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?
by Lilia Shirman on August 27, 2009
in Marketing
Let’s face it. Sales can generate revenue without Marketing. Not so in reverse. The true purpose of marketing – of the messages, and the programs, and the collateral, and the PR - is to accelerate and amplify sales efforts. When that’s forgotten, sales-marketing misalignment follows.
Companies focus lots of attention on understanding customer needs, designing messages and programs for them, and gathering feedback to improve products and go-to-market efforts. Unfortunately, when Marketers forget what marketing is for, they often neglect their other, one might even argue primary, audience: Sales. (To clarify, by “Sales” I mean both direct and indirect channels, so partners are definitely included in this discussion.)
You probably have a process in place to measure customer satisfaction and gather customer input. Whether via survey, customer advisory board, or support call analysis, some form of customer feedback is influencing your business. What feedback mechanism do you have in place for the Sales team?
Here are five simple ideas to help understand Sales’ needs and align Sales and Marketing:
1. Conduct an annual sales survey. Just like a customer satisfaction survey, this tool can assess current perceptions, determine needs, and prioritize their importance. Use a survey to find out what tools, information, and skills will improve sales productivity, and to assess how well various marketing organizations are supporting and collaborating with Sales.
2. Gather input through your sales and partner portals. Create a visible and easily accessible request form and encourage Sales to ask for tools, training, content, information, or other changes that will help them accelerate and close deals. Then use your existing sales and partner communications to highlight requests that have been implemented.
3. Create sales and partner advisory boards. Be sure to select a diverse set of members. This group can be a sounding board for new initiatives or programs such as Sales Kickoff agendas, improvements to product launches, or training curricula.
4. Place Marketing and Sales in the same room. The most effective marketing people are those that spend time out in the field, accompanying reps to sales meetings and listening to partners. You can’t regularly send everyone in marketing out into the field, but you can provide opportunities for greater interaction. Send marketing people to sales training, where they can see what sales is learning, and build relationships and hear feedback directly from their classmates. Have marketing folks who are involved in lead-gen and sales enablement activities participate in sales meetings and calls, so they can hear the issues and challenges Sales faces, and play a more direct role in helping overcome them.
5. Plan together. During your annual planning process, ask Sales and Marketing executives to identify specific dependencies on each other. The leadership team should then acknowledge each dependency, and jointly make decisions about whether and how each organization will fulfill their obligations to the other groups that depend on them. They should also agree on changes to the plan if the obligations can’t be met. Such collaboration early and at the highest levels of leadership permeates through both groups. (Of course, the same process should be used for the entire executive staff, not only the Sales and Marketing leaders.)
Marketers and Sales and Channel managers: Please share how your marketing organization gets feedback from your sales channels.
Customer centricity is well over a decade old. Companies have gotten better at tracking customer information, incorporating customer input into product design, and identifying customer needs in their sales and marketing messages. Despite these advances, the most frequent complaint by decision-makers involved in complex purchases is that vendors don’t listen, don’t understand their problems, and don’t convincingly articulate value.
Something is obviously missing from all that customer-centric activity.
Just about every discussion of being customer centric focuses on “understanding customer needs”. Unfortunately, most vendors focus on their customers’ needs, but not on the way their customers do business. That may sound like a subtle difference. It’s not. A focus on needs often misses the context for those needs. That’s important, because the context, not the need, determines value.
Let me repeat that. The CONTEXT, not the need, determines value.
Only by focusing on needs in context can you be truly, uniquely relevant. To become more relevant and valuable to customers (and grow revenue), find the needs that matter most now within the context of your customer’s internal and external business situation, and to which you can add the greatest value. Then sell and fulfill your offering in the way best suited to the customer’s way of doing business.
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.
The highly popular Net Promoter Scoring (NPS) customer satisfaction measure (originally created by Bain & Co.) has gained broad adoption in the last five years. Customers’ likelihood to recommend you to others is a great measure of their satisfaction and loyalty. Unfortunately, Net Promoter Scoring limits visibility and can lead your customer satisfaction initiatives astray.
There are two key issues with traditional NPS:
1. It asks customers to predict their own behavior. The standard NPS question is, “Would you recommend us?” Many companies have found that customers say they WOULD recommend, but over half of those that say they would, don’t.
2. A Net Promoter Score is not actionable alone. Simply knowing how much customers expect to recommend you doesn’t provide clues as to how to improve their loyalty and word of mouth.
Despite these drawbacks, the core concept of NPS is an important one: Happy customers create new business. The key to leveraging this concept is to tweak NPS to ask more actionable questions, and then incorporate it into a broader customer intelligence effort.
Read more in my recent Beyond NPS brief...
We just sent out a summary to the participants of this year’s Industry Specialization by B2B Vendors Benchmark Study. We had a record 120 B2B companies take part in this year’s study.
Companies see that greater customer focus, in the form of industry-specialized sales, marketing, services, and products will enable them to access more senior decision makers and increase deal sizes. Many are also responding to competitive pressures. The good news is that the investment is paying off.
The full report is due out next month, but meanwhile, a sneak peak at a few tidbits:
- 67% of B2B companies that already have some amount of industry specialization said they plan to further increase their focus on key vertical markets.
- It takes two to three years to begin to realize the full benefits of specialization.
- After 2 years, 70% of companies reported notable or significant impact on revenue from their investments in industry-specialized activity
- Industry alliances have a big impact on brand awareness
- Industry-specific case studies and quantitative ROI analysis were reported to be the most valuable industry-specific marketing tactics. Sales and marketing brochures were least effective.
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 26, 2009
in Marketing
Relevance – to your buyer’s context for making the purchase: company, industry, role, current business objectives and challenges, and personal interests.
Value – tangible, provable value that specifically and directly links what you’re selling to what the customer wants. Value is the intersection of results you have proved you can deliver (according to existing customers), and the results the customer is looking for.
Uniqueness – Your secret sauce. That thing that only you can deliver, or for which you are known as the best or the vanguard.
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
