Sales Tool - BlogBridge

I've started using a tool for tracking and following your company, your customers, prospects and competitors, BlogBridge. It's a locally installed application that persistently searches through news stories and blogs presenting its findings in an explorer-style window with three columns.

I'm following a couple of hundred different subjects and companies and it's a great way to find out what's going in the market place to help make decisions and to discover key information in time to react or make a decision. You can download the application free at www.blogbridge.com/.


Highly recommended, highly useful. 

Sales Methodologies - Why you should have one

There are a lot of great sales methodologies out there that will result in increased average sales productivity. A lot of sales people confuse a sales methodology with taking away their individual style with a top down process. Nothing is further from the truth. The words you choose and say, your communication style, your tenacity are not guided by a sales methodology, those things are uniquely you. So, how should you choose a sales methodology?

• Using the process should be non-intrusive and increase the sales reps productivity (more of an aha moment than you might think)

• The sales methodology needs to focus on the buying process, not your selling process

• The process must include all steps in the sales cycle, from the effective first call to getting the signature

• The sales cycle measured in the CRM needs to match exactly the objective steps completed in the buy/sell cycle and tell us what needs to happen next to get a positive decision

• The methodology should provide sales tools to the sales person to make them more productive, more quickly than stumbling around until they figure it out

• Use of the methodology should generate management reports that are the direct output of the process

A sales methodology should enhance the management process and set expectations of productivity and sales output. If the sales team and management are in alignment, then sales reviews, territory reviews and pipeline reports should naturally flow out of the process. Watch for future blogs on specific sales methodologies, as I have been trained in and implemented several, I have some opinions. For the ones I have selected and used, they are all good but success is dependent on matching the right methodology to your products, sales cycle, customers and average sales prices.

Email - It's not what it used to be, nor will it ever be again

I was just looking through my Yahoo!, Gmail and Hotmail personal email accounts and I've discovered something, my friends don't send me many emails anymore. I communicate with them through Facebook, Twitter and MySpace (for my musician friends). The only emails I receive are from companies trying to sell me stuff. I'm still habituated to looking through my personal emails in the morning but I know my sons, all in their 20's only check email once per week or less and it's only because they can read it on their phones that they check it at all. My high school aged daughter has completely abandoned email and communicates primarily using Facebook and more specifically the IM client buried in Facebook. Text based messaging has really replaced long phone calls for most inter-personal communication. Actually, it's pretty remarkable that we've spent a fortune buying expensive phones to primarily send text messages.

For business communications, I and my customers and prospects still rely heavily on email for communications. You can flesh out ideas more completely and attach documents to emails, something not easily supported or secure using Facebook, Twitter and the like. Although you can read a lot of articles on "The Revolution of Social Networking for Marketing," I believe there is something more profound going on under the covers. People are changing the way they socially interact using one to many communication methods for personal relationships sharing, events, ideas and social calendars.

In business, prospects and potential buyers still want to hide in anonymity, but I see customers (people who have purchased your products) wanting to open up their business processes to tools like Facebook, Twitter, blogs and the like to accelerate business and reduce friction. I also see a day where there will be one-to-many tools where prospects will want to interact with potential vendors on a one-to-many basis. I know that one of my colleagues has just been scheduled into a weekly conference call with a large systems integrator working on winning a massive federal procurement. The call includes their employees and vendors to update the team and provide a strategic view into the status of this opportunity. Imagine an application running 7 X 24 where everyone could share and update, provide levels of security (not everyone can see everything) and become a project repository and have it be as easy to use as Facebook. I know I’ll hear… SharePoint, but it is too rigid and not friendly. Here’s an opportunity for new kind of communications tool aimed at business users.

The Convergence of Sales and Marketing

I've been through a lot of sales training and usually within the first hour the subject of sales versus marketing is always a topic. Why do I bring this up? Because the friction between sales and marketing is such an obvious topic that the general failure of this relationship needs to be dealt with before sales people can deal with their own issues. The center of the controversy is the definition of what constitutes a sales lead. Marketing believes that a name, email and phone is a lead and sales doesn't believe that someone who signed up for a free iPod is a legitimate lead. Marketing has MBOs on lead counts and sales gets paid commissions for closed sales. So, what is the definition of a lead and who's right?

Ultimately, the value of leads can only be measured one way, how many converted to customers and in what timeframe? There are two timeframes that need to be measured, first how long were they owned by marketing and second, once accepted by sales as an opportunity, how long did the sales cycle last. Marketing needs to look at all lead generation as a two phase process, phase one is gathering large groups of people who initially respond to a marketing program and are captured into the internal marketing database and second, those people in the current re-marketing or lead nurturing process. There are a number of awesome tools that snap into existing CRMs that I will discuss later.

So, who should sales be talking to? Simply, those people from marketing who have raised their hand to buy. What?? Do people really volunteer to buy or enter a buying cycle? Ultimately, yes they do. Once a person or organization has determined the problem they want to solve, they want to find at least three vendors to flesh out a solution, go through a proof stage and, if their needs can be met and they believe they can solve their problem, make a purchase decision. The good news for us sales folks is that they need us during this process and expect us to participate.

Clearly this is an over-simplification of the buying process (great sales people don't sell they enable the buying process). It does delineate roles and reponsilibilities. So, now how do we measure marketing and sales? Hang in there for the answer when I write about KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

Sales 2.0 - What Happened?

After years of telling myself that I need to start capturing what I'm learning myself and from other smart people, I begin this blog on Sales 2.0. As far back as 8 years ago I noticed a number of landslide changes in the buying process. Notice that I didn't sales "sales process." We can try to shoe horn in any sales process or methodology, but if it doesn't match how our prospects make buying decisions, we're out of alignment and we are destined to fail. I have a number of observations that I've been thinking about for several years.

1. Where once sales people were the holders of the secret knowledge and prospects needed us for education, prospects can now go to multiple web sites and get near perfect knowledge.
2. Buyers have placed more shields around themselves to avoid talking to sales people. They use voice mail to block calls and prefer most communications via email so that they can better control their daily schedules and have documentation about vendor conversations.
3. Since we offer white papers, free downloads and webinars for their name and an email, we think we are generating leads and push them to sales people. What has happened is that prospects have become visible earlier and are beginning an education process for projects 6 to 12 months in the future. Once we treat these as current, active leads, we have lost credibility and trained our early stage prospects to avoid us in the future.
4. Google and other search engines have replaced trade magazines as the primary way to find solutions to perceived problems.
5. Traditional cold calling is a failed strategy. If they don't know you, you're being immediately round filed regardless of how clever your voice mail message.
6. You need to select and invest heavily into your CRM system. It takes a team of people to make a software or SaaS sale and your CRM is your central point of account and prospect information. There are many great systems, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Maximizer, Siebel and many others. Which ever one you select, you need a top down mandate to capture all customer interactions including sales and support incidents into a single system.

Unfortunately, although I wrote an internal paper on these changes in marketing and sales when I started at Keynote Systems 7 years ago, I wasn't smart enough to begin compiling best practices and write a book. Over the next several weeks, I am going to attempt to discuss the strategies and ideas I believe can help transition you towards success in this new world. If you have any ideas or reactions, please comment!