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.

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.

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.

This confusion over what a lead is may also be a contributing factor to a widening gap between marketing and sales, addressed often in this blog and many other sales and marketing on-line sources.  I keep hearing things like “we have 1,500 untouched leads in our CRM”, or “the new marketing campaign generated 3,000 leads”.  But are these really leads, or marketing generated interest … an inquiry.  It seems to me that to label a sales prospect a lead, someone should have invested labor, time and expertise in a determined lead qualification or lead nurturing process.  Inquiries are responses to marketing’s outbound efforts, like PR, trade shows, web site forms & other offers, and also social networking tools.  All this effort is great, and creates what many of us want, a very wide top of the sales funnel, but these aren’t really leads.

And the most forward thinking firms are tackling this issue head on.  Many, like the sales exec who spotlighted this topic for me, are deploying new inside sales teams focused specifically on sales development activities; lead generation reps nurturing marketing inquiries into bona-fide sales leads, account management teams focused on account-based selling methods, cross-sell / up-sell and service and maintenance contract renewals.  To empower these new sales development teams, managers are deploying sophisticated sales lead tracking systems that communicate with marketing automation platforms on the front end of the sales pipeline process and integrate with enterprise CRM platforms on the back end.  These platforms provide unprecedented levels of productivity and ease of use for sales development reps and detailed levels of reporting not available with traditional CRM systems.  More importantly, a sales lead tracking system bridges the gap between marketing and sales by empowering marketing with insight never before attainable to understand the impact of outbound messaging in sales prospecting and lead generation campaigns and detailed, step by step analytics of sales process effectiveness for future optimization.

Likewise, more and more organizations choose to outsource the sales development process to companies focused on lead generation and outsourced sales appointment setting firms.  This is evidenced by a simple Google search for “B2B appointment setting” which turns up results for over 80,000 companies and capabilities around this topic.  For organization’s struggling with a disconnect between marketing and sales, this can be the most timely and cost effective approach to providing immediate impact to your sales pipeline development.  Companies focused on outsourced lead generation services were the early adopters of sales lead tracking systems as their livelihood depends on the ability to drive more conversations and qualified meetings for clients.  At Jesubi, our largest and fastest growing customer segment is lead generation and sales outsourcing organizations.  It’s an extremely competitive space that demands a high level of professionalism and sophistication in process and technique for outbound activities to potential prospects.  This group understands the need for tools that track, measure and optimize the demand generation process.  And for the client, the level of real-time feedback, activity and market response reporting they can provide is invaluable … and not available with traditional methods or enterprise CRM platforms.

Regardless of which approach you choose, it’s critical that you make the distinction between an inquiry and a lead.  Let marketing focus on creating initial demand with a volume of inquiries suitable for your organization and industry.  Marketing and sales should align on a strategy (internal or external) that focuses on turning inquiries into leads, with a platform and process to manage, measure and optimize your lead generation and sales pipeline development.  The goal is for sales to drive their activity from leads, not inquiries.

After reviewing multiple publications from 2010, there’s significant evidence that the lead generation process will be a hot topic for 2011.  Based on what I’m reading, it’s apparent that numerous organizations need to get back to basic, core principles of selling in the new year, including sales prospecting, sales funnel development and managing the demand generation process.  Some evidence from a variety of 2010 publications:

• 42% of respondents plan to use lead generation management systems as reported by CSO Insights in their CRM 2.0 Analysis for 2010.
• Sales Development (lead generation reps) grew 47% in 2009-2010 according to Phone Works in their 2010 Inside Sales Compensation Study, with the same growth rate expected for 2011. Inside Sales rep deployment grew 30% over the same period.
• Astadia reported a desire by 59% of companies surveyed to optimize the alignment between marketing and sales on lead generation management strategy.

And companies continue to invest heavily in products to enable their lead management strategy, including email marketing platforms, marketing automation systems, and a variety of on-line tools to conduct webinars, demos, web meetings, on-line research and management of social networking platforms.

Will this be enough?  Are companies setting themselves up for big disappointments or costly failure in the coming year?

There’s lots of investment going on in top of the funnel platforms for sourcing leads.  And these tools are generating unprecedented amounts of leads, but is this helping?  I can’t tell you the number of executives I’ve talked with who lament the lack of lead qualification in their process.  Marketing has found new ways to generate very high volumes of leads, but continually report that sales has not followed up in a timely fashion (death to a good lead) or qualified leads properly.  On the other side of the fence, sales is reporting that while the volume of leads may be high, quality is low, and many marketing groups are incented to jam the top of the sales funnel but have no performance measures for quality in lead generation.  There were multiple articles, blog posts and whitepapers penned in 2010 about this growing gap between marketing and sales relative to a total funnel management strategy.  Marketing is taking care of the top of the funnel, and sales has the late funnel (opportunity management) largely covered with nearly 80% of organizations reporting deployment of an enterprise CRM platform and a host of new tools for forecast and deal stage analysis.

So everything is covered right?  I think most of us would agree that the Pareto Principle still applies to the overall sales pipeline, and that 80%+ of the sales process (time and effort) occurs in early and mid pipeline stages.  It’s apparent that organizations are attempting to solve this lead management gap between marketing and sales by hiring more sales development reps (nearly 50% growth), who are defined by Phone Works as “Representatives who use the phone and Internet to generate leads and opportunities for sales; they do NOT close sales but pass qualified leads and opportunities to inside sales, field sales or resellers. “  Sounds like a solid approach, but with nearly 50% of sales people not making quota (CSO Insights 2010 Trends Analysis), is this approach helping or hurting the cause?

There is no doubt that companies will continue to grow their inside sales teams and for many good reasons, lower cost of sales, foregoing the travel expense for face to face meetings (particularly in early sales pipeline stages), and these individuals are better managers of demand generation, lead tracking and sales qualification activities.

Which leads us back to the need for refining and optimizing the lead generation management process in 2011.  What are some things that can be done to help bolster the success of this endeavor:

• Develop stronger alignment between marketing and sales to manage your 80% of sales process activities better.
• Enable lead generation, account management, and inside sales personnel with a lead tracking system that focuses on ease of use, automated templates to insure best practice methods, and streamlined processes for early and mid-stage pipeline development activities.
• Help bridge the gap between marketing and sales by deploying a lead management system that integrates with the tools and processes used in top of funnel marketing activities for lead generation on the front-end, as well as integrating with the enterprise CRM platforms that manage late funnel sales activities on the back-end.
• Empower management with robust reporting capabilities that provide for detailed analysis of the marketing campaign and lead generation processes utilized in early and mid funnel activities.

Best wishes for a productive and successful 2011.

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.