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.

The post What if you could marry new world selling(sales 2.0/social media) with traditional sales best practices and resources? first appeared on True Sales Results.

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)

The post Effectively engaging new prospects-the new go to market imperative first appeared on True Sales Results.

How did a completely unknown start-up named Huddler find itself huddled in a Menlo Park restaurant with 26 top execs from the No. 2 advertiser in the world? It snagged itself a stop on Unilever’s tour of Silicon Valley earlier this month.

The post Selected news ready for posting … – Marketers to Silicon Valley: Help Us Get Ahead of Consumer – Advertising Age – Digital first appeared on True Sales Results.

NetProspex have tracked social media usage by the firms’ employees to develop a ranking of the 50 most “social” companies.

The infographic offers some additional information, as well. For example, they’ve measured what social networks are most popular among the employees of the US’s largest companies (LinkedIn comes out ahead of Facebook, and just 3% of employees belong to Twitter).

The post Selected news ready for posting … – Companies’ Social Media Savvy: Top 50 Most ‘Social’ Firms (CHART) first appeared on True Sales Results.

It’s a marketing truism that you can’t manage what you can’t measure.  But, faced with all the challenges of starting a company from scratch, the question is:  what do you measure and when do you start measuring it?

Startups often think that it’s better to live solely on Salesforce during their early growth phase and to delay an implementation of Marketo (or any other marketing automation solution) for richer times ahead when budgets and headcount are less constrained.  That usually means the thinly staffed sales team has to undertake everything from lead scoring and qualification to database updates.

Implementing marketing automation early in the life of a startup can pay off down the road. There are three main benefits to making an early commitment to a marketing automation tool.  First, it keeps highly paid, strategic, executive-level sales people doing what they do best (and out of the weeds of sales operations.)

Second, it allows marketing and sales investment to be more easily measured and analyzed.  Third, it lets real data about the performance of programs like email marketing inform your sales content and website structure.  Our marketing mantra:  metrics tell you where you are (# of visitors, page views, etc.)  Analytics tells you where you’re going by deriving meaning and actions (e.g., changes to content) from those numbers.

In other words, you have to “believe” in the value of marketing automation in order to commit early to its purchase and implementation. The program cost of marketing automation is only part of the objection that we hear from some of our startup clients.  The other issue is the need for an in-house resource to “drive” the marketing automation tool and ensure that internal processes are followed across the marketing and the sales teams to make the system hum.

We address this objection by putting a marketing operation contractor on site or by referring a partner like True Sales Results who can drive the system and ensure that best practices are established and followed early on.  Investing in marketing automation, as a percentage of a startup’s overall marketing budget, represents an “incremental” investment.  It helps leverage your senior sales talent better.  It builds discipline and internal processes that are invaluable to ramping revenue and maximizing your sales talent.

The post Turning a Sales Guerilla into a Sales Machine – Smart Choices for Startup Marketing first appeared on True Sales Results.