Evan Carmichael just posted his “Top 50 Sales Blogs to Watch in 2010” and yes, Sell, Sell, Sell! is ranked among them.  We’re at #38 so, we’ve got lots of room to grow!

Seriously, Evan’s put together a list that includes all the best blogs covering sales and selling and done a good job of grouping them by topic.  There are also some blogs I hadn’t heard of before that are well worth reading.

There are blogs for sales people, blogs for sales leaders, blogs on sales tools like web based CRM and every selling topic you can imagine.

Special congratulations to Jonathan Farrington, who’s blog is ranked #1 on Evan’s list!

Any business owner, sales manager or sales person could do well to benefit from the wisdom shared daily by this group of seasoned sales gurus!

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What does “sales process” really mean anyway? It seems like everywhere you look, sales trainers and gurus are talking about sales process. At the same time, small businesses are struggling to manage sales people and meet revenue targets and they’re not even sure why they need a “sales process”.

I think that the sales training and consulting business has a huge opportunity to help small businesses if they communicate what the benefits of their methodologies and expertise more clearly.

I also think small businesses have tremendous opportunities to increase their top and bottom lines if they begin to think about their approach to selling as a process.

We just all need to get on the same page. In working with small businesses to implement web based CRM software, what I see is that business owners and sales leaders hope the CRM solution provides them insight into the behavior of their sales team, the ability to collaborate as a team easily and some visibility of future sales.

Unfortunately, many sales leaders expect the CRM solution to establish the process for them. Equally unfortunate is the fact that many CRM vendors are happy to pretend that their CRM software can provide that process. It just doesn’t work. One size does not fit all. In fact, even two competitors in the same market will follow very different approaches to marketing and selling and those differences are often their competitive strengths.

So what is a “sales process” anyway?

Well, at the risk of offending some of my more brainiac friends in the sales training world, I think the answer is pretty simple.

A sales process is a series of steps designed to accomplish two things –

First, match the company’s interaction with the prospect or potential buyer to the typical process that buyer follows in investigating and selecting solutions. Example: If you’re selling something that people buy all the time, then they want to know how your product or service is different from what they normally buy. You contrast your product to the popular competitors in your niche and ask for the order. However, if you’re selling business solutions that are purchased once in a lifetime or once every few years, then your first challenge is more to help the prospect determine if they really need your solution. That becomes a much more drawn out and educational series of activities.

Second, the sales process should be measurable. It’s a series of objective steps taken by the buyer and by the sales team that tell you how close you are to an order. It’s not different that establishing a manufacturing process. If you build homes, you don’t send the painting crew to the site while you’re still pouring the slab, even if the customer tells you he wants to see how the kitchen colors are going to look in the morning light. These steps should be designed to be followed in a certain order. The steps in the process are sequenced so as to ensure that time consuming and costly sales activities are reserved for the most qualified and high value prospects and to provide prospects and potential buyers with information about your products and services and the problems they address in a way that opens their mind to a new way of doing things.

I find that most companies shopping for web based CRM software are focused on analyzing and measuring what’s happening in their sales efforts but, they’re not really sure what the process is. They see sales as a sort of art that they often don’t understand. Many times they’re hesitant to tell their sales people how to do their jobs. The business founder may not have any selling experience and therefore feels it best to leave the method to the sales people.

On the other hand, most sales trainers and marketers are focused on creating a specific way of introducing and selling products and services based on the unique characteristics of the niche you’re going after.

So, we have the vast majority of small businesses trying to measure sales where there is no process which limits the measurement to vague and generic things like number of calls made, number of meetings held, number of proposals created, etc. These are all great things to measure for many businesses but, can encourage the wrong behavior and be extremely harmful to sales. If you begin to track the number and dollar volume of proposals sent by each sales person and even reward the “leaders” in this area, what you’ll get is sales people spending way too much time with prospects that are not likely to buy just so they can send them a proposal. There has to be some data about the prospect that qualifies the proposal as being worthwhile and the customer as being a likely buyer.

At the same time, the business owner wants to see this type of information before they invest in relatively expensive sales training and consulting.

So you see the quandary of small business selling… Business owners trying to measure a process that doesn’t exist by making a small investment in CRM solutions before spending larger amounts on sales consulting to define a sales process!

We’ve just released a simple guide to identifying your own sales process so it can be managed in a web based CRM here.

As mentioned before, I think that web based CRM providers are feeding this quandary by trying to give small businesses what they want – a process. They say “Don’t have your own process, well take mine!” That’s not likely to work out well.

I suggest that a more successful approach would be for the business to determine what process is in place today. There is one, even if leadership doesn’t know it. Ask the top producing sales people. They’ve worked it out for themselves. Start measuring that process. That way your measurement of the process is not likely to encourage any behaviors that they aren’t already focused on. The data you gather will provide insight into where the greatest opportunities for improvement are.

Clearly, you’ll need to select a web based CRM solution that allows you to easily create and measure your own process. There are some out there

We’ve released a very simple 10 step guide that allows non-sales guru business owners to determine what their sales process is and begin measuring it from the beginning. That way 2 or 3 months into implementing your web based CRM software, you’re not staring at useless reports of calls made knowing that many of the calls being counted weren’t even related to moving a sale forward. You’ll be looking at data that has meaning in your business.

The fringe benefit of this approach is to involve your sales team in the process from the outset. You’re starting with their process not yours. When you suggest areas of improvement, it will be based on hard data they entered into your web based CRM.

Check out our step by step guide to identifying your sales process so it can be managed in a web based CRM here.

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But we’ve also seen those sales people and sometimes those companies that just seem to have a knack for making customers want to do business with them.  I’m talking about the way people sometimes see to go against all reasoning when deciding who to do business with.  They may not really have a need that can be quantified at all but, they still want to buy that product.  How do these companies do it?

The two videos below will open your eyes to that emotional effect that trumps all rational decision making.

The first is a presentation by Simon Sinek, author of “Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action”.  It’s a fascinating look at how the brain makes decisions and how companies like Apple become so cool.

The second is “Does More Money Motivate Higher Performance?”, a lecture by Dan Pink.  It highlights how people are compelled to higher performance by emotional motivations, not money.

I think taken together, these videos provide a framework for every entrepreneur and every sales person to ask themselves what their “Why?” is.  As a business the answers to this question can be the foundation of breakthrough marketing.  As a sales person, asking yourself these questions can give you the ability to compel your customer to want to do business with you.  To establish a relationship of trust and respect with your customers right up front.

Its really about “putting it out there”.  Letting your customers know where you’re coming from.  I think the hard part is that we’re human and sometimes we’re not sure where we’re coming from ourselves.  Or at least its difficult to articulate in ways that would be compelling to customers.

For example, I’ve mulled these questions over many times myself since view the videos.  As a provider of web based CRM solutions, what’s my “Why?” both personally and for the business?

So far, I’ve been able to identify that I’ve always seen business ownership and entrepreneurship as a core component of personal freedom.  I always wanted to start my own business.  However, in my early career reality drove me into sales and I came to see that being a commissioned salesperson is the next best thing to business ownership in terms of self determination.

Now, with SalesNexus, I love spending time with business owners and sales people to help them find more customers and keep them.  I enjoy it because I appreciate their challenges and because I know that their success will mean financial and personal freedom for them.

SalesNexus is in the business of helping businesses and sales people become free treat their customers like human beings and not numbers.  Success breeds confidence and the luxury of time.  With those blessings, your relationship with your customers changes fundamentally from the desperation of trying to survive as a business or clawing to meet your quota as a sales person.

So, I think I know why I do what I do and why SalesNexus is successful at what it does.  I’m not so sure I’ve figured out how to communicate that clearly and concisely.

I’d love to hear how you communicate your Why?

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Can we get real at this point? If you’re a race car driver, you need to know how fast your car can go and how far you can go on a set of tires. If you’re a farmer, you need to know how many bushels of wheat or beans or whatever an acre of crops are going to produce. Whatever your business, you certainly would measure the results of each effort so you can use that information to predict future results.

Why is it that most business owners don’t measure what’s happening in their sales and marketing efforts?

Really?! Can you really quote any hard data about your marketing and sales processes other than what you spend on ads and marketing, what your payroll is and how much you sell each month?

Sorry but, that is NOT going to cut it!

Think about this in the farmer example… If all you know is how much you spend on seeds and equipment and supplies during the year andthen how much you sell your produce for after the harvest then yes, you can figure out if you made money or not. But, you can’t do anything about it. Next year, you can say “I lost money on that wheat crop last year so, I’m switching to corn this year because the seeds are cheaper.” That’s no guarantee of better results. You need to know how many plants grew on an acre, how much water they got, how many plants died due to disease or bugs, etc. With that information you can adjust next year – plant closer together, bring in a watering system, etc. and get better results. You can also compare this crop with alternatives more clearly.

It just makes sense right? If you’ve got a sales team to manage, then you either measure the process or get used to firing sales people regularly and constantly training new ones that won’t last. The key to hiring and keeping sales people is making them successful. How can you help them if you don’t look under the hood?

After 7 years of working with business owners, sales executives and marketing gurus, I know that it’s just not easy to get the data that matters. Think about it like this… If you’re not doing it now because you can’t figure out how to, then your competition probably isn’t either. What if you figured out how to measure your marketing and sales processes so you can turn them into an Automatic Selling Machine?

Warning – most contact management, CRM and marketing analytics vendors are going to try and sell you more than you need, over complicate the challenge and expand the cost and cause you to fail to get what you really need – some real numbers you can use.

Sure, using a CRM solution, contact management system or marketing analytics solution can make measuring your process very easy but, only if you keep it simple.

That’s our objective here – to highlight the short list of things you need to measure so you can make it happen with or without software.

Really, you can use a piece of paper or a simple excel sheet to do this. My experience helping businesses implement CRM solutions tells me that you’re better off starting very simple and getting some data than spending 6 months trying to find and implement more complex marketing analytics and CRM systems.

The basic components of any marketing and sales funnel are Unqualified Leads, Qualified Leads, Value to your company, Won Sales and Referrals. That’s it. No reason you can’t start keeping that info in a spreadsheet right? In fact, if that’s all you have to have, setting up a contact management system to do it is easy too.

Again, the problem is that you’ll get dazzled by all the other things the various CRM solutions can do for you and things will get complicated fast.

#1 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
Total number of leads coming in.

Simple right? Well, it is but, it means you need to know about all of them. All the referrals your sales people get that they never mention to you. All the call-ins that come in but, never get called back by a sales rep, etc.

#2 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
Where does each lead comes from?

How did they hear about you? What ad did they respond to? Where did you meet them? Who referred them to you?

Again, simple stuff but, the key is to be sure you get this information for each and every lead you talk to. If you get 100 leads a month and fail to collect this information for 5 of them, it could really throw off any analysis you do.

#3 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
How qualified is each lead?

This one is tougher. The reason is that you have to decide on objective criteria that makes a lead qualified. Do they have a need for what you sell? Do they have the money for it? The answers don’t necessarily need to mean that are absolutely going to buy from you. Just that there is a basic fit between their needs and situation and your company. They’re worth your time. Choose the 4 or 5 questions you have to ask every new lead and start capturing the answers for each and every lead. I know, you won’t be able to get all that information for all of them. That’s OK. If you don’t get it all, they’re not qualified.

#4 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
What’s the value of the sales opportunity?

Best case scenario, what can you sell them in the near term? What is this opportunity worth to your company? Pretty simple.

#5 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
What market segment do they fit in?

In every business, you have a few segments you have developed unique solutions for. It might be business vs. residential or small vs. large. You’ve got to know where they all fit.

#6 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
Product you propose to them.

This could be a direct one to one relationship with the segment they fit in but, it’s usually not that simple. Some customers will request certain solutions even though it’s not what you’d recommend for them given the segment they’re in, etc. Again, you’ve got to track this for each lead.

#7 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
Won or Lost

Did they buy or not? Simple right? What about if they just say “call me later”? (that’s a No if they don’t buy within a reasonable amount of time BTW)

#8 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
Did they give you a referral?

Why do you need to know this? Well, you need to know if they were asked for one thing. Also, this is a great measure of the satisfaction of that client. Let’s face it… You can value customers by how much they spend but, a customer that gives you referrals is much more valuable than one that spends the same and doesn’t give you any referrals.

That’s it. That’s all you really need to know!

With this information you can look at each and every source of leads, every advertising expense and determine its value to you.

Powerful Insight into Marketing Return

You’ll compute the cost of each dollar in sales based on the source of the lead and you’ll be amazed at how different it is from one marketing channel to another. Variances of 100% or more are common.

Really, just start putting each new lead in a spreadsheet with columns for each of the metrics above and keep it up to date.

In fact, if you don’t have a centralized contact management system or CRM solution in place today, creating this spreadsheet is a great way to start looking for a CRM system. You can share the sheet with potential vendors and they’ll be able to see what you need to measure.

Just get started tracking and measuring these things right away. Even if you’re not sure where this is leading, I promise you it will uncover valuable insights that will lead you to more profitable and sustainable growth.

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So at this point we know that throwing money at advertising and marketing firms is not an option. We need a way to generate leads that doesn’t involve putting up huge sums with no way to know how and when it will come back to us. Ideally, we’d like a way to invest a relatively small amount, measure the results closely, make adjustments to increase the profitability and then ramp up the investment, the leads and the profits according to our needs.

Of course. And while we’re at it, let’s also say that we want our sales people to get involved only when we know we have a highly qualified lead.

Believe it or not, this is not as tall an order as it appears to be. The basic principle is to design a lead funnel, a series of steps that each lead can go through that will ensure that they want and need what you’re selling. At each step, you offer the lead something and their choice tells you if now is the time for your sales team to talk with them.

So how do you decide what these steps are? What do you offer to the leads at each step in your funnel?

The first one is the hardest so, try to get yourself in the head of your customers. Talk to them. Ask them what questions were going through their mind when they decided to start looking for a solution like yours. What is it that everyone in your audience or market needs or desires?

#1 Action Step to Get More Quality Leads and Close More Sales
Offer something that every potential prospect for your product or service will be interested in.

Remember, this is a funnel or a series of steps. The first one should not be too exclusive. It should be highly attractive to people that need and want what you’re selling and people that likely will need or want what you sell in the future.

The first step is not a free trial or an appointment with a sales rep or a buyer’s guide. Those are things you offer later in the process. Up front you want to offer something that someone with a general interest in the subject will find interesting. We want their accepting the offer to tell you that they could be a prospect some day. If you sell an industrial pump, you might want to write a quick guide titled “Are you spending too much keeping old pump equipment running?”.

Responding to your first offer doesn’t indicate a readiness to buy. But, it indicates that this is someone who is within your market space. You want to establish trust and credibility with this person so that when they are looking for what you sell, they reach out to you. That’s why you’ve got to have a plan to nurture the relationship regularly.

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#2 Action Step to Get More Quality Leads and Close More Sales
Nurture leads automatically

These are not hot leads. You’re going to be worrying about closing the hot deals in your pipeline every day. That’s why your lead nurturing efforts have to be automatic. You’ll put it off or forget about it if it requires you to stop what you’re doing.

Plus, there are email marketing systems, auto-responders, online CRMs or just simple contact management systems that are affordable, easy to set up and can do the job for you. At a minimum you need a contact management system or CRM that can keep track of which leads have accepted which offer and let you know when it’s time to make the next offer.

Mix it up. Some of the leads that accepted your first offer may actually be ready to buy. Give them that chance! Don’t force them to accept each offer in the sequence you determine. If the final step in the funnel is to attend a demo or schedule a 30 minute consultation, then there’s no harm in presenting that option to new, early stage leads.

#3 Action Step to Get More Quality Leads and Close More Sales
Let the offers qualify leads for you

A buyer’s guide is a perfect qualifier. If a lead wants to learn how to buy what you sell, then they are much more qualified than the lead that’s only been willing to read your report on effective maintenance schedules.

Attending a webinar or demo is a good strong qualifier. Anything that involves the lead investing their own time or money. But give them options. If they’re not ready for the buyer’s guide, have something else with involving less commitment on their part as well.

#4 Action Step to Get More Quality Leads and Close More Sales
Build your sales process to fit the offers the lead responds to

You’re sales person isn’t going to pick up the phone and call each lead that responds to the first offer. The idea is for them to invest their time only in leads that have responded to offers that really qualify them as near term buyers.

Be sure that your process makes it easy for your sales people to respond appropriately to each lead’s actions. If they responded to your first offer and then immediately requested the buyer’s guide, they just might be very hot. Don’t make that lead wait. Call within hours. However, if you’re going to call leads that respond to earlier offers, be sure the sales person is not going for the close immediately. In that situation, their objective is really to steer the lead toward the next offer in the funnel.

Again, a good contact management system or CRM will help. With a CRM that tells the sales rep which offers each lead has responded to, they’ll know how to handle each one. Many CRMs can even allow the sales rep to change the email campaign that the lead will receive based on what they learn on the call.

#5 Action Step to Get More Quality Leads and Close More Sales
Measure lead quality and close rates

A subtle change in the offers you make can have tremendous results. Some offers will attract the wrong sort of lead unexpectedly. Believe it or not, the worst thing you could do is generate too many leads of the wrong type. In that situation, your sales people are spending lots of time on leads that don’t buy.

For these reasons, you’ve got to know the metrics of your funnel. For everyone that responded to step one, how many closed? And the same for each step. When your sales people talk to the leads, what is their judgment of quality?

These metrics will allow you to find the offers that are working and the ones that aren’t and adjust accordingly. Your CRM should make it easy to track these metrics and analyze them.

#6 Action Step to Get More Quality Leads and Close More Sales
Hold your team accountable to following the process

This is not selling 101. Most sales people have that “go for it” attitude. They’ll want to call all the leads. That may be a huge mistake from the stand point of time invested in unqualified leads. Make sure they understand when to get involved and what to do in each situation.

Make sure they document things properly as we’ve discussed above. Again, this is not throwing sales people at leads and hoping for the best. This is a finely tuned funnel. You can’t tune the funnel without data. The sales team is going to be a big part of gathering that data.

Communicate these concepts to the team and then make sure they’re held accountable. If they document the quality of leads only 80% of the time, that can completely skew your analysis.

If particular sales people are having trouble following the process – taking the right action at the right time or documenting results, you’ve got to know about it and you’ve got to address it.

I’ve always found that the best way to encourage participation and buy-in by the sales people is to take advantage of their natural competitiveness. Use your CRM to run a report of how many leads have been responded to by each sales person and how many had the results documented properly. Put that report in front of the entire team at sales meetings. None of them want to be on the bottom of this list.

Remember, this is the 5th chapter in our newest eBook, “Build Your Own Automatic Selling Machine”. Register to receive each new chapter as its released and the entire eBook when complete, free here.

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When you are able to track advertising in this way, some very powerful things begin to happen. Your ability to objectively evaluate advertising options greatly improves. Your negotiating position with advertising and marketing vendors improves. Your ability to hold these vendors accountable to promises and expectations they set improves.

These things should enable you to have significant impact on the cost of and quality of leads. If you can reduce the average cost of each lead by 10% and increase the quality of each lead by 10%, that could be big for your business couldn’t it?

Well, that’s just scratching the surface! After all, getting the leads is not really the most challenging part of acquiring customers is it? It’s closing the deals. It’s hiring, training, motivating and managing all those sales people to take the leads your marketing generates and turn them into customers.

There is no question that the single most effective way to ensure the success of a sales person is to provide him or her with the highest quality leads. If 80% of your sales people are over quota this year instead of 20% like last year, what does that mean to your bottom line?

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OK, hopefully I’ve got your attention now! So let’s get specific about how we can measure the results of your advertising and marketing, channel by channel, ad by ad, so you can maximize the most profitable and do away with the duds.

#1 Way to Measure Advertising and Marketing Return Easily
Create a system to track leads from first contact through to close.

Now, don’t lock up your checkbook so fast… I’m not proposing that you run out and spend thousands of dollars on expensive solutions. In fact, this is one area where things can and should be extremely simple. Heck, if you can draw up a one page “lead sheet” that your reps can use to quickly check off the results for each and every lead, great! You’ll need someone to sit down periodically and tabulate the information but, this type of low-tech approach might be the best place to start for many.

Regardless of what method or technology you choose, here’s what you need to know about each lead –

Where did it come from? Be specific here. If they found you on the web, you need to know exactly how. If they did a search first, then you’ve got to know what they searched for. If they saw an ad in a magazine, you need to know which one.

Are they qualified? In any business, there are 3 or 4 questions you can ask any lead and know if they’re likely to become of customer. You’ve got to be sure you ask these questions every time and record the answers. (See our recent eBook – Double Your Sales in 2010 – for more discussion of how to qualify leads)

What are they likely to buy, for how much and when? Ultimately, we want to project the total amount of sales that can be expected and the projected time frame for each and every advertising option you have. This info is clearly crucial.

Did they actually buy and if so, what and for how much?

A couple of other things that are important to find out –

What’s this person’s role in the purchase decision?

Are they currently working with a competitor?

Again, if you can come up with a low-tech way to capture this information consistently for every new lead, that’s great. After all, this is going to require some changes in your processes and methods for your customer facing team so, you should keep it as simple as possible. However, if there are more than one person in your organization dealing with each potential customer or if the volume of leads that anyone in your team is considerable, then writing it all down can get to be a problem. Remember, all your analysis will be skewed if this information isn’t gathered consistently.

So, investing in a good contact management solution or CRM can be wise. Keep in mind the purpose of this exercise… You’re going to reduce the average cost per lead, increase the average quality of each lead and ensure that your sales people beat their quotas and your company grows!

Basic requirements for your contact management system or CRM solution that will allow you to measure your advertising results effectively –

Allows you to document the above information quickly and easily for each and every lead

Allows you each person on your staff that will interact with the lead or prospect before purchase to update the same contact management or CRM database

Allows you to mine the information captured to see the number of leads from each advertising source and quantify the portion that buy, aren’t qualified and/or are still in process.

That’s it. Remember, simplicity is key to success here. This is a means to identify the most profitable advertising channels for your business, it’s not an end in itself. Don’t get enamored by CRM solutions that do everything anybody could ever want but, cost thousands per person and take months to implement. That could defeat the purpose.

Regardless of whether you choose a low-tech approach or a high-tech online contact management solution or web based CRM system, you’ve got to be able to learn this information about each lead. So where is that data going to come from?

#2 Way to Measure Advertising and Marketing Return Easily
Ask the prospect.

Again, we’re going for simple. Sure, you could invest in all sorts of technology, fancy survey emails or even telemarketing surveys to gather all this info but, how long is that going to take to put together? What will it cost? Believe it or not, many sales people will push back and resist asking the specific questions you need answered. You’ll need to help them understand how you’re going to use the information to provide them more leads that are higher quality.

It’s crucial that you follow through too. You can set your efforts back by months or years if you force this on your sales team and then fail to use the information.

Be clear – every person that has contact with the lead before they purchase is going to need to be consistent in asking the decided upon questions and recording the answers.

#3 Way to Measure Advertising and Marketing Return Easily
Make it automatic.

Hey, wouldn’t that be cool? If you’re completely ecommerce, then it may be possible. All this data can be gathered by your website and shopping cart. However, if your customers typically talk to a human being at your company as a part of their decision making process, then there is going to be some manual data entry. No matter how shiny and new and innovative your contact management or CRM solution is, it’s the information that your customer tells your sales person that is likely to be the most valuable to you in measuring the effectiveness of the advertising that drove him or her to your company.

So, you should focus on automating all the other steps along the way and making it as quick and easy as possible for the sales person to add their contribution.

For instance, you can easily have different 800 numbers that you publish in each ad so you’ll know how the lead found your company when you pick up the phone. If they’re visiting your website first, you can build tracking into your web forms that will capture what terms the lead searched for in Google to find you. Many online contact management systems and web based CRM solutions allow your web forms to post new sales leads directly into the database with tracking information embedded.

If you’re using a contact management system or CRM solution, then required that the sales rep fill out all the key data we’ve discussed when they create or update the lead’s record. Also, make sure it’s easy for the sales rep to see what key information has yet to be gathered on each lead so they can ask those questions.

I’m sure you’ve got the idea. In the end, we want to see a table something like this –

# of Leads Qualified Closed

Trade Journal Ad 100 50 20

Paid Search 200 50 10

Radio Spot 50 25 15

Add the costs for each of those ads and you can calculate which is most profitable. You’ll be amazed to find that what you think you know if wrong and how much opportunity is available when you redirect spending to the most profitable channels.

Remember, this is the 5th chapter in our newest eBook, “Build Your Own Automatic Selling Machine”. Register to receive each new chapter as its released and the entire eBook when complete, free here.

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Doyle Slayton had a great article on his SalesBlogcast – 8 Follow Up Strategies to Keep Your Prospect Engaged – with some awesome tips. I especially like his suggestion of giving your prospect a referral!

If you add up the average number of times you call a sales prospect without reaching them, multiply that by the 1 or 2 minutes it takes to make the call and leave the voice mail and then multiply that by the number of new prospects you pursue each month, it adds up to a LOT of time!

I believe it’s a key reason that sales people can get so frustrated and discouraged by cold calling. They’re not in control. They can’t even get to talk to their prospect. You can get a feeling of inadequacy because it feels like you’re dialing the phone a lot but, you’re not talking to anyone that can buy. Most sales people find themselves calling the same list of prospects that they called last week and wondering, how many times have I called this guy? How many more time will I have to call to get to talk to him? Will his secretary be inviting me to her birthday party after all the compliments I’ve thrown her way?

Well, there are many things you can do to improve your results. You can work on your “script” for talking to the gate keeper, your script for voice mails, as well as your emails. You can look at new sources of leads that you can connect with more easily. In all cases though, you need to have a prospecting plan that tells you what to do on each attempt to contact the sales prospect. On the first call, you take one approach – you might have an introductory script for the gate keeper, you might choose not to leave a voice mail or you could choose to leave one introducing yourself. On the second call you mix it up again, and so on…

Of course, this means you have to know how many times you’ve called each prospect. That means you’ll need a basic contact management system or CRM. Imagine if every day you could pull up a call list that told you who to call, how many times you’ve already called and what to do on this call! Believe it or not, that’s pretty basic stuff in most CRMs or contact management systems.

But here’s the payoff! You’ve got to “give up” on a prospect after some number of calls. You wouldn’t want your contact management or CRM system to remind you to call the same person every week for the next 12 months! So, when it’s time to give up, you get to Fire Them! That’s right! You, the salesperson, get to FIRE your prospect! I know, it sounds crazy and also fun doesn’t it?

The good news is that this is not just a way to get some “pay back” after a prospect has repeatedly ignored your messages. Done right, as soon as your fire a prospect, they will call you back post-haste.

How can that be? Well, your customers are used to being chased by sales people. They expect it. In fact, your aggressive pursuit of them relieves the sales prospect from the need to remember to stay in touch with you, even when they’re genuinely interested in your products and services. If they’re too busy to worry about it now, they can delete your message knowing that you’ll call again in a few days.

Well not anymore! Now your CRM or contact management system is going to tell you to call them 3 or 4 times, leaving various messages and then on the 5^th call, the CRM will say “5^th attempt – Fire Them” and you’re going to leave a message like this –

“Hi, this is Craig Klein, with SalesNexus online CRM. We help companies like yours grow sales by helping them market and sell more effectively. I’ve left a few voice mails and sent a couple of emails and haven’t heard back from you. At this point, I’m going to assume that this is just not a priority for you at this time and I’M GOING TO TAKE YOU OFF MY CALL LIST. If there is anything I can do for you, please feel free to contact me at 800.862.0134”

The key phrase is “I’m going to take you off my call list”. No one wants to be taken off the list. You’ve just told your prospect that you value your own time and won’t be calling again. Believe me. If they have any interest in your company, your product or your service, they will respond. At a minimum, they’ll shoot you a quick email saying “Sorry, I’ve been swamped. I do want to talk. Can you call me in 2 weeks?” or something to that effect.

This really works! If you don’t trust me, then just try it 3 or 4 times this week. Print out this tip sheet I’ve prepared for you –

Download Printable Tip Sheet

You’ll be amazed how often genuinely qualified prospects respond to your firing them by calling you back straight away!

So put a couple of leads in your CRM or contact management system and set yourself reminders to call them 3 or 4 times and then a 5^th time to fire them.

It’s going to be fun and it’s going to work. Enjoy!

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But you need to know right? You need to be able to direct your advertising and marketing dollars to things that work. Things that generate profitable results. But typically all you can do is look at sales results in aggregate and try to make judgments about many discrete marketing channels.

The big guys do it by spending even more money on research, surveys, etc. That’s great if you’ve got the time and money. In most small businesses, you find out how the marketing is working by asking your sales people. After all, they’re the ones in the organization that speaks to most of the respondents to your marketing. This seems perfectly logical but it’s not.

Part of this is obvious. Bonus and commission plans can incentivize sales people to paint a skewed picture of the situation.

This is not to disparage sales people. They’re just trying to increase their commissions by selling more. However, if your sales compensation structure and your business priorities are not aligned well, this can amplify their perception of the value of certain types of leads.

#1 Reasons What Your Sales People Tell You About Your Leads and Your Marketing is WRONG – Sales people see volume as good.

You have to search long and hard to find a sales person that won’t tell you they can use more leads. More leads means more opportunity to them. More leads means more need for the services of a sales person. You may believe more leads is better also. If so, please see Reason #2 below!

You may sell into multiple markets or sell an assortment of different products or services which require marketing in different channels. So, you run an ad in a trade magazine for product A, attend trade shows to market product B and do “pay per click” search ads for product C. It’s very common for sales people to perceive leads from a trade show to be far more valuable than others. They’ll even “feel” like there are more of these leads than others when trade show leads are the lowest by volume.

I say “feel” because most sales people have no means of actually knowing how many leads they’re getting. Frankly, unless they’re paying you for the leads, they have little incentive to keep track.

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Trade show leads “seem” important and valuable to sales people because of the amount of time spent on trade shows and because they actually have met these people already. Sales people are relationship oriented. When they’re looking at a stack of 50 business cards from the trade show that they spend 2 days on last week, all of whom they met personally, they’re going to see those as “warmer” leads than the 500 names of CFOs in an excel file that you just purchased for them to cold call. Also, if they are more experienced with a certain type of lead or product or company, they’ll perceive those as more valuable. So, when you ask your sales people about the leads, they’re going to over emphasize the ones that are warmer and most familiar to them.

This may seem like a minor point but, it can be huge in terms of dollars! If you spend $10,000 on a trade show plus 2 days of your sales person’s time and get 50 leads, you’ve got to close at least 20% of them or your average sale better be well over $2,000 or both or its just unprofitable after you take sales compensation and operational costs out. On the other hand, if you may be able to spend $5,000 to get 100 leads via your website and your sales person hasn’t invested a minute yet.

Which brings us to…

#2 Reasons What Your Sales People Tell You About Your Leads and Your Marketing is WRONG – Can’t measure sales results from leads any better than you can

It’s really all about the quality of the lead. If you’re not using contact management software or a CRM solution to track the leads by source and tie that to results, then you can bet your sales people aren’t either. Sure, you probably have one or two sales people on your team that tell you they use Outlook or contact management systems like ACT! or Goldmine to track the leads you give them but, the fact is that’s not really their job as you’ve defined it and so, it’s likely to get inconsistent attention at best.

Even if you are using an online CRM to capture contact information for all leads that come in, where it came from and which sales person it was given to and your sales people are adding in the actual results once they make contact with the lead, it’s probably not happening all the time. If a sales person is given 100 leads in a month and they forget to log in the results for 5 or 10 of them, it can skew the analysis of this information tremendously.

What you want to know is how many leads came in, tied to each marketing channel and whether they were qualified and if they made a purchase. Seems simple doesn’t it? It’s simple for your CRM system to give you a nice analysis of this information but, it’s another thing to get to the point where you have it all in one place so the analysis can begin. If you’re not using any kind of CRM today, just try and track the leads that come in next month. If you are using a CRM solution already, you know what I mean.

You may be able to capture and track all leads that come in via your website. You may even have the front office trained to track all the call ins that happen when your ad runs in the local business journal. But what about referrals or trade show leads? Those go straight into your sales people’s hands… Even once you’ve figured out how to capture all the leads, it’s getting a good read on the quality of those leads that’s key. And it’s the most difficult part of the equation.

After all, it has to be objective for it to be really useful. Just like your sales people will have a tendency to see volume as good for its own sake, they’ll also have vague “feelings” about the quality of leads from certain sources that have more to do with the difficulty of getting in touch with those leads and generating the first real conversation about need than anything else.

To make it work you have to boil down lead “quality” to a series of objective measurements. Are they in the right industry for you? How much are the currently spending on products or services like yours? Maybe for you it’s as simple as how many employees they have or what their annual revenue is or how much they spend on telecom each month. For many small businesses trying to carve out a niche for themselves, it has to be much more specific.

If you’re using a contact management system or CRM solution, put fields in the system for your staff to enter the answer to these questions. If not, use a spreadsheet or even a printed “lead sheet” with blanks to input these answers. This way you’ll be able to measure leads based on each of these criteria and you’ll know which of your sales people just aren’t asking the right questions.

Remember, this is the 4th chapter in our newest eBook, “Build Your Own Automatic Selling Machine”. Register to receive each new chapter as its released and the entire eBook when complete, free here.

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In the pre-Internet days, a publication called “Consumer Reports” was very popular. Those of us that pre-date Gen X, Y, etc. remember how often Consumer Reports was cited in advertising. If your company was reviewed positively by Consumer Reports, you were darned sure going to let me know that. Their specialty was doing in-depth tests of all the important components of each product and then comparing all the major competitors side by side. What made them unique is that they did not accept advertising. This enabled Consumer Reports to conduct their analysis objectively and just as importantly, it gave their readers the impression they were uninfluenced by advertising dollars. Relatively high subscription payments from readers were the only source of funding to pay for all that exhaustive research.

Why did so many readers pay such a high price for Consumer Reports? Because it helped them make smart purchase decisions. People wanted to feel like they “got a good deal” or made the “wise choice”.

In addition to reading serious publications like Consumer Reports, other options were going out on your own by visiting stores and the library, checking with the Better Business Bureau, and talking with friends and colleagues.

Lots of time was invested in all of this investigation. Then, once you selected your short list of products and vendors, you had to start calling or visiting vendors and negotiating the price and terms.

As recently as 10 years ago, making a truly wise decision and getting a good deal involved a LOT of time and diligence.

So it’s no wonder that the Internet has become a crucial step in most people’s buying process. What most people don’t realize is how much the Internet has changed things.

As an example, just think of your last car purchase. Your buying process probably included all the above steps with the addition of some Internet searches. In the past, you might get out and visit some dealerships early in the process and “kick some tires”. And what’s the one thing we all detest about visiting a car lot? When it gets down to negotiating, there’s the inevitable process where the sales rep keeps going to check with his manager on the pricing, financing, etc. Why is it so frustrating? Because they leave you sitting there waiting not just once but several times in a visit. Sometimes for 30 minutes or more at a stretch!

When you were buying that car, when you did your searches on the Internet, you probably found some vehicles online that you requested more information about. That probably meant waiting for a sales rep to receive your request and call you. I bet you ended up spending a lot more time with the sales people that called you back quickly! We hate to wait. Especially when we’re ready to buy!

So the Internet has become the place to go for quick research and a quick response. In fact, virtually all buying processes involve two separate activities on the Internet. First, you do your research. Second, you reach out to vendors you’ve selected to actually begin the negotiation process.

#1 Radical Change in the Way People Buy: The Internet is the first place people go to do research to aid in their purchase decision and when it’s time to contact your business.

Even if people have to visit your physical location to make their purchase, you can bet they will look you up online to check store hours, get a map and maybe even request some info before they visit.

Your company needs to be a resource for customers during every step in their buying process. In fact, you can reach a much wider market via the Internet than you can via other media for the same money. You can expand your marketing reach and fill your funnel with far more prospects than you have today. But first you have to be sure you have what your customers want in at least three points in their process of deciding to do business with you.

We’ve already talked about two of them – the research stage and the contact stage. However, the most valuable step is actually the first step. It comes before the prospect has even decided to make a purchase. Maybe they are not even aware that the type of thing you sell is available. They’re just sitting out there suffering from a problem that you can cure for them.

Imagine if you were able to become a resource for folks with that particular problem or challenge before they decided to do something about it! Now you’re engaging with your entire market and positioning yourself and your business as a trusted authority on the subject. Who better to do business with when the time comes?

#2 Radical Change in the Way People Buy: Reaching a wider audience is no longer done through branding your product and service to the masses. It’s done through branding yourself and your company as a trusted information resource for people with problems you can cure.

In upcoming chapters of “Build Your Own Automatic Selling Machine”, we’re going to get specific about how to get yourself and your company in front of the right audience at the right times.

First though, let’s consider another way that the Internet has changed the way people buy. Remember the story about Consumer Reports earlier? The magazine filled a need for objective research for consumers. In the old days, if you were lucky, you had a friend, relative or colleague you could call on for advice about an upcoming purchase. For most of us, that meant we had one or two people we could call on about a given subject. Sometimes we just didn’t know anyone with the right sort of experience. That meant we were left talking to Uncle Bill, who seemed to know a little bit about everything…

The process of reaching out to people you know is a natural human instinct. Advice from friends suffers from at least three flaws –

A. People tend to think highly of their own decisions, which leads them to recommend things they’ve previously bought or visa versa.

B. People tend to tell others what they want to hear. Your colleagues are not likely to tell you anything that disagrees drastically with your point of view. They’ll skew what they say about their real feelings to make them more compatible with yours.

C: It’s time consuming to make contact with people and get their advice.

So here we are with the Internet making all our research easy and fast. It’s also very quick and easy to reach out to vendors for information. When you’ve got a problem and you’ve decided to fix it, most of us are not disciplined enough to put the brakes on and wait a week or two while we reach out to selected friends and colleagues.

Where do we turn for that crucial “advice from a friend” component of our buying process?

Online communities. Some would call it Social Media. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo Groups, etc. They’re all the rage right now of course. For many business owners and sales managers, they seem to be a way for employees to waste a lot of time talking with friends about non-work related stuff. However, these communities fill an important function in most buying cycles. They connect the buyer –your prospect– with others that can lend some advice in a very fast and organized way.

If you haven’t tried any these online communities yourself, then put this book down now and sign up for LinkedIn or Facebook. Join a group related to the industry you’re in. Ask a question that a prospect of yours would ask. Watch how many folks response and how varied their input interests are. The key question is how many of your competitors can you find in the community?

Recently Google began indexing LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter internal pages, among other sites. This means that when your prospects start their research by doing a Google search, they’re going to see recent discussions about related topics in online communities right alongside the regular web page results.

Back to the human need to connect with other humans for advice. These sites make that so easy and so fast, you’d have to be crazy not to post a question about an upcoming purchase.

#3 Radical Change in the Way People Buy: Online Communities are a rapidly growing touch point in the purchase process because they provide fast access to the experience and expertise of hundreds or thousands of people rather than the two or three people most of us know to ask.

The good news here is that this trend is still relatively new. Even in many high tech but very specialized fields, you may be the first of your competitors to take advantage of this trend. Many of the sites also make it extremely easy to monitor what’s being talked about related to your business or industry quickly.

Your short list of near term objectives for online communities should be –

1. Identify the communities you need to participate in. Ask your customers where they spend time. Don’t try to be everywhere.

2. Figure out how you can keep tabs on topics of interest to you in these communities efficiently. Many, like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, make it very easy.

3. Start getting involved in discussions that are related to your area of interest or expertise and/or business. More on this in upcoming chapters.

For most business owners that have been around for a few years, the website is an online version of your brochure or catalog. You’ve probably spent some money on the design of the site, as well as Search Engine Optimization and Pay per Click advertising. As discussed in our first chapter, “4 Reasons You’re Throwing Money Down the Drain When You Pay for Advertising and Marketing”, you probably weren’t pleased with the results and felt you overpaid.

That has to change. As you read the following chapters of “Build Your Own Automatic Selling Machine”, you’ll probably want to spend more time and money on your online presence. That’s good. However, we’re going to make sure you know what you’re getting and how to measure it first. Overtime, your online presence must become the most robust and appealing of the “interfaces” with customers and prospects you have.

In the coming chapters, we’re going to get very detailed about how to get you in front of a much wider audience as a trust expert in your field. You will have the opportunity to control the prospects buying process before they even know they’re buying anything!

Remember, this is the 2nd chapter in our newest eBook, “Build Your Own Automatic Selling Machine”. Register to receive each new chapter as its released and the entire eBook when complete, free here.

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The research is all over the place. At least half of CRM implementations fail to meet expectations. (ZDNet). Yet, more and more money is spent on CRM every year… more than $10B spent each year and growing by 10 to 20% annually. (CRM Landmark)

Why?

There are countless articles out there written to tell you how to get your CRM project right. There are thousands of CRM consultantsavailable to help you plan, implement and manage your CRM system. And still businesses keep getting it wrong.

The most commonly cited reason for failure is lack of end user adoption. In most small and medium sized businesses, that means the sales people just never start using the new CRM regularly. Within most SMBs that have recently implemented a new CRM solution, you’ll find that a few of the sales people are using the CRM heavily and just as many hardly use it at all. And so the results are very inconsistent, even within a single company.

For small and medium sized businesses, the objective of the new CRM system is normally related to basic information sharing amongst the customer facing team, sales pipeline management and marketing automation. That means virtually all the information to be managed and analyzed must come from the sales team.

And therein lies the problem. We’ve all heard “garbage in – garbage out”. Well with CRM struggles, it’s more like random input = random output.

It’s pretty simple really. If you want your customer service team to have access to the details about a new customer and maybe even a copy of the proposal the sales person sent, then the sales people have to be sure they enter that information for all their customers. If you want to be able to send an email offer to all prospects in a certain industry, then your sales team has to click the box in the CRM that indicates which industry every customer is in.

Unfortunately, management and CRM vendors doom many projects from the outset. Management has their reasons for investing in CRM technology. In a small or medium sized business, the most common objectives of management for the CRM solution are:

· Sales Activity Measurement (how many calls are getting made by each sales rep?)

· Sales Pipeline Management (how many deals are we currently chasing?)

· Team Selling Enablement (what’s going on with the XYZ Inc. deal?)

· Marketing Automation (get my company’s message in front of people more often)

So, the VP of Sales or the Business Owner and the IT guy and maybe the Marketing Admin all get together and start looking at CRM vendors. They evaluate solutions from the perspective of the cool dashboards and reports that the CRM vendors show them for managing sales pipeline, etc. After all, the manager’s not planning to input much data. Marketing looks at how the CRM system will integrate with the web site and how the CRM technology enables email blasts, etc.

If a sales person is involved in the CRM solution evaluation process, it’s usually an exercise in “getting buy-in” from sales early on. That’s a good thing but, it misses the point. Sales people aren’t normally very analytical or process oriented and so their interest in the various CRM technologies is limited to looking at the cool bells and whistles that the CRM vendor has that are meaningful to sales people.

And that, my friends, is the #1 reason why CRMs fail. The CRM vendor is happy to let all parties believe they’re going to get everything they want. Generally, all CRM solutions have much more capability that will be used in a given business. So management sees that the CRM system can do a lot of great things for them. All the things they really want and are ready to spend money on and many things that just look cool and might be useful. And the same is true for marketing, sales, customer service, etc.

If 90% of the input into the CRM system is going to come from the sales team, then what marketing and management will be able to do with the system will be directly limited by the amount of consistent input by the sales team.

Shame on CRM Vendors! They know this. But none of the largest vendors in the SMB CRM market offer a process to ensure that new users of their CRM solution align management and marketing expectations and sales input requirements. In fact, Microsoft CRM, Salesforce.com, Sugar CRM, ACT!, Goldmine and most of the brand names in CRM offer generic training for managers, marketing and sales people separately, allowing this disconnect between what sales will be inputting and what management expects to get out of the system to persist even after the purchase. If you want someone to help you get this right, they’ll put you in touch with a reseller or consultant in your area. If you’re lucky, you get someone that will keep you on the right path but, there’s not guarantee.

The fact is that many business owners and sales executives are very hesitant to require much at all of their sales people. The sales people naturally push back on using the system and argue for lowering the bar and without realizing it, management has just ensured failure. Because they’re going to give the sales people flexibility in using the CRM solution, its assured that they won’t get the management metrics in any level of detail or consistency.

What to do to ensure your CRM system succeeds!

Most searches for CRM solutions get started sort of haphazardly. Maybe a new sales recruit or marketing manager joins the team andstarts twisting your arm about it. Or maybe there’s a real challenge or opportunity in your organization that CRM is the perfect answer for. The first thing most small and medium sized businesses do is to start looking around at options. It’s natural but, fatal. Since you’ve never bought or implemented a CRM system before, you’re not sure what you need. So, to get your head around your requirements, you start looking at what capabilities are offered at the price point you have in mind. That’s a classic “tail wagging the dog” scenario.

The first thing you should do is write down the business objectives you have without regard to the CRM technology that may or may not be available to you. Try to prioritize your objectives financially. Which have the greatest potential to impact your bottom line.

Then decide what the bare minimum is for you. Which of the business objectives for your new CRM system can you live without and which ones are must haves.

Now, think about the information that will have to be input into the CRM technology in order for you to be able to extract the metrics, analytics and reports you expect. Ask yourself if the sales team will be able to input that information in a timely and efficient way.

Essentially, you’re after a map of reports and metrics you want out of the system to input into the CRM technology.

With this, you can begin to investigate CRM vendors and technologies with two sets of requirements –

1) Which CRM solution does the best job of giving me the reporting, analytics and marketing capabilities we see as adding value to our business? And…

2) Which CRM solution will allow my sales team to input the corresponding information the most efficiently?

In the end, you’ll probably find that your requirements are driven less by cost and management needs than they are by what it’s reasonable to expect your sales team to enter into your new CRM all day every day.

Rest assured that you are going to have to tell your sales team exactly what they MUST do with this new CRM system. You must define the minimum level of data entry in the CRM in detail.

At this point you may be asking yourself why CRM vendors haven’t figured out how to make this process easy for you. Well, a few have. But, the truth is that need for growth drives most software, and certainly CRM, vendors to create sales compensation plans and reseller networks that are entirely volume oriented. The CRM vendor’s concern is not how much value you get out of the solution but only that you buy their CRM technology.

As I said, a few CRM vendors have built processes that lead new customer toward an integrated solution that balances business objectives, management expectations and sales input time. It’s rare though.

At SalesNexus, our small business orientation has led us create an implementation process that helps every new customer align expectations up front and adjust training plans and user requirements accordingly. In fact, our simple process for tailoring each new CRM solution to the individual customer’s needs has led to one of the CRM industry’s best customer retention rates. We’re very proud of that.

If you’d like to learn how we ensure our customers’ success with implementing CRM solutions that meet their unique needs, call us and ask your SalesNexus representative to explain what CRM implementation services are included in your subscription at no additional charge. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

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