If you are a salesperson, you spend your days asking other people questions. However, there are 6 questions salespeople need to ask themselves. These questions will help you sell to people that are ready to purchase, sell from a position of power, and improve your client relationships. (more…)
All posts tagged: B2B Sales Management
Empower the great the build something greater.
Use Email Signatures, They are Important
I get emails all the time from clients, potential clients, and people who want me to buy something from them. What constantly amazes me is the lack of email signatures. I know for a fact that all email programs allow you to make an email signature with your name, rank, email address, phone number, Skype number, LinkedIn page, web page, blog address, and business address.
Why then, don’t people use them? It can’t be because they are lazy. Not having one loses you business. After all, it is not always best to respond to an email with an email, especially when a topic is new, complicated, or sensitive. (more…)
How to Build a Small Business Call Center
Everyday, the CAN team interacts with clients, mentors, and friends who are leaders in their fields, and we started this series to share their expertise.
As a part of our research I interviewed Nathan Waite. Nathan is the National Sales Director for SEMCAT Quoting Software headquartered in Lincoln, NE. I found his advice helpful and I wanted to share it.
Hire Competitive & Passionate People: When screening candidates, Nathan ranks competitiveness as the most important criteria for hiring new salespeople. He has found that salespeople with competitive spirits are energized by quotas instead of being exacerbated by them. However, he is quick to point out that a competitive spirit needs to be tempted by emotional intelligence. Nathan doesn’t tolerate any drama on his team and salespeople need to be able to stay in the game even when they are down. The third criteria is that people have to be passionate about SEMCAT’s products, since they are going to spend hour after hour talking about SEMCAT’s product. However, passion about the product is different and more important than technical understanding. Nathan has found that if people are passionate and competitive they can learn exactly how everything works.
Leader Planks not Leader Boards: Competitive and passionate people love to know their score and the score of the company so Nathan uses call center metrics to keep his people motivated. However, what used to be a Leader Board is now a Leader Plank. Too many call center metrics are difficult to keep track of and distracted people instead of focused them. Instead, The Leader Plank contains 5 call center metrics, current marketing yield, phone minutes per month, total sales per month, evaluations, and accolades. The following is an example of SEMCAT”s Sales LeaderPlank:
3000 Minutes per Month: A salesperson’s job is to talk to as many customers as much as possible. However, how much time is enough time. For people that work a 9-hour day, there are 9,600 minutes of work per month, but how much of that can be spent on the phone with clients? According to Nathan the answer is 3,000 or 31% of a 9am to 5pm Monday thru Friday work schedule. At this rate salespeople will feel like they spend all of their time on the phone, but will also avoid burnout.
Power 50’s: To help each sales person achieve their 3,000 minutes a month, Nathan employs what he calls “Power 50’s”. Each Power 50 is 50 minutes long. This is the longest an average salesperson can spend on the phone while being productive and without burning out. He encourages his salespeople to block out 3 to 4 Power 50’s each day, and use that time call on clients. They are supposed to treat that time like an appointment and focus all of their efforts on making phone calls. They can return to calls, send emails and schedule other meetings around their Power 50’s.
Separate Offices: While big companies can get away with putting a lot of salespeople into open floor call centers, Nathan recommends that if you have less than 12 people per room it is more cost effective to build individual offices. The reason is because people are too polite. He has found that salespeople will take turns when making phone calls or listen to other people calls and take notes. This is especially true if their are 2 or 3 people in an office. Basically if you have 2 salespeople in an office together, you would be better off just having one. So if you are going to spend the money building a call center, hiring, equipping and training salespeople, maximize your investment, put them in their own office. If salespeople have to share an office you can help them focus by giving them full headsets instead of just single ear headsets.
Phones, Headsets and Providers: Call center telephony is an interesting industry. There are so many options, little marketing, and no clear leaders. Growing up without a telephone monopoly or a landline selecting a phone provider and hardware has been borderline infuriating. I have struggled with the fact that desktop phone lacking any thought to user experience, with a “cutting edge” 16-bit color screen, that can only make voice calls can be more expensive than my computer, while Skype can make free video calls. Nathan recommended using a Voice over IP (VoIP) system if you have an internet connection with significant upload and download speeds. For example, CAN has 5mb upload and download for 30 people. The VoIP provider that Nathan recommends is OnSip. His plan for phone is simple. He gets the phones for as cheaply as possible, and invests in great headsets. For phones he recommends either the Polycom 430 (1 or 2 line, no backlight) or 550 (4+ lines, backlight), because they are simple and good enough to get the job done. He recommends buying phones from eBay, because he can get them at about a 50% discount from retail and it doesn’t matter if they are used. He uses the 50% savings to purchase each salesperson a Plantronics SupraPlus CS361N Noise-Cancelling Wireless Headsets. Personally he uses a Plantronics CS 55 w/ Plantronics HL10, because he prefers to have one ear free in case of an emergency.
Click-to-Dial: I asked Nathan if he had any recommendation and his only advice was to use a CRM with a Click-to-Dial feature. This allows people to stay focused on communicating with clients instead of dialing. In Nathan’s opinion this is the most important feature of his CRM, and it helps his salespeople meet the requirement of being on the phone for 3000 minutes per month.
Learn about building a dashboard for your call center, download “Dashboards: Take a closer look at your data.”
Take your call center even further. Learn how using our eBook, Predictive Analytics: The Future of Business Intelligence.
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Why Customer Segmentation Will Improve Your Marketing
I have been married for almost 10 years. I have gotten good at buying gifts, even clothes. I can match blouses and jewelry, dresses and belts, shoes and jeans. My secret? I look at the mannequins. Mannequins were designed to attract your attention in a store window and to lure you into the store. Then inside, they are designed to show you some of the combinations you could make with their clothes. Essentially they are designed to get you to buy more than one thing. This is perfect for guys. All we have to do is point to the mannequin and ask a store sales person where we can find those certain pieces of clothing. We can buy the mannequin lock stock and barrel and end up with a complete outfit for our brides.
This is actually what I do when I do marketing for companies. Marketing comes in two forms. Marketing to your current clients and marketing to people who aren’t your current clients. I view each as a completely different problem while most marketing companies do not. They have only have one mannequin with the same clothes for every store. Children’s clothes, women’s clothes, men’s clothes, all the same mannequin.
Unfortunately most of the marketing plans I see are all the same. The commercials are different but the plan is the same. They do direct mail, email, print campaign, radio, and if they have the budget, TV ads. Their view is that all people are potential clients which as you who follow the blog know, is not true. The problem is that they have no idea who their target audience is, and how to market to them. They found a campaign that reaches a lot of people and they sell you that one. It may have different clothes, but it is the same mannequin. It is essential to use customer segmentation to improve marketing.
This is critical to understand. Gone are the days when people walk down a street with stores on it, see a mannequin, and make the decision to go inside. Now, people browse their favorite stores online and are more loyal to store brands like Gap, Old Navy, JC Penny’s, Younkers, and Von Mauer. We have to get a new mannequin.
Mannequins, models, are going through a huge makeover right now. In fact, if you do a job search for entry-level marketing positions, they are looking for things like statistics, modeling, and analytics in your background. What they are struggling to come to understand is the idea of marketing to one person at a time. Marketing now needs individualized messaging.
I don’t have to go to far back to find when this was still science fiction. Minority Report (2002) shows a seen where character John Anderton is walking through the mall and cameras recognize, data base search, and present relevant ads, based on his buying history. To see a version of this now, just go to iTunes. Any song I buy will create 5 suggestions of other songs I might like, based on my buying history, songs with similar tempos, themes, or by the same artist. With a predictive analytics company like ours, we can do the same thing for your product.
First you have to understand something about how we view marketing. This is the key philosophy that makes us different. Marketing is using a different medium to get in front of your target audience for the sole purpose of selling to them. Selling to them. The sole purpose. EVERYTHING else is branding. Branding is fine. We do a lot of branding. We just don’t call it marketing. That key aspect alone will forever change the way you do marketing. When you use it as a sales tool, you will no longer accept marketing with no measurement of who looks at it, how it is crafted, and where it is put. It will focus your marketing on only the people who have an actual chance to buy from you in the marketing cycle. This does not include: people who might buy, people you think need to be introduced to your product, or someone who might have a need someday. What marketing with the intent to sell does is only spend your time and money on the people who are ready to buy now.
How do we do this? We use math and econometrics to understand the buying process. What causes people to think of buying a product like yours? What series of events leads to needing a product like yours? Who are the people in a company that make the decision to buy a product like yours? These are important things to understand in the process. Don’t market to someone who doesn’t need what you are selling, isn’t high enough up in a company to make any kind of decision, or hasn’t experienced any kind of problem that your product would fix. It wastes time. Why would you ever market a phone system to a sales person. They can’t buy it. Why would you ever market a copy machine to a company of 4 people. They can’t afford it.
I have heard the argument that you need to be in front of those people now so they think of you when he problem arises. Valid argument. However, because of the new view of marketing I just gave you, that states that marketing is used as a sales tool to find people who are ready to buy now, you can see that this is branding. Branding is necessary, we do branding; however, if you have a company like us who markets you correctly, i.e. to the right people, at the right company, at the right time, you don’t even need to do that.
Example. Name someone who makes shingles. Not someone who installs them, someone who makes them. Why don’t you know? Shingles protect everything in your home and are the first thing damaged in a storm. If you own a house, shouldn’t you know who the best, worst, and middle of the road companies are in the shingle business? The reason you don’t need to know, is that you don’t need shingles. When the time comes and you need shingles, you will do your research and find a company that installs the type of shingle you want on your home.
It’s the same for business. People don’t really need to know about your product until they start doing research about your product. Key point: Up until now, you had to guess when companies were going to need you and you had to brand so that people remembered you when that time came. Now, with analytics, we can predict when to contact companies because we can predict when they should be beginning research on products similar to yours.
Think about this — how can a marketing company know where to put your ads either on TV, radio, direct mail, email campaigns,and social media without knowing what causes someone to buy your product. Its time to start marketing differently. Instead of putting mannequins in the window, lets know the person that is walking down the street. Lets advertise to them when they need us, want us, and can afford us, and save our money on tire kickers, time wasters, and spectators. Its time to spend your hard-earned marketing budget on the people who we need to talk too. Its time to work smart.
How Not to Introduce Yourself
I got to cross something off my bucket list this year, I was a pastor in a wedding. Two of my really close friends got married and I had the honor of introducing them as man and wife. It was one of the more unique things I will ever get to do. However, I was shocked because I realized that how easy it was to introduce the newly married couple, “I now pronounce you man and wife”, however it can be so difficult to introduce yourself properly at networking events.
If introducing a newly married couple is so easy, how is it so difficult to introduce yourself at a networking event? It shouldn’t be hard or awkward. Yet we go to an event to meet people who we have never met, who are there to meet people they have never met and are scared and clueless as to how to make our introductions. Most of us gather up 20 seconds of insane courage and, more often than not, dive awkwardly into the introduction. I have immense respect for courage, but there are good and bad ways to introduce yourself that will lead to someone remembering you which is the point. In my years of networking, I have experienced quite a variety of these introductions. The following are some of the most “interesting”.
Lesson 1: Never let the act of introducing outshine the introduction.
None of the names used here are real because I did not remember the person or what they did. That is partly the point. I tell new networkers to always keep in mind that 1) most of us, including myself, have done one of these things in our 20 seconds of insane courage, 2) networking is tricky, hard, and has a massive learning curve, and 3) wisdom is only gleaned from the lessons of those that have gone before us.
Lesson 2: Wait until you are acknowledged before jumping in, and then stay and talk.
The Cannonball. These guys are the worst. There I am having a nice conversation with 4 of my friends when a person walks up to the table introduces themselves, in the middle of my sentence, to explain they are so and so and they are glad to meet me, and here is their card. Then they leave without another word and do the same thing at the next table. I believe this is the number one cause of sorting through cards at the end of the event and not being able to remember who half of them are.
Lesson 3: A card is not an introduction, throwing a card is like introducing yourself by yelling your name at someone as you drive by them.
The Dealer: This one makes me laugh every time. This is when someone walks up to you and your friends at a table and proceeds to introduce themselves as they toss you, not hand you, a card. It goes something like this:
“Hi, I’m Rick”,”Hi, I’m Rick”,”Hi, I’m Rick”, “Hi, I’m Rick” each time dealing you one of their business cards; not passing or handing, dealing. Throwing a card at you. I always laugh when “Rick” is done. A table full of people now have your card, but are thinking to themselves “Did I just get introduced to someone?” Its never a good sign when after you introduce yourself, people are still asking what just happened.
Lesson 4: Use an excuse to refill your plate or cup to disengage from a Never Ending Story. It is good for you and them.
The Never Ending Story: Great movie in 1984. Horrible way to introduce yourself. NES’ers think the only way to make you remember them is to talk to you. The. Entire. Time. I can’t tell you how many times I have gotten myself stuck with one of these. I just have to excuse myself to go get more food or drink and pray they find someone else to stick to. The hard part is when they find me again on the other side of the room and I have a full plate . The best way of getting rid of them is by using a trick my friend Rick Sheahan came up with. Give them a card, and tell them to call you. It works because they think they have accomplished their goal; and, to date, not one of them has actually ever called.
Lesson 5: Always give cards face up with your name facing them so they can see, not just hear, what your name and your company’s name is.
The Reverse Pick Pocket: This is my favorite networking story. So there I was, eating another plate of food, avoiding the Never Ending Story, when a man I had never met, walked up and introduced himself. While simultaneously shaking my right hand, slipped his card into my shirt pocket with his left hand. I think I probably looked at him for a full 5 seconds before I could say anything. What do you even say? Thanks for card Mr.??? Wait, Let me get the card back out of my pocket so I can know what your name is.” Unbelievable. He actually violated my personal space to try and give me his card.
A few things jump out at me about this story. While being very brave, he was very lucky I don’t have much personal space. I found it more funny than offensive, but he didn’t know that. Try that on a different guy he might get knocked out. We won’t even mention how wrong that would be for the opposite sex.
Lesson 6: Its hard enough to coach people to give referrals. People do not give them of their own free will. Especially not to someone they just met.
The Double Carder: This is when someone walks up to a complete stranger and hands them two cards so that you use the extra card to refer them. This is way too forward. Why should I refer you? I just met you, I barely understand what you do, let alone, am I confident enough to refer you to people that value my opinion. I do send double cards in Thank You notes and Christmas cards, but never as an introduction.
Lesson 7: It is hard remembering people at the end of the night. It just becomes confusing when you have two companies.
The Two Card Monte: Similar to the Double Carder, you get two cards from this person too. This time, they are different. One for each company this person has. You then have to play the game similar to the one played on a box on a street corner for money. Follow the queen, which company am I with, anyone can win. I feel like if I hold out the right card and say “this one” I might have a chance to win $5 dollars. Giving someone two cards does not promote two businesses. It just confuses me. Do I have to listen to two 30 second commercials and then pick which one fits my business. What about me? Do I get to give a one minute elevator speech now? I have always viewed people with two business cards from two companies at the same time as confused. I don’t usually follow up with them. Take that to heart, as I am not unique in how I handle this.
Lesson 8: I don’t know you. I don’t know if I need to know you. Let’s get pleasantries out of the way before we start with the power point.
The Used Car Salesman: I shake my head in disbelief when I see this. I don’t need your companies history, how great your products are, how many people are in your office, and all the awards you have won before I know if I need something you have. Introductions are about introducing yourself, not making a presentation. Let me figure out if I want a sales presentation before you make one. If you are new to networking , you get a pass on this, but all the more reason I ask new networkers to read my posts on networking first.
Learning to introduce yourself can be hard. Introductions take some planning and some courage to introduce yourself to someone you have never met. I hope you understand that while funny, all of these introductions are serious gaffes that lead to zero second meetings. In all of these cases, I don’t remember the names of the gaffers and I’m pretty sure that is the whole point of networking. When in doubt go introduce yourself, try this: Shake someone’s hand, tell them your name, hand them your card, comment on the food, and see where the conversations goes. It works for me.
Would you like to learn more about how you can improve your sales process using the power of predictive analytics?
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Be First and Influence the Purchasing Process
I just got off the phone with a friend of mine in the Hotel business in Omaha. It was an interesting conversation because she had lost a sale because her wall in the event space wasn’t green. Not environmentally green, I mean she didn’t get the job because her space wasn’t the color green. She was trying to figure out why someone would choose an event space based on the color. I explained to her that someone had influenced the purchase process.
I imagine the conversation went something like this: (more…)
Cold Calling Works Again
Cold calls used to work, then they didn’t and now they work again. I used to agree with most people, that cold calls do not work. In fact, I established my sales career on referral networking. However, I have rediscovered the power of cold calling and how to do it effectively. Networking is still important, but now I don’t have to wait around hoping for referrals.
Before the internet cold calling was effective because talking to salespeople was the most effective way for most people to learn about new products and services. As long as you had a good product, solid reputation and solid sales skills you could be successful. If someone wasn’t willing to take the time to listen to your sales pitch then they weren’t open to learning about the latest and greatest innovations that could transform their company.
However, the Internet made cold calling ineffective. It provided a more effective alternative to talking with salespeople that typically didn’t value people’s time and attention. Now, people had the ability to learn about new product and didn’t need someone to “sell it to them”.
Cold calling no longer worked because people no longer had problems to solve that they couldn’t solve using the Internet. They didn’t want a salesperson to create a problem. They certainly did not have time to listen to another sales pitch. If they had a problem they could solve it themselves, and this essentially took the power away from salespeople.
Salespeople transitioned from cold calling to networking and developing referral relationships. This worked because it established trust with prospects, and trust was something that the Internet lacked. The buyer did all the research to find possible solutions to meet their need, and then asked friends for a referral to someone they could trust to make answer a couple questions, provide a recommendation, and take the order. However, it is difficult to build a reliable sales system through networking and referrals, because you are relying on someone else to make the first move and then making sure that you are positioned in cahoots with the first person that they would ask for advice.
What cold calling and the Internet had allowed buyers to do is find products and services that they had the need, willingness and resources to purchase. The secrete is talking to the right people at the right time. With the right timing cold calling can be effective again, and sales people can once again activity take control of their pipeline.
Once we realized that timing was the secret, CAN set out on a mission to get our timing right. How could we build a system that would allow sales people to find leads when they had the need, willingness and resources to purchase? The solution is Predictive Lead Generation. Predictive Lead Generation allows you to build a detailed profile of your ideal client that identifies what factors trigger prospects to have the need, willingness and resources to purchase your product, and find leads that have the attributes of someone who is ready to purchase, and find supporting evidence you need to successful call and build trust. Instead of calling 100 people to get one person that is interested in your product, CAN is able to give you a list of 10 people. You still have to have a great product and solid sales pitch, but Predictive Lead Generation can help you focus on talking to the right people.
We have been using Predictive Lead Generation internally for four years. Before Predictive Lead Generation our sales team used to spend the entire week attending networking events hoping to snag a solid lead, and make up excuses about how sales is all about luck and can’t produce reliable results. Now, our sales team is focused on building relationships with the right people, and I am confident that my team will be able to deliver each month.
I encourage you to use Predictive Lead Generation to put cold calls back into your arsenal. If you want to try out cold calling search the Internet and find a company you decide needs, wants and has the resources to purchase what you sell, spend 10 minutes learning about the person you are calling, and then call someone who actually needs what you are selling, and will be glad you called. If that produces results, then you might be a good candidate for CAN’s Predictive Lead Generation system. While referrals may always be the easiest phone call, cold calls are now some of the most effective.
Identifying Your Target Market
When I started my sales career, my philosophy was to let anyone who needed my product buy from me. It worked. I was one of the more successful young salespeople and I exceeded my quota month after month. My target market was “anyone and everyone”, and it seemed to be working. However, I was unknowingly limiting my future success.
After hearing from several of peers who had been in sales for years that they wish they could start over and not have the bottom 10-20% of their book of business, I conducted research on my book of business. My research showed that 75% of my time was spent on customer service issues with only 15% of my clients. Furthermore, looking at who that 15% were, the study found that 75% of those were my lowest yielding profit margin clients. In addition to my failed attempts at asking for referrals to anyone, it was obvious that I needed to invest in identifying and focusing my sales efforts on my target market. Learn how CAN helped the Admissions department at a University focus on recruiting the right students.
Once I identified my target, two things happened: I started to receive referrals when I asked for them, and I was finally able to apply a strategy to my sales efforts. I no longer felt that I had to get everyone as a client, in fact, I started turning away people who were not my target market. Low and behold, gone were the price chasers, time wasters, and no-money makers that wasted so much time.
I used the following strategy to identify my target market, so that I could start selling smart:
First, I identified the events that caused someone to buy my product.
In my case it was a major life change. Things like buying a new home, getting married, having children, and changing jobs.
Second, I identified the characteristics of the people were that were experiencing these events.
In my case it was 20-30 year olds that had graduated college, had lived in apartments for 4 to 5 years, had a job were they made $50,000 or more a year, and had met their fiancés but had yet to marry them.
Third, I identified where my target market spends time.
In my case, my target market spent time at first time home buyer classes, professional certification training classes, marriage classes, gyms, and trendy restaurants. This provided my advertising with focus, also I started to have meetings and work at coffee shops and restaurants where I could meet my target market.
Lastly, I identified the people who were around people who needed my product.
In my case, these were real estate agents, mortgage brokers, ministers, trendy restaurant owners, lawyers, and headhunters. This step allowed me to know where I needed to spend my time networking and which events I needed to attend. All of a sudden I knew where I needed to be and who I needed to meet at each event.
Now when people are outside my target market, I can recognize when they might be one of the bottom 15% of my market that would suck up 75% of my customer service time. I can weigh the cost and benefit and decide if I should bring them on as a client, or refer them to someone who might be able to serve their needs better.
Let me know if you would like help identifying your target market, or using predictive analytics to find people who fit your profile and are looking to purchase.
Learn more about how CAN helped a online university identify their target market.
Using Business Cards
Good networkers typically collect between 3 to 5 business cards for every hour they invest at a networking event. It is important to have a system to process the business cards you collect at networking events, because while you might be able to process 3 to 5 business cards a day, anything over that requires a systematic way to keep up with connections until they become friends and clients.
Learn how we applied predictive analytics to CRM & accounting data to identify who was 60 to 80% likely to enroll at a Top 10 Online University.
Step 1: The first thing that I do is prioritize business cards based on the conversations that I have had with people. I start by throwing away the business cards of people that handed me their card, but that we failed to have a conversation. The reason that I throw those business cards out is because I don’t know anything about that person and their business, and they choose not to take the time to learn anything about me and my business. For people that I did have a conversation with I write down details about that person in my CRM (see Step 2). (more…)
How to Get Referrals from Clients
Referrals from current clients are completely different from referrals from referral partners. Getting referrals from your current clients require a different conversation, because they already know you, your product, and the benefits. One of the best I know at having the conversation is a friend of mine named Amy. She has developed a system that allows her to receive 10+ referrals per week from her current clients.
I asked her how she was getting so many referrals, when most people are happy with one or two per week. She told me not to be satisfied with just one or two referrals. “I used to get only one or two per week until I started expecting three or four from each person. Unless you make it a point, they don’t know how many they are supposed to give you. After setting expectations clients usually just keep providing names of people that I can help, until I stop them.” (more…)
Featured Posts – Click the Brain
