The next generation of sales has arrived. Salespeople are overhauling their sales skills to meet the requirements of new tools, processes, systems, technologies and ultimately their customers. As they sharpen their skills and sales talent, they realize the selling rules are changing and they can no longer survive selling from a Sales 1.0 perspective.

The buying rules are changing too. According to the findings of the Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Study 2007-2008, by Marketing Sherpa which included over 4,658 Technology buyers and decision-makers, buying influences are shifting to mega-committees. In today's B2B markets, as mergers and acquisitions continue to dominate corporate environments, more and more people are involved in the decision-making process, but fewer people have power to make a purchase decision. As the political landscape becomes more complex, the probability of selling to the wrong decision-maker is greater than ever.

Selling to People with the Power to Buy becomes essential. Salespeople go after big titles believing they have influence without realizing they don't.

But how do you know if you are dealing with a powerless contact? The following are 10 signs to pay attention to:

10 signs that lead to the powerless

1. They say no often without understanding what the solution is about.
2. They love talking with vendors and act as though they have power.
3. They ask for a lot of busy work - more research, demos, competitive analysis, etc.
4. They ask lots of questions–most of them are really good questions and most require additional legwork on your part.
5. They really like your product/service and really get it. They know how it fits in and how they would implement it.
6. They insist that vendors only speak with them and discourage any contact with their boss.
7. They usually don't like to give their boss's name and assure you they are your main contact.
8. They complain about not having any budget.
9. They stall and ask you to call back next quarter.
10. They schedule meetings that get rescheduled at the last minute because something more important took priority.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 05:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm working on some content and materials around "Cold Calling 2.0"...which should never include a cold call!

Cold Call: "A telephone call to someone who is not expecting contact"

Synonyms: flailing, wasting time, phone-spam, frustration, money-down-the-drain...

If anyone on my team at salesforce.com ever made a cold call ...my process had failed. Just to be clear, "Cold Calling 2.0" is still about salespeople proactively developing cold accounts to increase incremental revenue with calls and emails...but with different strategies and processes than 'cold calling'.

The sales prospecting mentalities and methods of 5-10 years ago are practically, or really, a waste of time. We discovered this at salesforce.com in 2002, after another 'cold calling' effort failed. We then spent an entire year testing and designing new methodologies, and proving the ROI on the investment, before we began building a team focused on targeting cold accounts to generate truly incremental revenue. (This team generated the new qualified opportunities and passed them off to the field salesforce to close).

Here is a sample of the growth of the revenue closed from the pipeline sourced by this 'cold calling 2.0' / outbound prospecting team. I've left the revenue amounts off for now, but we ended up growing new business enterprise bookings by 37%:

Closed Bookings By Month (Apr '04 - Jan '05)

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 05:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 05:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The sales profession has a problem with words. We use words too loosely - without agreed upon definitions. "Cold calling" is one of the classics. Does it work or not?

Well the first problem is that one man's "cold calling" in not another man's. Some people define "cold calling" as any time you pick up a telephone to call someone you don't already know. Other people define "cold calling" as when you pick up the phone to call someone you don't know and you don't anything about them or their company.

Today, the latter version of "cold calling" is dead -- or should be. But the former version is decidedly not dead. Our outsourced telesales business calls into prospects daily for our clients and generates $100,000's of new business that was not generated by other means (aka marketing techniques without using telephone-based selling). Or consider that MarketingSherpa found that 30-50% of buyers said that as a result of a "cold call" they took an action that benefited the caller (such as attending a webinar or adding the vendor to their consideration for a purchase).

The bar for sales people has been raised. Ignorant cold calling -- dialing executives with no background on them, their company or their challenges is as good as dead. But informed prospecting where sales people use "Sales 2.0 tools" like InsideView, Jigsaw, Genius.com and LinkedIn, to name a few, to make well-prepared and highly-targeted calls is decidedly not dead. And is not likely to be any time soon since the ROI on that activity is huge!

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)