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Sales 2.0 Tools

Working to automate your social selling emails

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Sales people have had automation for a long time but the traditional form of automation aligned with the traditional view of the sales job. It was “phone automation”. It took the form of auto dialers and click-to-dial solutions.

But now email has become an incredibly popular sales tool (maybe too popular but that’s a discussion for a different post.) Prospecting by email is the norm these days. I’ve written a lot before about how to improve the quality of prospecting emails but driving sales requires a certain quantity of emails as well.

There is a natural tension between quality and quantity. It takes time to research the information you need to construct the kind of prospecting email I suggest. When you break down such an email you see there are several points that are customized to that individual email.

Doing this research and then incorporating it into an email can take a while. I’d say maybe 15 mins per email from my experience of banging these out at various times in my sales career. 15 minutes times 10 emails is 150 minutes or 2.5 hours.

In a typical selling day other things interrupt. A prospect calls with a question. A client calls with a problem. Your Sales VP needs a report immediately for your CEO. Even if you “build a fort” around your prospecting time there’s a great chance you won’t get through more than 2.5 hours of this kind of work in a day.

Let’s say 3 out of 5 days in your week you get 10 quality prospecting emails out. So that’s 30 emails in a week. Now given these are “quality” emails my experience is you may get 3-4 conversations from these (maybe up to 5-6).

Will that be enough to drive the leads you need to hit quota?

Another approach to this problem is to blast out a large quantity of emails that are less customized. These lower quality emails (my opinion) can be automated and blasted out in their hundreds or thousands. My experience is you may only get a 1 in 500 or 1 in 1,000 response on these but because they are automated if you get 5,000 out in a week you may hit the same number as the “high quality approach”.

OK so the math above can certainly be argued over. I’ve never seen a study that compares the two approaches but would love to. If you’ve seen one please let me know.

But what if there was a third option? Something in the middle? Something that combined higher quality with greater quantity. Could such a solution 10 x your conversation rate rate?

That’s what a company called Sendbloom is working on.

Sendbloom is a “sales automation” tool. It helps a sales person produce customized emails that can also be sent out in volume.

Right now the level of customization does not cover all the elements I want to see in my social selling type emails but the potential is there.

As it works today Sendbloom can scrape your prospects’ websites for information on what technology they use. So for example it can see if they are running a marketing automation solution (such as Marketo or Hubspot.)

So if I want to send my prospecting emails to companies that use Hubspot I can give a suspect list to Sendbloom and have it send my email only to companies that have Hubspot code on their website. No need for me to go looking at hundreds of websites by hand (tons of time saved.)

The tool can also do the “traditional” marketing automation type tasks of sending a sequence of follow up emails to prospects that do not reply (that would be most even with my fancy social selling email approach.) Bunches of time saved.

I’d like to see a tool like Sendbloom integrate the prospecting components that I’ve found are most effective in helping you get in the door: a mutual friend and a trigger event. It can’t currently do that but talking to the company’s CEO, Ross Epstein, he understands the need and could include these concepts down the road.

The company is young but is already getting some good results with early adopters like Optimizely. In the Optimizely case the company’s inside sales team is saving a bunch of time writing emails and spending more time talking to the leads generated.

Marketing departments have some pretty sophisticated automation tools already (like Marketo, Hubspot and Silverpop). These tools do something similar to the functions Sendbloom delivers. Could these tools be adapted to fit the needs of sales people? Almost certainly. Will they? We will see.

I’ve spent dozens of hours in the last few years researching and building social selling emails. If I had an “automated assistant” that could bang these out 100 to 1,000 times faster I would be a very happy camper.

We’re not there yet but clearly we’re working the problem. When it’s finally possible that will be a “blooming” good day.

For a Client Base Built on Relationships, Social Selling Unlocks Doors

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This is a guest post by Russ Korins, Director of Marketing, Cohen Tauber Spievack & Wagner P.C.

When I came on board a year ago to head marketing and business development for a mid-sized law firm, the first thing I did was interview every attorney about his or her client base, what characterizes ideal clients, and the goals of his or her practice and the firm. These interviews showed what many similar professional service businesses find: our business is one of relationships. Prospects become clients one conversation at a time, through trust, credibility, and confidence.

Of course, this has been the case for many law firms for many, many years. But how does a Sales 2.0 world change what we need to do? In our case, we’ve found that the best use of social tools is selective, carefully chosen to improve how attorneys and the firm collectively nurture relationships and cultivate clients.

The tool I use most is LinkedIn, which I think of as a roadmap to our professional relationships. Here’s one example: we do a lot of work in licensing and joint ventures for biotech and pharmaceutical companies, so we’re always looking to connect with business development people in life sciences. I regularly search using that term to see who I know, who the practicing attorneys know, and just as importantly, who I know who knows someone relevant.

One time, I noticed that the same person—a longtime friend I had never really talked business with—kept coming up as the mutual connection between me and many different business development people in life sciences. So now he’s not only a friend, but also someone I was particularly happy to introduce to the head of our life sciences practice at an industry event.

Twenty years ago, understanding our roadmap of professional relationships was also important. But now, technology makes reading that roadmap easier. Just as importantly, note that technology isn’t a substitute for personal relationships—it’s simply driving what we already know we need to do.

As new technologies come along, I’ll be looking at whether they help drive and cultivate the relationships that fuel our firm’s business. LinkedIn is one of the best tools today, but nobody knows what the future holds and what better tools will come along. A Sales 2.0 world hasn’t really changed how we market our firm. More accurately, it’s given us more ways to do what we need to do today and will need to do for years to come.

….

Russ Korins is director of marketing and business development for Cohen Tauber Spievack & Wagner. In addition to having practiced corporate and technology law, he previously consulted to attorneys and other professional service business owners on marketing and business development. He can be reached at rkorins@ctswlaw.com or 212-381-8761.

A scoop of Insideview with some Jigsaw special sauce

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“A scoop of Insideview with some Jigsaw special sauce.” That’s my best shot at summing up a new “Sales 2.0” tool that I think you should check out. The tool is Owler.

Owler is a new company from the fellow who founded none other than one of my favorite Sales 2.0 tools of all time: Jigsaw (now Data.com as Jigsaw was sold to Salesforce.com in 2010 for a tidy $142 million in cash—I love saying that.)

That fellow is Mr. Jim Fowler and rather than naming his new company after himself he cut off the “f” and turned it into a company with a cute owl as a logo called “Owler” (I still can’t figure out what to do with “edelshain” but I’ll keep thinking.)

I have to admit that just by reviewing Owler’s website I did not “get it”. I even watched the intro video on there and got it a little more but not really.

Luckily for me I’m a world-famous blogger* so I got direct access to one of Mr. Fowler’s co-founders Tim Harsch and he talked me through the unique features of Owler. At this point I about 75% “got it”.

But it was when I finally got organized enough to login in to the tool and use it that I really “got it”.

Tip: if this post piques your interest go set up a free account Owler; otherwise you may not fully get it either. (Tim Harsch has let me know that Owler is still working on their marketing messaging as they just launched in April and he promises they will get better at conveying what they are all about as they age.)

Without using the tool I really could not figure out why it’s different from Insideview. I’ve used Insideview for a long time now and really enjoyed it. So I thought “This is not like Mr. Fowler to spend all this development time and come up with something with no difference from what already exists.”

And I was right. You see Owler looks a lot like Insideview from the outside but if you dig below the feathers there’s some secret Jigsaw sauce brewing beneath.

Once you login and add a company to track (just like Insideview) the missing piece to the jigsaw emerges. Right at the top of a company profile you see the magic buttons. These buttons ask you the user to add information.

For anyone that’s ever used Jigsaw (or now Data.com) this should trip a switch. It’s called “crowdsourcing” and it’s probably the number plate on one of Mr. Fowler’s cars. (I’ve never seen any of them but I’m convinced in my mind’s eye that one of them is a Maserati).

Owler is back to the old Jigsaw game of getting sales people to input information that can then be aggregated for other sales people to use. This way all of us become smarter than any one of us in isolation. Once that data starts to amass then we sales people will want to flock to Owler to get the info that our peers are inputting.

It’s also darn smart if you run a software company because data is the valuable asset these days and you’ll have a company that’s worth a lot more if you have proprietary data nobody else does.

Owler is pleasing on the eye and I found the user interface fun. It has a feel that makes you want to input information. I wanted to show Owler how smart I was by typing in all the facts I knew about companies that it did not–but then I realized I was going to miss dinner with my family.

What Owler does not have yet are any rewards like Jigsaw. As you may know Jigsaw gave you points for entering contact information and those points could be used instead of money to buy contact records for your prospects. I have a feeling some form of gamification like this will be coming to Owler. I understand in the Jigsaw days there were people who put in thousands of contacts to be “Mayor of Puzzletown” (or something like that) so I’d assume this makes sense here too.

All-in-all Owler looks like it could turn into a significant tool that you may want in your sales arsenal if you believe in Social Selling. It serves up the trigger events you need in a nice way and combines them with some good company data.

Owler is free and will remain so says co-founder Tim Harsch. Now that’s a good thing. How can they do that? Down the road when this hungry owl has gobbled up an ocean of crowdsourced data, just like Jigsaw, Owler plans to sell data in big chunks to even hungrier corporate buyers.

The real power will come as the crowd inputs more information. The only catch is Owler needs to grow the crowd hanging out there. So if you’d like to contribute to a new sales movement powered by the founder of Jigsaw click on over to Owler and start playing. You never know you could become the “Chief Hoot” or something.

Having a power tool does not make you a craftsman

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A lot of salespeople don’t like to do research.

That’s the way it seems hanging out in my “buyer’s chair” again this week. As much as Sales 2.0 and social selling tools improve (and they have), we are still only as good as how we use these tools.

I guess at some point the tools will be so good they will slap salespeople in the face with the exact information they need to really personalize everything they are doing but until then it seems to me that salespeople that do their homework will have a distinct edge.

Here’s a real email received this week (of course edited to protect those involved). This email came from a “Sales 2.0 tools company” rep. My comments below.

Subject: @Your Company: Tips for Training Your People

Hi Bruce,

Loved the recent tweet from [Your Company] on how to train your people. I believe we can drive more meaningful meetings and increase revenue per rep for your sales force.

I mocked up a brief look for you here how we are achieving this at [Fortune 500 Company #1], [Fortune 500 Company #2], and we recently announced our series C round for $50 Million – [click here for my slide deck]

You’ve been successful as a manager and VP and know your process better than anyone, is there a convenient way to put a few minutes on your calendar?

Also, Saw you were a an alum [from the school I went to] so I had to reach out

Best,

Eager Salesdude

My thoughts:

1. Not particularly inspired subject line. He mentions a Tweet my company put out. But OK you did read a Tweet my company published so mentioning that puts you in the top 20% of emails I get. That’s some level of personalization.

2. Mentioning the Tweet is OK but I did not actually write this. Someone in my company did. (It did not come from my personal account. It came from the corporate account. I guess that was obvious but you did not mention that.)

3. The email came to “Bruce”. I’m not Bruce. Bruce left 2 18 months ago. You’d think you could find that out with a little checking. It’s a good attempt to personalize but it’s not so great when you address correspondence to people who don’t work here any more.

4. OK the 2nd sentence really puzzles me. In the first sentence you said something about us. I liked that. OK it was not about me but at least it was about my company. But after one sentence you already jumped into “drive more meaningful meetings and increase revenue per rep ”. And what was the connection between sentence 1 and sentence 2? Your quota I suspect. Not feeling the love in sentence 2.

5. Paragraph 2 starts off with an angle that I’ve used in my selling many times and probably gotten wrong many times. You see my company is not that big. We don’t have huge budgets. We know that. So when you tell me you’ve worked for “super rich investment bank” and “money flowing all over the place energy company” that does NOT make me think your software would be a perfect fit for us. It makes me think this is probably expensive and we can’t afford it. I know it makes you feel good that you have these marquee “logos”–but I don’t feel good right now. How about using some company examples much more like us?

6. Next sentence. Thanks for telling me you guys just got tons of funding. I guess that’s supposed to tell me you are stable and will be a good vendor for a long time but it rather reminds me we don’t have $50 million in funding. But OK thanks for sharing.

7. And then another non-sequitur “click here for our slide deck”. Not sure what that has to do with your marquee clients and your funding but OK. I know, I’m being an English stickler now.

8. OK now finally a sentence I like. You’re flattering me a bit with “You’ve been successful as a manager and VP”. I like that. Oh but you’re talking about “Bruce” I forgot, darn.

9. And mentioning we went to the same school that’s nice too. You’re being human. I would have liked this sentence at the beginning (and about me not “Bruce” but I should get over that.)

My takeaway from this email  is the stuff that buyer’s like me really like are the things that are the most personal. I realize it’s not easy to get that sort of information so a lot of salespeople don’t put in the time and effort to find it.

Many Sales 2.0/social selling tools are about helping you find this information but we’re still not at the point where these tools are so smart they are just going to lay the info on a silver tray for you.

In my opinion, the sales people that put in the extra effort will get the extra results.

Of course the extra time involved in doing that research will reduce their activity volume so that’s the friction. So what’s the optimal point on the sales activity quantity vs. quality curve? Your thoughts?

Email Prospecting: How to avoid being a Right Charlie

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I got this email a few weeks ago from someone I did not know at the time.

I liked it and replied to the email. I think this email has several ingredients you could use in your email prospecting.

Nigel,

I’m a young entrepreneur looking for your input as you are a sales 2.0 leader.

I have 1 very, very quick question and if you could answer it, it would mean the world to my team and I. Thank you!!!

Imagine that you have 5 brilliant data-scientists that can build software to automatically research your prospects and their company before any sales meeting. What would you build and how valuable would that be for you?

Thank you again, you rock. People like you who respond to these emails are why entrepreneurs are able to build amazing products.

Aaron

Aaron Frazin
CEO – Charlie
@afrazin

Here’s what I like about this email and what you may be able to include in your emails when prospecting:

1. He flattered me right off and he knew who I was by calling me a “Sales 2.0 leader”. You’d think knowing who I am and buttering me up a little would be so obvious it’s not worth pointing out here but keep in mind that 90% of the prospecting calls and emails I get don’t recognize who I am.

2. He relieved some of the pressure by saying he only had one “very, very” quick question. Like most “SNAPpy” prospects I’m stretched like a rubber band for time. One of biggest fears when receiving a sales person’s call is giving up my time. Promising to be quick lowers the bar and increases the chances of getting that first vital conversation or email reply.

3. This seemed like fun when he said “imagine”. I actually felt this exercise would be interesting (but I also noted to self “I’m not going to spend more than a few minutes on this”, see #2 above.)

4. He flattered me again at the end, “Thank you again, you rock. People like you who respond to these emails are why entrepreneurs are able to build amazing products.”  Since my mission is to make a difference to the sales profession helping entrepreneurs build great products for sales people is totally aligned with what I’m about. Hard to overlook this sentence for me.

One thing he could have done better:

As I’ve mentioned to Aaron, the one item I really would have liked to have seen at the very beginning of this email is a reference to someone we know in common. Something like “I’m a young entrepreneur looking for your input as you are a sales 2.0 leader. I just spoke to Anneke Seley and she said I should speak to you”.

That would have increased the chances of me responding a lot. I did respond to the email but that would have totally sealed the deal.

Epilogue: after I responded to this initial email. Aaron asked for clarification on some points I made. It was too hard for me to type that all out so I requested a call. We had a really enjoyable call and now of course I’m writing about him. I’m also planning to take a look at his sales tool, Charlie, and write about it here.

Nice outcome I’d say. Please consider (and let me know if you have any thoughts on making this email even better.)

PS in case you don’t know your Cockney rhyming slang, a “right Charlie” means someone not too smart

Social Selling: Walk the Talk, Please

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I was packing up my things to go home for the night and my office phone rang. “Hmm”, I thought, “I better not pick this up or I’ll be late getting home as promised and then they’ll be trouble”. So I let it ring to voice mail.

But of course curiosity overtook me so once the voice mail light lit up I checked it.

“Nigel, it’s John from XXX company. Thanks for being interested in our best practices. I’d like to show you how our award winning software helps companies like yours to sell more. Please call me back on 123-123-5555 and I would love to set up a demo of our software.”

So it was a voice mail that sounded like a hundred other voice mails I’ve received. Not terribly notable. But before I hit the delete button something struck me:

Company XXX is putting a lot of marketing effort behind positioning themselves as a social selling company. A company that helps other companies implement social selling. In fact, they are having a major event shortly with lots of sales experts talking about social selling and Sales 2.0.

So how could this sales person call me and include nothing about me. Could his script not be customized with just one more element than my name? Was it just too much effort to look at my Linkedin profile and know who I am?

I mean if you look at my Linkedin profile or Google me you would know in about 10 microseconds that I have spent the better part of a decade going on about social selling and Sales 2.0. Could this information not be included in this sales person’s voice mail?

How about just “Nigel, it’s John from XXX company. I know you’ve been very involved in Sales 2.0 and social selling for quite some time and I wanted to get your thoughts on our software.”

I don’t think my ego is the biggest on the planet but I do like people to notice one obvious thing about me before they try to sell me their amazing tool.

So a plea to all companies helping push the social selling and Sales 2.0 movement forward: please have your sales people “walk the talk”.

This has happened to me several times before. It leaves me with my mouth hanging open and ends up with me being late getting home.