Archive for April, 2015
Five Practical Tips to Build a Better Network
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on April 27, 2015
For many businesses to continue to grow and thrive, it takes more than just excellent products and services. It takes building awareness and a loyal customer base. It also requires patience and resilience to make it through the difficult times. And it takes building a community of partners, contacts and allies for continued success.
There is no substitute for a great network, even as our definition of what makes a network becomes more elastic as our preferred ways of connecting and sharing information evolve over time and in response to new technology (Twitter follower? Facebook Friend? LinkedIn Connection?). Here are our five favorite tips for networking better this year to help you build that community.
Attend Events Across Industries – If you are looking to build a network in your local business community, don’t limit yourself to events related to your specific business type or industry. You want to broaden your potential network as much as possible and open your business to as many relevant customers as possible. Look for events in industries that are complementary to your type of business, or that also target the same type of customer as you based on geography or demographics. You’ll be more likely to find businesses willing to cooperate and work together, since you are not in direct competition with each other. More importantly, you never know whom your new contacts will know and this is the key to networking. There is enormous unknown potential in every new relationship.
Share Your Story and Listen to Theirs – All business owners and entrepreneurs have at least one thing in common: the courage to take that big risk for something they believe will be successful. Take the time to share your founder story with other business owners and learn about what motivated them to start their business. You may learn that you have a lot in common–similar challenges, suppliers, even customers. Exchanging stories is the first step to building a relationship that can help your business grow.
Reinforce an Offline Connection Online, and Vice Versa – Any time that you meet a new contact at a networking event, conference, or even the coffee shop, make sure to also connect with that person online. Reaching out via LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook is a great way to thank the person for their time and remind them of a few points from your conversation. The same advice works for online contacts: if you’ve made a new connection through LinkedIn, make the effort to have a phone call or meet in person to explore how you can work together to make each other’s businesses grow. Bonus tip: Make sure your company’s online presence is memorable and professional. Put your logo on your LinkedIn profile, company Facebook page, or Twitter page for a consistent look online.
Always Be Prepared – Make sure that every interaction is productive by being prepared. Have a stack of updated business cards with you at all times, and keep flyers or postcards with your latest offers or promotions handy as well. These critical marketing materials can be made quickly and affordably online with an online business card maker, so there’s no excuse for being unprepared. Even as our social and professional lives move more and more online, business cards are here to stay. So challenge yourself to share twice as many cards as you did last time. It’s also easy to stay on top of your online presence. Prepare yourself before releasing a new product, service, or offer to your customers. Usually when a business does something new, customers can have a fair amount of questions and feedback. Grab a friend or two to man the phones at your business or saddle up on your Facebook messages page to help handle the rush of comments. Releasing new products should get people excited about your business, not get you too stressed out.
Set Up a Next Step – It’s easy to lose momentum after a networking event; they can be overwhelming at times. But all these events can be worthless if you don’t make plans to communicate after the event is over. Make sure you can gather as many business cards as you hand out, and reach out to these people soon after the event closes. Stay on the top of their minds. Set a date in their calendar, whether it’s for tomorrow or two months from now. All of your networking efforts can be worthless if you don’t follow through. You can’t always depend on the other party to set up the next steps. Take control of the situation and make a name for your business.
This article was originally posted to the Business 2 Community Blog by Dena Enos on April 2, 2015.
The Sales Process Is Not A One Way Street!
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on April 24, 2015
Our thinking and visualizations of our sales processes, deal strategies, funnels, and pipelines often cause us to do the wrong things. It’s because we have a “one way street” mentality as we think of our deal strategies. Things progress–top to bottom, left to right (or right to left in certain parts of the world).
We prospect, qualify, discover, demonstrate, propose, close, implement. Everything moves in one direction, we’re always moving forward—-except when we don’t.
The other day, I was reviewing a critical deal. You guessed it, it was large and critical to the quarter end. The sales person had it moving from the proposing to closing stages of their sales process, but the deal had been stalled for some months. The sales person was insistent that it would close when projected.
In reviewing the deal, the sales person had been using the sales process. She’d been working on the deal for about 6 months, was executing the process step by step moving it through the stages until it reached its current point and it stopped. She was trying to move it forward, but it just wasn’t working.
As we examined things, we started seeing there had been a major management restructuring, with new management at a couple of levels above the decision-maker. This brought on a shift in corporate priorities, and as a result other projects were being cancelled.
I asked, “Is the deal still a priority, is it a real deal? Should we re-qualify it? Given all the changes just above the decision-maker, do we need to reassess the whole thing? Should this be in the closing stages of our pipeline?”
That’s when I started seeing the nervous glances among the team. They had worked hard to get the deal to this place. They needed to close the deal. They tried hard to argue, “We’ve followed our sales process, and we’ve done everything we needed to do to get it to the closing stage of the process. So we just need to push it forward.” They were trying as hard as they could to push the deal through, but it just wasn’t happening.
We agreed they would go back and explore the urgency of the deal with the customer, particularly given the changes. They also found a way to meet with some of the new corporate executives.
They learned, there was some interest in the project, but it wasn’t a high priority and the funding for the project was being diverted. With some of the shifts in the corporate strategies, the needs and requirements for this project were changing. The good news was they were changing in a way that made the deal both bigger and made my client a much better fit.
As we examined all the information the team had gotten, we realized we needed to start the sales process all over again. While much of the work they had done would probably be very valuable, things had changed.
The team needed to re-qualify the deal, and then go through all the sales process again. All based on the changes that had occurred within the customer.
While the team intuitively knew all of this, they were blinded thinking things only go one way in the pipeline or in our sales process. We always move forward.
Ideally, we do, but the sales process and the pipeline is a two way street. Sometimes things go back to the beginning of the sales process, sometimes they pop back to the top of the funnel.
Not recognizing this means we are fooling ourselves and our managers in the expectations we set in our pipelines. Not recognizing this means we are not aligned with the customer and where they are with their buying process. As a result, we aren’t creating the value we should–in fact may be doing all the wrong things.
The team moved the deal back to the top of the pipeline. They changed the projected close date–actually they left it open, since they needed to re-qualify the whole deal. They started developing strategies to start the whole process all over again. While it was disappointing, without doing this, they would have continued doing the wrong things with the customer and have been setting the wrong expectations for their own management. They would have been wasting their and everyone else’s time.
We all have deals like that. Deals we’ve worked hard on. We’ve brought them to a certain place, but they stop. Things change, we need to reassess, restart and go through our process yet again. Perhaps we are a little smarter from having gone through it once before. Perhaps we can accelerate the buying process, based on that knowledge, but we have to go back re-qualify, rediscover, re-demonstrate, re-propose and close again on the “new deal.”
Don’t think of your sales process or pipeline as a one way street. Things can and should move backwards. Denying it doesn’t help anything.
This article was originally posted to the Partners in Excellence Blog by David Brock on March 30, 2015.
Seven Responsibilities Sales Managers Must Own
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on April 20, 2015
Shifts in the business-to-business buying process have transformed selling as we know it. In the past, salespeople had a fair amount of control. They were given a territory, a pricing structure, a margin target and a set of products and services they could offer, and then sent off into the wild blue yonder. They were responsible for managing their territory and producing results. Sales management provided oversight, facilitated requests back to corporate to ensure that orders were expedited and generally stayed out of the way, unless additional support was needed to help underperformers. That’s how things used to be. Now, the role of sellers – and therefore sales managers – is much different.
The “State of Sales Productivity 2015” study by Docurated found that only one-third of a sales reps’ day is actually spent selling, while 31 percent of their time is spent searching for or creating content, and 20 percent is spent on reporting, administrative and CRM-related tasks. Nowadays, 82 percent of sales reps feel challenged by the amount of data and the time it takes to research a prospect, according to a study by IKO System.
If you want to thrive in this new era of sales, it is now up to you as a sales manager to view territories, customers and products as if assessing a financial portfolio that you are responsible for investing. The people involved, the marketing dollars spent and the efforts expended are all for you to decide. It is your responsibility to make your investments wisely.
Since the time and attention of your salespeople are part of that investment, it is your responsibility to own their calendar, their workflow and where they spend their time. You may be of the old mindset that this is micromanagement, but in today’s marketplace, the investment belongs to the company, not the sales rep. This means your role as sales manager must adapt if you want to succeed in life after the death of selling as we know it. Your new responsibilities as a sales manager include the following:
Selecting targets – There’s an adage that salespeople talk to whoever will talk to them. In the new world of selling, your responsibility is to make certain that they are talking to the decision makers who can approve large opportunities that will come to fruition in the near future. Working with sales leadership, you must establish a filter that helps to define the most likely candidates for higher-opportunity sales efforts.
Defining priorities –Help your sales force prioritize what opportunities they pursue and how much time and effort they spend on each opportunity. Good sales managers keep key opportunities that are real and relevant to the current circumstances in the crosshairs of their salespeople.
Defining time guidelines – Set and enforce guidelines for how sellers spend their time. They no longer can just meander about a territory or go on a sweep of their current account base with the intention of “checking in and finding out what’s going on.” Rather, they must undertake a strategic and surgical approach to going after identified targets in a prescribed way.
Monitoring compliance – You are responsible for providing data that allows you and other leaders in the organization to monitor what is happening in the marketplace regarding customers, competitors and surrounding regulations and technology shifts. Consistency in the execution of a sales process gives data to the organization that clarifies what works and what does not. We’re not talking about activity management and monitoring for its own sake. Your focus should be working toward compliance in the sales process to protect the integrity of the data captured so everyone has relevant data for good decision making.
Navigating the terrain – Your sales process lays out a map for action, but a map is just a two-dimensional representation of a sequential process. Good sales management also addresses the third dimension – assessing the terrain of what is going on in the marketplace based on the data you’re getting (including variant data) from the sales process. There will be occasions when you will need to send out a scouting team of select salespeople to find out new information. Then it’s up to you to analyze what they bring back and use that information to better navigate the terrain.
Securing resources – There will be occasions when competing priorities of other departments impede progress on landing a big account. It’s your responsibility to make certain that significant sales opportunities are visible to leadership and to secure from less-than-enthusiastic parties inside your organization the resources needed for a successful sales process.
Knowing when (and when not) to expedite – It’s your job to expedite what needs to be expedited—and to know when not to. If you try to expedite every opportunity, soon no one will respond. Salespeople are often viewed as that proverbial “boy who cried wolf.” For the sake of the organization and for the sake of your reputation and that of your salespeople, you’ll need to be the gatekeeper on when an opportunity needs to be expedited, and when everyone should simply follow the normal sales process.
This article was originally posted to the Sales & Marketing Management Blog by Tom Searcy on March 16, 2015.
Social Selling Isn’t Just “a” Thing – It’s “the” Thing
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on April 15, 2015
You can’t read a sales- or marketing-related blog without seeing something about social selling. There are tips and techniques, camps and courses, and even social selling consultants, both real and fake.
But as this new sales trend/methodology/process starts to take hold beyond just the cutting-edge techies and social media mavens, it’s starting to look less like a “new sales methodology” and more like a requirement for any salespersons’ toolkit.
If I were to say to you today, “I want to help you learn telephone selling techniques,” you’d laugh me out of the room. Why? Because you’ve been doing that your entire career, as has every other salesperson.
Social networks, however, are relatively new. And it took a few years for smart salespeople to figure out how to leverage them for insights that helped move deals along. It also took a few years for people—you, me, your manager, your leads, their marketing departments—to all jump on the Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and other (Yes, I use Google+. Don’t judge me.), bandwagons.
Now, the use of social networks is ubiquitous. Seriously, who do you know who doesn’t have a Facebook account or a LinkedIn profile? It’s a pretty small group. So using this information to help you sell more is an obvious, albeit new, part of your daily life and it’s going to be for a long time.
So while the term “social selling” is pretty popular these days, it’s not really a thing. If you want to achieve your quota and outsell your competition, you need to treat it as the thing, meaning it’s what will set you apart for now, but pretty soon, it’ll be a normal part of selling, not just a buzzword.
This article was originally posted to the InsideView Blog by Jason Rushin on March 18, 2015.
What Separates High-Performing Sales Organizations From Average and Underperforming Sales Organizations?
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on April 7, 2015
That’s what Velocify, along with Steve Martin, author of the “Heavy Hitter” series of books on enterprise selling, set out to discover. They asked 800 sales executives, managers and front-line sales reps a whole lot of questions—42 of them to be exact—to get at the answer.
The results of their study, which can be downloaded here, should be of interest to any sales leader. The report aims to show how high-performing organizations differ from average and underperforming organizations in terms of attitudes and structure.
Survey respondents were asked to compare year-over-year revenue growth for the past 2 years. Those that characterized their growth as significant were rated as high performing organizations. Those that characterized their revenue growth as flat or declining were rated as underperforming organizations (those in between were characterized as average).
The report offers up a summary of how people in each group responded to the questions. It’s interesting to note that 47% of the respondents were quota carrying salespeople. It could be enlightening to see how their responses compared to those of sales leaders.
Here are some of the key highlights from the study:
- High-performing sales organizations set higher quotas and expect fewer sales reps to meet their quota
- Mediocre sales organizations were slower to fire underperforming sales reps
- The best-performing sales teams were more likely to describe themselves as a “cohesive group”
According to the study, three key differentiators separated the great sales teams from mediocre teams according to the study.
Differentiator #1: Aggressive Goal Setting The best performing sales teams consistently set higher quotas and expected fewer sales reps to meet quota.
46 percent of respondents at high-performing organizations said that less than 60 percent of salespeople should make quota, compared to just 30 percent of respondents at average and under-performing organizations.
18 percent of high-performing sales organizations indicated that salespeople will be terminated for poor performance after one quarter compared to only 2 percent of average and 5 percent of underperforming organizations.
Differentiator #2: Team Mentality A team-oriented outlook was more prevalent among high-performing sales organizations.
High-performing sales organizations were nearly twice as likely to describe themselves as “a cohesive group of like-minded individuals” than people at lower-performing organizations, who more often described themselves as “a loose collection of individuals.”
The best teams also viewed individual talent as a lesser factor for sales success than mediocre groups, but were less likely to include below-average salespeople – exhibiting a more unified sales culture.
Differentiator #3: Process-Driven High-performing sales organizations were more likely to employ a structured sales process than others.
High-performing sales organizations were almost twice as likely as underperforming organizations to describe their sales processes as “closely monitored” or “strictly enforced or automated.”
High-performing sales organizations ranked “disciplined sales process and systems usage” as the second most important factor separating great from good sales organizations. They were also more likely to closely monitor lead follow-up than lower-performing organizations.
The report, “The Sales Organization Performance Gap,” includes analysis and survey results for 15 key questions. Here are a few (somewhat re-worded):
- What is the optimum percentage of salespeople who should make quota to validate that quotas are not set too high or too low?
- How soon is a sales person terminated for poor performance?
- In what order should the factors that separate great from average (and from underperforming) sales organizations be prioritized?
This last question uncovered an interesting result. Both the high performers and the good performers ranked “lead generation and pipeline activity” as the most important factor, above six other factors including sales leadership and sales talent.
Comparing how you would answer these questions to those of the survey respondents just might cause you to re-think the attitudes and structure of your own organization.
This article was originally posted to the Smart Selling Tools Blog by Nancy Nardin on January 28, 2015.
Why Self Image Matters in B2B Sales
Posted by Rick Pranitis in GENERAL DISCUSSION on April 3, 2015
B2C marketers have long known that the key to customers’ hearts and minds is to make the connection between the brand and customers’ sense of self. Powerful brands (think Apple and Nike) reinforce customers’ positive self-image. B2B marketers, on the other hand, have shied away from the idea, instead approaching selling as a rational, numbers-driven process where the best value proposition wins. Consequently, until recently they’ve paid little attention to the psychological needs of individual stakeholders in a purchasing organization. But that’s changing as suppliers have come to appreciate that companies don’t buy things, people do.
Our research shows that understanding the personal motivations – particularly around identity — of key people in a buyer organization are every bit as important to a sale as convincing them of the superiority of your solution.
This becomes even more important as the number of people involved in buying decisions has grown. Today, between five and six decision-makers typically have to agree on a purchase before it can happen. If a seller doesn’t have an advocate in the organization to help drive the consensus, a so-called “mobilizer” who is personally motivated to champion the deal, the sale can stall (see “Making the Consensus Sale” Harvard Business Review, March 2015).
To find out what might motivate a customer to take on this mobilizer role, CEB surveyed over 4,000 individual customer stakeholders involved in a B2B purchase. By evaluating over 70 different supplier attributes for their impact on customers’ perceptions of value, we found that customers perceive three distinct types of value provided by suppliers. We labeled these company value, professional value, and identity value.
Company value captures all ways in which your offering is perceived to help customers win at the company level — things like allowing the firm to achieve operational goals or increase customer loyalty.
Professional value is all about the ways an offering might improve the individual productivity of employees, for example by making an employee’s job easier or increasing her workflow or productivity.
And finally identity value describes the ways an offering might impact how employees perceive themselves by, for example, boosting their pride, helping them win respect, or strengthening their sense of community. This third category is distinct from the other two. It is less about “how the firm does” or “what I do” than “who I am.”
When we analyzed the relationship between which type of value customers perceived in a supplier (company, performance, or identity value) and their likelihood of advocating internally for the supplier, this is what we found: Offerings with a lot of company value (those that benefit the firm overall) don’t reliably inspire stakeholders in the company to advocate on a supplier’s behalf, becoming mobilizers who will help build the consensus needed to secure a purchase. Offerings that provide professional value (helping an employee do his or her job better), while encouraging mobilizers somewhat; don’t have a particularly powerful effect. But offerings that provide identity value, positively reinforcing a customer’s self image, had a powerful effect on turning these customers into mobilizers.
In short, the most effective way to create internal advocates or mobilizers for your offering is to make sure that – in addition to explaining the company and professional value it provides – you reinforce the ways it will deliver identity value — making them proud and respected, and strengthening their sense of community within the organization.
One of the best B2B campaigns of this is industrial supplier Grainger’s “Get it, got it, good” promotion —exemplified by their “Downtime is a Real Downer” video. Grainger identified production facility managers as their target — the individuals in the organization they hoped to turn into mobilizers who would help build consensus. The campaign connected the benefits of pride in work and having a sense of being king of one’s domain directly to the purchase and use of the Grainger solution. Grainger’s value proposition directly impacts the way the target mobilizer sees himself, building his confidence and willingness to act. Using Grainger’s offering doesn’t just make him feel better about Grainger; it makes him feel better about himself.
Communicating the spectrum of types of value your offering provides – from the company level to the individual level – is important, of course. Each value type has a role in helping to drive the needed purchase consensus. But if you fail to inspire individual customer stakeholders with the promise of identity value – qualities of your offering that enhance their sense of self – they may not step forward to advocate for you. And without them, it will be an uphill battle getting the consensus you need for a purchase.
This article was originally posted to the Harvard Business Review Blog by Brent Adamson, Karl Schmidt and Anna Bird on April 2, 2015.
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