Jesubi’s patent pending Prospecting Velocity report shows marketers and sales managment what the demand generation bell curve looks like so no call is wasted and more importantly no lead is wasted by too few attempts.

Astadia has partnered with Jesubi to help clients bridge the gap between sales and marketing.  Come see us at Booth 513.

The above statistics regarding the increase in sales conversations is exactly what Jesubi has enabled for a $ 4 billion company.  They have witnessed a 72% productivity increase in the number of sales conversations their sales team had in a year over year comparison with one of the major CRM vendors.  Imagine what that 72% increase could do to your teams forecast.  The forecast won’t change by itself – the sales team needs to drive more activity earlier in the sales funnel. 

Jesubi enables our clients to track their sales more closely than ever before.  You can know what leads are tracking thru the process.  You can know which reps are converting clients to proposals at the highest rates.

As I shared the above metrics with our sales team today, I pointed out to them that I don’t know of a single sales manager, business owner or sales rep that would not want to have that same 72% increase.  It’s a question of credibility.  We have to be able to share the value that our solution is providing, by helping clients optimize their sales funnel in the most efficient means possible.   The only way to drive the increases our clients are seeing is to a: enable a systematic approach and b: make it easy for sales reps to utilize.  Both are being accomplished every day with Jesubi. 

Let us show you in a 30 minute demonstration how Jesubi can give you that 72% increase – after the demonstration we’ll be happy to let you take Jesubi for a 30 to 60 day test drive with some minimal training requirements. 

Just think what  a 72% increase to your forecast would be worth…

Good selling!

My first successful selling experience started when I was 9 years old and taught me one of the basic facets that have stayed with me all my life.  Many of you gen x – gen y won’t know what I am talking about but those of my generation absolutely will recognize the story.  Pre-internet as a 9 year old I enjoyed my share of comic books, in the back of those comic books were many opportunities to make money.  One of those caught my eye.  SELL FLOWER SEEDS and make LOTS OF MONEY!!  That caught my eye.  I took the initiative and sent in the form and 2 weeks later I had a box of flower seeds to sell.  It was a straight commission engagement.  I sold the flower seed packets for 50 cents and got to keep 16 cents per package sold.  The company sent me 96 packages of flower seeds to sell.

It wasn’t easy, but I hit every house in my neighborhood as well as surrounding neighborhoods.  I even hit some house’s twice as my supply dwindled.  By the end of 4 weeks I had sold every package.   The first real dilemna of my young sales career hit me then.  I had worked really hard and now had $ 48 in my shoe box.  Unfortunately the agreement with the company was after selling all the packages I was to send them their money back which meant taking $ 32 out of my shoe box and sending it back to the company.  To a 9 year old $ 32 extra dollars in the shoe box seemed like a million bucks.  I sat on the money for a couple of weeks when finally my mom asked me what I was doing with the money.   I told her that I thought I had earned the money that it wasn’t fair to have to give the company $ 32 when I only got to keep $ 16.   That’s when I got my first true mentoring experience and it came from my mom who wasn’t a sales manager, but had a great moral character driving her.  She said “A deal is a deal, you signed up for it, they did what they said they were going to do, it’s up to you to honor your end of the deal”.  I sent the money in that day.  I have never forgotten those words, both on the buying side or the selling side.

Thanks Mom!

We find that more and more companies adopting Jesubi want the level of accountability Jesubi provides for funnel management.  Its hard to have a great forecast without having great activity front ending the forecast.   Our customers now understand for every 10 conversations they have they get 3 meetings and from every 3 meetings they get a new name customer.  When you have metrics like that you can instill that culture of accountability and have everyone contributing at a similar level.

It was at PTC that I learned the concept of capturing metrics, both for internal use and for external use.  It was probably one of the most memorable times in my sales career.  Some of the internal metrics we tracked from a sales standpoint was every sales rep had to hunt for his/her own business.  That meant every sales rep was goaled on driving 4 demos of Pro/Engineer per week.  The key to that metric was the company new that for every 4 demos that the sales team did a new name customer would close.  The beauty in that model was as a sales manager it was pretty easy to figure out who was going to make it and who wasn’t.  I remember one of my reps closing 13 new name accounts in one quarter, pretty impressive when you figure that most of these companies were very conservative manufacturing companies.

Some of the external metrics we would espouse to potential clients was the fantastic productivity Pro/Engineer enabled.  An engineer using Pro/E could be 2 to 4 times more productive versus using traditional cad/cam systems.  With that kind of productivity, people were buying after one demonstration.  The entire sales team was laser like focused on metric capture and the company would dedicate numerous hours of sales training to everyone knowing several “ho-hum crashers”/metrics that would get a prospects attention. 

Today, Jesubi represents a similar productivity gain to selling what Pro/E did for engineering.  Our clients sales teams can get more done with Jesubi than they can with other sales force platforms.  At Jesubi we realize selling is hard enough so we try to make the process easier.  Our systematic approach is winning accolades and praise everyday from our customer base.  When we can show a prospect how his/her sales team will be two to three times more productive they take notice.

Put Jesubi to the test and see how fast we can double your sales teams pipeline.  No better time than the New Year to get started with a huge lift in forecasted business.

Happy New Year!

I have said earlier that most traditional Sales Force Automation solutions have focused their efforts on optimizing the opportunity side of business.  Here’s my challenge to that philosophy:  When I was the VP of Sales for Aprimo back in 1999 thru 2002, we had anywhere from 8 to 20 sales reps globally and on any given quarter 15 to 35 deals we were chasing.  I ask you if we managed everyone of those deals to 100% efficiency and effectiveness could I turn those 15 to 35 deals into 50 or 100 deals?  No.  Could I grow those deals sure, but could I double or triple each one and still close each one not a chance.  So my team was managing 15 to 35 deals per quarter, but we had over 50,000 people who we had touched either thru marketing activities or sales activities.  If we could have figured out a way to sell to those 50,000 people in a more efficient manner – isn’t it logical that it would have been a lot easier to find 50 to 70 more deals in that universe than closing 100% of the forecast and trying to double each opportunity while we were doing it??

That fundamental philosophy is at the core of our beliefs at Jesubi.  More systematic activity with analytics around what’s working and what’s not can truly help sales teams sell more.  By helping clients assess which industries are responding quicker, what size of company is responding quicker, which sales rep is the most effective – by doing all these things better than can be done with traditional solutions, Jesubi does in fact help clients sell more.

Don’t take our word for it, take our customers word for it.  We’ll be glad to put you in touch with those who have seen what a solution focused on helping customers sell more.  We wake up every morning trying to figure out how to enhance our product so every customer benefits from new features and reports.  Check it out, you won’t be disappointed.

I’d be very curious to here what other’s have experienced in the pursuit of a new market or outright demand generation efforts – what’s a good number – at Team Jesubi we average about 20 to 22 touches an hour.  You might say impossible, but I’ll let you in on a little secret that has worked really well for us.  Using Jesubi’s campaign management solution for demand generation efforts we’re attempting 3 touches per day to sales executives and business owners, the first two times we hang up the last one we’ll leave a voicemail.  Why do we do that because in our business it’s all about figuring out when someone’s going to be at their desk.  We’ve found our response rates go up significantly with this cadence over leaving a voicemail today and then systematically calling back on a pre-determined cadence.  Let’s face it sales managers, marketing managers and owners of business are busy and they aren’t at their desk often, but we’ve been able to find ways to connect with them.  In implementing this new strategy our touches per hour have increased from 17 to the 20 to 22 discussed earlier.

The key is Jesubi enables efficiency.  So does excel, but excel doesn’t let you capture institutional knowledge or automate the calling cadence like Jesubi does.  Let me know what your team achieves and how they do it.

Right now in my inbox I have 7500 unopened emails – the proliferation of un-solicited email has made it hard to get messages through with all the noise. Suppose you were one of the 125 plus internet security software vendors who was funded by Venture Capital in the past 5 years, is it possible to differentiate yourself solely on your email content, website and white papers? I don’t think so.

What if you have a brand new product that is revolutionizing a functional area, but have not raised $ 10 Million from Kleiner Perkins or Benchmark Capital yet, can you get all the white papers you need created and analysts following you? Probably not.

As I have stated in earlier posts, when I was the VP of Sales for Aprimo in the early days, there were no analysts covering what became the EMM, EMA, MRM space, the space didn’t exist. Marketers weren’t waking up and saying “gee, I have to solve this Enterprise Marketing problem I have”, had we relied solely on the e-marketing play and nurturing prospects we would have been out of business a long time ago. Instead, through all of the e-channel strategies as well as dedicated cold-calling efforts, we were able to secure 75 new name accounts within the biggest companies in America, as well as secure clients on two other continents! All but two of those clients came from dedicated prospecting efforts by not only our direct sales team, but our inside sales team as well. I venture to say, none of those 73 new name clients would have been clients in the first 5 years had Aprimo waited for the leads to score high enough or them to place an inbound inquiry.

For Jesubi’s own purposes, we use every channel we can, but of the 490 plus demonstrations we have done, 14 have come from email, 476 have come because our sales team picked up the phone and called someone. We have a 15% response rate from the leads we’ve talked to in securing a demonstration. Is it expensive, to have a team making those calls, yes!! Would the cost of not having all the customers we’ve secured by doing those initial demos be more expensive absolutely yes, we’d be out of business.

In the B2C game, the web and the e-channel are powerful drivers, in the B2B game, every channel must be used and used effectively and efficiently to drive customer wins. Cold-calling isn’t going away soon unless American Entrepreneurialism dies a sudden death or the need to drive increased revenues dies as well.