Sales Readiness In the Digital Age
•Als PPTX, PDF herunterladen•
0 gefällt mir•1,510 views
Integrated marketing had made it easier than ever before for an organization to nurture cold leads to the point of sales readiness. In this webinar, Mike Vannoy, COO of Sales Engine International, discusses what "sales readiness" means in the digital age as well as other sales best practices.
Empfohlen
Empfohlen
Weitere ähnliche Inhalte
Was ist angesagt?
Was ist angesagt? (20)
Ähnlich wie Sales Readiness In the Digital Age
Ähnlich wie Sales Readiness In the Digital Age (20)
Mehr von SalesEngine
Mehr von SalesEngine (19)
Kürzlich hochgeladen
Kürzlich hochgeladen (20)
Sales Readiness In the Digital Age
- 1. Sales Readiness in the Digital Age
- 2. For Today‟s Presentation • To join the audio portion of this webinar: Call: 1 (773) 945-1011 Access code: 286-562-701 • We will start promptly at 1:00 PM EST • Your phones are muted. Please use the Q&A function of the meeting window. (found under “Tools” menu)
- 3. About Sales Engine International • Private - founded in 2006 • Executive team of senior sales and marketing executives built their own “sales engine” that delivered ½ decade double digit sales growth for $1B company • Provide Integrated Marketing Services to companies from Start-ups to Fortune 50 • Growing 126% annually by using the same “sales engine” we provide our clients • We‟re not consultants that “tell” you how to do it… we are an outsourced business process and we do it all for you
- 4. About today‟s speaker Mike Vannoy COO, Sales Engine International Mike Vannoy is a Partner and Chief Operating Officer at Sales Engine International. He has learned the best practices in sales acceleration founding start-ups, running large sales teams and as a senior executive in a Fortune 500 company. Mike is a Yellow Belt in Six Sigma and is responsible for all client operations at Sales Engine International. www.SalesEngineIntl.com
- 5. Agenda • What is a “qualified” lead? • Lessons Learned • Sales Readiness – Timing – Sales Intelligence – Situational Fluency • Failure points in digital marketing • Conclusion & QA
- 6. What‟s a “qualified” lead?
- 7. Sales & Marketing “Alignment”
- 8. Marketing is in Nirvana • Content is being created & campaigns executed • Prospects are visiting the web and being nurtured • Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL‟s) are flowing in
- 9. Sales is trying to make quota • MQL‟s are only one source of Leads • Enormous pressure to make quota this Qtr • Spent entire career qualifying sales opportunities
- 10. “Aligned” but love-fest is over
- 11. Lessons Learned? The game has changed
- 12. Shift from “Alignment” to “Integration” Alignment Integration • Ideal Prospect Profile Timing • Buying Personas Sales Intelligence • Lead scoring Situational fluency • Rules of engagement
- 13. Timing is everything • 100x more likely to „connect‟ with lead within 5 minutes vs. 30 minutes • 21x more likely to „convert‟ leads contacted within 5 minutes vs. 30 minutes • 7x more likely to have “meaningful conversations” w/decision makers” in 1st hour • Only 37% of companies respond within hour
- 14. Timing is everything • Real time email/text alerts • Email, web visits & content consumption • Include contact information • Include context of the digital behavior • Design for mobile devices
- 15. Does sales intelligence matter? Access to prospect Business Intelligence (BI) 60% 54% 54% 50% 47% 47% 40% 34% 30% 25% 20% 18% 18% 10% 0% Inside Sales Outside Sales Lead Conversion Win/Loss rate achieving quota achieving quota rate Access to prospect BI No access to prospect BI Source: Aberdeen Group, January 2010
- 16. Sales Intelligence: What keeps them up at night
- 17. Sales Intelligence: What they are interested in
- 18. Sales Intelligence: Who they‟re connected to • 90% of C-level executives never respond to email blasts or cold calls • 80% do engage when referred by a connection
- 19. Situational fluency • MQL’s are only one source of Leads • Enormous pressure to make quota this quarter • Spent entire career qualifying sales opportunities • Different skills & talk-track to qualify vs. engage top-of- funnel prospects
- 20. Situational fluency • Create a „playbook‟ for every campaign • Align „marketing‟ message with high probability pains of prospects • Not all „Click-thrus‟ are alike… they didn‟t ASK to be called but they ARE interested • Give reps the questions to uncover and quantify the pain • Give it to reps anywhere on any device at any time
- 21. Failure points… Sales Readiness
- 22. Conclusions • The game has changed • Sales Readiness requires more than “alignment” • Effective „sales ready‟ teams – Follow up at the right time – Armed with great knowledge – And equipped with what to say
- 23. Thank you Q&A‟s
- 24. Get the map 878% better than cold calling If you would like to receive a copy of our Sales Acceleration Map, email: alexis.borucke@salesengineintl.com
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Alexis
- So I looked on KeywordSpy.com this morning at it appears there are about 2,900 searching the term “qualified lead” each month and a Google search results in page after page of case studies, white papers and all kinds of brilliant people telling you what a qualified lead is. As a person who runs a business delivering nurtured leads to clients, I can tell you that the answer is… whatever the sales team says it is. Seriously, there are some clients where the founder CEO is the sale reps for the company and only has the bandwidth to call people who fill out a ‘contact me’ form. Other large clients with deep pockets saturate the the market with large field organizations filled with hunters looking under every rock and a new name that can fog a mirror is a lead. In the b2b space, sales cycles tend t be longer, involve more people and buying influences and the lines between lead and sales opportunity are vanishing because the buyer is in control like never before and they will choose to engage when they want to and wont when they don’t… no matter what sales training class you just attended. According to Serius Decisions, 70% of b2b buyers report they didn't follow a linear process when evaluating vendors and bounced back and for the between steps making it impossible to a) map a single linear marketing to sales handoff and b) a single definition of when the darn lead is qualified… this environment sets up the concept of splitting his notion of “qualification” to MQLs and SQLS whereby both parties can agree to what marketing needs to do to start the digital conversation with prospects, Sales can do what they do best, qualify those prospects and then we measure how many MQL’s turn into SQLs and start the never ending process of optimizing what each group does.So how do we get sales and marketing aligned in this new digital world?
- Again, a simple google search will give you all kinds of places to start and we think there are a couple of really critical first steps that everyone should take:First define your ideal prospect profile… your IPP. This simple exercise will have a huge impact getting sales and marketing on the same page.Second, go a step further and really flush out the buying personas in those ideal prospects.. This will get everyone using the same vocabulary and better understanding what makes the prospect tick.From there, it makes sense to map out common processes for handing leads to sales and back to marketing for further nurturing.What we find is this Kumbya meeting between sales and marketing ends with hugs and high fives celebrating the new found “alignment” between the two organizations…
- Marketing is giddy coming out of the meeting feeling like they finally are respected by the sales department and their “mutually defined processes” will finally hold those cowboy sales reps accountable to following up on the leads they have worked so hard to nurture and deliver. They’ve attended all of the webinars on digital marketing, their editorial calendar is packed, content is being created, they are engaged in the social web and the MQL’s are flowing in… they are thinking “sales is gonna LOVE me!”
- Then…. enter reality. The sales reps and sales leadership team was completely sincere when they agreed to the definitions of the IPP, the buying personas and the flow charted follow up plan but what they weren't ready for was that they weren't equipped to make the most from these leads. For one thing their manager still ehld them accountable for their own prospecting so there was an unspoken deterrent to give “credit” to marketing for leads. More importantly when they did follow up on these leads, they used the same techniques they had been trained on… qualify for access to power, negotiate for access for economic buyers, quality for budget, need, authority and timeframe…. The problem is… they are using these techniques on a prospect who didn't’t ask to be called and merely clickd on an interesting article to read. They aren't in the market, they don’t hate their current vendor and they don’t want a sales pitch. After about 1-2 days of hitting the phone following up on these MQL’s with their boss asking for this month’s forecast… they quickly abandon the MQLs and dismiss marketing as “not getting it”.
- And so… shortly after they all walked out the meeting hand in hand on their way to happy hour… the love fest is over. Sales and marketing were aligned but not integrated.
- So what have we learned…Borrowing an analogy from sports, the two functions cannot operate like a football team: one group take the field for offense and another for defense. They must function more like a soccer team: a single group of players on the field -- some primarily play offense, some primarily play defense, and some (midfielders) play both, helping their team score and preventing the opponent from scoring. Sometimes, the ball gets booted all the way down field, but generally a soccer team moves the ball forward from one line to the next, sometimes passing the ball laterally or back a line for “support” until there is a clear opening to move forward. The whole team works toward keeping the ball in the scoring end of the field and preventing opponents from taking the lead.So how do we get everyone on the same field moving in the same direction at the same time?
- We do it by truly integrating the two functions rather than aligning on a superficial level of understanding. Again, things like IPP, buying personas, lead scoring and rules of engagement are alll very good things. But to integrate sales with marketing we need to deliver the right message at the right time, with the right information and with the right words that align to the prospects buying journey. Lets take a deaper dive into these three components of integration:TimingSales IntelligenceSituational fluency
- First lets talk about timing… today’s technology allows real time reporting on who’s opening emails, who’s on your website and what pages are they on and for how long… this all may seem a bit big brother to some and I've had many clients directly say they don’t want to call the prospect right away because they don’t want to creep them out. But think about your own behavior… if someone send you an email, one of 150 that day, and you happen to click on it because the headling was interesting…. You speed read the article clicked on another page and thought to your self…. “hmmm, interesting but back to work” and on your day you went. If a sales rep happened to call 20 minutes later… not asking about the email you just opeend but instead with a well thought through open ended question about the same pain point the article was about…. How much more likely are you to spend the next 3o seconds on the phone with this person than if they called… say, a couple days later. Do you think you would even remember the name of their company” would that pain point still be top of mind or would you be focused on the next fire in your office?The data is very clear that the sooner you can follow up on a prospects interest, the more likely you will be to engage them<read stats>
- So what specifically should you do…. Well there are tons of vendors who can give you real time alerts when people open your emails, click through, visit your website, download or watch content… You MUST turn this technology on and get it in the hands of your reps. At Sales Engine we turn on these sales alerts and include critical information like contact information and intelligence about what pages the prospect clicked on tipping their hat to the topics they are most interested in. Now I would strongly advocate for dedicated inside sales time to follow up on campaigns so you can jump on this digital interest immediately but you should also enable these alerts for mobile devices so a sales rep could get the alert and make the call right from the information on the screen.Share story… client used to follow up 48 hours after campaigns, turned on real time alerts and immediate calling and appointments went up 300% the very first campaign.
- So now that we are calling at the right time tanks to technology integration… what do we need to know when we pick up the phone? Well Aberdeen produced a tellign story a year ago where they showed how access to BI (business inteligence) improved Lead conversions by a whopping 16% and had material impact on every other phase fo the sales process.For our discussion today, since we are talking about alignment and integration lets focus on the lead conversion numbers…. What would be the revenue impact on your business if you converted 16% more leads into your funnel? That would eb a life changing event for most businesses. But when we say business intelligence, what do we mean? I’m going to break it down into 3 buckets:What keeps the prospect up at nightWhat are they interested in,,, specifically what about YOU are they interested in, andWho are they connected to
- First what keep them up at night. We have a saying that your prospects are shopping without you on the internet… they will buy from someone, the question is will it be you. Well. The reverse is also true… you can learn all about your prospet online without ever having a sales call…. Your competitors have access to this same information… who will be more prepared… you or your competitor?There are dozens of great vendors that integrate with Saleforce Automation systems to give you great business intelligence at your fingertips. Now an inside sales rep making 75+ dials a day may not have time to do a deep dive on a prospect and read a dossier, but anyone can glance at the headlines and key business metrics while dialing the phone…. There is no excuse to not be prepared when you pick up the phone today.
- Now that you know about they business and their industry… what is it they know about YOU? And what are they interested in? This is where good marketing automation comes in… you MUST have good marketing automation and you MUST integrate it to your SFA or CRM system so that you build a personal history for every prospect… measure exactly what content they are consuming, what campaigns made a connection and which ones didn’t and what web pages are they focusing on. Simply having an alert that the prospect is on your website is not enough… what would the conversation look like if they were on your core product pages vs. the careers page? Would you call to “introduce” the company and give a high level “overview” to someone who had spent 30 minutes on your site today reading nearly every page and clicking thru on all of you emails for the last month? Of course not, just like you wouldn’t dive deep into requirements gathering for someone who’s never heard of you.We provide this kind of detail to our clients and integrate with the major CRM platforms to be sure reps have this Intel before picking up the phone.One client shared a story where they were being squeezed in a negotiation where the prospect was actin like they were no linger interested in their phone conversations and insisting they needed a better price to even consider them as an option… their digital body language told a different story however and the reps ability to immediately jump on the phone with the prospect when they were actively researching them on the website turned the deal around.
- Finally we need to now who the prospect is connected to. The reality is that no mater how well prepared you may be about their business and what they are interested in, if you cant get them to take a meeting it may all be for nothing.<read stats>The mainstream social apps like LinkedIn all integrate to applocations like SFDC which make it easy to use your knowledge to leverage relationships that can better get you access.
- The final area is situational fluency… for those of you who have in selling in the b2b space for a decade or mare probably know this term from the old Bozworth Solution Selling model. Well the model still works today it just needs to be applied in the right way. Again, lets think about our own behavior… if you got an email, say a newsletter, from a company you’ve never heard of but the subject line caught your attention… you may open that email. If the copy and graphics are consistent with what you thought you were opening and the call-to-action was compelling, you may click thru… maybe you read an article or whitepaper or signed up for a webinar like this one. You didn’t explicitly ask a sales rep to call you but you did tip your hand that you had at least SOME level of interest in that topic. As a rule… busy executives may “open” email by simply browsing through their inbox, but they don’t take the deliberate action to CLICK unless they are actually interested. They’re too busy to waste they time if they weren't interested.But this is where the situational fluency comes in because asking old fashioned BANT questions qualifying for budget, authority, need and timeframe my be like asking a girls to marry you on the first date… you will scare them away and possibly get a restraining order! And you don’t want to forever burn that bridge wth a viable prospect who was digitally engaged at the top of the funnel.
- The answer is playbooks. Playbook script out the detail for reps by literally giving them the open ended questions to ask that will flush out the prospects pain… coincidentally the same pain that the articefocussed on. The playbook also gives a script to leave for voicemail and copy paste text for a 1:1 email follow up.<we do this for all clients><importance of web based playbooks for real time updates and any device so they can prep for calls on the road>
- <eveiw map at high level and talk about faiure point>
- <read>