By Jill Konrath, Selling to Big Companies

I was recently asked, "If you were mentoring a new salesperson, what would be your top five sales tips and how did you learn those?" 

Good question! It really got me thinking. There are so many things I'd like to tell a new seller. But what are the most important? What things could I recommend that would have the highest impact on success?

After serious deliberation, here are my thoughts ...

1. Focus on making a difference.

Nobody cares about your product, service or solution. That's the hardest thing for sellers to realize. All they care about is the difference you can make for their organization.

For example, today I sell sales training. If I'd call a VP of Sales and mention that, they'll tell me their not interested. However, once I changed my focus to the tangible outcomes they'd get from using my sales training, the door opened wide. After all, they were extremely interested in shortening their sales cycle, reducing the ramp up time for new hire sales reps and driving revenue growth.

2. Slow down to speed up your sales.

This was one of the hardest things for me to learn. When I first started selling, I was so eager to be successful. I tried to wow my prospects with my great product knowledge. I closed often and early. But the more I tried to rush things, the more resistant to moving forward my prospects became. They'd throw out obstacles and objections that I couldn't overcome. When I learned to slow down, parcel information out over multiple meetings, and simply advance the sales process one step at a time, suddenly my sales increased.

When you're scared about not getting the business, your prospects can intuitively sense your fear. One of the major symptoms is rushing the sales process.

3. Pay the price of admission. Do precall research!

To get into big companies, you can't make a 100 cold calls saying the same thing to everyone. Several years ago corporate decision makers stopped answering their phones and rolled all calls to voicemail. They delete most message within seconds because they sound like salespeople making their pitch.

I discovered that the only way to capture the attention of these corporate decision makers was to create a very personalized message based on in-depth research in their firm. Once I started doing this, I started setting up meetings.

4. Create an account entry campaign.

It takes 7-10 contacts to crack into a corporate accounts these days. Most sellers give up after 3-5 attempts. If you want to set up a meeting with a corporate decision maker, plan multiple touches from the onset. It takes a while to break through their busy-ness and register on their Richter Scale, but it can be done.

You can use multiple formats in your campaign too: voicemail, email, direct mail, invitations to teleseminars, and more.

5. Analyze your sales approach from your customer's shoes.

It's not important what you say. The only thing that matters is what your customer's hear. For example, when I was trying to reach a decision maker a while back, I decided to leave the message on my own voicemail first to see how I sounded. When I listened to my message, I was appalled. I sounded pathetic! So I worked on scripting my message and kept calling myself over and over till I finally created something I would respond to if I were the prospect.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 05:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

By Richard Fouts, Comunicado

I called on a senior IT manager today who told me, “Our policy is to never buy products that embed open source software.”  She is with a large insurance firm (surprise, surprise). The sales rep I accompanied on this call was unfortunately not that seasoned in objection management, and launched into one of those “Get over it” arguments citing the maturity of the open source movement with comments like “You’re buying open-source products today and just don’t know it.”

Use Open Source to Practice Consultative Selling
This was a great opportunity to practice consultative sales (vs. showing off your superior knowledge to a prospect). If you encounter this argument from a traditional slow adopter of emerging technology (and you should do this homework before you call on your prospect) here are some facts I acquired from doing a little research.

Start With An Objective View of Open Source Realities
Sticking with our insurance example, such IT organizations that ignore or avoid the open source issue are free to do so. But it could put them at a serious disadvantage if their competitors are using mature, stable and well-supported open-source technologies (particularly in those applications that give them business advantage in claims processing or managing customers).

Our sales person wasn’t completely wrong. Open source is indeed entering IT organizations that buy from IBM, BEA, Oracle and SAP, all which benefit from the economics of open-source (but choose to not disclose this information to customers with their own version of “Don’t ask; Don’t tell” ).

These vendors don't lead with the open-source argument, anymore than our insurance firm leads with the economics of its Indian-based call center. 

Oracle, for example, embeds the Apache XML parser in its enterprise ERP solution. In doing so, it directs more resources to functions of higher value vs. lower level system software. Customers get high quality software at lower cost.

Provide Risk Management Advice
Open-source does present risk and to not acknowledge this is naive. But this is where consultative sales people can help. If you’re selling IT consulting services, or even open-source products, advise your client to ask vendors how they support technical issues of products that embed open source. Ask how they provide the same level of legal support (for example, with warranty and indemnity issues).

Talk About Business Advantage
If you let Miss Insurance know that her competitors are benefiting from open source, and how, you’re helping her make an informed decision about how she buys. You become a more trusted adviser if you explain it in terms that are as objective and unbiased as possible. Even if you’re selling products with open-source qualities, hence appear biased, you’ve given your prospect some important information about a competitor.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 05:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Nigel Edelshain, Sales 2.0

This post continues my efforts to bring you the content that we present in our live "mini sales training" events. This is Part 7 of the series (the preceding parts are here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6.)

In this post I'm still talking about prospecting as that is where most of us sales people feel the most pain. In the first six parts of this "mini sales training" I have covered preparation (hugely overlooked) and in prospecting so far I have covered: using a multimedia prospecting approach and how to keep yourself motivated. Now I'd like to talk about something boring: being organized!

Time Management: I believe a foundational skill for sales people is time management. If you can't manage your time, you won't find time to prospect. Sales people who cannot manage their time will always find something else to do. My friend John Orvos of SellMasters says you need to "build a fortress around your prospecting time." In other words schedule your prospecting time into your calendar first before anything else in your week. Try not to let anything else interfere with it. In most companies "you eat what you kill", if you don't make time for prospecting, you will starve!

Scheduling Follow-Up Calls: follow up is key in prospecting. The research out there clearly shows it takes a lot of "touches" to get through to a cold contact (a minimum of 7 but could be up to 20 or 30!) You need to use some kind of system (usually a CRM system) to keep track of the next follow-up call when (like most of us) you have hundreds if not thousands of contacts. Keeping your follow-up call times documented and organized so you call when you need to (or said you would) is critical to good prospecting.

Understand Your Priorities: some calls are more important than others, some contacts are warmer than others. Make sure you develop a system for tracking key priorities in your prospecting efforts. We use fields in our CRM system to identify the importance of contacts and accounts so we can quickly identify the high priority contacts and accounts in our large database. Keeping these priority fields current is critical so important contacts do not get lost in a "haystack" of low priority records.

Note Taking: CRM systems are pretty boring. But taking good notes on your interactions with prospects is very important if you "team sell". Team selling can be extremely powerful. It lets others come up with ideas you may have missed. But team members can only help you if you take enough notes for them to know what's going on with that contact/account. Make sure you keep good notes on all prospects. The benchmark we use for CRM notes is: can some other member of the team read your notes and get an accurate picture of the status of your work so far on that contact? If not, improve your notes.

As I've said before "sales is just like accounting". In prospecting this is so true. The details count a lot. The cliché of sales people is as loud backslappers buying drinks at the golf club. Great characters but lousy at administration...and details.

The reality in a "Sales 2.0 world" is that sales people need to be "boring" and not miss a detail -- or they will miss a deal.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 10:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Brian Carroll, InTouch

What do you do with leads or inquires once you generate them?

This basic question is overlooked by so many and yet it’s the leading cause of failure in what would otherwise be effective lead generation programs.

The common-sense answer to this challenge is easier said than done: Have your best people respond to them quickly and consistently in order to qualify them into sales ready leads.

The need to better manage leads and inquires has given rise to a slew of new software companies offering a variety of lead management or marketing automation solutions.

An interesting conversation was started recently by Laura Ramos on the Forrester Marketing blog about lead management software. I’m really glad to see an analyst giving their opinion and I look forward to more insights. Ramos’ post, B2B Lead Management Market Heats Up is definitely worth checking out.

According to Ramos, there are four primary buckets of technology solutions aimed at solving the “how do I make lead generation activities more effective?” They are:

1. Web analytics
2. Database services
3. Marketing automation
4. “Pure play” lead management

With that said, I think it is important to realize that lead management software and marketing automation tools are only one part of an effective process.

Software will not spontaneously generate collaboration between sales and marketing, nor will it create solutions that match your processes and it certainly will not generate sales-ready leads on it’s own. However, for many the allure of easy execution and fast results are difficult to resist. It’s easy to overlook that these systems require a great deal of hands on input and maintenance to be fully appreciated.

My company has spent well over a million dollars and years to develop our lead management software that we use as part of our services and learning what works through continual testing and refinement. That said, I can say from experience that developing a good process always takes more time than you think and developing people to execute the process consistently is even more difficult.

I regularly encounter organizations that invest in expensive software before they fully understand the fundamental operational processes that it will be supporting. This was and still is true of CRM and SFA systems. Lead management software has turned out to be no different. If you want to fully leverage your lead management software, you’ll first need to develop operational discipline and focus on good execution.

Start by understanding your lead generation requirements and design a suitable process to support it and insert the software into the process where it will be most effective and actually used. Most importantly, don’t under estimate the need for a dedicated team of people that will drive the process and make the inputs into the system.

Begin by mapping out a clear process. At InTouch we use process flow and data diagrams to collaborate with clients when designing lead management programs. Make sure you involve and collaborate with everyone who will be part of the process. Their buy-in will be key to the programs success. Then identify if there are still any gaps in staffing. Finally, once people and process are mapped out, select the tools or systems that will help your people efficiently manage the process.

Lead management is the bridge between sales and marketing that connects the beginning and middle of the customer acquisition process. It requires engaged people to execute the right process, which is then supported by the right software.

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

By Jim Logan, JS Logan

A friend asked me to review a letter last night – a three page sales letter a partner of their company wants sent to my friend’s customers. It’s a letter offering a service of the partner – part of a joint referral program between the two companies.

I read the letter, laid it down in front of me, and sat there silent. “What do you think?” I asked.

“I can’t read past the first page.” replied my friend. “The font changes six or seven times, the language has a funny tone….it sounds manipulative. It’s the ginsu knife of sales letters.”

My friend was right on every point. The letter read like a late night infomercial:

• Mr So-n-so here with a big offer…
• I think so highly of (fill-in the blank) I had to make this offer to you…
• But wait, there’s more…
• Here’s the best part…
• Act now, we can only make this incredible offer for x days…
• PS
• PPS

It’s not one single element of the letter that makes it odd, it’s the continuous sing-song way it flows and the continual hooks that it offers. The font changes are effective at drawing attention, but are annoying.

Why mention this?

Because it is the exact type of letter we’ve all received in the mail. This letter is a perfect example of the type of copywriting you’d expect in stereotypical direct mail.

It’s technically perfect.

My friend said three other people at their company read the letter and had the same reaction - all thought the letter was old school, hard to read, manipulative, didn’t get to the point quick enough, and had the look-n-feel of junk mail sent from someone who’s not quite sincere.

They decided to give it to me for a professional opinion.

They didn’t need one. Their opinion is all that counts – they’re a typical recipient of such a letter. We all are.

The point to this post is there’s a lot of talk about Web 2.0 and how today’s Internet savvy surfer needs to be treated and communicated with different that their Web 1.0 brethren. The same applies to direct mail and copywriting.

It’s time the marketplace gets on board with Direct Mail 2.0 and stops the insanely antiquated copywriting techniques of continuous type treatments, hooks, and sing-song tone.

What do you think?

Do you think the direct mail copywriting tactics described above continue to be effective –or – is all direct mail dead and merely a thing of the past? Why? What, if anything, should be done different in this Web 2.0 world?

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 04:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)