- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Google and other search engines have replaced trade magazines as the primary way to find solutions to perceived problems.
- 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.
- 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.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
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.
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Couldn't agree with you more, Mike. I've been in the game for 6 years now and the shift in the buying process has changed. Especially in software, sales people are more contract negotiation people now as products seem to sell themselves. Certainly looking out for the next installment!
ReplyDelete- Elliott
Can't speak to #6 since I've never really been on the side of things to use a CRM tool, but your other points make a lot of sense.
ReplyDeleteThese days it is more reasonable to invest in getting the 'right' message to show up as a result of various search queries rather than having a host of evangelists/sales people trying to make believers in your product – unless those sales people are experts at seeding the ‘right’ websites with useful information.
Most people today don’t really like to read very much either. Information needs to be presented in ways that transfer the most amount of information in the least amount of time and with the least amount of effort – and in a way that targets the problem the customer is trying to solve rather than falling into the old trap of always touting the product’s best features.
Getting the search engines to bring the customer to you is only half the battle. The bigger challenge is to make sure that the message that is presented is tailored to the query that was entered – or better yet, the query that the customer meant to enter - and you only have a few seconds to do that before they decide to try another link.
- Tim
Tim - I couldn't agree more. Bringing the wrong people to your website for the wrong reasons is a waste of your time and theirs. A lot of attention needs to go into precise, tightly worded web pages that will clearly present your message to the right people... and help Google/Bing/Search Engine of the Day, help you.
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