Todd Miechiels, a Web Marketing guru that I know and trust, just posted a great article about an experience with a client who’s phone system was turning off prospects.

Todd’s article also highlights the value of track-able phone numbers that enable recording the calls.  If you’re spending big bucks on lead generation, these are things you should consider.

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If not, then you’re part of the problem!

Yesterday I was treated to one of the most egregious examples of nervous sales person babble I’ve ever experienced. Uhg. It was painful.

Too bad too… The service this guy was selling is something I need. Unfortunately for him, while I was listening him go on and on, answering unasked questions, I was searching the web for competitors to talk to that wouldn’t waste my time.

I did have some fun with it though. Eventually it got so ridiculous - I had asked a simple yes or no question about 10 minutes before and the guy hadn’t stopped talking yet - that I finally just interrupted him and told him I wanted to show him something.

I suggested that I confirm that I was understanding the benefits of his service by trying to sell them to him. That got a laugh and knocked him off balance a bit so, I asked him 3 simple questions. I can’t elaborate on what the questions were because that would give away the company he works for and I don’t want to cause embarrassment.

Bottom line: Recent experiences like this one show me that too many sales people still haven’t gotten the message - sales is not about talking, telling or teaching. Its about listening.

Your goal is to continue to ask the prospect questions about their world. Understand what’s working for them, what challenges they face, where they think they’re heading and most importantly, what are the greatest risks they see in the current world or in the future. What are they afraid of.

Why? Because people buy for emotional reasons. Especially in business, people buy things because its a piece of a vision in their head or they buy because they’re afraid of something. Either way, if you know what that is, then its easy to show them how your product or service can be a crucial part of the vision or protect them from failure, cost overruns, etc.

If you have the bad habit of prattling on with customers a bit too much, here are some suggestions:

Record your next sales call. Listen to it afterwards and try to write down the questions that all of your statements were in answer to. Even if the question was never asked, what was the question you imagined when you started your statement.

Be direct. Imagine that you’re extremely busy working on the biggest deal of your life and a new prospect pops up in your face. You don’t really have time to spend with him/her so, what questions would you ask them to determine if its worth your time. Now, start asking those questions first in every new sales situation.

After each sales call, ask yourself if you learned enough about your prospect to know what’s really eating at him. What keeps him up at night? If not, you need to ask more questions.

Use the 80/20 rule. You’re prospect should do 80% of the talking. You’ve got to get good at asking leading questions to get there.

Get used to uncomfortable silence. Sometimes you don’t get the answer you want. Sometimes you’re not sure what to ask next. That’s OK. The solution is NOT to start filling the air with statements about your products and services. A better solution is to ask something simple like “I know you’re busy, as am I. At this point, does it make sense for us to continue to explore possibly doing business together?” The reason a question like this works is that you don’t have time to waste on people who don’t want what you’re selling.

Your goal is to figure out if they’re likely to buy early by asking questions. If not, don’t try to change their mind unless you ask permission and they agree. Move on to the next guy.

Here are some resources to help you with the art of asking questions:

Open Ended Questions Tool

Jack Perry on Open Ended Questions

OK, enough already. Just remember what my Dad always told me about dating, “A big talker gets attention in a crowd but, one on one, girls love a good listener”.

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SalesNexus just released a new service called “Mail It For Me” within our web based contact management system that allows sales people to send sales letters and marketing collateral to propsects and clients with a push of a button.  No printing, stuffing envelopes, printing labels, messing with postage, etc.  Just one click!

If you mail things to clients and prospects, you HAVE to watch this video:

Pretty awesome right!  Our partner in this is Sales Contacts, Inc.  Visit their website or check out here on the SalesNexus site.

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Today I noticed his recent post on Lead Nurturing techniques.  Not sure what Brian’s strategy is but, he’s basically given away the keys to the store with this post!

I know for sure that users of CRM and Contact Management Systems are increasingly working to create Lead Nurturing or Drip Marketing campaigns, via email or print pieces.

If Touch or Drip Marketing campaigns are on your agenda, then you’ve got to read Brian’s post.

Enjoy!

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 I noticed this audio clip on Salesopedia and thought you all would enjoy it.

Customers lie to sales people mostly out of fear of being taken advantage of in my opinion.  Mark Hunter’s audio description of why this happens and how to manage it as a sales person is worth the listen!

Enjoy!

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You may think that’s an unwise statement given that I run a company that sells online contact management systems for small business sales teams…

So, let me first say that SalesNexus does have some pretty cool and cutting edge technology.  However, we’re different from others in the CRM and contact management markets by focusing more on helping our clients understand their own sales and marketing processes.  Then we customize our technology to fit their business’ needs.

In other words, we try to keep it as simple as possible.  Sales people want to sell, not play with computers.  The technology should be as transparent as possible.

So, today I saw the video below of Wally Wallington using simple rocks, pieces of wood and buckets of concrete to move blocks of concrete that weight thousands of pounds.  He’s basically figured out a totally low tech way that Stonehenge could have been built.  Watch the video…  

Isn’t that amazing!  To give credit where credit is due, I first saw the video on J-Walk Blog.

Wally’s amazing accomplishment with stone age tools is a great example of how its more about understanding the process and the “levers” in the process.

If you sell or are a marketer, do you understand where the levers are in your process?

I can assure you that they are there.  Some are have mild strength and some have the power to propell you and your business to new heights.

The process of identifying and then measuring the steps in your sales and marketing processes, so that you can see where the levers are, is not just about measuring the performance of your current sales team or your marketing ROI.

Its just like what Wally did.  Once you start to look at the levers you’re employing today, you can start to imagine and evaluate new and stronger levers much more effectively!

So, start moving the rocks around people!

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Most small businesses are missing a HUGE opportunity to improve the quality and quantity of the leads their sales teams are working with and improve marketing ROI.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM).  I know, I’m sort of preaching to the choir here on this blog but, my point today is not to convince small business owners to focus more time and spending on SEM.  I’ve tried that for 4 years.  I’m rarely successful.

Somehow, most small business owners just don’t get it.  My point today is to ponder why this is.

I’m sure part of it is just good old fashioned ignorance and discomfort with all the unfamiliar technology and jargon.

But, the opportunity seems to me to be compelling enough that most entrepreneurs would be willing to wade through the learning curve.

Here’s how easy it can be - with the SalesNexus online contact management system for instance - you can put a form on your web site (lots of our customers don’t even have a contact us form when we meet) and every time a prospect fills it out, their name, phone, email, etc. can be automatically added to the contact management database, an auto-responder email campaign can be started AND an alert for the sales rep to call can be triggered.  All automatically and instantly.

Beats spending hours and hours at networking events collecting business cards that probably never end up in a centralized, shared contact management database and many of which probably don’t even get called back.

But to me, the real win is that a search lead is already qualified in ways that a cold call or networking referral can never be.

When you get a referral for instance, they may occasionally have a burning need you can fill but, most often, they need or use what you sell but, are busy with other projects right now and you start a process of chasing the referral, trying to cajole them into making investigating your offering a priority.

With a search lead, your potential customer has decided on their own, without any prompting from you, to stop what they’re doing and do a search for something like what you offer.  So, by the time they click on your search ad or listing, visit your site and submit your form, they are effectively telling you they have a strong need for what you have.

You pick up the phone and you don’t have to convince them to give you some of their time, they’re happy you called.  They are immediately ready to tell you all about their needs so that you can help them address the problem, challenge or opportunity that caused them to do the search in the first place.

Its a big difference.  In a small business, that difference means shorter sales cycles and more sales time focused on hot leads looking to spend money on a product or service like yours rather than on luke warm leads that might buy something someday, if you’re lucky.

Of course there is a lot that you have to do right to make SEM work this well.  In my opinion, you do have to have a good contact management system to collect the leads, ensure proper follow up and enable analysis of the quality of the leads.

You also have to have a good offer that compels visitors to your site to fill out the form.  This offer has to be “in tune” with your search campaign and with the type of customer that is most profitable for your business.

Of course, there are a lot of experts out there that can help.  There are also a lot of people pretending to be experts that can waste a lot of your money.

Here are some resources for you:

Do it yourself tips and tools from Google.

A great SEM guru you can trust to recommend solutions that will work for your business. 

If you’d like to explore how Search Engine Marketing can help your business grow and profit, join me for my SalesNexus webinar on Wednesdays at 2pm EST.  We always cover our contact management system working with our web lead capture service and if you hang around until the end, I’d be happy to answer any questions on SEM.

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You know the feeling.  We’ve all been there.  On hold, wading through phone menus, wasting time.  The most frustrating thing is when you tell your story to one rep, then they decide they need to hand you off to a different department, and so on.

Well I must give credit where credit is due.  Yesterday I had two truley surprising customer service experiences.  In a GOOD way!

First the webcam on my Dell notebook wouldn’t work.  I went to their site and noticed a “chat with a technician” button and went for it.  The technician responded quickly, asked the right questions, diagnosed the problem and posted a link to a download, then used GotoAssist to install and configure it for me.  I was back in business in 30 minutes. 

The best part was that during the entire chat, my cell phone was ringing off the hook and I was able to take every call and take care of business while the Dell rep was taking care of my computer.  It was as painless as it could have been.

Then the same evening I had a rare opportunity to pick a pay-per-view movie of my choice and relax.  The kids were having a sleep-over and my wife was out with her family.  But, the Comcast Movies On Demand service was giving me an error.

This time I just called the number on the screen and started wading through the phone system, and got disconnected, twice.

So I hit their website and noticed the Chat button again.  I tried it again and within 10 minutes, my movie was on.  Again, the best part was that I wasn’t chained to a phone.  The pizza guy came while I was chatting with the Comcast technician, I let the dog out, a phone call came in, life continued uninterrupted.

One note - I asked both the Dell and Comcast reps where the actually were and they were both here in Texas.  I think that makes a difference.

SalesNexus has been using Chat for support users of our online, hosted contact management system for a couple of years and its definitely been a win-win.  Its more efficient for us and our customers find it quick, easy and convenient.

I have to give Comcast and Dell Customer Service Grades of A+ for the way they leveraged chat to do an excellent job taking care of me.

The great news is that its also easy to set up in any business, even the smallest of businesses.  If your business has a website, you can set up a chat button within a day, or less.  Boldchat and LivePerson are two that we’ve used and have been pleased with.

No matter what business you’re in, chat can be a real win for you.  There are always going to be times when you’re team is tied up on the phone and the next customer ends up on voice mail or on hold.  Chat can be another answer.

Now, imagine that you have a Chat button on your site AND you have a good contact management database available to the Chat attendant.  A client initiates a chat by entering their name or email, your attendant looks them up in the contact management system and sees the history of their relationship with your company and now your client is really getting treated like a king!

I know I’m going to be finding new ways to leverage chat.  You should too.

BTW - I watched “I Am Legend” with Will Smith.  Pretty darned good.

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I had an experience like that today.  This customer, we’ll call her Nicky, just joined her company as Director of Sales.  Prior to her arrival, there has been NO sales tracking, contact management, CRM or marketing to speak of.

Nicky’s fought these fights before and she’s got big plans for her new organization.  I love working with people like Nicky!

She knows the value of basic contact management, sales activity tracking and pipeline management.  She also knows that putting some straight forward and management direct marketing in place will help her nurture clients as there is a lot of repeat business in her world.

Its not uncommon that SalesNexus customer have these requirements.  What’s uncommon about Nicky is that she’s not overwhelmed by all the choices, decisions and minutia associated with achieving all of these goals AND she’s not crazy enough to try and do it all at once.

The conversation I had with Nicky was really just blind luck on my part.  Nicky’s business has seasonal patterns and the big sales push of the year is going on right now.  She’s smart enough not to let implementing technology take her eye off that ball.

But right now she’s using an excel sheet to manage the sales pipeline.  Remember, there is no contact management or CRM at all.

Normally, new SalesNexus clients want to get it all in place ASAP.  That means we discuss the type of contact management system they are using now or at least what data they’ll want imported into a new database, then we immediately dive into adding custom fields to tailor the contact management database to the client’s unique needs.  Then we start creating reports that summarize the key metrics in their business and finally build marketing campaigns.

Believe me, an implementation project like this can be a real bear to manage with all of the decisions associated to be made by the client who is still not conversant with the technology.

So Nicky says “Listen Craig, I need a basic contact management database to facilitate data sharing during our sales push.  During that time I’ll start experimenting with tracking sales pipeline in the contact management system.  When October rolls around, I’ll know the system pretty well and THEN I’ll have the time and knowledge I need to decide how to the contact management system should be customized for my business.  Then we can create some reports to track sales activity and the pipeline and then finally, start building marketing campaigns.”

So I say “Wow!  Thank you.  You just made my life a lot easier.  I’m going to love working with you!”

So there is it folks, the road map to successful implementation of a new Contact Management, CRM or Sales and Marketing Automation system:

1. Import your basic contact data into the contact management system and encourage logging of notes and activities.
2. Lets some time pass.  Experiment with queries, reports, etc.  Get to know the system.
3. Then huddle everyone up and decide what specific fields you want to add to the database that are uniquely relevant to your business.
4. Build a report that ties sales activity to sales pipeline - the idea here is that if a sales rep is showing a sales opp at 90% for this month for a huge dollar amount but, he hasn’t completed the key fields in the contact management system and has only had one call or meeting with the customer, you know some thing’s fishy.
5. Then start building marketing campaigns that target the niches you can carve out of the contact management database using the unique fields you’ve added.

I know it seems obvious.  Problem is most customers want it all ASAP so they can realize the ROI that they’re hoping for from their investment in contact management.

I’m going to work on helping customers find the right pace.  Thanks again Nicky!

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I’ve been tweeting for about 5 days now and it is kind of addicting.  It appears that the trick is to “follow” the right people.

As of this morning, I’m following 32 people and 13 are following me.  These people are from all over the country and mostly in the high tech world.  Its sort of like listening in on a phone conversation between people you admire.

By the end of the week, I hope to post some examples of interesting/valuable bits of info I’ve picked up on Twitter.

Follow me here.

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