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 vendor presented to our class of 300 and announced if you follow my message you can sell a lot of these products.  As you go thru your neighborhood, he said, when someone answers the door ask them ” would you like to buy some trash? ” he said you will get their attention 100% of the time.  Then you explain that it’s actually recycled paper products made into this great stationery and you can help the freshman class out by purchasing some today.  He went on to say it’s hard work but the close ratio was very high when one utilized this process.

Now to the motivation part, the freshman class said for every student who sold 6 sets you got x prize, for 12 you got y and so on.  If you sold 100 you got to go to a really nice restaurant paid for by the school.  If you sold 300 you would receive a Johnny Horizon wristwatch which was the symbol for save the earth back then…  I set a goal to get a watch.  I followed the instructor’s process and script religiously and within two weeks I had sold over 300 sets of stationery.   The average student sold 10 sets of stationery back then.  The difference – motivation and a process that if followed worked and worked well.  I remember walking out of the presentation and people saying “can you imagine asking someone to buy trash – how stupid would that be?”.   Three weeks later my classmates were asking me how I sold so much -  I said it was simple I followed the process and the script. 

How much of that goes on today?  More than any of us want to know in sales management.  Due to the ad-hoc nature of today’s CRM tools, every rep can create his or her own process.  Management has no way of knowing nor enforcing a process, nor can management compare the results easily with the exception of what’s on the forecast.  It’s no wonder there are superstars and there is everybody else.  The superstars I have known have been religious about the process.

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!

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.

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!

Now, think about your sales team.  Unless they are fulfilling orders, they have to hunt for new business, find prospects that are interested, find the power base within a company, make lots of calls, lots of meetings and hopefully close lots of deals.  What part of your sales force automation solution helps instill a structured approach to this process???  When confronted witht his question more and more companies are asking themselves, why shouldn’t they want a more structured approach to revenue generation.  Wouldn’t it be nice if the institutional knowledge and approach of the best sales reps could be captured and shared?  I think so.

After showing our product to a sales consultant yesterday she said – “Wow this is what we preach every day, but we’ve never had a system that enabled a systematic approach to selling.”  Does it require a behavioral change, yes, but does it help a sales team sell more – without a doubt.

As we close out 2009, it’s exciting to realize the fact that a systematic approach has helped Jesubi grow 600% in arguably one of the toughest economies this generation has ever seen.  2010 looks even stronger.

Enjoy the holidays!

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.

Moving from an ad-hoc approach fostered by all the other vendors to a systematic approach requires some guts on our customers parts.  After all, all of the above entrenched players are much bigger and have much more cash than Jesubi does.  Why can’t one of them just throw a few developers at the problem and solve it – I ask you it’s been 25 years and it hasn’t been addressed yet, why would they change now. 

The title of my blog is David versus Goliath.  Many, many times in the history of the technology sector, the David’s have overcome insurmountable odds to win and win big.  Microsoft versus IBM in the early 80′s, Parametric Technology versus IBM, Computervision, EDS and SDRC in the early 90′s.  Now it’s Jesubi’s turn.  We’ll win because we understand SaaS not only includes software but SERVICE.  Talk to our clients and they will tell you we want our customers to win like we want to win.  Talk to our clients and they will tell you the unprecedented productivity they are receiving from Jesubi.  Talk to our clients and they will tell you we not only talk to them we LISTEN to them.

We used to be excited when a new name customer came in within the quarter, now we are seeing multiple new names every week.  Let us know when you want to be LISTENED to by your SFA/CRM vendor.  Let us show you why Jesubi is helping customers sell more everyday.