Cube Management: Elevator Pitch

Elevator Pitch. So what's our elevator pitch around this new mantra or this new tag line? Well, here we go:

So, what does Cube Management do? We help companies transform their sales and grow their business with globalization and fierce competition. We help our clients set themselves apart from their competitors and rise to the top of their market. We provide outsourcing, consulting and recruiting services that help our customers sell more. What makes us different in our market, is our integrated solutions across the spectrum of sales marketing and business development. No other company in the Pacific Northewest has the capability to provide such a holistic set of sales, marketing, and recruiting services as Cube Management does today.

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Cube Management Mantra: Transform Your Sales, Grow Your Business

Transform Your Sales, Grow Your Business. This is our new tag line at Cube Management for 2006 and actually, is the mantra of what Cube does and what value it brings to its clients.

The word transformation is a very powerful one. It means "To convert from one state to another". Our goal is to help our customers, our clients find a way to transform their sales efforts. When we talk about sales, we're not talking just about the function of sales; we're talking about sales defined by revenue. This means everything that's facing the customer needs to be transformed in order to get a company on the path of steady growth.

Transform your sales and grow your business is the mantra that we're going to be using in order to execute a series of marketing campaigns this year with our prospects in our market. We expect this mantra or tag line to help our customers to clearly understand what they get when they buy from our consulting and outsourcing and recruiting company, versus our competitors. As we change our tag line and rebrand our company around this mantra or fundamental branding idea, we hope that it will help us to reframe our marketing message in a way that's even more compelling for our customer. Instead of telling our customers what we do, we're focusing on telling our customers and prospects what they get that is unique and different when they buy from Cube Management.

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SEO What?

SEO, What?? It's amazing to us that so many companies are still missing the mark when it comes to search engine optimization as a vehicle for generating leads. This is the most important guerilla marketing technique that any company can be using in today's day and age in order to generate more business for itself, yet most business owners are still skeptical about the value of good online marketing.

FACT: 85% of business buyers go to a search engine to look for a vendor when they don't already have one in mind. They either used Google, Yahoo, or MSN to type in key words and find potential vendors for products and service. If 85% of all business buyers are doing this, yet your company is still engaged in traditional advertising through yellow pages or tradeshows or direct mail or other types of vehicles like this, how is it that you can expect to grow your sales when you're not present where actual people are searching for your product and service?

The other great news about search engine optimization is that your company doesn't have to be big in order to gain a high level online presence, where organic search brings your company name up. Likewise, it doesn't have to be the biggest company in order to get to the top of the search engines, given today's pay per click campaign opportunities. So, if your company is still not doing anything to optimize its web presence by getting it optimized for search engines and indexing your website into the major search engines, and doing link building and textual optimization, you're really missing the mark.

Doing this kind of foundation work to provide for better search engine visibility for your website is not even expensive and there are plenty of search engine optimization companies out there or search engine marketers, SEOs and SEMs that are capable of doing this work. Think about how search engine optimization can help your business. Even if your company is not doing ecommerce and selling online, most companies still routinely go first to the internet to look online for vendors and they go first to your website to see what sort of a vendor you are. So, it stands to reason, that even if you're not selling your products online, from the standpoint of an ecommerce engine, you still should be marketing your products online to generate leads and awareness for your company. So, if your company is still in the dark ages and hasn't done any work to optimize its web presence, or if your company's name is the only thing that comes up when people actively search for your company by name but they can't find you when they search for your product or service, then you've got some work to do. Now is a great time for you to think about investing a modest amount of your marketing budget into search engine optimization in order to boost your online success and lead generation in 2006.

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Sales Channel Selection: How To Manage Resellers

Many companies think that once they've selected resellers for their products their work is done and that it's now the reseller's job to go push the product out into the market. This is a serious error in thinking on the part of the companies that are really looking to accelerate their sales and maximize their market penetration. The most effective companies who are using resellers understand that building and maintaining effective distribution channels requires a serious commitment of resources from the company in order to make them successful and that third party channels and resellers can't do the job on their own. In fact, most companies that are using third party distribution channels have a very active organization and system of services to support those resellers to make them effective.

If your company is using resellers and not gaining any market advantage or traction through them, the first thing you'll want to look at is what level of resources are you putting toward maintaining and building and supporting those third party channels. A lot of companies, when they hire resellers, fail to put any resources towards this effort. Necessary resources include having an actual channel manager, integrating these people with the sales force so that the company's direct sales force is working with their channel partners or providing them with training / marketing materials or other sales tools that will help them to do their jobs.

Most resellers, in today's day and age, sell where its easiest to sell and that usually means they're selling for their manufacturers or their principals who are providing them with active lead generation and active sales support, as well as marketing programs and tools. So, if your company is trying to build an effective distribution channel using third party resellers, you're going to have to rethink how much resources you're spending in order to actively manage and support them.

Managing resellers is much like managing your own sales team. You have to be actively engaged and have people out in the field working with them in order to gain mindshare from them against the other companies that they're representing. To do that, you need to make sure that you've got the right sales people or channel business development people working for you who are capable of partnering and working with these kinds of resellers in a partnership format. Not all sales people are capable of doing this. Many sales people view resellers as potential competitors, but the ones who do understand how to partner with resellers can get a lot of leverage for your company by working very closely with the resellers and their territory.

Often times, a company will want to have a vice president of business development or a director of business development or regional business development managers or segment business development people working to support their channel partners. Their only job is to maximize the penetration of reseller channels.

These are just some ideas of what you can do in order to boost your channel performance by working more actively and more actively supporting your resellers. If your company needs to do an overhaul of your system integrators, OEMs, or resellers, there are plenty of companies out there that do channel development consulting and who can assist you in improving your channel performance.

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Sales Channel Selection: Acquire Potential Candidates

The next step in a channel selection process is to acquire potential candidates. This can be done by going to trade associations and looking at trade association directories for resellers, of which there are many, to actually get lists of potential resellers. Or it also can come from looking at who your competition is using or complementary products companies are using in order to get their products to market.

It certainly includes defining a list of potential candidates. You'll never want to select a reseller without having multiple options to compare against, just like you'd never hire a key salesperson without having multiple options to compare against. So, acquiring lists, getting names, also getting referrals from your best customers is an excellent way to identify potential resellers. Who are they buying from? Who do they like to buy from? Who do they view as the most professional reseller vendors in your market? Those are easy questions to ask of some of your best customers and prospects to define who it is that you should be working with as your channel partner.

The next step is contacting those companies and using either referrals or through a direct mail process which is very easy to set up and do. Then, you establish the actual channel partner selection criteria that you're going to use in order to make sure that you understand what it is that you're looking for. After developing that selection criteria, you're going to want to develop a questionnaire or an interviewing guide and gather the information that you need from those channel partners in order to match that information against a selection criteria that you've established. Then, of course, from there, after you've gone through the due diligence process, gathered their performance history, understood their sales organization, looked at how much they're selling for each of their principal vendors and understood who their customers are and why they win against their competition, you're going to want to go into the process of actually negotiating an agreement.

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Optimize Sales Channel Selection

Optimize Your Channel Selection. So many companies sign up third party resellers and distributors and system integrators and OEMs without giving proper rigorous attention to the process that's required in order to define the selection criteria, find adequate channel partners, and actually go through a process of due diligence in order to screen them, select them, and bring them onboard. A well developed channel selection process, a reseller selection process, looks a lot like a very rigorous process for hiring and acquiring members of your senior management team or your key employees in sales and marketing. It starts by defining very clearly which markets you're after, which segments you want to reach, what types of customers you're trying to acquire, and then doing research and analysis to determine which companies are actually calling on and supplying goods and services to those customers day in and day out in your focused market.

Once you've defined those customers and those market segments that you're after, then looking at the different types of reseller organizations that are available for you to get your product to those customers becomes the next task. This step involves making sure that you understand exactly what sales and support structures required for your product in order to deliver it as a solution to the end customer. Some companies use manufacturer's reps that are just basically commissioned agents. Other companies use value added resellers, others used stocking distributors, and yet others use system integrators that actually build their products into complete turn key systems for their customers. So you're going to want to make sure that you do some analysis to figure out which kinds of reseller channels you need in order to most adequately provide your product to your customers in a solution that they're willing to buy, and then make a decision about that type of channel structure. Many companies use multiple types of resellers to reach different types of customers as well.

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Boost Sales Channel Performance

Boost Your Channel Performance. Let's talk about how many companies use third party distribution channels to leverage their overall organizational resources to increase sales. In today's day and age, a lot of companies are using third party channels for reselling and supporting their products. Those channels include OEMs, system integrators, value added resellers, manufactures reps, agents, and distributors, among others. They are used both domestically as well as internationally to push product out through multiple channels to their target markets. Yet many companies view this channel activity as being something that's free and easy to attain and don't necessarily focus the right resources on really developing and managing the right channels that would optimize their sales performance.

We see a lot of companies that set up and sign up third party resellers for their products, but gain very, very little actual sales performance from them. The reason for this is really twofold. First of all, without a very rigorous selection process, signing up a third party channel doesn't necessarily lead you to success, just like hiring a poor sales person doesn't necessarily mean you're going to sell more. Number two, once signed up, many companies make the mistake of thinking third party channels will sustain themselves on their own, with very little support. So, we're going to talk a little bit about channel selection, and channel management to optimize sales performance in the next two discussions.

The key here, though, is to remember that third party channels can be a very powerful sales tool and a very powerful mechanism for getting your products to market faster and at lower fixed costs compared to going through direct sales channels ,and has the potential to extend you into markets that you could not otherwise reach on your own, by virtue of the specialization and the location of different resellers in your target markets. So gaining market coverage through third party channels is a very compelling argument. The issue is, making sure that you're not just setting up channels that are full of empty promises and not actually capable of delivering sales for your company.

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Go Up Market with Your Messaging and Positioning

Go Up Market with Your Messaging and Positioning. Is your company's messaging and positioning caught in the same ho hum features and benefits trap that many companies face? If so, it's time to consider shifting your strategic marketing plan and going up market with your company's messaging and positioning. Doing so can have a transforming effect on your companies ability to compete and successfully win in its target markets with its target customers. Going up market is not a difficult task. When your company shifts its messaging positioning from "here's what we do", to "here's what you get", fundamentally, your message has a much better chance of resonating with potential sales prospects and customers.

As markets become more and more competitive, reframing your messaging in order to put your company's products or services in the context of how your customers gain is a requirement in order to win in your market place. A good example of going up market with your messaging positioning is as follows: We have a metal fabrication client that we did some work with before, who's old messaging on their website used to say, "X company provides sheet metal, stamping, cutting, forming, shaping, and fabrication services to companies in the aerospace and automotive industries." After we reworked the company's message to, "We provide integrated supply chain management services to our customers to help them improve their engineering, reduce their product lifecycles, and cut their inventory costs, while increasing their ability to respond to changing market demands."

As you can see, those two messages are completely different from each other, even though they come from the same company. One message is framed in terms of what the company does, and the other message is framed in terms of what their customers get when they buy from them. Which company would you rather buy from?

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Inside Sales: Your Secret Weapon

Inside Sales as a Secret Weapon. Many "best in class" companies in the technology and manufacturing sectors are increasingly using inside sales, telemarketing, and lead generation teams to replace field sales people. It's being done in order to drive improvement and sales efficiency at reduced costs. If you look at the best in class producers, in just about any sector in the technology industry today, they've been planning and deploying telesales, lead generation, and telemarketing functions for many years with a high degree of success.

Using inside resources gives you a number of advantages over field sales personnel. First of all, inside sales are a fraction of the cost of a traditional field sales person. Second of all, their efficiency, because they work in highly controlled environments, is much higher than a field sales person who is working remotely outside of a sales office. Third, using inside sales people allows you to match the cost of your lead generation activities with the value added that's produced at each stage of the sales cycle. So, the earlier you are in the sales cycle, the less value added there is in terms of your person's impact on sales and therefore, your cost needs to be lower. Such is the case when using inside personnel.

A lot of companies complain or object to the fact that inside sales would not work in their particular industry. But we've seen it work across a very wide variety of fields, from technology, software, hardware, through to manufacturing to retail, as well as in such industries as construction and business services. Telesales and inside sales have long been known to be a secret weapon of many companies and even though we all have a stereotypically negative view of telemarketers, we know that teleseales can be deployed in just about any industry today with a high degree of success. The resulting acceleration of your sales and the rapid advancement of your sales pipeline at reduced costs, is a direct benefit of considering shifting some or all of your selling model to an inside sales or telesales team.

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Using Temporary Personnel For Sales & Marketing

Let's talk about using contract sales and marketing professionals to boost your business. Many companies today are trying to maintain lean staffing, and as a result, are looking to hire contract sales and marketing professionals and recruit them on a temporary basis for specific projects. These projects range from redoing websites to product marketing to product management...all the way through doing search engine optimization and internet marketing projects, as well as telesales and inside telemarketing jobs.

If your company is tight on budget and concerned about taking on additional full time equivalent employees and regular status, a good option is to outsource or contract for those sales and marketing professionals through a reputable staffing and recruiting firm, such as Cube Management. It gives you the added flexibility of being able to get your projects done and, at the same time, not take on long term employment commitments that you don't feel comfortable that you can keep.

There are many options out there when it comes to hiring contract sales and marketing talent, but there are few companies that actually have the capability to screen and qualify those professionals and provide really qualified professionals to their clients base upon their sales and marketing knowledge. If you're interested in bringing in contract sales and marketing professionals, whether it be for frontline, middle management or inter management roles, consider going to a company that has strong sales and marketing process knowledge, strategic consulting capabilities, and other skills so that when they send you team members for interim work, you'll know that they've done a good job of screening the experience, knowledge, skills, abilities, and performance of those individuals and they bring you only the best.

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Boosting Online Conversion

What are you doing to boost online conversion? Sure, everybody is using the internet and running search engine optimization & pay per click campaigns these days. But the real question is, if you're spending dollars to drive traffic to your website, what are you doing to make sure that you're maximizing the number of visitors to your website and who you're actually able to convert them into sales leads. Often times, companies spend money on SEO and pay per click campaigns to increase traffic, but they miss the mark entirely when it comes to creating calls to action, compelling offers, and other tools for their potential clients that would actually allow them to convert by gathering their contact information for further follow up and turn them into leads. This is a common mistake amongst companies that we work with. They spend money driving website traffic, but their site is not conversion friendly. Ultimately, they are spending money uselessly… they're pouring money down the drain in order to generate sales leads but they're not achieving their goals.

There are a lot of things that can be done to immediately make your website a lot more conversion friendly. The first thing is to make sure that you've got rich, compelling content that appeals to your audience and positions your company as a thought leader and expert in its field. If your website has this kind of information, people will want to read it. Secondly, make sure to convert your best information, best thoughts, and best useful tools to conversion mechanisms and allow those tools and guides and downloads to only be downloaded in exchange for contact information. This is a basic “blocking and tackling” technique on the internet.

A lot of companies give away everything for free and they don't ever ask for a website visitor's contact information. This is a big mistake. So, you need to have an architecture for content on your site that includes easy giveaways that don't require conversion but the more value added information that you have that should definitely subject to a conversion mechanism so you can capture sales leads and follow up with those prospects. Lots of companies spend too much time on promoting their site and not enough time on making sure that when a visitor gets there, they can actually convert them to a sales lead. We do work in this area to help our clients to improve the stickiness of their site and improve their conversion ratios.

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Breaking Sales Maverick Bad Behavior

There are many things that can be done to break this habit of maverick behavior and bring these kinds of people into alignment. First of all, develop a corrective action plan that focuses on the person developing the soft skills. This can be done through the normal performance planning process. Second of all, sometimes it makes sense to assign a coach to an individual top producer; somebody that that individual respects; somebody who can mentor them and provide them with feedback in a way that they're able to accept. This can be done by somebody on your team or it can be done by bringing in an outside executive coach or sales coach. Often times, a third party sales consultant or sales coach is the best way to go. Also, it might be smart to work through issues of culture and behavior on a regular basis through agenda items at your sales meetings and your sales retreats. This will help you to emphasize to your team at large how important the other aspects of the job are, in addition to just producing results.

There are lots of great books out there that can be used as well to help “Sales Mavericks” understand what it is that a company is expecting from them. We'll give you examples in another blog post. So, if you have top sales mavericks who are also your top sales performers and you're looking for ways to reduce your frustration and improve their adherence to the company's policy and culture, you're not alone. All of us have faced this in sales management, and it's our job to make sure that we're clear with these individuals about what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior and not be afraid to take corrective action up to and including termination if these people become too disruptive to the organization. Everybody is replaceable and even the top performers who believe that they walk on water should be replaced if in fact, they're not capable of adhering to what a company needs in order for them to be successful.

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Managing the Sales Mavericks

Managing the Sales Mavericks. All of us have experienced top performers on our sales team who consistently produce the highest sales numbers, but also produce the most disruption for our organizations. These people which I call "mavericks", can have a huge impact on bottom line for your company, but they also can be a big drain on your organization. Often times, these mavericks won't follow the company's policies and procedures when it comes to sales process, selling methodology, reporting forecasting, using your CRM tools, etc. What do you do with these mavericks and how to you manage them to a better result? There are certain companies that are willing to accept this kind of behavior and allow top sales people to run roughshod over their organization and essentially do whatever they want. The best companies, though, focus on working with top performers to align the rest of their performance and behavior with the company's culture and values and the company's specific sales process and procedures.

It's the job of sales management to play to the strengths of each of their top sales performers to make sure that they continue to produce the results that are vital to the company's success. At the same time, sales management also is responsible for making sure that those top mavericks are brought into alignment with the company's fundamental directives, as it relates to culture, behavior, following processes, reporting, etc. This is not an easy task for the sales manager and it's one of the reasons why they get paid the big bucks. Often times, the most talented sales people are the most roguish and the most arrogant when it comes to following the company's requirements. In particular, they tend to view themselves as superstars unto themselves as their own entity and not necessarily as a part of the team.

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No Maybes For Recruiting

Recruiting: Maybe Means No. Have you ever run up against the edge of a hard decision to hire a sales person or marketing person onto your team? They look great on paper, they interview well, and everybody likes them, but there's something in your gut that's telling you that you should be concerned about making this hire?

One of the most important things that we can rely on as we make good sales team hires is our intuition. When we're recruiting new sales people, it's very important that we take them through a rigorous recruiting and screening process that includes sales aptitude profiling, behavioral interviewing, gathering of sales achievement history and other items like that. But on top of all that, it's important that we use our intuition to know whether or not a person is just selling themselves well through the sales process or actually can and will sell well for our company. Is there a fundamental fit in values? Is there a fundament fit in chemistry? Is there experience that they bring to the table going to be a good fit with the company's culture? These are all soft issues that can sometimes fundamentally get in the way of the right hire.

You can have a top sales producer that comes from a certain environment that's different than yours and they can fail miserably by virtue of the fact that they don't fit well with your team and the methodologies and the culture that you've created in your company. It's really important when you go through the interviewing process, that at the end of that you decide whether or not there's a clear fit and there's a strong compelling reason to make a hire. Fifty-three percent of all sales people are all mishires and it's not because 53% of all sales people are all bad at their jobs. It's simply that not enough time has been spent through the recruiting process to really determine fit.

So the next time that you're about to hire a sales person but there's something in the back of your mind or in your gut that's asking you whether or not this is the right decision, and as a result you're lingering on a maybe as opposed to a clear yes, just remember, maybe means no. It's a hell of a lot easier to go find a clear yes, and make a strong hiring decision and move forward with all of the benefits that comes from that than it is to make a hire that turns into a mishire and spend precious months trying to recover from that. So remember, maybe means no.

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Questions For The New Year

It's 2006 and it's a great time to think about and create some new year's resolutions in sales and marketing. Here are some questions for you to think about as you head into the new year:

Have I got a well developed strategic plan, strategic marketing plan for 2006? Have I developed goals and objectives for both myself and marketing teams as we head into the new year? Are my sales objectives aligned with companies overall goals? Do my sales team members all have a clear sense of priority and understanding of what their short term directives are? Have I got my lead generation programs sorted out and in order so that I know I can feed the pipeline with enough sales leads in order to meet our sales objectives? How is my sales team performance? Are there specific individuals that I need to put on corrective action or terminate so that I can recruit new sales people and fill those spots and top grade those positions? Are there things we can do to streamline our sales process and reduce our sales cycle by doing some flow charting and work flow development around our sales process? Is our website up to date and do we have good search engine optimization driving traffic to our website? And when people get to our website, are there good compelling offers and conversion mechanisms that will allow us to convert visitors into actual sales leads that I can pass on to my sales people? Should we consider a pay per click campaign in a new target segment or direct mail campaign that will help us drive more leads in the door from a specific new market that we're after? How are we going to beat our competition in 2006 and what are we going to do different to up the ante and gain market share in our core markets?

These are all just some ideas of topics that you could be thinking about as you head into 2006 and formulate into new year's resolutions. New Year's resolutions are great ways to press the reset button on complacency and past thinking and turn new ideas into new actions that will take your company and its sales and marketing forward.

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Best Argument For Outsourcing

Don't let your customers take control of your business. We've recently had a series of customers take an active role in doing projects that they were not suited to do, i.e. building websites where they wanted to have control over the content and actually write the content while we built the website architecture, the graphics, the navigation, etc. Several of these projects have turned into disasters, not because of the fact of the customers weren't capable of writing good content for their websites but because they didn't have the time or the priority that was necessary in order to get the site done on time. As a result of that, customers have fallen way behind schedule, in terms of getting their actual websites live, and they could have avoided all of this by outsourcing to a qualified service provider who has the turn key ability to develop and deploy a website, including navigation, graphics, architecture, SEO, etc.

If your company is considering developing a new website or refreshing your current website, think hard before you decide that you want to maintain control and do part of the project internally. If writing and developing websites is part of your companies core competencies, than you certainly should keep it in-house. But if you're not in the business of doing this for a living, you're much more efficient to outsource it to a company who does this all the time and who can do it faster, better and cheaper than you. That will free you to focus your resources on doing what you do best…making money and growing sales in your business. This is the age of outsourcing when it is time to give up those things that you can no longer do efficiently internally and turn them over to the experts. We certainly have learned our lesson and as we go forward with our clients. What are you doing to shed those activities that aren't part of your core competency so that you can focus on accelerating your sales and marketing your business?

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Salesperson Termination: Do Not Let Sentiment Overrule Reason

We have a client that just terminated the sales person after 10 months for non performance. Why did it take so long, you ask? Well, the client was very interested in making sure that it did everything possible to work with this sales rep in order to enhance their performance. But in retrospect, it should have been about 4 months ago or so that the client fired this person. The reason why it hung on was because the company was waiting and hoping that a different result was going to come by just providing some more time to the sales representative.

What's the key lesson here? It is when you can see that a sales person's not performing and that you can see that they're not making steady progress in improving their sales activity,pipeline, and volume of closed business. The best rule of thumb is to act quickly, to let that kind of person go so that you can make room for replacing them with somebody who can be more productive. Many sales managers get attached to the individuals who are on their sales team. The process of building positive motivation and a “team spirit” can cloud the image of whether or not a sales person is actually performing. Sales management needs to make sure that it doesn't wait and hope too long for a sales person to get success before taking the necessary action to terminate and replace individuals who are non performers.

But it's very easy for sales management to be clouded in their perspective on this subject...again, wishing, hoping and wanting the sales person to perform. Frequently, delay happens through the “non-performer” efforts to sell the sales manager on the fact that things are actually improving. On the case of our client, the sales representative actually spent a good portion of his time preparing and briefing management on trying to provide evidence that sales were actually picking up and that a full pipeline was right around the corner. So, this in one of the key things that you need to look for as a sales manager… whether or not the person who you're working with actually is demonstrating actual results and improvement in their sales pipeline versus just selling you on the fact that things are getting better.

Do you have any sales people in your team who are not hitting their numbers and haven't been for several months? Do you have any new hires who are way behind in terms of hitting their forecast and achieving their sales results you originally hired them to produce? Now is a great time for you to take a look at those individuals and determine what you're going to do to either get them on a short term corrective action plan or move them out of the company. Make sure that 2006 is a year in which wishing and hoping is replaced by solid commitment to excellence and achieving the sales results that you need for your company.

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How To Better Use Your CRM System

So, the first step towards upgrading your CRM tool needs to be spending time doing some sales process definition exercises...by defining the different sales stages, process steps, and activities that are associated with each of those steps, as well as intervals. Define the probabilities of each stage in terms of opportunity management, and then once defined, actually integrating those into your CRM tool with salesforce.com.

It's very easy to define different stages of the sales process and to teach how to customize the fields that are necessary in order to get everybody to use the system consistently. Once you do, you're able to easily establish management dashboards that give you visibility over activities, whether it be number of phone calls, number of attempts, number of connects, number of appointments, proposals, and closes through to your actual pipeline and sales forecast. You get really good visibility at what's going on at each sales territory. If your company is struggling in that area, it's easy to overcome the problem by enlisting a sales consulting firm that knows how to define sales processes and integrate them with CRM. What are you doing to improve your sales force automation in 2006?

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Sales Process Essential For Optimal CRM Use

We work with lots of companies that are having a hard time defining, refining, and automating their sales process using modern CRM or SFA tools (customer relationship management sales force automation). For companies that are struggling to integrate CRM and develop a CRM tool to improve their sales efficiency, the great news is that there is outstanding tools out there today that allow companies to deploy sales force automation with relative ease and at very low cost.

We've deployed and managed salesforce.com for several of our clients and are using it internally, not only for automating our sales process, but also as an automation tool for automating our e marketing campaigns and lead generation programs.

The key to deploying a successful CRM tool is defining your sales process up front. Many companies buy CRM software like ACT or Goldmine or even more expensive systems than that, but they don't do the upfront planning to define and lock down their sales process so that they can integrate it into their sales force automation system. We see a lot of “garbage in / garbage out” coming from Sales Force users who are using the system in different formats and not following a common set of rules. This makes it impossible for management to get good pipeline information, forecasts, as well as sales activity data on each of their sales team members.

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Sales Training: Integrate Into Weekly Sales Meetings

Second of all, one of the best practices of any sales management team is to integrate sales training into your weekly sales meetings. This doesn't mean that you have to spend a lot of time on it, but having a sales training topic at every weekly sales meeting is a good way to freshen people up, get them thinking about their work, about how to do their job better, and keep them motivated as it relates to working on their basic sales technique and their sales process. Even a 10 or 15 minute shop talk by the sales manager or one of your sales team members can be a great way to integrate sales training topics into your weekly routine.

A great way to give people ownership and empowerment for these topics is to have different members of your team lead a topic each week, under your sales management's guidance, brainstorm a list of topics that would be good to cover over the upcoming weeks, and then actually assign those tasks to different people to lead those topics. That gives each of your sales team members a sense of commitment, participation and empowerment in leading the sales team. It also allows you to pinpoint who are the best sales trainers and who are the best potential leaders of your sales team.

In addition to integrating sales training into your normal weekly sales meeting agenda, it also makes sense for you to pull your sales team out of the field into a 2 to 3 hour sales meeting at least once a quarter to review past quarter results and also to do sales planning for the upcoming quarter. Sales training should always be on the agenda of those sales team meetings, whether they be at your offices, or in some remote retreat. Finally, having an annual sales training retreat as a part of your annual sales meeting makes a lot of sense, as well. Many companies do this, where they organize a 4 or 5 day sales meeting and spend at least one, if not two, days of that time dedicated to different sales training topics. Sales training takes a lot of different forms, from sales technique, to updating them on the company's vision and strategy, through to new product training and launch planning... there's a whole variety of topics that can be covered on the sales training agenda. But the key is, to make it frequent and ongoing and a part of your ongoing relationship with your sales team. Focusing on sales training is an absolute key to enhancing your sales team productivity, performance, process improvement and success. What are you doing to integrate sales training into your overall sales management structure?

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Sales Training: Get Personnel Aligned With Selling Philosophy

There are a number of different levels of sales training that you should be considering for your company if you're not already doing so. First, make sure that all of your sales team members, and particularly new hires, are brought up to speed on the companies basic technique and philosophy. If your company is using a consultative selling model and you're hiring new employees that have not had sales training on spin or solutions selling or some other form of consultative selling, a good place to start is to send those new hires off to a boot camp, in order to get that sort of training. We partner with sales training companies that are able to provide that very effectively. Making sure that all new hires have a basic set of foundational sales training tools is very important.

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Sales Training: Positive Reinforcement

Let's talk about sales training and the importance of it as it relates to making sure that you're continuously sharpening the saws of your key sales team members in order to enhance their performance, keep them motivated, and keep them on the top of their game.

Many companies fail to recognize the importance of providing ongoing sales training to their team in order to enhance their motivation and improve their performance. The fact is that any sales team, no matter how good they are, needs to be continuously reinforced in terms of their behavior, their practices, and their techniques, and sales training is a key vehicle for doing that. Companies that are continuously investing in sales training for their personnel are the ones that get ahead in the game and maintain a highly productive and motivated workforce. They also make sure that their sales team is on the same page as management, in terms of direction, vision, focus in terms of new product development, new product launches, customers and the company's overall sales strategy. Sales training provides a primary vehicle for this and is a key aspect of any sales manager's tool kit when it comes to enhancing sales team performance.

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Absolutely Necessary To Provide Ongoing Sales Training

What is your company doing to provide ongoing sales training to its sales team? Many companies assume that when they hire sales people that are already trained they don't need to invest in ongoing training. This is a big mistake. We see the "best in class" companies continuously working with their sales people to sharpen their saw and keep themselves at the top of their sales game. Sales training should become an ongoing part of your investment by sales management in upgrading and improving the skills of your sales force in order to stay competitive, learn new techniques, adapt to changing sales realities, and keep an open dialogue going between sales management and its people on how to improve sales performance.

Sales training can be integrated into a number of different formats in order to improve sales team and individual performance. For those companies hiring entry level individuals. it's important that they be put through basic sales training on consultative selling methods. There are many training courses out there and many approaches. Many consulting companies provide this kind of training…we partner with a couple of them. They can be easily deployed to help your individual sales people to establish basic training. On top of basic sales technique training, most companies provide annual or quarterly training to their sales team as a part of their regular sales meetings. In addition to that, savvy sales managers always include a training topic in their normal sales meetings, whether it be typically 15 to 20 minute session on account strategy or covering a more advanced topic once a month.

Integrating sales training into your sales management structure and your sales meeting structure is an important part of making sure that you're sharpening the saws of the individuals that are out there working to gain sales for your company and to accelerate your revenue growth. If your company needs help with sales training, there are a number of approaches you can take. A starting point would be to start with a sales consulting firm that can help you to asses the level of training that you have amongst your current sales people and design a program that will upgrade the skills of your team and your individuals in order to meet the needs of your current selling organization and selling model.

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The Consultative Selling Advantage

Consultative selling as a way to win against your competition. Many companies today are still trying to push features and benefits of their products on their customers without understanding the deeper needs of those prospects and how they fit with their own company's products or services. Companies that are still pushing feature and benefits, as opposed to pulling information from their clients and consulting with their clients in developing a solution, are those that are typically not able to accelerate their sales and are struggling against competition that uses a more sophisticated sales approach.

Consultative selling has been well developed and documented over the years, whether it be strategic selling, need satisfaction selling, as originally pioneered by Xerox, solution selling or more recently, spin selling, all of these essential approaches deal with the basic premise that you start by doing a needs analysis of your customer to understand what their needs, their pains, their issues are, and then adapt your sales approach based upon the information that you're able to gather from your prospect. Many companies have still not trained their people on spin selling or solution or consultative selling and need to do this in order to improve their sales effectiveness.

We work with a variety of clients that are still following the "old push" features benefits selling model when they can easily adapt a more consultative approach. The companies that are following the best practices, in most industries today, as it relates to selling, have adopted a consultative approach and have greatly boosted their sales performance and effectiveness as a result of that. We work with different companies that teach consultative selling techniques. We also highly suggest spin selling by Neal Rackham, which is an outstanding book, and it can help any individual to quickly grasp the basic concepts of the complex sale and master them, if they put them to work. Consultative selling is a requirement in most sophisticated product and competitive environments today. Consultative selling is something that can be easily adopted by your organization. What are you doing to transform your business and your sales team towards a more consultative selling model?

We've taught dozens of companies how to use spin selling or consultative selling to their advantage. The approach typically can take 2 to 6 months to adopt and really entrench in your sales team's behavior until it becomes habit, but the rewards are great. Your company will be able to move up market in terms of its professionalism, be more adept at competing against its most fierce competition, and also simplify and develop a deeper understanding of what your customers true needs are, what they pain is, and how your products, service, and solutions can fit uniquely with their requirements.

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The Transactional Selling Model

By contrast, many companies choose a transactional selling model, which is quite different from the enterprise model. Whereas, enterprise is multi tiered, multi-locational and very consultative and strategic in approach, transactional selling model lends itself towards commodities products, where the buyer is not nearly as sophisticated, the decision making cycle is not nearly as long, and the sales cycle, as a result, can go very, very fast. Companies that are involved in a transactional selling model include everything from companies that are doing telesales and closing deals over the phone, such as shrink wrapped software companies, through to purveyors of commodities services, where going for the close on the first or the second call is easy.

The transactional selling model is very good if you're product is well understood by your target audience, already in demand, is purchased by a large percentage of your target, and where the decision making and sales cycle and switching costs in order to purchase your products are relatively low. Typically, a transactional based selling model does not require a sophisticated sales organization...it's mix of field and inside major account salespeople - it typically lends itself towards a telesales model or a straight field sales or a hybrid model, where there is no hand off between in side and outside sales, between lead generation from the telemarketing perspective and inside sales. So, many companies choose a transactional selling model when they're in a very competitive market and the sales cycle are short, the average selling price of the product is low, and the actual sales process is simplified down to its lowest common denominator.

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How To Succeed At Enterprise Selling

Companies that succeed at the enterprise selling model are those that have truly a national, if not global reach, and have the resources deployed and targeting the different areas of the enterprise prospect in order to be able to maximize their account penetration. Account coordination and sales management is extremely important in the enterprise selling model since the coordination of multiple constituencies in the organization in order to orchestrate as a sales process is what's required. We've seen many companies, particularly startups, that target the enterprise and have a product that is best suited for the enterprise but don't have the staying power or the resources to fully maximize their coverage of their target major accounts and as a result, they run out of money before they actually have a chance of penetrating those accounts.

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The Enterprise Selling Model

Let's talk about different types of selling models and sales processes as they relate to different businesses in the “B to B” sector. First of all, let's talk about the enterprise selling model. The enterprise selling model is characterized by high level of complexity. Typically, decision making cycles are long...there are multiple constituents involved in multiple locations at multiple levels of the organization. This means that deploying a sales organization in order to meet the needs of the enterprise selling model are complex, expensive, and require a heavy level of investment.

If your company is considering selling to the largest enterprises, you're going to need to organize your sales force around this reality and make the necessary investments and have the long term perspective that's required in order to be successful in this arena. Many companies make the mistake of trying to target the largest enterprises when they don't truly have the resources necessary in order to build a sustainable and repeatable sales process that will allow them to penetrate large enterprise accounts and win over the long term. Enterprise selling model requires deploying a multi-tiered sales force, including inside sales, field sales, as well as major account personnel who are stationed close to or can get themselves close to the various constituents throughout the targeted enterprise that need to be approached and developed in order to maximize account penetration in the large enterprise account.

In an enterprise selling model, it's a very consultative approach where advanced needs analysis is being done throughout the organization in order to truly adapt and design the sales process around the account objective. Many companies don't have the capabilities to go this deep into the selling process in order to have a chance at success and they often end up frustrated and don't achieve their sales objectives as a result despite multiple attempts to gain access to the enterprise.

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Contract Marketing Personnel

Hiring contract marketing personnel. In today's day and age, many companies are trying to maintain variable costs when it comes to their overall headcounts so that in times of downturn, they can easily shed those resources. So they're turning increasingly to staffing firms that are capable of supplying contract marketing personnel for such purposes of doing market research, product management, product marketing, as well as web design, copywriting and other marketing communications projects. It's easy today to find these types of personnel which are highly qualified by going to a professional staffing firm such as Cube Management. Product marketing, product management, sales management - these are all positions that are easily found.

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Define Your Sales Process

The first step in this process is to define your sales process. You can't deploy CRM without first doing this and it's really easy to do so. We've developed a set of tools that allow your company to actually go through the steps of defining all of the work flow and different field sales and inside sales definitions as well as opportunity stages so that they can be easily mapped into sales force automation or CRM.

Once you've completed the complete sales process definition which typically defines the work flow, the different sales opportunity stages, as well as the different actions and sales tools to be used at each stage. It's very easy to integrate those into your CRM system and deploy them and then use the CRM system as an actual tool to manage the workflow and improve your sales efficiency. That is the number one benefit that you're going to get out of a well defined sales process and sales process integration is how you're going to get better efficiency from your sales force. You're also going to get better opportunity management, better visibility over your overall pipeline, and a better overall sales forecast leading to better predictable revenues and better forecasting accuracy. These are just some of the benefits of integrating your sales process with CRM.

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