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Introduction
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Introduction (contd)
The articles in this collection focus on crucial questions such as: What are your business strategies and priorities? Who are your customers? Why do they buy, and how do they buy? How do they want to be engaged? What role does each part of the organization (particularly sales and marketing) play in engaging and communicating with the customer? How do marketing and sales integrate more effectively in the new buying environment? How do you refocus marketing and sales, focusing on collaboration and eliminating the traditional silos? How do you create value for your customers? How do you create a compelling and differentiated customer experience? What are the key drivers to performance in your organization? How do you build your processes or dene roles and responsibilities to optimize performance? How do you measure and track performanceboth within your organization and in terms of your customers? Until you answer these questions, its impossible to get the greatest value from CRM, SCRM, Sales 2.0, or whatever other tools you might be using. But if you take the time to articulate your strategies and priorities, then these tools can dramatically improve your organizations productivity and efciency. David Tyner offers a view on sales forecasting accuracy in Exceed Your Sales Expectations. An expectation of every buyer of a CRM system is dramatically increased forecasting accuracyafter all, with all this information in the system, wont forecasting accuracy be improved? David suggests the challenge is not the system, but the underlying methods that organizations use to assess the likelihood of winning a deal. He suggests that our error is grouping all prospects into a single category and treating them the same. David provides an alternative approach by differentiating the type of prospects and how to work with each type. In Triple The Effectiveness Of Your Best Sales People, Ben Bradley offers insight on how to organize and integrate your sales and marketing more effectively. Improving focus, decrapifying marketing, developing core competencies around lead generation, and leveraging data in more comprehensive ways can all help improve the effectiveness of your people, freeing them up to focus on interacting directly with customers. The role of the salesperson is changing. Additionally, the role of marketing and how we qualify leads is also changing. Charles Green talks about this in How Social Media Are Ruining Your Lead Qualication Strategy. All the old rules and assumptions on which we base our traditional lead generation programs must change
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Introduction (contd)
in the social world and with social customers. As Charles points out, this is actually goodas long as we recognize the changes and leverage them in our lead generation programs. Social media offer us tremendous advantage in reaching out to customers, engaging them, leveraging their conversations, and generating leads in new ways. In Using Social CRM To Improve Communications, Cheryl and Douglas Hanna explain how todays social CRM systems invite customers to interact directly with the company, helping us engage and communicate with customers and prospects. Esteban Kolsky shifts the conversation from technology to goal alignment, collaboration, and integration in Is Social CRM Compatible With Enterprise 2.0? This is an important discussion because the whole point of all this technology is to help us reach our goals of engaging and working with customers and prospects. The best way to maximize the capabilities of these new tools is to dene strategic goals and then leverage technology platforms in support of strategy. When I talk to executives about incorporating social media and networking into the marketing and sales programs their organizations conduct, I always get the question, How do we turn our investment in social media into sales and orders? In his essay Four Experts On How To Turn Social Media Into Sales, JD Lasica synthesizes the views of leading social media practitioners. How many times have you wished that you knew what your customers thought about a given issue? In the old world, you might have done some market research or convened a focus group. These methods tended to be limited, expensive, and slow in yielding results. In todays world, all you have to do is listen/engage/ask. I started this discussion with the bold statement, I cant imagine any high-performing individual or organization not leveraging these tools to their utmost. The articles in this e-book are just the beginning of the discussion. Read these articles and discuss the ideas inside your organization. Then start staking out your strategies and positions in the new worlds of marketing, selling, and buying!
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Dave Brock is President and CEO of Partners In EXCELLENCE, a global consulting company focused on helping organizations achieve the highest levels of performance in sales, marketing, customer service, and business strategy. He helps individuals and organizations develop and execute strategies to outPerform, outSell, and outCompete their competition. Dave is an internationally recognized speaker, writer, and thought leader in leadership, sales, value propositions, marketing, strategic alliances and partnering, business strategy, and management. @davidabrock www.partnersinexcellenceblog.com
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The Seeker
On the surface, this prospect appears to be the best. After all, she is most like your mother in that she recognizes just how special you are. She has demonstrated admirable wisdom by successfully identifying you as someone who can potentially solve her particular problem. Perhaps she looked you up through a web search, found you through social media or just somehow innately knew that you were the (wo)man! More likely, she is using one of your competitors and has decided, for one reason or another, to contact you.
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Unless you represent the clear-cut industry leader, the notion of a prospect seeking you out should actually be cause for some concern. It should raise a red ag for you when companies look to spontaneously replace their current vendor. If they were a good customer, paid their bills on time and worked in partnership with their current vendor, why would they be looking elsewhere? If they were indeed a good customer and the incumbent vendor were moderately competent, that vendor, its sales team, and customer service staff would be bending over backwards to make sure their good customer was happy. Case in point, I was once contacted by one of my competitors largest customers. They called me in for a meeting and already had all of the information I would normally solicit waiting for me, accompanied by a list of one-sided, ridiculous demands. Against my recommendation, our company met their demands for reduced pricing and extended billing cycles as well as some other one-sided concessions. They quickly became my fourth largest customer from a revenue perspective. Frankly, I looked like a hero for the quarter. However, the stringent requirements of this customer caused me to have the lowest year-over-year growth of my sales career! My prospecting time was diminished and time
spent with protable customers was cut. I was not able to methodically sell and produce the right kind of business. Eventually, the reasons why this company left its incumbent supplier became painfully obvious. In an unprecedented move, I presented a business case for why our company should re this customer and no longer do business with them. We gave them 30 days to nd a new vendor. Despite the loss of this revenue, I was able to sell far past the decit and ended up in the top 1 percent among all sales people globally for my company. I still say that my best and most protable sale that year was selling my company on the idea of cutting that customer loose. The moral of the story: be very cautious when a prospect seeks you out. Find out why they have sought you out. Be very slow to give concessions. Most importantly, establish a balanced, open communication system with them so that they view you as a respected partner and not a pawn.
The Sought
The Sought are the most challenging and have, by far, the lowest conversion rate. However, these prospects
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are the key to success for the B2B sales elite. If you want the highest quality leads, you have to seek and engage them for yourself. No one knows more about your products strengths and potential for success than you. No one knows more about the types of businesses that will have a painful problem that your company can solve. No one is as invested in wanting to close the right kind of business than you are! This is the prospect you are cold-calling, sending more information to, and trying to get time with in order to engage the right buying inuences. The big challenge with these prospects is that they are extremely difcult to accurately forecast in your sales pipeline. A symphony of sales activity must take place, rapport built, relationships established, knowledge exchanged, and persuasion gently applied. After rst contact, the entire sales process must be executed with awless precision. Keep in mind that this prospect may shut you down at any time because, after all, they did not seek you out. Unlike The Seekers and The Suggested, The Sought have no initial reason to engage with you. Often The Sought will tell you that they are happy with their current supplier. To that, my response has always
been, If you are happy with them, wait until you get a load of me! Of course Im kidding, but seriously, the fact that they are happy with their current supplier is some of the best news you can hear. It may have more to do with their being a perfect customer than their supplier making them happy. Your job is to get to the right person or people with the right message at the right time.
The Suggested
These are relatively rare in B2B sales. When you can get them, they can be fantastic. Though not always an easy sale, they represent the opportunity to work from a position of mutual, professional respect. Unfortunately this is uncommon at the beginning of a sales cycle. The main challenge with The Suggested is that they are often not properly qualied. I recommend that you try to introduce as many of these prospects into your pipeline as you possibly can. Sources can include your own marketing department, current clients, social media, and your oldest and dearest friends. The B2B sales elite treats all prospects with the utmost professionalism. However, its especially important to go the extra mile with these prospects. Remember, your actions reect not only on
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you but on the person that referred you. If you do your job well, you will have done the person who referred you the business a favor by making them look very smart for recommending such an outstanding company and sales professional. Lastly, make sure you report back the results to your referral source and, if possible, reciprocate by providing them with leads as well (e-mail me and Id be glad to share some ideas on how best to do this). Realizing that there are salient differences among the types of prospects is one of the rst steps in understanding a sales pipeline. In reviewing potential sales opportunities, as a sales manager, how did they get here? should be one of your rst questions. This will help you manage actions and exceed expectations.
David Tyner has 18 years of experience as a toplevel performer in sales and operations. He has been a perennial Presidents Club member throughout his career. Currently, Dave serves as the director of sales for KinetiCast, the simple, powerful, and proven online sales presentation tool for the B2B sales elite. As the director of sales, he helps sales people and sales organizations to exceed their quotas. He is the author of the KinetiCastsponsored Sales Salve blog and has been featured as a guest author for many top sales blogs. Dave lives in upstate New York with his wife and their two daughters.
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sales and marketing organizations were aligned in what their customers want and need. Decrapify your marketing: A January 2009 Customer Experience Panel conducted by IDC Global asked which of the following is the #1 thing a rep can do to improve the value of your relationships with the sales team and the vendor they represent? More than 40 percent of respondents said: Put aside the generic sales pitch. This meansit is okay to go off message or off-brand as you help your people build sustainable relationships with your customers. Give sales people time to do what they do best: It is easy to under-estimate the amount of work required to convert a qualied lead into a sale. From justifying ROI, recruiting and coaching an internal champion, managing expectations and competitive positioning, the skills required for successful selling are very different from the skills required for successful prospecting. Expecting the same person to excel at both is unreasonable. Lead generation must become a core competency: Cold calling, trade shows, advertising and other big marketing tactics still work for lead generation. However, the time is not far away when a consistent
program of long-tail content, SEO and word of mouth marketing will become your primary source of leads. The time is now to start understanding this reality and begin preparing your organization for the inevitable. Simple data matters: In B2B, it doesnt take a rocket scientist to know that you cant sell something to someone unless you know their e-mail, title, mailing address, company afliation, and phone number. In other words, you cant sell something to someone unless you know who they are. Getting the right data, keeping the data clean and cultivating the contact data until the prospective customer is ready to have a conversation matters more than most think. If you love your data, your data will love you back. Slightly more complex data is even better: Once your data is clean, you are then ready for the big time with lead scoring and modeling online body language by tracking a prospects visits to the website, webinar attendance, downloads and other behavior to determine the best times to enage the sales team. You cant do the fun stuff until you get your data under control. How many net new names did you add to the CRM each month? Dont be content with the existing database. Every month there should be a concerted
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effort to bring new names into the CRM. Even if you have a huge ow of inbound leads into your website each month, the acquisition of new names ensures your marketing remains proactive as you hunt for new key accounts. The type of person who is comfortable cleaning data, who understands key account selling and is happy being the guardian of data is very different from the type of person who is happiest in front of customers. It may be the best qualied person for this role is not a sales person at allbut rather a specialist that understands the tools and techniques of marketing AND selling.
Ben Bradley is managing director of Macon Raine, a public relations and marketing agency. Known for wearing plaid and sweater vests before they were popular, he writes about the intersection of marketing, technology, and business. As an avid indoorsman, his primary interests include technology adoption, change management, micro-nance, network and physical security, collaboration, networks, and groupware.
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How Social Media are Ruining Your Lead Qualication Strategy (contd)
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How Social Media are Ruining Your Lead Qualication Strategy (contd)
Charles Green is an author, speaker, and world expert on trust-based relationships and sales in complex businesses. Founder and CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates, he is author of Trust-based Selling and co-author of The Trusted Advisor. He has worked with a wide range of global industries and functions. Charles works with complex organizations to improve trust in sales, internal trust between organizations, and trusted advisor relationships with external clients and customers. He spent 20 years in management consulting. He majored in philosophy at Columbia University and has an MBA from Harvard. A widely sought-after speaker, he has published articles in Harvard Business Review, Directorship Magazine, Management Consulting News, CPA Journal, American Lawyer, Investments and Wealth Monitor, and Commercial Lending Review, and is a contributing editor at RainToday.com.
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a Keurig coffee maker which I nd incredible, yet I was not the purchaser. Still, positive consumers like me are potential customers. Company SupportSocial CRM systems can track keywords and give continued support about a product. When someone from the company is listening, angry customers can be immediately identied and referred to a customer service agent who can act upon negative comments and avoid potential damage. Practicing Social CRM invites customers and clients to interact with a company and manage customer relationships with more success while saving money from potential unknown re storms and risking the loss of valuable customers. Cheryl Hanna is a real estate agent and freelance writer living in South Florida. She writes about customer service and the customer service experience at www.serviceuntitled.com. You can email her at cdh732@gmail.com or see her posts at Service Untitled.
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There is something to that idea Is compatibility of goals the only area where Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0 are pulling in the same direction? If you dig a little deeper, the two projects leverage similar tools. Features, bells, and whistles may vary from one camp to the other. But at the core, the basic functions are the same. Collaboration, Integration, and Platform-driven development are the same whether you are talking about customers, consumers, partners, or employees and functions. The jobs may differ, but the tools used and the systems and platforms they rely on are similar. Vendors have not explored these similarities in details. Its here that the promise of collaborative enterprise shines. We have similar goals, similar infrastructurewhat about similar operating principles? This is going to be the critical point in blending these two disciplines going forwardhow they operate so that all stakeholders benet, while building value for the organization.
Convergence will be less about technology and goals, those are easy, and more about making it all work together. Dont you think? Esteban Kolsky Esteban Kolsky is the founder of thinkJar, a consultancy and think tank specializing in helping vendors develop better enterprise applications and users create awesome strategic customer experiences. He previously was an analyst with Gartner, researching customer service and customer experience, and assisted with the planning and deployment of several hundred CRM, call center, and contact center solutions for Global 2000 organizations. Today he continues to help vendors and organizations to improve their relationships with customers and is recognized as a thought leader in the areas of collaborative enterprise, social business, social CRM, and all matters related to customer interaction management.
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Who: Rob Fuggetta, CEO, Zuberance Comments: Rob cited a company that assayed customer loyalty with the ultimate question: How likely are you to recommend our brand or product to a friend? Customers responding 0-6 were considered a detractor; 7-8 a passive; 9-10 an advocate. Great advice: Rob told brands to involve customers by inviting them to respond to questions and make it easy for your advocates to engage with your brand. He pointed to a campaign by HomeAway, a vacation rental site, and said that its success lay in interactions with its communitywe just gave them a way to connectrather than offering giveaways or free T-shirts. He pointed to a lawsuit just brought against TripAdvisor, which was sued for defamation because, the litigants alleged, the hotel guests posted inaccurate reviews. Audience reaction? Overwhelmingly on the side of TripAdvisor and the unfettered ow of opinions, right or wrong. He talked about a $20,000 investment by ClubOne that led to a $180,000 return69 percent of participants in a 14-day free offer brought a form into ClubOne to try out a membership, and 15 percent of those people
purchased memberships. You can measure with great specicity the results you get from social marketing. Final words of wisdom? Put in $1 and get $10 back by launching a word of mouth campaign that stokes genuine conversations about a product or service. This is earned media, not paid media, where fabrication and marketingspeak hold sway. Who: Michael Brito, Vice President of Social Media, Edelman Digital Comments: Michael underscored the difference between a brand inuencer and an advocate. Advocates are talking about your brand even if you ignore them. Inuencers, for the most part, require incentives. They offer insights into a product in exchange for a quid pro quo, such as access to write a story. It all comes down to trust. Edelman issues an annual trust barometer, where publishers and journalists are high on the list (rst time Ive heard that in a decade!) while marketers are not. If you look at your advocates across the Web, their reach is much greater than being featured on the front page of TechCrunch, he said. Listening and doing nothing is worse than not listening in the rst place.
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J.D. Lasica, one of the earliest social-media strategists, is a consultant to Fortune 1000 companies as well as mid-size companies, startups, and nonprots. He is widely considered one of the worlds leading authorities on social media and the revolution in user-created media. J.D. is chief executive of Socialmedia.biz, wrote the book Darknet, about emerging media, founded Ourmedia, the rst (free) video hosting site, and speaks at a wide range of conferences. J.D. lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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