Strategic selling is like a complex symphony. And the conductor of the orchestra is the sales rep. There are various inflection points in a complex sales cycle and good sales reps understand when they need introduce the appropriate “instruments” within their arsenal (i.e., corporate resources, tools, customer references, etc.) to build to the crescendo and close the deal. Conversely, bad sales reps aren’t able to discern those inflection points, tend to have little to no control over the sales process and fire their proverbial “silver bullets” in to the air hoping it strikes at the heart of the vampire. In an enterprise sales environment, you need to earn the right to meet with power. Continuing on the silver bullet metaphor vein, the vampires are the senior execs responsible for making the decision and controlling the budget. You shouldn’t bring senior or strategic resources from your company in early stage sales meetings or before the right people are in attendance.

Back to the symphony metaphor:-) Good conductors “move” through the musical composition engaging the audience and adeptly building to a crescendo. This is analogous to good sales people driving through the sales process building value, differentiating their solutions and ultimately consummating in a closed deal that was a true collaboration with the customer.

When you have sales people that continually tend to get stuck in stages of the sales process and try to throw resources at the problem (i.e., wasting your silver bullets) in hopes of resolving it; it is a clear signal that you have a sales rep that isn’t capable of managing/driving a strategic sales process.

The picture is the late great conductor of the Boston Pops, Arthur Fiedler. I grew up in Massachusetts and went to college in Boston, so I have fond memories of Arthur Fiedler conducting the Boston Pops at the Half Shell every July 4th in Boston.

Here are some helpful strategic sales ‘conductor’ tips:

• Like a great conductor, never try to rush, skip pieces of or cut corners with the ‘concerto’ (sales process)
• Engage your audience and tailor your performance to appeal to different members of the ‘audience’ (buying committee)
• There are parts of the ‘concerto’ (sales process) where it’s okay to be playful and other parts where you need to be serious
• Always focus on where you are in the ‘concerto’ (sales process) and how you need to effectively transition to the next stage
• Make sure the ‘audience’ (buying committee) is aligned with you through your ‘concerto’ (sales process)
• Building to a ‘crescendo’ (value) and ‘closing’ with authority is how you receive a ‘standing ovation’ (successful sale):-)

The post first appeared on True Sales Results.

Having said that, it never ceases to amaze me how often sales is an afterthought when planning a go to market strategy and tactical execution plan. Our company provides strategic Go To Market Sales & Marketing services to both startups and F1000 companies. Naturally there are many different considerations depending on the size of the company, but at the same time there are some common underpinnings that should be built in to any sound go to market strategy/plan, regardless of your company size.

Think about a go to market strategy that incorporates an aligned sales and marketing perspective. If you’ve developed some intellectual property (IP) that is disruptive and valuable, you can’t simply offer a free download or trial, build a community and then expect that in 12-18 months you will have a sales pipeline that is converting in to paying customers and revenue . There is the whole ‘sales engagement model’ that needs to be baked in to your go to market plan. How are you getting validated contact information from the free downloads so that your sales people can engage? What have you built in to the trial version that motivate the prospect to engage with you? What does the sales engagement model look like from someone visiting your web site for the 1st time to officially signing up as a paying customer? What go/no-go gates are built in to that process for both the prospect and your sales team at each stage in your engagement model?

The metaphor that I like to use for developing and executing an effective go to market strategy is firewalking. Walking barefoot over a bed of 1000 degree Fahrenheit hot stones or coals. If your go to market strategy is only taking marketing in to consideration, then it is akin to saying that at the end of walking over these hot stones we will be generating $X millions in annual revenue to only find out that not only aren’t you anywhere near the sales pipeline or revenue that you expected, but your feet are on fire and you have serious burns and blisters. Continuing along this vein, in the aligned sales & marketing go to market strategy, you think about the ‘engagement model’ carefully to prevent burns and blistering (i.e., missing pipeline and revenue goals). Should we hire sales people that have really long legs and are light so their strides minimize the # of times they have to touch the hot stones/coals? What are the factors that prevent burning that we need to consider? What is the optimal firewalking technique that our sales people need to be proficient in? What can we do in advance, during and after our ‘sales engagement model’ to ensure that we are performing most effectively? Are there any ‘gates’ that we need to know in advance that would determine go/no-go for proceeding with our firewalk?

I’m sure this sounds a bit dramatic but if you think about the failure rates associated with startups and new go to market initiatives, it can be an incredibly treacherous endeavor even with the proper strategy and planning. Best of luck with your firewalking and remember to leverage an aligned sales & marketing approach for your go to market initiative!

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A lot of companies over the last few years have “lowered the bar” on what information, if any is required to download content from their web sites. The rationale behind this was that we don’t want to make it hard for people to engage with us. Ironically, we’ve made it easy for new prospects not to engage with us. I agree that in this day & age requiring street address, city, state, zip code and some other items on an inquiry from is anachronistic. Yet, “lowering the bar” too low results in worthless contact info for sales follow up and engagement.

I submit that there is an optimal balance between requiring too much contact info from an inquiry and too little. One suggestion is to require a valid corporate email address with  a validation step prior to providing the requested content. An additional suggestion is that you ask for incrementally more information based on the value of the content that they are requesting. Incremental and mutual commitment is a sales best practice that I’ve been preaching to my sales teams for 20 years and I believe that it is more relevant than ever. If someone isn’t willing to provide a valid corporate email address to get your content, you need to question how serious or legitimate they are as a prospect. In fact, it might be a competitor trying to glean positioning or competitive research on your company and products.

There is a seemingly endless pool of people (millions) that love free content and will never be real buyers of anything. You need to ask yourself what is an acceptable percentage of your time and resources that can be invested with people that won’t buy or are unqualified to ever buy your product or services. The best sales people are great at qualification and they don’t want to invest time with prospects that won’t buy. Companies need to adopt the same qualification rigor at the front end of the funnel or pipeline by developing stringent ideal customer profiles (ICP) and adhering to that profile and associated criteria.

There has always been an inherent distrust of sales people and marketers. They are know for making false claims about what their products or services can do and then hiding the failures. There is a more nuanced, subtle process needed to engage prospects today. Buying a huge list and then conducting an email campaign with purported compelling calls to action and follow up telesales efforts are producing diminishing results. In fact, I can share through experience that those returns are getting exponentially worse. The fact is that prospects and customers can easily hide behind voice mail and email and never reply. Worse, many prospects and customers pretend to engage with you and attempt to suck all the information that they need out of you and either go radio silent on you or will dictate that they will get back to you when they are ready. In the meantime, they are evaluating alternative products and services and making purchase decisions without your sales people knowing.

The validity of a win/loss report these days is questionable at best because in many cases it is simply impossible to ever get a response from the prospect or customer to know what they decided and why. Secondly, how do you define when you were truly “engaged” with the prospect or customer in a real sales evaluation these days? That definition has gotten a lot murkier and many sales people would classify the initial( and only) interaction with the prospect as an inquiry or lead but the prospect has actually gone on from that initial interaction, evaluated alternative products or services and made a decision without that sales rep knowing.

So it begs the question, what do we need to do as marketers and sales people to engage new prospects and sell more effectively in today’s world? There is a lot of good strategy and thought out there on this subject. By no means exhaustive, but here is my simple list of things that are imperative to do well to engage and sell effectively in today’s world. This list represents a blend of some high level strategic requirements as well as some lower level tactical needs:

• Sales & marketing is aligned, measured and rewarded on building new qualified sales opportunities (quality pipeline growth) and converting to revenue and new customers (best practices sales conversion ratios).
• Identify the virtual communities (communities/forums/blogs/social networks) where your influencers and decision makers trust, spend their time and conduct their research
• Develop content “teasers” that engage your prospects and starts to build trust and credibility with them
• Inside sales reps that can engage with prospects in their communities and that can convey domain expertise and value
• Sales reps leverage content teasers and a steady stream of fresh, quality content that the prospects find increasingly valuable
• Engage and drive prospects to quality content hub
• Require and validate additional info from prospects based on the level on content value (incremental and mutual commitment)
• Engage in mutually qualified sales cycle with clearly understood decision criteria, milestones/time frame, participants and process (leveraging sales best practices)
• Convert qualified sales opportunities in to new customers and revenue (leveraging sales best practices)

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Clean energy: China takes lead in spending, Pew report finds

SHANGHAI — China has taken the lead in investments in clean energy, spending nearly double what the United States did in 2009, as it ramps up projects in both renewable and traditional energy, a report said Thursday. China’s investment and financing for clean energy rose to $34.6 billion in 2009, out of $162 billion invested globally, according to the report by the nonprofit Pew Charitable Trusts. U.S. spending ranked second, at $18.6 billion, with European nations also recording strong growth. “Countries are jockeying for leadership. They know that investing in clean energy can renew manufacturing bases, and create export opportunities, jobs and businesses,” Phyllis Cuttino, who directs the Pew Environment Group’s Global Warming Campaign, said in a statement.

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This is not someone who is relatively new to sales that simply doesn’t know any better. Rather, this is a really bad sales rep who keeps blindly attempting the same approach and getting the same results. Is anyone thinking about the definition of “insanity” at this point? He’s not crazy, he’s just insanely bad at sales!

Sales can be a numbers game, but the best sales people make it a “smart” numbers game. It’s not just about activity such as cold calling or emailing, it’s emailing and calling with a well thought out purpose. Do some research on the industry, company and person that you are calling or emailing prior to reaching out to them. What challenges are they facing? What are their strategic priorities? If you can’t logically build a bridge from your solution to their needs, you shouldn’t waste your time or theirs.

I’ve always coached my sales teams over the years that they should be weighing where they invest their time and resources to maximize their return in the form of sales success and commissions. If you don’t value your own time, why should any prospect?

Bad sales is offensive and rampant. Particularly during touch economic times, it pays to do your homework and separate yourself from the desperate sales masses.

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http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/feb2009/sb2009029_386936.htm

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I consider myself to be a hybrid in the sense that while I’ve been selling for 20 years, I’m always interested in new and better ways to sell. Kind of a perpetual student that also has lots of real world experience to apply. A “street” PHD in sales earned from successful and failed sales experiences over 20 years.

I worked for IBM, Lanier and Hertz during the first part of my career. I consider those experiences to be my sales boot camp days. I learned the importance of sale process, solution selling and good old fashioned prospecting. Remember when sales reps were expected to prospect and build their own pipeline? They were large companies that could afford to invest in young sales people and help teach the fundamentals of sales. They also leveraged industry best practices in their sales processes and methodologies. This time period in my career was the equivalent of my Bachelor’s degree.

Then I graduated to the Master’s degree portion of my career where I joined my first start-up as employee number 10. They were a boot strapped company that was sub $500K in annual revenues when I joined. We had some great people within the company and enjoyed tremendous growth and success over my 7.5 year tenure. We grew the average selling price from $10K to $250K with many enterprise class deals in the $1M+ range. We started out as a small, departmental MS-DOS based solution that ran on local area networks (LANs), transitioned to an enterprise class, MS Windows based client server solution and eventually developed a web browser based version that was sold through a SAAS model. We sold primarily to the F1000 and because it was an HR solution, we sold to virtually every vertical imaginable.   It was an incredible experience that culminated in a successful initial public offering (IPO).  When I look back on that experience, I realize how fortunate I was to be in a company that had true sale & marketing alignment. We worked hand in hand with our marketing team and truly collaborated on what we were experiencing in the field and what we needed to adapt to succeed and prosper.  Why does everyone think that it is so hard to take a company public? I mean we did it with my first start-up experience☺

Next I graduated to the PHD stage of my career where I was the VP of Sales for start-ups and large publicly traded company. I co-founded several companies and served as a strategic sales advisor and mentor/coach for other companies.  What I’ve learned is that there is always change in the business world and the pace of change is constantly increasing. Yet, some things remain the same such as having a compelling value proposition, being able to quantify your customer’s pain/needs, building a solution that addresses those needs and being able to prove through differentiation that your solution is better than alternatives. There isn’t any automation that can replace the fundamental human side of selling.

Having said that, you can leverage new world technologies and methods to sell more effectively. You do need to engage your prospective customers through community based selling.  You also need to tailor your messaging to the buyers needs and offer graduated opportunities to engage with you. Lastly, you need to provide clear value to your prospective customers at each stage of the engagement model or you will lose them. Marry these new world (blogging/social media/tailored content/engagement community) concepts with traditional best practices sales methodologies/resources and you will have a clear sales and marketing advantage in today’s confused world.

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