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.

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.

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.

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!

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.