by admin on March 19, 2010
in Sales
Last time, I wrote about top sales resources. Case studies were at the top of the list. That’s because in multiple sales surveys, including our own study of industry-focused go-to-market efforts, case studies come out as the most effective sales tool.
Getting a customer to put their name on a case study is a big effort. Make sure the case studies you produce create the greatest possible impact. Here’s how:
- Relevant – Create them for every industry you pursue, and make it easy and fast to find them by industry.
- Audience-appropriate. Write business-focused studies to be sued with senior, line-of-business audiences. Write technical ones describing relevance of features and specific.
- Quantitative – Include actual numbers to describe everything from how long a deployment took, to improvements in key metrics, to financial benefits, and ROI. Not only do numbers impress, they provide a level of credibility that fuzzy, buzzword-heavy marketing speak just can’t.
- Multimedia – Enable customers to learn about other customers via multiple mediums. Printed summaries are great leave-behinds at meeting and trade shows, but a 2 minute video of a customer speaking has much more impact on the web or embedded into a presentation.
- Brand-heavy – If you only focus on a single case study, make it one from a highly recognized name, ideally in the industry you are targeting.
Weigh in with your own tips about great case studies.
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. This is especially critical in larger companies, where account managers must be relationship experts, but cannot possibly know the details of every product, business process, or industry (unless they are vertically-aligned). The very fact of bringing in an expert who is perceived as more senior by the customer is often enough to move a deal forward.
- Business-level messaging and sales tools targeted at the high-level decision makers and budget holders. These should complement detailed product-focused content, which is necessary but insufficient bu itself. Business messaging targets the audience evaluating the investment rather than the people evaluating your product.
- Training & tools that enable sales reps to ask great questions and have intelligent conversations with customers at multiple organizational levels and functional roles. Asking great questions accomplishes three critical things: Positions the sales person as an ally and advisor, demonstrates that they can listen, and provides valuable information about the customers that can guide the rep in structuring the deal.
- Quantitative results achieved for other customers. While compliments (customer testimonials that discuss how easy you are to work with) are good, hard numbers about specific improvements they achieved are always more powerful. Numbers in the elevator pitch get attention and meetings, and numbers in the business case help close the deal.
Share what do your B2B sales reps value most!
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.
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.
Given that segmentation is the cornerstone of marketing, I am often surprised at how little of it B-to-B companies actually do. Company size and geography are often the only criteria for segmentation, with industry being a distant third. There are other ways to slice and dice. A few ideas:
1. Look at customer characteristics such as tolerance for risk, speed of technology adoption, core business driver (are they technology-driven, customer-driven, supply-chain driven, etc.) – some may be much more likely to buy from you than others.
2. Separate customers with different levels of familiarity and experience with your company and products – your objectives and sales approach will be very different.
3. Split companies up by specific situations, business processes, or use-cases that are common to an industry or a business models. The solutions and services you offer them will vary drastically.
4. Define audiences based on their roles and responsibilities within an organization or within the decision-making process. Also consider segmenting by organization structure and culture – highly hierarchical, process-focused companies need a different sale then flat and agile organizations.
5. This seems painfully obvious, but then again, its rarely done: Segment based on actual customer objectives. This one is difficult and takes account-specific research to determine who fits where. So we tend to just assume that all companies in an industry, experiencing the same pressures (you know, the slide that says “Increased competition, Decreasing customer loyalty / ease of switching, regulation and/or deregulation, growing complexity of IT environment..”) must have the same objectives. But in fact, some are looking to get bought, some want to grow internationally, some want to raise revenue from existing customers, while other are focused on boosting profitability.
Most companies also under-utilize the insights that segmentation provies. Next time we’ll explore the uses of segment characteristics in various parts of your organization.
Comment and share some innovative segmentation criteria you’ve seen used by BtoB companies.
