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.

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.

It is clear as we talk to sales leaders that at the same time they want quality leads for their sales teams, fundamentally in a B2B world it is almost impossible to score a lead accurately until a sales rep picks up the phone or engages in an email dialogue with a prospect.  No amount of white paper downloads or website visits or email opens or clickthru’s can validate what  a lead is truly worth to the organization until that conversation occurs.  Yes an inbound inquiry that says I am interested and want to purchase is incredibly valuable, but there are so many other times when a customer is doing due diligence on an industry, gaining insight competitively or looking for a new job that once again is hard to score accurately until a conversation occurs. 

That’s where the inherent analysis of each conversation that occurs within the sales organization occurs.   By categorizing the initial disposition of the outcome of the call and then capturing on what attempt it occurred on and the interval in between Jesubi creates Prospecting Velocity reports.  We have filed a patent on it as more and more customers come to depend on it to help them assess their own sales efforts when it comes to funnel managment and they tell us they can’t get that information anywhere else. 

Our goal is to integrate in Prospecting Velocity with some of the other Marketing Automation solutions so we can bring the scoring together with the sales reps activity.  In that way both sales and marketing can gain a true appreciation for all of the Marketing Qualified Leads being generated and assess their true value to the organization.

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’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.

Jesubi is a Customer Acquisition Management (CAM) solution, it truly helps sales people sell more. Some of the key differentiators of a CAM solution versus an SFA solution include programmatic selling – using the power of technology to create call cadences that everyone can use and learn from. As I stated in an earlier post it took 12 attempts to get a hold of the champion at Merrill Lynch and when we accomplished that we were tracking those attempts in excel. Jesubi automates those attempts so it is one click to leave a voicemail and one click to capture call results. Another key differentiator of a CAM solution is the ability to capture “tribal knowledge”. How many times have you wondered why the top 3 reps were always the same? The only way to compare in a traditional SFA solution is who sold how much this quarter, this year. With CAM solutions like Jesubi “tribal knowledge” is captured and helps the sales team as well as management understand do the top 3 reps do more activity, do they have a better conversion rate when they speak to someone or are they better at closing, thus enabling the team to learn from this “tribal wisdom”.

There are a whole number of ways to help sales teams sell more, Jesubi is one way that truly does automate the selling process and let a team learn as they go. Check out a demo and I believe you’ll see why a Customer Acquisition Management solution might help your team hit the targets they need to achieve.