Guest post by Tristan Bishop @knowledgebishop. Tristan drives digital strategy at Symantec, using social media monitoring and Social CRM to capture customer commentary. He is widely considered to be a powerhouse of knowledge in the Social CRM arena…. and a super silly daddy. Tristan blogs at KnowledgeBishop.
For those that are wondering, “what the heck does customer service have to do with the sales and marketing cycle”? The answer is more than you probably think.
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I just finished Aaron Ross’ new book entitled: Predictable Revenue. If you are in Sales or Marketing leadership you need to read it. If you are a front line sales or marketing professional, read it too and buy it for your boss. For those of you that don’t know Aaron lead the charge at Salesforce.com in building their Enterprise inside sales team. Aaron grew the team from just himself to over $100m in incremental recurring revenues over a few short years.
I was reading David Skok’s For Entrepreneurs blog (one of my favorites if you are interested in building SaaS sales and marketing teams) and I stumbled across this excellent interview with Aaron Ross. Below is my favorite excerpt.
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Guest post by Bob Marsh, SVP Sales Strategy at ePrize and Head of Sales Contest Builder an ePrize company.
This was a question I posed to sales managers via a few different LinkedIn Groups over the last month. It became a lively conversation with over 50 comments made across the groups. While it’s not a statistically significant study, it does provide insight from some experienced sales managers on how to motivate salespeople.
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Here are some really awesome Slideshare sales presentations to dive through at your leisure. I picked these 7 out because they are all truly forward thinking and range from creating best practice inside sales process, creating the social enterprise, viral marketing trends and sales strategy. Have at it!
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As sales reps and leaders we’ve all been on calls with these two personalities – the raving fan and the miserable grump. Both types are similar, they just happen to live on different sides of sales town. What do these prospects have in common? They will never buy from you, no matter what you do or say, no matter how perfect a fit your offering is for their personal aspirations or company. How do you know if you have one of these prospects? I say this tongue in cheek, but it illustrates the point quite well, you could insult the prospects first born child and you would still not notice a change in their demeanor. The fan will still love you and the grump will still be miserable.
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Have you ever wondered where all this rapid change is leading us in the sales and marketing professions? What does the rise of the social networking fabric, advancements in technology and changing buying habits mean for our companies and our jobs? While nobody really knows where all this change is taking us, I do believe there are some tell tale patterns that have emerged. These patterns will continue to etch themselves into the marketplace until they are just the normal course of doing business. Below are some fascinating quotes on these patterns and my take on what it means for sales and marketing leaders.
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At HubSpot we’ve had the pleasure of having some really awesome people stop by to tell us their stories and share their awesomeness in their respective field. For HubSpot’s last Biz Talk we had the pleasure to have Nancy Duarte come tell us her story. For those of you that don’t know Nancy Duarte, she is widely regarded to be the top mind in creating, designing and delivering world class, kick ass presentations. If you have ever seen an Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore, you have experienced the work of Nancy Duarte – she designed the slides for the documentary that became known across the world.
If you are in sales or marketing and want to tell better stories that resonate with your prospects, internal and external stakeholders — you should watch Nancy’s presentation shared here. She is good. She will make you a better story teller and presenter.
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Geoffrey James just wrote an interesting post over at his Sales Machine BNET blog entitled: How Important is Sales Technology. Not Very. He wrote the thing to be edgy, but on the whole I just don’t agree with him. At any rate it warrants a discussion.
Geoffrey’s 4 main points were:
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I speak with executive leaders all day long and sometimes I’m quite bewildered by the belief sets being operated on. I’ve made a list of these sales and marketing limiting beliefs over time and I’ve compiled the top 59 for your enjoyment here. Many of you are going to think these are obvious facts or truths. That is not the case in the executive leadership at more companies than you could ever imagine. If I had to SWAG it I’d say that 70% of all companies have this stuff ass backwards.
Alright, enough postulating, it’s time to let it rip baby.
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Sales reps know objections are a part of the sales process and there are many great resources that detail strategies for handling objections. Many of these strategies focus on how to handle objections verbally in either face to face encounters or over the phone. There is much less thought leadership on how to handle objections with content and this post will dive into a few ways you can do just that.
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Here is the dirty little secret in the sales industry – sales quotas across the board are going up and sale rep quota attainment is going down. I asked my friends over at the Service Coach to share their thoughts on this alarming trend and why it’s happening. Here’s the low-down, no frills, no BS take on some ugly, ugly data.
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Guest post by Russ Emrick of Breakout Selling:
Very few salespeople are achieving their quota. The numbers are alarming – down to almost 50% and down from 64% quota attainment in 2008 and 67% quota attainment in 2007. The data raises many questions for sales organizations. While quotas have risen by 33% in the past 5 years less reps are hitting their number. The question becomes why and how do we fix it?
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The most mind boggling statistic in the sales industry has to be that 50% of sales reps are not making quota. With all the Sales 2.0 tools available and ease of finding info on the web the sales industry is still struggling to hit its goals. I want to know why. So I asked Trish Bertuzzi the founder and President of the Bridge Group and inside sales bona fide expert to give us the skinny on some troubling data.
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As many of you know I work for HubSpot, a cutting edge inbound marketing software company that is transforming the traditional methods of marketing. HubSpot is a real world, living and breathing case study of best practice sales and marketing alignment. In the series of posts to follow this one I will focus on how to transform your organizations into a sales and marketing aligned machine.
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You have no doubt heard the hype about selling more with social media. I can’t read through 10 blog posts today without reading some advice on how social media is going to “completely change” the sales profession. With the rise of a new technology the sales consultants, gurus, talking heads, etc are heavy with advice on how to use social media to sell more. Too many sales professionals and organizations are dazed and confused and are using the wrong sales strategies to leverage social media in the sales process. Too many tactics and tools and not enough strategy backed with process and data.
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Guest post by Brian Zimmerman Principal at OpenView Venture Partners.
Sales managers have long been searching for ways to encourage their team members to be more productive and efficient. In my experience working as both a head of sales and now assisting expansion stage companies for OpenView Venture Partners, I’ve found one consistent problem impeding that productivity and efficiency.
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Fun post I helped out on for the HubSpot blog.
Excerpt:
The applications of social media don’t stop in marketing. Social media can also be a very helpful tool in the sales process when Sales is following up with leads and opportunities, especially considering the fact that, SiriusDecisions projects that by 2015, 71% of initial BtoB inquiries will be web-driven, and “a sound social media strategy is key to driving this inbound interest.”
So how can you use social media intelligence to help you make a sale? I recently sat down with Chad Levitt, a member of HubSpot’s own sales team and the author of the New Sales Economy Blog, to discover how he uses social media intel to prep for his sales calls. This is what I learned…
For the full post click here.
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This is a pretty neat infographic I stumbled across from the great team over at InsideView. The data highlights the efforts of Global Fortune 100 companies around social media and some interesting consumer trends. One thing is certainly clear — a large part of the sales process is happening on your company website, blog and social media properties before your prospect ever speaks with a sales rep.
Some interesting takeaways:
Forrester estimates that by 2014 3.1 billion dollars will be spent on social media passing email and mobile spend
Fortune 100 companies are blogging an average of 7 times per month
A negative customer review can cost a company about 30 customers
Social networking sites are visited by 75% of global consumers who go online
Some things I’d like more data on:
Of Fortune 100 companies that are actively using social media and blogging, how many of those companies are generating leads for their sales team with these efforts?
How much revenue can these Fortune 100 companies tie to their social media and blogging efforts?
Of the Fortune 100 companies with B2B sales teams, how many closed deals that can be tied to a lead that was generated through a social media or blogging channel?
That would be a cool follow up infographic @insideview!
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The rise of the new economy after the financial meltdown of 2008 and the resulting depression has lead to some interesting shifts in the corner office.
As the economy is expected to rebound in the next couple years (no guarantee here), CEO and senior leadership turnover is predicted to rise at major companies according to a recent Businessweek article with data from Crist/Colder Associates.
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Really interesting presentation from Charlene Li (@charleneli), founder of the Altimeter Group. I’ll get up a post shortly with my thoughts mapping some of these disruptive technologies back to B2B sales. If you take the time to go through the presentation you will see many of the disruptive trends are around changing consumer buying habits/business models. It won’t happen overnight, however, I believe we are going to start seeing these disruptive forces in B2B sales environments within a a couple years, maybe less.
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Check out this fabulous Slideshare presentation by HubSpot on Marketing Transformation. I may work for HubSpot and some might call me biased, while that may be true, this is still one kick ass presentation.
Buying habits are changing. Marketing is changing. Sales is changing. Is your company changing?
For more on the Marketing Transformation movement join HubSpot for an eye-opening, week-long look at how search engines, social media, and mobile technology are transforming our lives—and how businesses like yours are embracing and utilizing these tools to transform costly, low-yield marketing programs into finely-tuned lead-generation machines.
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I absolutely love the research the Altimeter Group cranks out on a weekly basis – it’s must read stuff if you want to understand what is coming down the pike. It’s a fun brainteaser to try and map evolving social trends back to B2B sales and marketing processes.
There’s a good deal of chatter on social selling and how buyer 2.0 is changing B2B sales organizations’ go to market strategy. Most of this conversation zips right to which magical Sales 2.0 technology to buy to help sales reps take advantage of relevant social media conversations and trigger events happening on the web.
IMHO that’s like asking a woman to marry you on the first date just because she is hot.
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I’m always down for a little bit of sales chart porn. Here is some great stuff from my friends over at The Bridge Group.
Source: The Bridge Group
What is the takeaway?
The traditional sales model of direct field sales reps is moving to more cost effective inside sales models. Just look at some of the growth numbers in any inside sales hiring study. The profession of inside sales is on the rise. Are you ready?
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Is your company struggling to generate more high quality leads for your sales team? If you answered yes, you are not alone, in fact, you are in the majority of organizations that name their biggest marketing challenge as generating high quality leads for their sales team.
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Some light reading to catch up on over the weekend for those so inclined.
Is It Time For A New Compensation Model For Search And Digital Marketers?
Need to Justify Social Media? Use Real Numbers About Real Money
Why Groupon Is Poised For Collapse
Inside Sales Tip: 7 Slump-Busting Ways to Get Your Mojo Back
Why HubSpot Acquired Marketing Automation Company Performable
B2B Response Databases: Which is Best?
Getting Funded in a Frothy Market
The Blurry b2b Buying Process and the New Breed of b2b Buyer
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