When President Kennedy announced the goal of putting Americans on the moon, no one had any idea how to do it. Not even the Russians, who had inspired the race with their ventures into orbit, understood how to get to the moon. Yet Kennedy got us there. He used the sheer confidence of his belief to convince Americans that the moon was an attainable objective. He then dedicated extensive resources to enable the scientists and engineers in the effort to achieve it.
There is a lesson here for sales organizations. Setting big goals at a sales kickoff and barraging reps with information about the newest products just isn’t enough. The top reps will deliver the numbers in any case. The rest will struggle without extensive resources and support.
Sales reps report that the following are especially effective in helping them achieve their targets:
- Case studies, case studies, case studies. Repeatedly and consistently rated as the most useful sales tool. (Post on making case studies more useful coming soon!)
- In-account deal support from subject-matter, industry, or technology specialists.
- Business-level messaging and sales tools targeted at the high-level decision makers and budget holders. Complement detailed product-focused content with these.
- Training & tools that enable sales reps to ask great questions and have intelligent conversations with customers at multiple organizational levels and functional roles.
- Quantitative results achieved for other customers. While compliments are good, hard numbers are always best.
Share what do your B2B sales reps value most!
Later this week I’ll be moderating Silicon Valley American Marketing Association’s event on Social Media for B2B Lead Generation. The keynote speaker and panel are as well-informed a group on this topic as you’re likely to find: David Meerman Scott, author of New Rules of Marketing and PR, Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot and author of Inbound Marketing, Mike Linton, former CMO at eBay and before that at Best Buy, and Zack Urlocker from MySQL (now Sun Microsystems).
What would you ask this group about using Social Media to drive a sales pipeline? Here are some of the questions I’ll have for them:
- How do you move from conversation to lead generation within social networking environments, and without angering the people you’ve engaged?
- How does a company select the social media hubs that are most important to their business and their audiences?
- What constitutes a “qualified lead” in the social media context?
- How do you estimate the resources required to create a presence in social mediums?
- What can B2B companies learn from BtoC practices?
- What’s your advice for the change agents who are advocating greater investment in social media by their companies?
- How should resource-strapped start-ups allocate the time and resources for social media?
- What are the top three do’s and dont’s for using social media to feed a sales pipeline?
Your turn! What would you ask? I’ll post some of the answers to your questions here after the event.
by Lilia Shirman on September 21, 2009
in Sales
I just watched a great TED presentation by Dan Pink on the science of motivation. The net is that rewards work well for very simple tasks that require no creativity. They actually produce worse performance for complex tasks requiring insight, creativity, and innovation. What works for the latter, according to Dan Pink, in intrinsic motivation created by autonomy, mastery, and purpose in people’s jobs.
How much of these three does the typical B2B enterprise sales rep have? Some autonomy in terms of work hours and location. But not much in terms of processes, procedures, reporting, pricing, etc…
Mastery? Everyone is moving to “self-paced learning,” which means you watch a video or presentation on your PC while multitasking. What kind of in-depth, hands-on education can you really get that way? Hardly the best way to teach negotiation, interviewing and discovery, listening, rapport-building, solution design, or anything else that’s truly core to a complex sale into a large account.
Purpose? (Other than the commission?) I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve heard sales and corporate management say, “the reps are coin-operated.” Create a spiff, and get the result. True. You get SOME result. But what if instead of a spiff (or in addition to one), you convinced your reps that what they are selling is meaningful, significant, and really matters? That they have to be the sages and advisors who will help customers save their companies? That meeting the quota isn’t about going to “Club,” but about saving or creating jobs and livelihoods for others?
Maybe sales reps don’t operate by the same rules as all other humans. But I doubt it. Would love to know for sure. Anyone out there who’s tried something other than a spiff to motivate sales?
A great set of tips about on-the-fly sketching from XPlane are directly related to a recent post here about “2.0ing your sales meetings”
Happy to see that collaborative selling approaches are becoming popular, and now insightful companies like XPlane and WhiteBoard Selling are helping sales reps get more interactive and collaborative. That can only translate into greater customer relevance, and more productive and valuable sales meetings.
by Lilia Shirman on June 30, 2009
in Sales
I’m amazed how often I ask enterprise sales reps about how the product they just sold will be used, and they don’t know!
Understanding the use-case for your product is essential to making the sale. If your sales reps can’t answer the following questions, then they don’t understand the customer and they can’t be relevant nor articulate your value and uniqueness.
Why is the customer purchasing?
What initiatives, objectives, or pressures is the company responding to via this and related purchases and actions? What’s at stake for each participant in the purchase decision?
How will the product be used?
Which business processes will it be involved in? Who will the users be? How will it change people’s day-to-day jobs? What performance and business metrics will it impact? How will it change your customer’s customers’ experiences?
What’s the context?
What other systems, processes, and business areas will your product interact with? What else is going on within the company that will determine the value of what you’re selling?
by Lilia Shirman on June 5, 2009
in Sales
Your sales reps need to know how your customers think about their customers. How educated are they about this? Everyone gets product training, but other desperately needed enterprise sales education topics are neglected. Here are a few:
- Listening skills
- Customers’ industries, business processes, and critical business metrics
- Usage situations (“use-cases”) of your products / services
- Negotiation in a style that fits your brand and company character
- Long-term account planning (Not the sales process. The relationship process.)
- Research, information gathering, and asking questions to discover pains and opportunities
- Presentation skills sans Power Point
Idea Design’s blog about asking is right on – and applies to businesses as much as to charities. At the end are three points that may as well have been written for businesses – here they are, with business terms inserted:
“1. Be where your [customers and prospects] are. Hang out with them. Learn their language and be relevant to them.
2. If you want to [close deals] sooner or later you are going to have to ask for [the sale].
3. And when you do ask, ask in a way that is appropriate to your [customer]. ”
In a business, these apply to the sales reps, and to the rest of your organization. Get your messages into the places customers look to for information (note – first place they look is not your website). Your marketing, services, and product development / design staff should be attending the same events, reading the same publications, and participating in the same discussions on and off-line that your target audiences do.
Most sales people don’t have much trouble asking for a sale – but they often fail to do their homework and communicate why their offer should matter to the customer in the customer’s terms. That makes the ask inappropriate. To increase the frequency of yeses, increaes the relevance of your offers. To make that relevance natural, as Idea Design suggests, hang out with the customers.
I hate hate hate pricing my consulting work. There is always a tension between the value it brings to the client (which gurus like Alan Weiss will tell you is the only thing that matters), the reality of the client’s budget, the amount of effort and expertise required, internal company politics, etc.
So even before reading the article about a coffee shop that does not post prices, I had tried handing the pricing reigns to clients by asking some version of, “What do you think this work should cost, given the value you expect it will bring?”
Results? Some clients did not want to name a number, and I ended up pricing the project as usual. Some DID name a price: always higher than I would have quoted. The difference: Clients who were comfortable naming a price already knew me and had worked with my firm before. It seems letting your customer set the price may be a great model when:
1. The customer is well-informed about the product and its value, or can become informed easily and quickly as in the case of the coffee shop. (This is the basis for free trials: Assume the customer will assign little or no value when first encountering a product. Depend on familiarity leading customers to agree with you on price.)
2. The customer has had some exposure to competing products and prices, and has a basis for comparing the relative worth of your product vs. the others.
3. The customer has a relationship with you, even if only a momentary one (note in the video that the cafe owner describes people “looking him in the eye and stating what they think is fair”)
Share your thoughts on if and when letting customers set the price is the right thing to do.
After 2 days at the Sales 2.0 conference, I fear we may be on the same path CRM took in its early days. Though some of the new tools are great, and MUCH easier to adopt, there is too much talk of technology, not enough about behavior and cultural changes. All things 2.0 are really about interaction and collaboration with customers. And that requires a change in mindset.
Basic example of 2.0 principles in action, that actually requires less technology. (A version of this focused on customer references was used very successfully by Beverly Chase and the BEA marketing team)
Instead of arming your reps with the new and improved power point presentation, design a white board talk. Script it with questions and discussion points instead of spiel. The result is a conversation where customers contribute ideas, and the content evolves based on the here-and-now in the room, and not what marketing thought up a month ago back at corporate.
