Have any sales reps out there ever felt like this? Sales managers, have you ever overheard a conversation like this (and cringed as it played out)?

Jesubi’s sales visibility software takes the guesswork out of prospecting and follow-ups. That’s because we enable  a structured approach to selling. Not only will companies be able to have complete confidence that all leads are approached in the right way, Jesubi also allows complete transparency throughout sales organizations and prevents  leads slipping through the cracks

If you’re interested in learning more, go ahead and request a free demo here . It’s the fastest way to discover how Jesubi can help your sales process.

It’s a big and frustrating problem, but we couldn’t help but add a little humor to the entire situation. Has your exchange with a member of your sales team or your boss ever felt like this?

Okay, here’s the good news: it doesn’t have to be this way anymore. Jesubi’s sales productivity software makes it easy for reps to automates follow-up tasks, log activities in a single click, and navigate the entire CRM world much faster. Jesubi’s sales analytics software also gives managers the ability to standardize lead follow-ups, get real-time insight into their sales funnel, and improve the productivity of their sales team.

If you’re interested in learning more, we would love for you to request a free demo here and see how Jesubi can help your sales process.

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.

Most replies to those requests are self serving i.e. check out my company we work with lots of other companies, or we do email marketing better and we can nurture your leads better than anybody else.  In a few cases you will actually hear customer references that state here’s how someone helped me drive more revenue to our pipeline.

Jesubi’s solution is in use by 100′s of B2B lead generation reps at several different outsourced vendors around the nation.  They must be doing something right as they are the fastest growing customer segment we have today.  The interesting thing about all of them is the degree of professionalism that exists within their teams.  Some focus on large enterprise class customers, some work with smaller companies trying to figure out the landscape they need to play in.

In the course of our discussions we’ve also talked to a lot of other companies who hang a shingle out and say “We do appointment setting” for companies like yours.  In the spirit of entrepreneurship, anybody can incorporate and begin trying to set appointments for clients.  In many cases how they intend to do that isn’t really transparent to the customer.

Here’s some things everyone should think about when it comes to choosing an outsourced B2B appointment setting firm:

1)  Full transparency – yes you want meetings for your sales teams but if in the course of setting 10 meetings for you your outsourced firm has conversations with 1000 other prospects and because they don’t represent your brand or product well those 1000 walk away with a jaded view of you.  What’s going to happen when one of your field reps calls into that account and they say we just talked to you 30 days ago, we know what you do and we’re not interested.  How long does it take to recover?  In a full transparency mode, you not only see the people that your vendor talked to and set a meeting for you but you also see the people who they talked to who weren’t interested – which to me is just as important if not more so.

2 ) Pay for performance – There are two types of models in the B2B appointment setting world - pay for performance i.e. buy appts at $ 400 or $ 600 or $ 800 per appointment and pay by the hour where you are actually hiring a few reps who work on your behalf and they are managed and paid by the outsourced vendor.  The thing that always puzzled me about pay for performance is how can someone know they can sell you an appt for X dollars.  My question to you is if one of your best reps called for 40 hours per week for 4 weeks how many meetings could he or she set.  In most cases nobody knows.  If you can’t know how many meetings your best rep can get how would you guarantee success if you were the vendor?  One of the major vendors who uses a pay for performance methodology won’t let clients see the list they are calling into, won’t share the message they are using, won’t give the client anything except a meeting time and place and won’t confirm who the meeting is with until 24 hours before.  Is this the way you want to interact with your clients in a total secretive manner?  In another case, I asked a vendor who used a pay for performance model how they could sell appointments for $ 695 a piece without really knowing the demand for a specific product.  What they explained shocked me – they said “we sell appointments, when we get a new contract the first thing we do is mine our database of existing people we have set meetings with because we have found that if we’ve set one meeting with them there is a propensity to set another”  my reply was don’t your existing clients find that disingenuous – The response “We sell appointments it is up to our clients to figure out what to do with the prospect when they get there” – Is this the kind of prospect you want your sales team calling on someone who will take a meeting because they have time to kill?

3 ) Dedicated team versus a pool of reps.  Some outsourced vendors dedicate specific team members to your project while others will distribute work across whoever is available.  If the vendor is an extension to your team do you want “dedication” or a “pool”.  Make sure you know which type of vendor your dealing with.

4 ) Technology in place to capture team efforts.  Some vendors will call in your SFA solution some have invested in their own that optimize their teams efforts.  Others make little or no investment having their remote teams call via excel spreadsheets or paper and pen.  If your vendor isn’t willing to invest in their team how much or they going to invest in making sure their team knows your products, competition and overall landscape.

I am sure there are lots more to discuss in choosing a vendor but these 4 hot buttons of mine seem to resonate when talking with clients about B2B appointment setting.  Feel free to add more to the list

An article in the New Sales Economy Blog provided a great definition for sales process, composed of 3 elements:

1. A standard workflow
2. Division of labor (specialization)
3. Centralized workflow management

This is nothing unique.  These 3 characteristics are actually some of the primary tenets used by manufacturers and producers over the past 40+ years to re-engineer their production process – the disciples of W. Edwards Deming, Total Quality Management, Six Sigma, The Toyota Way (Kaizen), etc.  Problem is, very few sales organizations have gone to the extent that their manufacturing counterparts have to re-engineer process, most sales groups still operate as ad-hoc as ever.  But what Deming did for the Japanese production model and Jack Welch did at GE, can and should be applied to modern day sales organizations.

A Standard Workflow – Numerous sub-processes exist within the overall sales process and most can be managed with standardized workflows.  A standard workflow basically means the automation of routine tasks, with detailed reporting to continually optimize the workflow processes, minimize errors, promote best practices, and create better and repeatable processes for constant improvement – a Six Sigma for Sales if you will.  Many technologies are now available to address specific process improvement such as email marketing platforms and marketing automation solutions addressing top of funnel lead generation activities.  Specialized SFA solutions for mid-funnel lead qualification, pipeline development and prospecting efficiency are gaining fast acceptance.  Niche products for forecasting and opportunity analysis are being deployed for late funnel management capabilities.  Automation, tracking and optimization for account management (post sale cross-sell/up-sell), and renewal contract reps are being implemented rapidly.  The tools are there to make this a reality for sales organizations.

Division of Labor – Sales organization’s in this Sales 2.0 world are stratifying their teams by sales development specialty.  Gone are the days of the marketing department pumping out leads to the bag carrying field rep.  Sales development specialists include lead generation reps handling the lead nurturing and qualification activities in the early pipeline stages; inside sales teams handling market specific deal management (SMB, geo, other) or appointment setting for outside sales reps; account management teams are focusing on cross-sell/up-sell of products and services to an existing client base in addition to customer service responsibilities.  This specialization or focus of specific individuals to specific sales process is ideal for the implementation of new technologies that help create, manage and refine the workflows that can optimize the resources and productivity of these individuals.

Centralized Workflow Management – Do you have a data hub that can track, manage, refine and optimize all the sub-processes and workflows in your overall sales process?  Can you manage this information real-time, cross division or organization or geography?  Can managers and senior executives determine quickly and easily where bottlenecks or opportunities reside in workflows and sales processes?  Many will say this is the intent of their CRM – but is your CRM platform really delivering this type of insight and manageability?

The capabilities are there.  It’s time for sales to join the process revolution.

This disconnect occurs because many sales technology providers refer to their solution as CRM, but really it’s not.  This is primarily due to the herd mentality of companies wanting to be considered a player in a large multi-$B enterprise market space.  And the major enterprise players like Oracle/Siebel, SAP, Microsoft and now even Salesforce.com have popularized the CRM acronym to the extent that many of the new players feel compelled to wave the CRM software flag over their technology.

When you Google the definition of CRM, 10,000’s of responses come up, and it is clear there is no universal definition of Customer Relationship Management.  In fact the majority will agree that CRM is a business strategy, and not a technology platform.  A businesses CRM strategy may be enabled by certain technologies, but this is not a requirement.

And when CRM is defined in terms of a technology platform, it is referred to as a database or repository for a company’s interactions with their customers, including an organizations marketing, sales, customer service and technical groups.

That’s why I believe many executives think they are looking for a CRM solution, when what they really need is sales force automation capabilities.  CRM is a boiling down the ocean thing, a forever strategy that is never perfected and will be extremely costly in terms of corporate lives and dollars.  But SFA can be accomplished quickly, easily and with very near-term payback.

It’s clear that many organizations are interested in automating and standardizing the methods by which they conduct their top of sales funnel activities; this is being handled by a host of new and fast growing companies that deliver marketing automation solutions.

Likewise companies are looking for tools to enable more streamlined, automated and optimized lead qualification and sales pipeline development capabilities for mid-funnel activities.  This is where SFA begins, and continues through to opportunity management (where enterprise CRM may pick up).  We call this Total Funnel Management at Jesubi; when you automate and optimize early funnel activities (lead generation), coupled with streamlined processes for prospecting and lead qualification mid-funnel, directed to opportunity management late in the sales funnel.

The reality is that enterprise CRM platforms are not equipped to handle this level of automation for a total funnel management strategy.  Enterprise CRM was architected to be a repository/database for storing information and activity history for customer interactions, with reporting and dashboards.   Enterprise CRM was not designed with end user productivity in mind, and typically fails at any measurable type of automation capabilities.  As these systems get bigger and loaded with functionality and module bloat, they move even further away from sales force automation as they require more screen jumping & navigation, significant data input and ad-hoc manipulation by end-users, and increasing administrative requirements to maintain, update, integrate and enhance the platform.

Sales executives and SMB founders that we talk to want simple & fast systems to deploy.  They want ease of use at the get go, with minimal to no training; a system that is easy to configure and update, with integrations to their marketing automation systems — and sometimes integration to legacy CRM platforms if they extend to customer support and technical ops.  Most importantly they want a system that allows them to automate and manage their selling campaign activities and sales processes, with detailed reporting that allows them to continually optimize these capabilities … they want sales force automation.

In the course of these discussions we got on the subject of cold calling and what percentage of time a rep should be responsible for hunting in his or her own territory.  In the first conversation, the VP of Sales said “I never want my sales team prospecting.  It is marketing’s job to do lead generation for my team.  If they don’t have enough to call on it’s marketing’s fault.”  How many marketers out there have heard this before?  The questioning look I got from him said I didn’t get it.  He looked at me and said “why would I want my most expensive sales resource making cold calls.”  I replied with “what happens when they don’t have enough opportunities to work on” and once again his reply was “that’s marketing’s problem.”

Two hours later I met with the second VP of Sales and when we got on the same conversation about sales prospecting and cold calling by sales reps his thoughts were at the opposite end of the spectrum.  He said “sure I’d love for my team to only be working on opportunities but if that were the case then I don’t have enough sales reps.  I’d like to see them with a 50/50 balance.  50% of their time prospecting for new opportunities and 50% of their time closing the opportunities that they’ve got in their pipeline.”  He went on to say that he had practiced persistency in his own prospecting efforts when he carried a bag.  He’s now led several high growth tech companies to wildly successful outcomes with that same process.  He deployed Jesubi specifically for the ability to implement this process and to enable his sales team, so when hunting they now will do it several times more efficiently and productively than can be done with any other CRM tool.

The most interesting fact in the above conversations is while these two VP’s of Sales are competing in the same space with similar offerings and competing primarily on cost advantages, one of the companies is growing at an exponential vector.  I’ll let you figure out which one.

Parametric Technology redefined the mechanical design space in the late 80′s and early 90′s and went on to peak at over an $ 8 Billion market cap. The founder struggled to raise capital in the early days and tried to sell his technology to a couple of existing companies in the space already, fortunately for him they never offered what he was asking and the rest is history. I was the 88th employee at PTC and watched them grow from $ 4 Million in revenue to over $ 600 Million when I left. There never was a job that was more difficult to do everyday but more fun to do everyday. Everybody woke up in the morning saying let’s go dominate this market.

Aprimo another company I joined in the late 90′s as the early VP of Sales, just announced last week that they had entered into a definitive agreement to merge with Teradata in a deal valued at $525 Million. Once again two founders with an idea to help automate the marketing function within businesses, put themselves and capital at risk to launch the company in 1998. I too took some of the capital I had made at PTC and put it to work at Aprimo. The growth rate at Aprimo was slower, but the success was every bit as rewarding. The big difference was Aprimo pretty much created the Enterprise Marketing Space. I can tell you it’s a lot easier to build a better mousetrap and go compete with the encumbent vendors than it is to create an industry. My hat is off to Bill Godfrey the CEO of Aprimo for having the fortitude to stick with his vision and create and define an industry.

At Jesubi, we too are trying to bring a better sales force automation tool to the marketplace. One click call results, one click conversation results, it’s not brain surgery but our clients tell us they LOVE the ease of use. In the early days of PTC, the early adopters were the companies who needed a competitive edge to beat the Japanese manufacturer’s so clients like Motorola and Texas Instruments who were competing in the electronics race were the early adopters. Jesubi is seeing the same trend as we continue to dominate and win business in the sales outsourcing industry. If you’re going to build a business that does sales outsourcing whether it’s appointment setting or tradeshow follow-up or closing deals, you have to do it better, faster quicker than a client can do with their own people and sales force automation tools or you won’t stay in business long. In 2010, alone 12 marketing service companies or sales outsourcing companies have chosen to implement Jesubi for their sales teams. They are our fastest growing customer segment as they continue to add more users as their client success grows.

Is it a risk to build another Sales force automation tool in this day and age? Is it wise to invest in a tool that helps clients do lead generation, lead nurturing better? Is it wise to compete with gargantuan companies like Salesforce.com, Netsuite and Microsoft? It’s what living the American Dream is all about. Take a risk come to market with a better product and then try and out execute your competition.

I believe we can achieve our realization for one reason and it’s because we wake up in the morning, every morning with the thought running through our heads – “How can we help our clients sell more?”. It’s a novel thought amongst traditional CRM vendors but everybody at Team Jesubi from the sales team, to the development team, to our client success team, is 100% aligned to that goal.

Have a great holiday season and may all of you have the opportunity to partake with a successful completion of your own American dream.

Does your sales team have a metric for how many touches (electronic and/or verbal communication attempts) are necessary to have a substantive discussion with a targeted decision maker?  Our previous blog post referenced the shocking number that up to 87% of marketing generated leads don’t talk to a sales rep.  What?  Where’s the persistence?  In this economy, with 50% of reps not making quota, can anyone afford not to pursue a new lead until they have been truly qualified?  We hear time and again that most leads are only attempted to be touched 1-3 times, maybe an email and then a call or two.  But how can this be an effective method of prospecting and sales qualification given today’s challenge of connecting with executive decision makers?

We believe in practicing professional persistence in prospecting.  This does not mean that we deluge the lead with an avalanche of outbound communication, but we do deliver a consistent and persistent mix of electronic and verbal touches to put forth our best effort, always with professionalism, in reaching a targeted decision maker.  Our team utilizes a 3 Email, 12 Call automated prospecting template targeting VPs of Sales and Marketing with a campaign duration of 1.5-2 work weeks.  We have customers who employ anywhere from 4 to 20+ touch points in their automated selling campaigns to reach leads and targeted decision makers.  Our friends at Vendere Partners point to a 6 Call, 2 Email prospecting workflow as their best-in-class B2B lead generation method.  There is no silver bullet for a specific number of outbound sales touches.  The reality is this number will change based on the title of decision maker, industry, length of sales cycle, type of sale (SMB, enterprise, etc.) and many other factors.

The key to enabling professional persistence is to deploy a sales tracking system that provides for a systematic selling approach – the ability to create, deliver and manage automated templates for top of funnel marketing and qualification campaigns as well as mid-funnel sales processes for prospecting, cross-sell/up-sell, and other sales process methods.  If you take these measures, you’ll have a real-time lead management and sales tracking system that will not only shed light on the proper metric for touches based on any market criteria, you will also have a sales process management system that will continually provide for the optimization and adjustment of your selling and marketing campaigns.

So back to the phrase, “professional persistence for sales prospecting”; how much is too much, or not enough?  I can tell you as a sales leader whose team targets my peers as a primary decision maker, one of the most gratifying experiences is when a VP of Sales agrees to take a meeting because “I like the way your rep sold to me”.  We use a consistent and persistent, systematic selling approach, leveraging an automated prospecting template to reach out to sales executives.  And dozens of time we get the meeting because “your sales rep was persistent but professional” and “I would like for my team to sell this way”.

In the converse, only once has a sales manager told me that they no longer wanted to hear from us because of the “barrage of communication”.  This individual had been in 3 different campaigns, over the course of six months, and recently received 2 Emails, 2 voicemails and a few no connect calls over the period of a working week.  Which made me wonder, how is this organization’s sales team handling new leads, growing their pipeline, and communicating with decision makers?

Are there sales leaders out there who truly believe that sales reps should be waiting for marketing to provide their leads?  Perhaps all this great new technology means that selling is now based on a steady stream of inbound interest … web leads just pouring in.  And maybe sales people don’t need the phone anymore, how often do they use the one on their desk?  Do they actually make calls from their smart phone, or is this just another tool to send/receive email and text?  And reps certainly wouldn’t think to use voicemail anymore, because the social media tools are making the connection for them, right?

Don’t get me wrong, these are good tools and there are places in the marketing and sales funnel for their use.  But if your organization is betting the pipeline or sales forecast on a primarily electronic strategy, I’m very dubious.  You cannot replace the human touch element for qualification, verification and movement of your sales pipeline.  David Raab recognizes this in his new whitepaper, First Contact Management, Bridging the Gap From Marketing to Sales.  My money will always be on the sales organizations that practice professional persistence.