Selling Styles: Art or Science (A Love Story)

I love my job. My primary responsibility is to create LEADS. In my career, I’ve created a few hundred thousand quality leads to be distributed across an array of sales teams. With numbers of this scale, the main issue that kills me is not necessarily the lead source, cost per lead, OR lead quality. It’s that “Susie” closes her leads at “18%” and “Jimmy” closes his at “8%”.  Mentally, I see “n” number of Jimmy’s missed opportunities floating away in the smoke of burning money — WTF!

I live in a world of facts, specific metrics, blended averages and trends. Given that the laws of large numbers suggest reasonable equity in quality and distribution across all the Sales Reps, it is extraordinarily painful to realize the amount of money burned with the conversion rate delta from Jimmy to Susie. It’s painful enough when you have only 2 reps, but what if you had 1 Susie’s and 3 Jimmy’s or 5 Susie’s and 30 Jimmy’s?

Which begs the question – should Sales Reps sell via ART or SCIENCE?

In some organizations, 80% of the revenue is created by only 20% of the sales team. If you want to achieve the next level of scalability, I feel you need to master the SCIENCE in order to raise all the boats. And when I mean YOU, I mean Reps AND Managers AND Executives.

• Executives must budget for and recognize that giving their Managers the right tools will allow them to monitor, correct, leverage and be held accountable for the results.
• Managers must study the space they are selling in and put together a best practices selling process to use in the tools that all the Reps will follow.
• The Reps must use the tools and follow the process - even if flawed – so Managers can monitor the measuring points, view those metrics objectively and make changes to the process as needed to drive improvements across the entire sales team.

Think of it this way. What if you could leverage some of “Susie’s Art” and mass produce it as a Science.  True, you can’t convert 100% of it, but…

• What “Jimmy Sales Rep” out there wouldn’t want to drop the way he does it in exchange for the success Susie has?
• What Manager wouldn’t want to close the gap between Susie’s and Jimmy’s closing percentage to make his numbers better?

What Executive wouldn’t fork over the short money (Often the daily price of a cup of coffee for that same Rep) for the tools that would easily pay itself off by closing that gap alone?

By the way, did you notice the word – Process.  Right away this screams science.  It’s a documented, repeatable way to generally get the same results within the laws of large numbers.

Don’t have one? Are you afraid of the term? Don’t like being “boxed in by the man”?  Do you think you’re too small an organization to have one?

You want to scale? You want to succeed? Then “sales process”, “opportunity workflow”, “lead management”, or any similar term has to be part of your vocabulary.  Don’t let the term make you cringe. Any good sales manager wants his team to have the right sales best practices. It often starts with process.

If you have a sales process, do you monitor the results? Do you leverage the peaks? Do you remedy the valleys? It’s not just about where your wins come from, it’s about where do you lose deals. Where is one rep winning where the other reps are losing? How can you correct that? Is your best Sales Rep still running strong? Are your weaker Sales Reps getting stronger? Are you reaping the benefits?

Documented or not, I guarantee you have a sales process.  At Landslide CRM (insert shameless plug to our Interactive Demo that explains more), we come across, uncover and shape real sales processes and opportunity workflow all the time.  Don’t be afraid of process, leverage it.  Find empowerment and freedom through the structure. A successful CRM that provides that structure and process doesn’t have to be complicated to be powerful. And make sure you are collecting as much data as you can by leveraging the use of custom fields to your specific selling needs so you will have a factual, metrics based, picture of what’s going on in your organization. You can always go back and report on what you’ve collected later … but you can never make decisions on information you’ve never collected.

In the end:

• Jimmy will be closing a lot more like Susie.
• Managers will be able to help more Jimmy’s along and make their numbers.
• Executives will not only see a return on the monies invested, but also the time to put that “Science” in place.
• Your Lead Generation Team won’t be watching their budget go up in smoke.

Which do you prefer … Selling as an Art or a Science?

Special thanks to Jeffrey Cody for his contribution to the Solution Selling Blog.

Top 7 CRM Predictions for SMB’s in 2011

This past year has brought seismic changes across the CRM landscape, from the explosion of mobile devices to the ever-increasing presence of social media incorporated into the business landscape. So what’s ahead for CRM’s for small businesses in 2011?

Here are my top seven predictions of what you can expect:

1. Social Capabilities Become Integrated

Social media has arrived to all aspects of our lives, and yes, it will play an active role in helping us sell both business and consumer products in 2011. Social media tools will become integrated into our core CRM solutions. To be successful, social media cannot just be an add-on, it must be fully integrated into the CRM platform and business processes. Social media should flow through every process in the sales cycle.

This integration will make it easier to manage social media campaigns from within your CRM. It will also offer valuable points of contact to interact and strengthen relationships with customers and prospects in a more social environment. Organizations will discover a faster sales cycle and lower cost of acquisition using integrated social media.

2. Mobile will Drive Productivity Gains

2011 will be the year when CRM finally hits the mobile device. It’s impossible to go anywhere these days without seeing people of all ages and occupations with a mobile phone in hand. In 2011, mobile devices will become the critical tool for companies of all sizes trying to gain a competitive edge in today’s marketplace.

As a result, many organizations will make iPads, iPhones, Blackberrys and other smartphones a standard issue. These devices are proven and powerful enablers that help sales professionals book new business and stay in touch with customers with instant access to e-mail and phone.

In 2011 we will find companies leveraging these smartphone devices beyond just being a necessary communication device. They will be using them as input devices and access tools for their CRM systems to reach much higher levels of productivity.

3. Sales Playbooks will Increase Close Rates

Taking a lead and converting it into a deal is a leap of faith with yesterday’s CRM systems. In 2011, you will see leading CRM vendors begin to incorporate sales “playbooks” or “checklists” that highlight key steps in the sales process to help sales people sell more effectively.

Here’s what happens with traditional CRM systems: a lead comes in, the salesperson enters the data related to a company name, contact name, contact info, product they are interested in, price of product, identify the lead program the lead came from, prospect company revenue, industry, org chart and on and on. Your sales team may spend their entire day entering unlimited amounts of data about the lead. Is that considered time well spent closing a deal? I don’t think so!

In 2011, CRM systems will become intelligent enough to help the sales reps figure out what to do next, and more importantly how to do it. Incorporating these playbooks will increase close rates on deals.

4. Lifecycle ROI Management for Small Businesses is Possible

In 2011, CRM systems will allow companies to take more holistic view of the ROI for an account. They will track the marketing cost, close rates, deal sizes, etc, allowing for automated reporting of the ROI for any campaign or account. Today, there are disconnected systems that do pieces of this. In 2011, it will become fully integrated into the CRM for small businesses.

Additionally, sales and marketing executives will use the same CRM system to manage customer renewals, up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. This data will be automatically included in ROI calculations.

The realities of the new economy have highlighted the importance of being able to effectively manage the entire lifecycle ROI calculation for a customer.

5. SMB’s Totally Embrace The Cloud

In 2011, SMB’s will realize what larger businesses have been seeing for many years, cloud computing is the future. SMB’s will realize the benefits of faster deployment, lower cost of ownership and allow them to focus on their core business. Cloud computing also gives them access to powerful applications such as CRM’s that are otherwise not possible to deploy in a smaller business without the need for a large IT organization.

6. CRM Vendors Add Personalized Services

The majority of CRM systems offer basically the same core functionality and the same feature sets. Some, obviously, do it better than others.

I believe in order to really differentiate from the pack, CRM vendors will need to switch from a product-oriented focus to a more service-based approach. We should call the new category SaS … “software AND services” and not SaaS, “software AS A Service.”

Instead of simply selling a product, CRM vendors will begin to offer a list of value added services including adoption assistance, lead generation, best practices training, data importing/exporting, etc. The impact of these services will establish a long-term partnership and ensure that the systems features are being properly optimized and adopted.

7. Sales Forecasting Becomes More of a Science than Black Art

Although it’s difficult to do, sales forecasting is critically important for organizations. 2011 will bring us tools that allow for much more accurate sales forecasting for small businesses.

Sales management is under an ever-increasing pressure to provide more accurate sales forecasts of top-line revenue to better schedule production resources, order raw materials and to plan for the cash needs of the business. Companies of all sizes use sales forecasting to decide, with the greatest accuracy possible, what and how much to build and buy. Sales forecasts drive hiring plans, investment requirements and compensation plans to name a few.

There is considerable data that suggests that most quarterly and annual sales forecasts are off by a huge margin. According to a CSO Insight research report, sales forecasts are found to be accurate only about 50% of the time… that’s no better than tossing a coin!

Why?

It’s simple: Forecasts are subject to personal opinion!

In 2011 you will see tools that drive much more precise sales forecasts by completing steps that follow a proven sales process. Once a sales process is defined and realistic percentages for the likelihood of closing a deal are assigned to each step of the process, then the forecasting system takes care of the rest. Now it’s easier to generate more accurate forecasts that reflect realistic sales opportunities based on activity completion in the sales process - not opinions or, as I call them, “hopecasts.”

So there you have it. The seven things that I predict today’s small businesses will see—and should be looking for—in 2011 as they consider and adopt a CRM system.

 A big thank you to Rick Faulk for his contribution to the Solution Selling Blog.

Executing on Competitive Differentiators

It’s easy for a sales rep to talk until they are blue in the face about how they are “better and different”. Recently, my company launched a new sales initiative that was a bit of a surprise to me: Our CEO would be taking to the phones to personally call some of the sales leads and opportunities in our sales pipeline (or any deal that we would ask him to take a swing at, for that matter). Additionally, he would even be calling a few of our leads to get some first-hand exposure to the customers that were interested in our services.

This initiative got me thinking to back to when I was in the market to buy a new car. I spent a lot of time with many different salespeople and visited  each company’s website. But, despite being a ‘hot lead’, I never got a personal introduction to Takeo Fukui, CEO of Honda, Akio Toyoda, CEO of Toyota, or Takashi Yamanouchi, CEO of Mazda. So, why does this type of sales approach resonate so well with our customers and our sales team?

For us, the answer is that it shows our customers how truly valued they are to us – not just to get their business, but especially after we get it. It shows them a living, breathing, and tangible example of our company’s leadership and it is a reflection of our corporate culture. This initiative is already generating positive feedback and is proving to be a very strong competitive differentiator. In fact, several of the customers who spoke with him were favorably impressed enough to move ahead to not only trial our product, a few even signed up on the spot.

But there’s more to it than just having your CEO make sales calls.

Differentiation is about showing the customer that they’re going to be served with the right solution – the one that makes their job easier, or faster, or less painful. It’s easy for a sales rep to talk until they are blue in the face about how they are “better and different”. It’s another thing when you can show a customer a concrete example of how being better and different applies to their needs and sensibilities.  For example, instead of telling a client that your solution is “quick and simple” to implement, why not show them by quickly and simply building them a custom demo and use for their evaluation?

We should never be afraid of proving our capabilities, or naïve enough to think that our customers are not interested in this proof. The following are a few examples of executing on competitive differentiators:

• Let your customer take a ‘tour’ of your company. If you brag that your organization has excellent support, and this is something that resonates as a point of interest for your prospect, have them call support and ask some questions.
• Show by example – don’t just talk about it. If you claim to offer a personal touch that only a mid-sized company can provide vs. a colossal, impersonal corporation, show them! We introduced our CEO to a few of our customers and it’s working great for us!
• Prove what you can do. If your product is able to offer your client an effective ROI, be sure you have a easily understood ROI calculator on hand and demonstrate this to your prospects.

There are many different ways you can show your customers how you’re better and different. You’re not just trying to get their business – you want them as a customer. While the difference is subtle, never forget that it has a major impact on how you approach the sales process and the effect that your customer feels.

Upon original publishing, Ken Cross was working with Landslide, but is now a part of Sales Performance International’s Business development team. We welcome him aboard.

CRM Selection Strategies: Basic Guidelines

Currently, in the CRM industry, there are a myriad of potential solutions to pick from (this isn’t a 5 Guy’s style menu, where you can have anything that you want, as long as it is burger or a hotdog); instead there are many options in this crowded and commoditized market. Therefore, you may want to ensure that your search is focused on several key concepts that we will explore, which include:

• Is the solution that you evaluating capable of easily codify Solution Selling®?
• Is the solution simple for your team to use?
• Are there multiple access points or available internal resources available to assist your team?
• Can the solution generate the necessary reports to drive your organization to become Solution-Centric?
• Does the vendor have the ability to offer you a customized trial site to properly evaluate?

Why are these points critical?

First, are the CRM solutions that you are evaluating capable of working with the Solution Selling® methodology?  Ensure that you ask this upfront, do some research, and ask your CRM sales reps if they have experience with implementing their solution with a codified sales process. This is very important to ensure that the concepts that you have invested time and resources in are adopted and become “sticky” with your sales team. You need to ensure that the phases, steps, and most importantly, the verifiable outcomes are easily tracked by the reps – if they can check off a box or use a dropdown to update their progress, you have made it easy for them.  But, again, it is the verifiable outcomes that you need to ensure are simple to enter, access, and report on.

Next, keep it simple for your sales reps. You need to ensure that the solution is easy for your reps to understand and use, and multiple access and data entry points help to drive this principle. Data is king, and how the reps provide this data can determine whether or not they will even use the solution (aka user adoption). For example, as a rep on the road, at the end of the day, do they need to open their laptop in their hotel room, initiate their VPN client, enter their notes, upload their completed tools, and then finally get back to revenue generating activities?
 
Instead, look at CRM options that provide multiple means for your sales team to easily interact with the system and access their clients and prospect’s information. You may want to send in the clouds!  Explore a hosted solution (aka as cloud-based), which can be accessed from anywhere. This type of CRM comes directly over the web and can typically be accessed via a web browser.

Therefore, it eliminates additional time that the reps spend trying to either get their VPN to work, or syncing of data from their laptops to the server based CRM solution. Next, ensure that there is a an easy to use and reliable mobile application – at the same time, don’t expect your sales team to spend a great deal of time tapping away at the tiny screen to enter in notes… Let’s be honest, they are likely only going to use the mobile version to quickly review the history on an account, double check the address, and look up a phone number here and there, which brings us to our next point.

As a culture, we are addicted to our mobile devices, but they are not the best option for entering long and detailed notes and other information. Therefore, explore other options for your team to get the info into the CRM…  A couple of options to consider: 

1. Assess your internal resources. Do you have someone within your organization that could support the sales team by assisting with data entry, updating the progress made in the Solution Selling® process, and ensuring that their verifiable outcomes are tracked, uploaded, and completed? 
2. Explore using technology in this area too. There are options in the market place that allow reps to dictate their notes over their phones, then receive this information back as a transcript either directly into their CRM, or in the form of an email.

Further, have you made a list of the critical reports that you need to be able to generate?  Will they require extensive customization? Are they Solution-Centric reports?  For example, your pipeline reports need to include the yield percentages, completed verifiable steps, and an at a glance summary of the next steps.

Lastly, take it for a test drive. Insist on either a trial or proof of concept before moving forward with the project. You need to explore the CRM with your sales team, and other leaders within the organization to ensure that you have in-fact chosen a CRM that supports your focus on becoming a Solution-Centric organization. Additionally, you will likely not want to move forward with a solution until you have clearly seen Solution Selling® codified within the solution, have worked with the CRM vendor to help you to upload some sample accounts, and have had a chance to work with them to review your necessary reports. Additionally, ensure that you involve a sample of your sales team in the evaluation and provide them with a structured evaluation plan to ensure that you can get highly objective information. For example, provide them with a set of criteria to rate key components such as ease of use, features, mobile functionality, etc. on a scale of 1-10.
 
In the crowded CRM market place, Try not to get swayed by the latest features that present well, but that are unlikely to be used by the sales team. Stay focused on the fact that your chosen CRM should be a tool that helps the team to close more deals, save time, and to run more efficiently. In summary, ensure that Solution Selling® can be codified within the solution, it is easy to use, and is available for you to try before you buy.

Why Solution Selling® Playbooks for Kadient (CRM) Work:

As CSO Insights reports, on average, over 50% of a sales reps time is already spent on non-selling activities. When sales people are sent hunting for information, they find themselves sifting through interviews, weaving through web pages, relying on user ratings and lost in a sea of links to over-tagged search results from a company intranet or portal. Even with more sophisticated portals that provide search options to narrow results, it’s still a job within itself for a sales person to find what she needs. But more than time lost, is the fact that salespeople are often not properly equipped for the complex selling situations of today’s educated buyer. They don’t have command of the knowledge they need to sell to specific buyers. And when sales teams introduce new products, hire a team of new sales people, or set stretch expansion goals, there is an even greater lack of preparedness for the task at hand. 
 
Simply put, the answer to these business challenges is not a better content portal. Content portals are focused on solving a content problem, not a sales execution problem. What reps need to sell smarter, is the right knowledge for specific selling situations pushed to them when and where they need it.  This is where an interactive solution selling playbook can make all the difference. Kadient’s Interactive Sales Playbooks are designed to maximize sales productivity by delivering situation-specific messages, content and tools, at the right time all within the system where reps work their deals – their CRM.  Situation-specific Sales Playbooks align all the knowledge a rep needs to move an opportunity forward with a proven sales process like Solution Selling®, giving them the coaching they need to have the meaningful conversations required to effectively move through and close deals.
 
With Solution Selling® Playbooks, reps have more time to sell because they have what they need to do it but, more so, they have the confidence to sell because they have the specific knowledge they need in the context of the opportunities they are working. Knowledge transfer is critical for a sales rep to be successful; sales and product training only goes so far in arming a sales rep with what’s needed for a specific selling situation. Delivering what they need contextual to when they need it has measureable impact on overall sales performance.
 
Three Key Benefits of Embedding Solution Selling® Playbooks in Your CRM System:
 

• Sales Playbooks Maximize Your Investment in CRM
• Integration Makes Situation-Specific Playbooks Possible
• Playbook Analytics Open a Whole New Window into Your Pipeline

 
Salespeople need more than access to the latest and greatest content to succeed. They need proven process, married with content and all the other tools available to them. They need it when and where they are selling and they need it to be very specific to the buyers they are selling to. Sales leadership needs a better understanding of what is really working to move opportunities through the pipeline, so they can do more of it. That’s what Solution Selling® Playbooks will do. Sure, they will solve your content problem, but they will bring you much more value than content portal alone ever could.

Read more about Solution Selling® Playbooks for Kadient in a recent blog by Dave Stein...

Learn more about Kadient’s offerings…

Blog written by:   Rich Berkman | Vice President, Sales Enablement Strategy

www.kadient.com | www.santcorp.com