The recipe to create a successful sales team seems so basic, but those who are responsible for consistently delivering revenue to their organization know that it can be anything but.

A multitude of factors impact the performance of your sales team, and many times, the least noticeable ones have the largest impact upon success.
Hint – Hidden Factor #1 could make the difference between your team generating $2,000,000 more in revenue or leaving it on the table!

Download our new whitepaper, 5 Hidden Factors that Make or Break Your Sales Team, to learn more.

Consider the world of sports.  Larry Bird stayed after practice to take 1,000’s of shots when he was the only person in the gym.  Josh Hamilton takes 1,000’s of swings in batting practice beyond what the average baseball player does.  Vijay Singh is famous for staying on the range even after a successful round of golf, taking 1,000’s of practice shots to continually hone his game.

Likewise in business, we label top salespeople as a “natural sales person”.  It’s also assumed that these individuals are successful by some innate ability to sell in any circumstance at any time.  I’ve known plenty of so-called “natural salesman” who shined at one point in time during their career.  But eventually even these “naturals” stumble and fall, and it’s almost due to ignoring or lacking execution in the fundamentals.

We all know what the selling fundamentals are, it’s a core group of activities including closing, qualifying, nurturing, negotiating, leading, managing and differentiating – but the core fundamental to them all is prospecting.  Now sometimes the naturals can subsist on that larger list of fundamental skills in the previous sentence, but when they fail, it’s almost always due to the latter core fundamental, which is prospecting.  And what do you hear from the naturals when they fail?  It’s the economy, or competition, or some other market dynamic.  Yet when the naturals fail, I guarantee you there is an every day rep in their industry that got through these market challenges because day after day, week after week, they diligently prospected and kept their sales funnel full.  Like Larry Bird, Josh Hamilton and Vijay Singh, they took 1,000’s of shots.

Case in point – when you ask most sales people what they dread the most, the answer is almost universally prospecting.  It gets put off because it is seen as a necessary evil, been given a negative connotation like “cold calling”.  We’d rather push lead generation off to marketing, or wait for our web site to deliver the goods, but not take ownership ourselves.

There’s an interesting parallel in NCAA Division I and NBA basketball.  Many great scorers (natural athletes) are poor free throw shooters.  This seems counter-intuitive.  If the player can make a basket with defenders hanging all over them, why can’t they make an unguarded shot from a minor distance?  When the great free throw shooters are posed this question, hall-of-famers like Rick Barry, Calvin Murphy, and Larry Bird, their answer is simple.  They had a high free throw % because they routinely shot 1,000’s of free throws during the course of their careers.  Their peers chose not to because free throws, like prospecting, are a mundane activity of their profession.  But I’ve always noticed that the greatest performers found ways to make these mundane activities interesting.  Whether it was a personal challenge to better a previous mark, or betting the player in the cube next to them on who could contact the most leads, or simply not making excuses for lack of performance.

So how many of you chose to prospect to 1,000’s of leads last quarter?  Before you claim that there is not enough time to achieve this, consider these options:

• Did you try to align with your marketing department to increase the number and potential of your pipeline?
• Did you consider new sales process techniques to increase your prospecting productivity?
• Did you do what Larry, Josh and Vijay do … keep shooting or swinging even when everyone else has gone home?

I read a recent blog entry in the Sales and Sales Management Blog (WARNING: disgusting image in post) that really got me thinking.  The author describes 3 types of underperformers … 2 types you get rid of, but one, the “Slow Developers”, that bear consideration for growth and development.  The author postulates that Slow Developers should not be marched to the exit doors and provides some good advice for helping these sales underachievers.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could spot Slow Developers early in their tenure, with an understanding of exactly where in the sales process they require training and nurturing?  Can your existing CRM system help you understand where training and development issues exist?  Consider this graphic from Jesubi’s sales performance measurement reporting features:

Rep A is more experienced, converting 10% of leads contacted to the call to action – an appointment.  Rep B is less experienced, but is following his manager’s advice to drive a high volume of activity.  However, Rep B is struggling with appointment conversion (3%) and qualifies an excessive amount of leads as “Not A Fit” (31%).

In one of my past sales management roles, there’s a strong possibility that I would have fired Rep B.  We did not have the ability to track Total Activities and Conversation Results at this level of detail, so if there was a lack of appointments (low conversion %), we would shoot.

But if you had the insight provided by a sales tracking system like Jesubi, you could get real time information on your team’s ability to operate at the various stages of your sales pipeline development process.  You could identify outliers on the top and bottom ends (stack rank your team), and determine sales training needs for underperformers well before marching them to the firing line.  This is really important if you want to stop tracking revenue (a lagging indicator) as your primary sales metric.

Perhaps some value proposition training would help our struggling Rep B increase appointment conversions.  Providing objection handling training and role playing might impact the “Not A Fit” qualification problem.

Here are the real world results of applying this insight to sales development efforts:

• Appointment conversion rate (10%) matches senior rep’s level
• Rep B higher volume produces 50% more appointments at same conversion rate (21 vs. 14) … high volume can mean higher quality sales prospecting
• “Not A Fit” qualification rate reduced dramatically to 2% and 48 more prospects added to the sales funnel

Can your CRM system provide this level of sales management insight for the Slow Developers?

Current conventional wisdom holds that forms of electronic communication like email, texts, “tweets” and other on-line dialog are the preferred method of interaction between buyers and sellers … but is this really true in the B2B world?

In the end, wouldn’t we all prefer to qualify prospects (and vice versa) with a live conversation?  Can electronic methods ever provide the ability to judge sentiment, emotion, and the thoughtfulness that occurs when we simply talk to someone?

Many publications, on-line sources and industry experts report that sales focused organizations are deploying more and more inside sales teams for lead generation, prospecting, pipeline development and account management activities.  The lower cost of entry, shorter ramp up times and ease of deployment (remote, home based agents, etc.) has fueled this growth.  Empowering this new wave of inside sales specialists are a host of SaaS, Cloud-based, Web 2.0 and Sales 2.0 platforms and tools that deliver significant enhancements to the selling process … and also an increase in cold calling strategies leveraging these new capabilities to drive unprecedented levels of productivity and sales efficiency.

What if your sales organization had the ability to determine connect and conversion rates with target decision makers?  Or measure the effectiveness of your messaging and value proposition?  Understand when (by time of day and day of week), and (persistence in prospecting) direct contact will insure the highest possibility of connection success?  And if you could review and manage this data in real time, and increase your number of meaningful conversations by 50, 100 or 300%, how would this impact your pipeline and forecast?

Today’s successful selling organizations are deploying a new order of sales professional equipped with technology that enables these results and more.

So is cold calling dead?  Probably for some, but the new breed of inside sales professionals and managers understand the benefits and importance of meaningful, personal, voice to voice conversations.

In fact, the dialogue might sound a little like this:

With Jesubi, we give you the tools to see the whole sales funnel —  not just the top and bottom/ incoming leads and the forecast in the end. With our one-click call dispositions, the ability to automatically create follow-up tasks, and reporting capabilities on the back-end, Jesubi can significantly improve sales productivity and give you insight like you’ve never had before.

Check out our website here and request a Free Demo now.

]]> http://www.jesubi.com/1524/in-the-board-room-cartoon/feed 0 http://www.jesubi.com/1660/marketing-sales-aligned-for-lead-qualification-process-59-say-yes http://www.jesubi.com/1660/marketing-sales-aligned-for-lead-qualification-process-59-say-yes#comments Wed, 29 Jun 2011 20:25:45 +0000 alilane http://jesubi.com/?p=1660 [...]]]> It’s an age old argument, is marketing generating enough leads or qualifying them properly, and is sales in turn capably handling the leads they are given?  Sales will claim that marketing is selling wine before its time, while marketing contends that sales doesn’t know good wine when they taste it.  Depending on your organization, this may be a crack or a chasm, and many organizations are struggling to bridge this gap between marketing and sales.

Creating a systematized, predictable, and repeatable front-end process prior to the hand off from marketing to sales is paramount.  The old formula of MQL (marketing qualified lead) to SQL (sales qualified lead) needs cooperation, continued involvement and continuous feedback between marketing and sales.  Creating an impactful lead qualification system is very much achievable with today’s technology, when bundled with a pipeline management solution that helps optimize marketing campaign and sales process efficiency.

Would it help your organization if you could automate the lead qualification process, with the ability to receive granular, dynamic reporting on each step?  If you could understand conversion rates by campaign, source, time phase, individual contributors, and overall sales processes?  How useful would it be if you could measure, in detail, the effectivity of your messaging at every stage of your sales pipeline management process?

Instead of talking about the barrier between marketing and sales, today’s industry leaders are leveraging technology, process improvement, communication and organizational learning to bridge the gap.

The big question was what to do with old contacts who had viewed a demonstration but had not chosen to purchase.  In other sales management jobs I have had it was always the same question, should marketing take them back or should sales continue to own them since we had already done a demonstration.  By using Jesubi’s sales tracking system and data-mining the information we had we identified 600 contacts that we had done a demo for who had not spoken with a sales rep or anybody at Jesubi in the previous 180 days.  Naturally, my instincts said if they had interest 6 months ago perhaps they’d be interested in seeing our latest release.

The results of reaching out to the people who had viewed a demo but hadn’t talked to a rep in 180 days has been fantastic.  We have set-up follow up meetings with almost 30% of the people contacted and 20% of those have ended up on our forecast.

My question is if we had not re-engaged them would they have remembered us and would they have called us back on their own.  I think not.  Out of sight out of mind with groupon offers coming every day and facebook posts to read, people forget the value proposition you bring to the table.  That’s why it is called sales and not order taking.

I would love to hear from others who take the time to reach back out to formerly interested prospects with a sales campaign not just a marketing newsletter and see if you see the remarkable results were enjoying.  I just wish I had done this more often earlier in my career.

What’s even more interesting is when asked why someone is rated higher than another is his/her manager’s response to the question.  He does more cold calling, or she has a better sales process, his sales pipeline is higher or she is better at lead generation.  Most of the answers are very subjective without a lot of cognizant data to support the opinion.

We at Jesubi for the past couple of years have discussed how our CRM solution helps sales reps be more productive.  Our clients have seen upwards of 200% more productivity as measured by total sales activity.  You can check out a quick video on our Total Activities report which is one way a rep can be compared to his or her peer group.  What’s been interesting is when clients get in and start utilizing Jesubi they like the productivity gains, but they love the visibility that reports like our Total Conversations report provide management.  The ability to know how every conversation is going is utopian for most sales management.  It is just very difficult to capture.

Most owners of companies want their sales teams to sell more, the hard part is understanding where to focus those efforts.  By enabling more visibility to sales management and the right kind of visibility, businesses should be able to do the right things to help their sales reps handle objections better, forecast more accurately and ultimately sell more.

As the owner of the sales pipeline it’s important to recognize that you can’t increase the pipeline dramatically by ownly focusing on the pipeline it’s everything sales does before an account enters the pipeline that will drive the increase.

What’s even more interesting is when asked why someone is rated higher than another is his/her manager’s response to the question.  He does more cold calling, or she has a better sales process, his sales pipeline is higher or she is better at lead generation.  Most of the answers are very subjective without a lot of cognizant data to support the opinion.

We at Jesubi for the past couple of years have discussed how our CRM solution helps sales reps be more productive.  Our clients have seen upwards of 200% more productivity as measured by total sales activity.  You can check out a quick video on our Total Activities report which is one way a rep can be compared to his or her peer group.  What’s been interesting is when clients get in and start utilizing Jesubi they like the productivity gains, but they love the visibility that reports like our Total Conversations report provide management.  The ability to know how every conversation is going is utopian for most sales management.  It is just very difficult to capture.

Most owners of companies want their sales teams to sell more, the hard part is understanding where to focus those efforts.  By enabling more visibility to sales management and the right kind of visibility, businesses should be able to do the right things to help their sales reps handle objections better, forecast more accurately and ultimately sell more.

As the owner of the sales pipeline it’s important to recognize that you can’t increase the pipeline dramatically by ownly focusing on the pipeline it’s everything sales does before an account enters the pipeline that will drive the increase.

What’s even more interesting is when asked why someone is rated higher than another is his/her manager’s response to the question.  He does more cold calling, or she has a better sales process, his sales pipeline is higher or she is better at lead generation.  Most of the answers are very subjective without a lot of cognizant data to support the opinion.

We at Jesubi for the past couple of years have discussed how our CRM solution helps sales reps be more productive.  Our clients have seen upwards of 200% more productivity as measured by total sales activity.  You can check out a quick video on our Total Activities report which is one way a rep can be compared to his or her peer group.  What’s been interesting is when clients get in and start utilizing Jesubi they like the productivity gains, but they love the visibility that reports like our Total Conversations report provide management.  The ability to know how every conversation is going is utopian for most sales management.  It is just very difficult to capture.

Most owners of companies want their sales teams to sell more, the hard part is understanding where to focus those efforts.  By enabling more visibility to sales management and the right kind of visibility, businesses should be able to do the right things to help their sales reps handle objections better, forecast more accurately and ultimately sell more.

As the owner of the sales pipeline it’s important to recognize that you can’t increase the pipeline dramatically by ownly focusing on the pipeline it’s everything sales does before an account enters the pipeline that will drive the increase.