Are Your Prospects Apologizing? They Should...

I was talking with a VP Sales at a tech company today and the topic came up of how difficult it can be to reach prospects. We were on the same page as he realized it takes numerous attempts to reach a prospect and he gave me an example of how he had to call one prospect in particular 4-5 times. Most reps would have given up by then we agreed. I said I bet the prospect apologized when you connected with him finally didn't he? He said YES. We have that happen all the time, it's an indicator of doing something right.

Do you often hear your prospects apologize?

You might ask...why would a prospect apologize? What could they do to me that they need to? Or why would I confront them and put them in a position where they needed to apologize? Hmmm....

Prospects often apologize very early in discussions. What does this mean to you? It means you now have their attention.

But the question of WHY they would apologize is still out there. ANSWER: They apologize because a client called them ranting about a problem and they had to put out a fire, or one of their staff had to leave on a family emergency, or they had a key team member quit, or because they get 300 emails and 15 vendor calls a day, or because an enterprise platform they just bought crashed, or they have 200 sites offline right now because an application went down....the reasons are innumerable.

But why would they apologize to YOU about how busy they are?

Because they DO have an active requirement and they ARE interested, they know they asked for information or even had a great call with you already--there IS an opportunity, they just got so crazy busy they couldn't call you back. The fact you had to call them 4x is kind of embarrassing for them, and they really apologize they weren't available. You have their attention now...

If you aren't hearing a lot of apologies--are you connecting with a lot of your prospects? A traditional approach is to call prospects 1x o 3x and then give up. I have even heard reps say "if they were interested they would call me back."

Wendy Weiss quotes from a recent study in her Cold Calling Bootcamp: The National Sales Executive Association did that discovered:

2% of sales are closed from a single attempt,
3% from two attempts,
5% after 3 attempts,
10% after 4 attempts,
but here is the whopper--
80% of deals closed after making from 5-12 attempts.

Companies often do a "Did They Buy" Study on past leads that typically reveal that from 50%-70% of your prospects ended up buying something, but did they buy it from you? Prospects tend to take the path of least resistance, so if someone is making it easy to buy from them, by being available and persistent--they have increased their chances of getting the deal.

Jill Konrath's book, SNAP Selling, goes into great detail about the "crazy busy" world our prospects are working in. Today's sales reps need to navigate their prospects busy lives to connect, it's well worth the effort since the percentage of closed deals skyrockets after 5 attempts.

If you hear a lot of apologies from your prospects, you are doing a great job keeping them engaged and making it easy for them to buy from you. If you aren't, then take a look at your process for follow up and ask if you might be giving up too early?

When was the last time a prospect told you they were sorry they didn't call you back sooner?

Are Your Beliefs About Prospects Costing You Deals?

The last mile of any lead generation program is that stage where the rep needs to connect with prospects and close the deal.

Over the years, research organizations like The Aberdeen Group, SiriusDecisions, and CSO Insights have all reported that a high percentage of leads never receive a follow up from sales--why is that?

With all the sales enablement systems, processes, automation tools, and training--reps still have a hard time connecting with prospects. I had a great discussion with sales transformation expert Aaron Ross this week, and he made an excellent point that reps do things for reasons they think are valid, or for reasons they may not even realize are costing them results.

Why would reps do things that are counter productive? Part of it stems from their belief system about prospects. The top 7 of those beliefs are:

1. If the prospect was really interested, they would have called me back


2. I don't send email as a follow up


3. If they were interested they would schedule a meeting


4. Prospects don't return voicemails


5. Prospects don't like getting sales calls


6. Cold calling is a waste of time


7. You can't reach executives over the phone

If these beliefs were true, we would all be out of business--I would certainly be since my business is cold calling executives! Let's look at these one at a time:

#1--The truth is, prospects can be super interested and are just too busy to call back. Executives depend on the tenaciousness of reps to keep connecting with them to keep the dialog going. The Bridge Group's study on this showed reps often need to call in excess of 7 times to reach executives! Executives get hundreds of emails and dozens of calls a day--that is a lot of noise. Reps that realize this and change their belief to something along the lines of "I need to call them several times to reach them--they are super busy and I understand that" see a much higher % of connects, and deals.

#2--The truth is that email isn't a follow-up in of itself. But what it does do is act as a vehicle to keep your name and your company name in front of them until you reach them. Use the power of that mental imprint to build momentum in your connection effort. A belief like "Sending them a note helps them to remember me when I call--just because they didn't respond doesn't mean they didn't see it" will see good results.

#3--Some prospects perceive meetings as sales pressure. The depth of discussion executives are willing to disclose on informal calls is huge. A belief that "prospects don't need a meeting to have an in-depth discussion" frees you up to have a productive, unplanned discussion.

#4--The truth is prospects do listen to voicemails. They can't call you back if they didn't know you called, and even if they get too busy to call you back your voicemail will often prompt them to look at your site, note your info, talk about it to their peers, and get visibility for you that you didn't know you had. Believing "voicemail makes a difference" helps build momentum in you connection effort.

#5, 6--A more accurate way to say this is prospects don't like getting bad cold calls. The thing reps forget it part of being an executive is making and taking calls. They call people constantly, and they fully expect to be called by people they don't know. What is irritating is to get a call from a rep that is pushy, gimmicky, assumptive, or some other unproductive trait is going to get cut short. Believe "executives are open to get calls that are peer-to-peer, open discussions that get to the point and have substance" will help reps have a whole different dynamic in their discussions.

#7--Applying #1-6 thought transformations can overturn this belief that executives can't be reached, or persistent lead follow-up is a waste of time. Prospects do in fact take calls, we have literally hundreds of thousands of examples that they do. It takes more calls, more effort, more thought about what you will say. But when you do that--you'll see that the negative beliefs did nothing but hold you back.

Do you need help to transform your reps beliefs about prospects?

2012--The Ingredient For Success, Hindsight

Over the last few years, marketing and sales teams have experienced a lot of changes--some great, some challenging, some worked beyond what was hoped for, and some we aren't seeing in many marketing roadmaps for 2012. Now that companies better know who and where their prospect are, they can focus on reaching a higher concentration of them with their demand generation efforts.

The great thing about the last few years is hindsight is 20/20. The experiences you've already had, and results available through recent studies can help you to achieve a new level of success THIS year by focusing on those high-return activities.

A recent report on sales intelligence showed reps are performing at a 11%+ higher quota attainment by using sales and marketing enablement tools to prospect accounts. The challenge is getting reps to use them, or even for management to block out the time to train them. We have been able to help our clients get the benefit of social media, demographic sales intelligence, and optimized lead management by providing an outbound teleprospecting solutionthat utilizes all of those as part of a high return teleprospecting effort. So for teams that internally are still at the early stages of defining how to best utilize those, we can give them the advantage as though they were using them internally without any adoption resistance.

The result? One client told us that 80% of the last 5 large deals that closed were from our lead generation program. Again and again we see that by staying on top of where sales and marketing enablement is going and bringing best-practices to our clients, they get the benefit without the pain of any learning curve or resistance to adopting new ways to prospect.

Are you leveraging best practices of the current marketing and sales landscape that has proven itself? Are you looking at these solutions or onboarding partners that use them effectively for your campaigns?

InsideView, Data.com, Marketo, Salesforce, and solid practices around lead lifecycle management and sales intelligence all contribute to increased revenue.

Onboarding partners with a plug-and-play infrastructure and optimized environment that leverages the above solutions gives you immediate ability to still bump your pipeline to that 11% increased performance result.

Hindsight shows what is working for teams today and how they are meeting aggressive revenue goals--what that means for you is you can quickly leverage those practices that work for your own teams.

Happy Selling!

Sales-Ready Leads vs. Engagement-Ready

One of the ongoing topics in the struggle of sales and marketing alignment maps to the definition of timing for sales to engage with a prospect and what is a "sales-ready" lead. The answer to that question has a direct bearing on the success of any particular campaign. It also represents a component of the measurement criteria any organization would use as definition of sales-ready opportunities.

How can you figure out the answer to this question for your organization?

First, you have to look at 5 areas:

1) Your sales cycle and methodology
2) Average deal size
3) Your position in the competitive environment
4) Objectives around pipeline building
5) Prospect behavior

One of the many areas marketing automation serves is developing the relationship in the white space between identifying a prospect and when they are ready to engage. This has clearly paid off for the companies making this investment.

However, the answer to when the rep engages truly will vary depending on the answers to the 5 areas above.

I did a post a while back about not letting BANT downgrade good leads. The point of that is if you don't redefine when you should engage, you will lose opportunities. If you have a more transactional-based sale, and it really is being in the right place at the right time, then traditional BANT may apply to you. But in large enterprise deals, buyers engage with vendors early in their project cycle, they are willing to bring you in, socialize you to the key members on their team, let you influence their requirements planning, and will develop a preference for vendors long before BANT criteria all comes together.

BANT shouldn't be the marker for when you engage, it should be the marker for when you engage differently. Your behavior as a company may change to align with the timing and budget, but you should be engaged with them before it gets to that stage if you are looking at a large opportunity. Buyer behavior has defined that requirement as they clearly are willing and want to talk with vendors early. If you wait too long, you are already entering an environment where you are displaced by relationships your competitors have already forged.

By looking at opportunities as being "engagement-ready" builds a stronger pipeline and will achieve greater revenue. Buyer behavior is a critical consideration of an engagement-ready opportunity in large enterprise sales. If a company is at an early stage of a project and they want to talk to you now, then you are investing in their eagerly maintaining the relationship all the way to getting the business!

Engagement 101

All marketing and sales teams look for the silver bullet to get prospects to talk to them. It is the subject of countless blogs, articles, and LinkedIn Groups. Is there something everyone is missing? Is there a blind spot reps and marketers have that will solve this?

The answer isnt a secret—it’s just factoring “real life” into the picture. It isn’t a certain phrase or time of day or trick to get prospectsto agree to listen, it is just being a peer. Peers understand how to connect with their peers. Approaching a conversation with understanding makes all the difference.

Your prospects get up to 20 calls a day from vendors, not to mention dealing with their internal teams and many responsibilities they have. Demands on their time and attention is constant. A vendor call is the first thing to fall off their radar; a vendor call is the very lowest priority on their list. Keeping that in mind helps reps adapt to their selling environment. It isn’t that there is no opportunity, even an active one—just initiating a discussion about something new isn’t something everything will stop for.

A way to illustrate this principle, let’s say a reporter has a very exclusive interview with a very hard to reach individual—getting this interview will advance their credibility and their career, and the individual told the reporter “okay you can talk to me on my morning run, but I won’t stop running—but if you can keep up I’ll talk.” Does the reporter say “no, I will call you once and you call me later that day--that is how I normally do this.” The opportunity will have come and gone before that happens and the story becomes old news, and likely another reporter will hacve got the story. A smart reporter will take the opportunity on the interviewee’s terms, put on some running shoes and get out there and get their story. Adapt to the environment.

Reps have their proverbial running shoes they need to put on, and that is persistence and agility. Your prospects are running all day, and you have to run alongside them to connect. They will talk to you but it’s on their terms. Even sales ready leads out of automation platforms need reps to adapt when it comes to the actual discussion. This takes it to the next level and offers up new challenges. What are your prospects terms?

1. You have to keep trying to catch me, I am busy and have a lot going on.

2. Vendors are low priority until I make a connection and see the value.

3. Don’t waste my time with trying to schedule a meeting before I know if there’s an opportunity, you got me on the phone—tell me something that keeps me interested.

But what if you say “They should call me back—I sent them an email and left them a voicemail.” You can certainly take that position, and reps do that every day. And their prospects still don’t call back and they are buying from competitors all the time. It creates a vicious circle of no one getting what they need; the prospect still has a requirement and the rep still doesn’t connect.

Staying at the speed your prospects are at is the single most important change you can make to your outreach effort—don’t wait for a call back.

Happy Selling!

What Social Media Brings to Cold Calling

The Sales 2.0 Conference this last week drove home excellent points for sales reps and managers alike about utilizing social media in the selling process. One of the data points discussed was from CSO Insights recent study how 92% of sales teams have raised quotas in 2011. One of the ways reps can meet the challenge is to better utilize the available data in social media sites to develop and maintain more active opportunities.

It's interesting most companies use social media as part of their overall marketing strategy with Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc. But sales organizations often utilize (or not) social media quite differently as an internal resource. Some sales teams are still struggling to find contacts in accounts or don't know how to leverage free data out on the web to help them access and understand their prospects.

It is even still frowned upon in some sales teams to spend time on social media sites researching prospects. The thing to realize is social media has a multi-faceted application, both business and personal, and if sales organizations don't know the value for B2B, the positive impact can be hidden. Also, unless a rep understands what they are looking for, they can spend time looking in the wrong places. Some companies have invested in sales intelligence sites such as InsideView which is a great investment for teams to have access to all relevant information on social media sites, the web, and available sales intelligence on companies/prospects.

Two areas contribute to success in researching prospects:

1. Understanding HOW to use social media sites for B2B research

2. Knowing what information lives in which sites.

Here is a starter model any B2B rep can use.

Look up prospects on LinkedIn before you call them for the first time. You will learn something about their role, their history, their "brand." You may have contacts and groups in common and discover you aren't so out of their circle of contacts as you may have thought.

Also look up the company profile on LinkedIn, understand their offers and how they communicate to the world. You don't have to read everything you find, just get a feel for who they are. It also helps reps understand what is important to organizations. For example, if they have a "green" initiative, how can you speak to that? Like an individual profile, it is also a centralized point of info for other things such as press releases.

It is also important to know what not to research that may be a time waster. No need to spend large amounts of time finding your prospects' personal interests on Facebook, view photo galleries, personal tweets, or anything that has no bearing on your interaction. Doing that much of a deep dive takes time that impacts productivity. Most people monitor their privacy settings and don't make everything available, but more isn't better in terms of research.

Your prospects will appreciate you have done your research and it will help you mold your discussion to the right topics.

If companies see the value in leveraging social media for prospect information and build a best practice for using it, they will definitely achieve positive impact on their pipeline and productivity!

Happy Selling!

Impact of Marketing Automation, CEO's from Marketo and Eloqua at Dreamforce

Marketers have become much more bottom-line oriented over the last several years with great success. In the enterprise selling environment though, there are still some core challenges. A few of the big ones are providing long-term reporting on programs, maximum utilization and coverage of leads, and how to track revenue.

Back in 2008, the CMO Council released a report that stated over 45% of B2B marketers were unable to measure the return of their programs--it's a real multi-dimensional challenge since sales cycles can exceed 12 months or more in enterprise sales environments.

Understanding the potential impact within YOUR organization will help map out objectives and create a reasonable roadmap to implement the many features and see long-term results. Over the last couple of years, our clients that are using automation platforms along with our own reporting have been able to see the huge impact their telemarketing programs alone make--so we are a big fan of the visibility analytics and reporting provide.

At Dreamforce this year, marketing automation was a hot topic. Below are a couple of great interviews with Marketo's CEO Phil Fernandez, and Eloqua's Joe Payne. The interview, conducted by Marketing Automation Software Guide, discusses many topics, some of the highlights are marked below.

Phil Fernandez, Marketo:

1:13 Revenue Performance Management helps companies generate more revenue
1:40 The way marketing and sales have worked in the past has changed completely, Buyer 2.0
2:50 Revenue Performance Management is about helping sales be more effective

Joe Payne, Eloqua:

0:55 How marketing automation ties sales and marketing together
2:23 How marketing automation affects the funnel
7:27 Marketing is key to driving revenue

8:07 The process of selling has to change

13:44 The importance of revenue to CEO's