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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Calling all sales teams!  If you manage, are part of or know someone who is a member of a sales team that can benefit from nationwide Television exposure, you’ve got to check out The Great American Sales Challenge!

My long time friend and colleague, Larry Poe, has been selected to host an exciting new TV show, The Great American Sales Challenge.

The show is being produced by the same folks that produced the hit show the Biggest Loser.

Its a great honor for Larry and I’m so proud of him.  He’s going to be great!  Larry’s in a class by himself when it comes to taking a team’s sales game to new heights.

Now, Larry’s searching for sales teams that want to get involved. 

Watch the video, this will get you pumped up!

This Powerpoint will explain what type of company/sales team they’re looking for and what you’ll get if you participate - Great-American-Sales-Challenge

I think this is going to be a great show.  Show casing what its like to be under the pressure that sales people perform under and highlighting the difference between typical selling and top producing sales excellence, as taught by Larry.

What’s also super cool is that I know Larry is going to focus on the importance of managing sales performance through measurement.  Larry has made the SalesNexus Web Based CRM software a cornerstone of his sales performance consulting practice for years now.  We’ve even developed a custom version of the SalesNexus Web Based CRM solution for Larry’s customers.

If you or someone you know might be a good candidate for the show, Larry would like to talk to you ASAP.  Contact me here to be connected with Larry.  Be sure to tell me a bit about your team.

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I love the posts by Dave Brock and Tibor Shanto this month – “Want To Sell More, Disqualify More!” and “So You Want To Sell More? It’s Easy!”. Tibor suggests better prioritization and time management and Dave suggests disqualifying prospects early so you have more time for the qualified ones.
Both are extremely worthy concepts and in my experience, the two most valuable and timeless ways to multiply selling results.

Allow me to attempt to take these two concepts to a philosophical plane please.

Selling is a profession that has taken its share of lumps over the years. Mostly due to the manipulative techniques oft employed. Don’t get me wrong… I love selling and I love sales people but, I believe that the failure of many sales people to raise their game and adopt the many tried and true techniques available to them right here on this blog and in countless books and training programs is that they can make the sales person feel manipulative.

What if we see the profession of selling as an act of kindness? We are helping customers find solutions to problems or paths to opportunity!
Your sales manager may not want to hear it but, if you go into each and every conversation with customers with the objective of identifying that customer’s greatest and most pressing need and helping them meet that need, good things are bound to happen.

I’m not just putting new, more altruistic labels on the same old tactics of asking leading questions to help the customer realize that they need what you’re selling. I’m suggesting that we’ve all been trained by society to think of what we do as manipulative but, it’s not.

So, if you want to sell more, leave all your preconceived notions about ABC (Always Be Closing) at home open your mind when you enter a meeting with your prospect or customer. Try making your sole goal to serve as a friend, trusted advisor or mentor for your customer.

Each and every core sales tactic can be re-imagined in this light and not much changes about the techniques but, everything changes in terms of the simplicity and attitude that you’re able to bring to the table, which leads to far more effective execution.

Such as bonding with the customer – we all know we should take time in the beginning of a conversation with the prospect to “get to know them”. How’s the wife?, kids?, etc. Of course, sometimes you get more than you bargained for. The sales person, knowing that they’re expected to report meaningful progress forward in the sales pipeline to their management, eventually feels compelled to cut the personal conversation short and direct it toward the potential purchase. Actually, the fact that the customer feels like talking about the wife or whatever indicates that they NEED to talk about that subject. Maybe they have some frustrations, fears or recent successes that are dominating their thoughts. What better way to establish a relationship of trust and respect with a customer than to just talk with them about what’s on their mind. Let them share their pride in their kid’s success. Listen to them if they just need to vent. You may run out of time before you get to talk about business and you won’t be able to tell your sales manager that you’re any closer to getting the order but, you’ll know that you can expect honest answers based on their trust in you from this customer in the future. That’s truly valuable.

What about qualifying or disqualifying? Well, if your goal is to listen carefully, ask probing questions and really understand what your customer needs the most, then you may find that they don’t need your product or service that badly. Fine. Give them your best recommendation for a solution that will fit their needs. Now you can spend more time with prospects that do need what you’re selling and this customer now sees you as someone they can trust. If things don’t work out with the solution you recommend for them or their needs change and your solutions are a fit for them, they’ll know it and they’ll truly want to do business with you.

So, you’re not a salesperson anymore are you? You’re just a very kind, understanding and helpful person. Trust me, people like to buy from those types of people.

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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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Advertising firms will be pleased to create a “campaign” for you. They’ll charge you for every minute of their time to produce “creative” and to make “media buys”. They’ll start to tell you about the old marketing axiom that says a person must see your ad three times before it really sinks in. They’ll start to use the word “brand” a lot.

No doubt, your brand is important. However, if you’re a small business and you’re not sitting on a huge pile of money that will allow you to completely saturate your marketplace with your company’s brand, then “branding” will not grow your business.

#1 Fallacy in Marketing and Selling that Causes You to Waste Money and Destroys Profits – All Marketing and Advertising Starts with Branding First

Wrong! Think about it… When you think of strong brands, who comes to mind? IBM, Frito-Lay, Coca-Cola? No question that those brands have real value. Those names have been beat into our heads since we were all children. They’ve also been very consistent. A Coke today is pretty darned close to a Coke 40 years ago. Heck, these companies names are part of our language.

Think about the last few Coca-Cola ads you’ve seen. They’re really not about the product at all. They’re about emotions – happy times, good friends, etc. The objective is to create a connection in your mind between the word Coke and these positive emotions. That’s great for Coke. They spend billions of dollars on this type of advertising because their product is already literally everywhere. As you go through your daily life, you are presented with the opportunity to purchase a Coke in the break room, at lunch, at the gas station, in the grocery store, etc. If you’ve got a warm and fuzzy feeling connected to their name, as you’re walking down the aisle it may cause you to stop and grab a six pack.

You don’t have that kind of money or time. You need to generate sales. Huge media buys (TV, Newspapers, Radio, Product Placements, etc.) are not an option. If you’ve just introduced a new caffeinated beverage, what are you going to do? How can you possibly chip away at the huge mountain of history and branding that is Coke?

Not by trying to beat them at their own game, that’s for sure!

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#2 Fallacy in Marketing and Selling that Causes You to Waste Money and Destroys Profits – Small Businesses CAN Afford to Go Head to Head with the Big Guys

That’s right! We’re just not going to try and beat them at branding. That would be insane. You need to connect with customers who have a need for your product or service. If you’re selling to businesses, what are the problems you solve or the opportunities you allow customers to take advantage of? That’s how you’re going to “brand” yourself.

In B2B selling, it can be difficult to even get a list of specific people that want or need what you have to sell them. There is no magazine written specifically for refinery production supervisors with employees with problems following safety regulations, for instance. For many businesses, it comes down to this – you can’t afford to advertise in magazines, etc. that are read by your audience because they’re also read by thousands of people that aren’t going to be interested in your product AND your competition has run up the cost of that advertising.

In our last chapter, we talked about the new ways in which people buy. Internet searches are a key step in the buying process for most people now.

You can cut through the challenges we’ve discussed by positioning your company and your services at the point where the customer begins to look for solutions to the problem your service address – his Internet search. In a later chapter, we’re going to give you 6 simple steps to generate qualified sales leads you can afford. For now though, let’s focus on the how you get in front of the customer.

We know you can’t afford to broadcast yourself to the masses in hopes that those that actually need a product like you sell will see your ad three times and respond to it. We also know that those that do have a problem your company can solve will likely go to the Internet and start searching for solutions as one of their first steps.

Your challenge is to be there. Be at the top of the results when they do the right search. They type “how to fix a broken widget” into their search engine and up comes a link to your website. Think about how that changes your advertising and marketing challenges.

Instead of trying to “get in front of” the thousands or millions of people that could possibly one day need your products, you just need to jump out in front of the ones that have begun to look for solutions.

We’re not going to get into all the details of Search Engine Optimization, Pay per Click Advertising, etc. There is plenty already available for free on the Internet for you to read and I bet you’re not interested in editing HTML pages anyway. You can hire someone to do all that for you and it shouldn’t be too expensive.

Your job is to create something of value that you can give to your prospect for free. I know, we’re talking about growing your sales. Remember, someone who doesn’t know your company at all just did a search on the Internet and your company has come up in the results alongside several others. You know, by virtual of what they searched for, that they have a problem you can solve for them. What you need now is to help them see your company as a resource to solve their problem or conquer their opportunity.

So, you create a resource they can use to understand their challenge more clearly, analyze possible solutions and essentially become an informed buyer. A report on the Top 10 Reasons Companies Suffer From Whatever it Is That Your Customers All Suffer From. A Buyers Guide that tells them the key questions to ask themselves and vendors when buying the things you sell. A “Free Consultant” or Needs Assessment can even be an effective offer in many cases.

When someone takes advantage of these resources, you know they have a problem you can solve and that makes them a lead. You can create a marketing funnel that leads highly qualified leads directly to your sales team. They take advantage of your report on the Top 10 Reasons… and at the end you offer them a free consultation.

In addition to getting this sort of free offer in front of your market via search engines, you may be able to do this through direct mail, telemarketing and other means. In fact, that’s what’s so powerful about this approach. It works through all mediums. If you write a free report to hand out at the big industry trade show, you can also publish it on your website and you may be able to get it included in the trade association’s post trade show newsletter, etc.

It’s important to think about this process in terms of quantity. If you specialize in custom designed valves for processing plants that handle a certain type of material, you wouldn’t want to offer a free consultation to every processing plant you can find. That would leave your sales team spending a lot of time with prospects that may be highly interested in learning about the cool, innovative product you’ve come up with but, have no need to buy it because they don’t work with materials that require it.

#3 Fallacy in Marketing and Selling that Causes You to Waste Money and Destroys Profits – More leads is not always better

Your sales team is the engine of your business’ growth. Why would you want to pour bad fuel into the engine? What happens to an engine that runs on bad fuel? It deteriorates. Your sales people will get frustrated if they’re spending all their time on leads that don’t buy. You’ll have more problems with keeping them motivated and more importantly, your cost to close a real deal will go up.

The number one objective is to develop a marketing funnel that feeds your sales team with highly qualified leads. If they’ve read the free report, downloaded the buyer’s guide and requested a free consultation, they have essentially qualified themselves and educated themselves. They’ve basically turned themselves into a slam dunk for your sales team!

As you build your marketing funnel, you’ll have to experiment a bit. You may find you get a lot of response to one offer but, getting the prospect to take another step in the process is tougher. You’ll need to get analytical about managing your marketing funnel. Using a good contact management, lead management or CRM solution is crucial. You need to measure each step in the funnel and track where your sales people are spending their time and what’s working and what’s not. It’s a mistake to try and manage this process by listening to anecdotes from your sales team. ( more on that later ) You need hard data to make decisions confidently. A good CRM system can provide that information while also helping your sales team be more productive.

#4 Fallacy in Marketing and Selling that Causes You to Waste Money and Destroys Profits – Relationships are not about being face to face

Just as you can’t afford to blanket the marketplace with your “brand”, you can’t afford to have your sales people flying all over the world talking to every prospect that demonstrates curiosity in your products. That is a sure-fire profit killer.

Maybe an average deal for you is $100,000. That sort of sale can justify a lot of travel expense and sales time. However, if you’ve got to visit 10 customers 4 times each to get one order and still pay for building and delivering your product or service, the numbers don’t look as good anymore. It’s also about time. The amount of time your sales team spends on each lead defines the maximum number of sales you can make. Increasing the profitability of your sales effort means reducing the amount of time spent with leads and preserving their time to work with and filter a higher volume of leads and focus quality time only on highly qualified prospects.

Especially if you’re selling a big ticket item or a long term relationship, the tendency is to “get in front” of prospects and build relationships. There are lots of ways to build relationships that don’t involve a face to face visit.

In fact, relationships are really about trust, credibility and empathy. The marketing funnel process you’re going to build will create credibility for your company by offering your prospects bite sized pieces of your knowledge and expertise. Delivering the content can help build trust. But, most important is empathy. Asking the right questions of your prospect and listening to their unique answers shows that you’re both knowledgeable and appreciate the specific needs of each prospect.

Demos and presentations can be done over the Internet. A phone call that involves you asking open ended questions and listening a lot can build a much stronger relationship than an expensive trip where you roll in with your overhead projector and walk the prospect through 20 slides.

Remember, this is the 3rd 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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