» Prospecting help

Can a sales force automation tool help a company sell more?

Bill Johnson — Fri, 21 May 2010 16:52:17 +0000

Let’s face it sales force automation tools have been around for over 25 years now. If asked how they are used most companies would reply they are a repository of all our intellectual property of business contacts, activities and customer information. No question the industry has helped companies retain the knowledge base of contacts and customers, most companies don’t have a good means to capture activity information as it’s far easier to call some one or send an email from outlook than it is to utilize traditional tools. If you want to drive sales behavior it has to be compensated and it needs to be easy. Most tools fall down on it needs to be easy.

Fundamentally, at Jesubi we spend our waking moments trying to figure out how we can help our clients sell more. One of our clients saw a 3x improvement in number of sales meetings that occurred, another client saw a 58% increase in “reach rates”. If you can get in front of more people you should be able to fundamentally sell more assuming the people you are getting in front of fit the profile of companies you sell to.

Within the next 90 days, you will see Jesubi release solutions that address what we’re calling “total funnel management”. How many leads does a company start with, moving to how many activities does it take to drive a sales meeting, how many meetings does it take to drive a proposal/quote, how many proposals/quotes does it take to close a deal. It’s not rocket science, but according to our customers no one does it well today. We think by providing that insight we can indeed help our clients sell more.

Culture of Accountability

Bill Johnson — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:43:49 +0000

Have you ever wondered why some sales teams blow their numbers out consistently quarter over quarter, year over year? In a discussion with a friend of mine we both agreed that the most successful sales teams we had encountered always had a culture of accountability. It usually started at the top and worked its way throughout the organization. The accountability extended over a wide variety of sales areas from activity, to forecast accuracy to closed business. Most sales reps have a high degree of self motivation, but when the whole team has that self-motivation it can be awesome to watch.
Why is it Cisco continues to hit their numbers? They’ve been around a long time and most companies no longer have the level of accountability they do, but yet their sales teams still do forecast calls on Sunday afternoons. If people don’t hit their numbers they don’t keep their jobs long. If they do hit their numbers they move up in the organization. It is very impressive a company Cisco’s size has been able to maintain that level of accountability within its sales culture.

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.

What is Prospecting Velocity™?

Bill Johnson — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 08:50:00 +0000

Most sales managers know that if they have 100 deals in the pipeline at the beginning of the quarter how many will close and how long it will take to work a prospect from the earliest stages of the sales pipeline through to closure. Unfortunately, very, very few sales people or sales managers have any understanding as to the effort it took to get a prospect into the sales pipeline.

At Jesubi we are trying to change all that. We have introduced a report called Prospecting Velocity™ which enables clients to understand the efforts it takes to get a prospect into the sales pipeline. Prospecting Velocity™ takes a look at the number of attempts to reach someone, the number of conversations that occur, the time interval between calls and presents a report that shows connect rates, conversion rates at each step of the process. With this information a Jesubi customer can understand by industry, by title, by size of company what the best Prospecting Velocity™ to utilize going forward.

Jesubi has enough customer feedback to show new clients that no two clients are the same and the need for Prospecting Velocity™ in this economy is invaluable.

Wouldn’t any sales rep like to know that if he calls into a client 8 times over a 6 week period he has a 75% better connect and conversion rate than calling in once a month for 8 months? Wouldn’t a sales rep want to know that he has a 90% connect and conversion rate in 2 calls versus making 4 additional calls that add no lift. Our clients at Jesubi believe so.

Sales Management has the opportunity with Prospecting Velocity™ to understand the knowledge within the sales team as to what best practices really are instead of guessing what they are.

The need for professional persistence

Bill Johnson — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 16:46:00 +0000

9 years ago when I was the VP of Sales for Aprimo, Merrill Lynch was one of the accounts we were targeting as a potential customer. Aprimo sells an enterprise marketing automation solution and at that time there was not much awareness of the EMA, EMM or MRM space so there was a lot of brute force involved in getting out name out. With Merrill Lynch we were targeting several executive management positions within marketing. We knew that calling into those positions required a dedicated persistence that was not obnoxious. We would make up to 12 to 14 attempts spread out over 3 months. Several of the marketing executives we finally spoke with weren’t interested, until we hit upon a Director of Marketing for one of the lines of business on our 13th attempt. He said he would take a meeting and over the next 4 months he became our champion which led to the initial purchase of Aprimo’s software suite. Because of our team’s persistence, Merrill Lynch became a 7 figure customer of Aprimo’s. Sure it would have been easy to have quit calling after 4 or 5 attempts, but then we would have been like so many other vendors, hoping to get Merrill Lynch as a customer instead of having them as a customer.

The professionalism in our approach helped win our contact over, we didn’t call 12 times in a day or 12 times in a week, but spread the calls out over a 3 month period, always leaving a professional voicemail with our value proposition and a specific call to action.

We were tracking that persistence with excel spreadsheets back then, but now with the creation of Jesubi we have enabled that functionality within the core product application. Check out Jesubi and maybe Jesubi can help you win your next major opportunity.