vendor
• 16.3 percent more likely to switch to another vendor

But the study didn’t just reveal what doesn’t work for the “why pay” story; it also illustrated what does. Specifically, the winning message, according to the study, is one that

• Reinforces the status quo bias while introducing key new capabilities to solve existing needs – not introduce new needs, and;
• Anchors high with the price increase request, before giving a loyalty discount if the buyer purchases within a prescribed timeframe

The best performing messages in the study suggest your message should open by documenting results to date before reinforcing status quo bias, introducing new capabilities, and anchoring a high price increase before providing a loyalty discount.

You can view the full research in our new report on communicating price increases.

The big revelation from this research is that the disruptive message so in vogue today may be highly effective when you’re trying to win new customers. But, when you’re trying to convince customers to stay or pay more, that message will backfire in a big way – potentially causing your customers to rethink the value of their relationship with you.