Is Sales 2.0 About Marketing, Sales, or Both?

In this post I interview Doyle Slayton, sales thought leader and author of the fantastic blog Sales Blogcast. In this interview Doyle shares why he doesn’t think Sales 2.0 is about sales, some of the challenges he’s seeing with the rise of Web 2.0 and customers doing initial research on Google, and why being strategic is more important than ever.

Sales Strategy Interview with Doyle Slayton.

Chad: As a sales rep that is in the game everyday, have you seen any benefits to your business because of Sales 2.0? Why or why not?

Doyle: Yes,  huge benefits, but I can tell you that I have a little different opinion on this one.

I don’t think Sales 2.0 is about sales at all. Sales 2.0 is all about marketing. If you ask me whether Sales 2.0 is helping me with my sales job… the answer is no. If you ask me whether Sales 2.0 is helping me build Sales Blogcast into a full time business, then my answer is a resounding YES!

I’m very active on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook and I maintain a presence on as many other social networking and bookmarking sites as possible. My sales job and my blog have a different target audience, so my Sales 2.0 activities are all dedicated toward building the “Doyle Slayton – Sales and Leadership Strategist – SalesBlogcast.com” brand.

Chad: Do you have any plans to begin using social media like Linkedin and Slideshare in your sales process? Why or why not?

Doyle: My blog, LinkedIn Group, and twitter have all been a part of my sales and marketing strategy from the beginning. All three have helped create a strong web presence.

I focus on asking thought provoking questions, writing articles, and creating valuable discussions around the ideas, challenges, and solutions that people need to be thinking about and talking about to get better!

To answer your question about SlideShare, I visit the site often but I don’t have any of my own slides on there. I like finding other people’s great ideas… and if I think my readers will find value in those presentations, I will post it on SalesBlogcast MindShare. I always have a lot of people tweeting, reblogging, and sharing my posts, so with the things I’m doing on MindShare you could say it is a way of me saying “thank you” and paying it forward.

Chad: What are some of the biggest changes you have seen in the sales industry over the past year and where do you think the industry is heading?

Doyle: The biggest changes I see involve business owners and executive teams who have decided it’s time to make significant changes to help drive sales. In the previous decade, it was easy to say, “These sales people are just making excuses,” but if you can’t retain your people and your business isn’t growing, you start to realize it must be something bigger than just a problem with mental toughness.

Don’t get me wrong, sales will always be about perseverance and working hard, but now more than ever, it’s also about being strategic, building a brand, differentiation, marketing, and most important — lead generation.

Some Sales Challenges and Sales Tips.

Chad: What are the biggest challenges you face everyday and how are you going about overcoming them? Can you share some of your best practices?

Doyle: Far and away, the biggest challenge is getting decision makers to answer the phone. The second biggest challenge revolves around so many products and services becoming commoditized.

But, now that they are shopping, they want to make a good decision, and decide to also visit with other vendors. They do a search on the web to find three or four more providers and invite them to participate in the process.

More than ever, a sales person’s success is largely dependent on the leads lists they are calling from. This used to be a common excuse for non-performers… and that’s why it’s taken so long for sales managers and executives to pinpoint the problem. I’ll put it in perspective and share a few examples.

1. Hoovers/Reference USA – These are unscrubbed lists… unqualified leads. It’s not much different than calling out of the yellow pages. Sales reps have to go down these lists and hammer the phone to try and get through to a decision maker or end user, qualify the prospect as a viable lead, and then begin the sales process.These sales reps are spending about 90% of their time prospecting and 10% of their time selling and closing deals.
2. Qualified Leads – These are lists that come from any number of sources, whether it is a telemarketing team handling the process described above, to working a competitor’s current client list that somehow leaked out to the competition. These sales reps are spending about 70% of their time prospecting and 30% of their time on follow-up and trying to close deals.
3. Interested Prospects – These lists come from scrubbing down the two lists mentioned above, it could also include call in’s, referrals, and responses to marketing efforts. These sales reps are spending 50% of their time in front of prospects who are looking to buy right now… and the other 50% of their efforts on the traditional prospecting, cold calling, and hunting activities.

If you look at most sales reps, here’s what’s happening right now. Let’s say you are selling for a small or medium sized business. Most of your prospects are coming from example  number one above; mainly from extensive outbound cold calling and cold email efforts.

Sales 2.0 Trend: Your Customers Google You First.

You have a prospect who has been putting you off for three months, six months, or maybe they’ve even put you off for more than a year, but this time when you call, they are frustrated with their current provider and they give you the appointment! They are letting you in because of your persistence and professionalism over time. But, now that they are shopping, they want to make a good decision, and decide to also visit with other vendors. They do a search on the web to find three or four more providers and invite them to participate in the process.

The original sales person who at one point loved cold calling and the hunt is now thinking “Are you kidding me? I’m crankin’ the phones doing all the things that in the past have made me a top performer and when I finally get my foot in the door my prospects are using Google to invite everyone else in!!!”

I don’t care how good your product is or how good you are as a sales person, when you are up against three or four other vendors, you are going to win some and you are going to lose some. That’s what I’m talking about when I say that so many products and services are becoming commoditized.

Chad: You recently wrote an awesome blog post on follow up strategies to keep prospects engaged – can you talk a bit about some of these strategies and why they work? Are you using social media in these strategies?

Doyle: Follow-up ranks among the most important activities in sales. If we follow-up with value added purpose, we build credibility, and we keep the prospect engaged.

Our prospects have 10 other sales people calling and 100 other things on their plate. We have to stay in front of them and make ourselves a priority. The whole idea behind my 8 Follow-up Strategies is to separate yourself as a resource who truly has the buyer’s interest in mind. Instead of being the boring rep who calls to “touch base” you are the excited resource who calls with “a new piece of valuable information to share with ya!” It’s information that gets you closer to winning the deal!

Chad: What are some of the biggest mistakes you see sales reps making? What is the best piece of advice you can think of for sales reps?

Doyle: I’d say there are three common mistakes. First is not using your CRM, which leads to weak of follow-up and no measurable pipeline. Second, is not using an effective word-track when calling on prospects which leads to more rejection and lost opportunities. Third, is not knowing “the score.” I often see sales reps on two ends of the spectrum… those who think they are doing poorly but in reality are making great progress. Unfortunately, they don’t know the score, and don’t know how close they really are, and they quit just before achieving success.Then there are reps on the other end of the spectrum. They are doing very poorly, but think they are doing a great job. Again, these people don’t know the score and are out of touch with reality.

Sales 2.0 Trend: Build Your Personal Brand and Rise to the Top.

Chad: How has your awesome blog Sales Blogcast helped to build and promote your personal brand? What made you want to launch a blog?

Doyle: I spent nearly 8 years working my way up through the University of Phoenix system. During the last 5 of those years, I was the Director of Business Development for the Dallas/Fort Worth campuses. My team grew from leading six reps to having responsibility over 3 managers and 25 reps. It was an amazing opportunity to develop a team that was initially not producing, to a team that consistently ranked among the top 5 teams in the nation.

On a couple of occasions, there were advancement opportunities that came open, and because those roles would take me further away from the world of sales, I had no interest in even applying for those positions. There came a point where that segment of my career had run its course, and I needed something new to continue my own personal development.

That’s when I decided to start SalesBlogcast.com. I wanted to share my experiences and my thoughts on sales and leadership. I guess you can say I wanted to put myself out there and see what would happen. It was humbling and exciting to see the type of response my articles were getting! I knew then, if I was really going to make an impact, I was going to have to make one more significant change.

I walked away from University of Phoenix where I had a big salary, stock options, great benefits, and a huge match on my 401k.  I wanted to sell software. I would use these new challenges and experiences to be relevant and real with all of my readers.

Chad: What are some of your favorite blogs around the blogosphere?

Doyle: There are so many great blogs out there… I like to visit Alltop and go to the Sales, Leadership, Marketing, and Social Media pages. I’ll skim over the titles of each RSS feed and click through the ones that catch my attention.

Chad: What do you think is the next big thing in the sales industry? Any thoughts?

Doyle: I’d like to see three things happen.

1. There are a number of lead generation and inbound marketing companies that are attracting a lot of attention. Some of these providers are generalists and others are industry specific. Sales and marketing teams that plug-in to these resources and figure out the lead generation/brand building formula will achieve the greatest success.
2. The best companies will create web portals with electronic tools and resources that their sales team can access to share new information with their prospects. Instead of each sales person having to re-invent the wheel, they will have access to ready made articles, videos, flash demos, white papers, case studies, etc. The most sophisticated portals will have some of these tools automated so that a sales person can select a series of resources to go out to a prospect over a period of time.
3. I think there must be a focus on simplifying CRM tools. Most sales people and even their managers don’t use their CRM because it’s too complicated and too time consuming. Sales managers and CRM providers must come together to customize the CRM to a sales team’s needs and then train the heck out of them to understand exactly how to use the tool to their advantage. It’s the only way to build a strong pipeline and keep prospects from falling through the cracks.

Chad: Thanks Doyle!

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Doyle Slayton is an internationally recognized Sales and Leadership Strategist, Speaker, and author of Sales Blogcast.  He is the founder of SalesBlogcast.com, the online community where business professionals network, share best-practices, and make each other better. Some of Doyle’s most popular writings include, Four Disciplines of Extraordinary Leaders, 10 Things I Love About Cold Calling, Trust and Credibility, Social Web Your Career to the Next Level, and many more.

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4. Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing
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