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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CRM and Sales Process Integration

Let's talk more about sales process integration with CRM. Lots of companies fail to see the connection between developing a well defined sales process that's repeatable and scalable and the actual recording of sales activity, tracking and forecasting of sales results in a customer relationship, management or CRM system, also known as sales force automation or SFA. In today's day and age, a company cannot afford to deploy a CRM system without first spending the necessary time in order to define their sales process. Likewise, other companies that have well defined sales processes, to the extent that they don't do a good job of customizing their CRM systems--to integrate with that sales process-- they'll find many disconnects leading to frustration, poor data management, poor forecasting, poor reporting and poor pipeline visibility when it comes to sales management tools. So, now more than ever, it's really important to integrate both your sales process with your CRM system to get the optimized results that you're looking for.

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Activity, Not Productivity

A lot of companies miss this point and they mistake activity for productivity. The fact is, is marketing only comes when you actually capture a lead and convert it into a sale. So a higher percentage of leads that you're able to convert on your website obviously will translate into a higher percentage of close orders from those potential visitors.

But it's extremely important to make sure that you're focusing across the whole spectrum of your lead generation mechanisms when it comes to online marketing. Some companies do really well in one area, such as search engine optimization, but fall down when it comes to calls to action in conversion mechanisms that generate sales leads. We believe that all of those activities are equally important and it makes no sense to invest in one without investing in the other.

The same goes for companies that are interested in upgrading or renewing their websites. A lot of times, we have clients that come to us and they want to spend money to upgrade the graphics look and feel and navigation and messaging on their website, but they're hesitant to spend money on search engine optimization so that actual buyers who are looking for their products and services can find them on Google, MSN, or Yahoo. We think this is a big mistake. Why would you build a brand new website if nobody's going to see it anyway?

Other companies come to us and believe that they should have a new website and are willing to invest in search engine optimization but they fail to see the significance of developing and placing strong offers in conversion mechanisms on that website. So they end up getting a lot of traffic but since there are no compelling offers to capture leads from visitors they end up converting very few prospects into real sales leads they can follow up on. As a result, CEO's are cracking down on spending money on new websites and new creative because they're still not getting good marketing ROI.

We believe that there is a better way, where you're focusing on all aspects of an integrated internet marketing program, including good website development with strong offers and conversion mechanisms through to strong SEO and pay per click campaigns in order to drive targeted searchers to your website and convert them.

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It's All About Conversion

It's all about conversion. In today's day and age, a lot of companies are investing in search engine optimization and pay per click advertising in order to increasingly drive traffic to their website. The real question is, what are they doing to convert those visitors into actual sales leads? Are they capturing their contact information through the exchange of an offer such as a download or some sort of contest, sign up, or other premium in exchange for that contact information so that those contacts can be followed up on. That's what we call conversion.

Many companies do a great job at driving traffic but do a poor job of actually working on increasing those conversion ratios so that a higher and higher percentage of visitors are actually leaving their contact information so that you can follow up on them. In an integrated guerilla marketing campaign that uses search engine optimization and pay per click,on the front end, is only as good as a well designed set of conversion mechanisms and offers on your website to transform those companies and sales leads. When we deploy systems for our customers, we're always looking holistically at creating not just good traffic but making sure that conversion ratios are at or above industry standards so that we can actually achieve a return and investment from our marketing efforts.

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Make Granular Your Sales Activity

We've found that it’s really helpful to break down your sales activity into as much granularity as possible to be able to count the fundamental ratios between number of raw activities and number of more refined activities. When I talk about raw activities, I mean attempts at phone calls. When I talk about refined activities, I'm talking about number of actual connects with potential prospects that turn into qualified opportunities and of course, the even more refined activities where you take a refined activity and turn it into an actual opportunity and an opportunity into a sale. So, all of those different levels of activity, from raw to more refined, are possible with tract using a modern CRM solution.

A lot of companies struggle in this area because they don't have the expertise to integrate their sales process with their CRM system. This is one of the things that we specialize in and make it really easy for you to get the numbers out that you need in order to more effectively manage your sales force. So, running your sales force by the numbers doesn't need to be guess work in today's day and age. If you're having problems finding a solution for this, it's very easy to find a consultant to help you to do what we call sales process integration with CRM, allowing you clear visibility and clear accountability over your sales effort and your sales team's day to day activities.

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Need To Run Sales By Numbers

Running sales by the numbers. In today's day and age it's very easy for you to establish to gain great visibility over your actual sales activity using modern CRM systems. We've deployed CRM systems like Salesforce.com for many different clients. They allow us to quickly establish a dashboard that gives us accurate accounts of all calling and customer proposal and visitation activity. If you run your sales by the numbers and look at that activity on the daily and weekly basis, it's very easy for you to quickly see what patterns are emerging in your sales team performance and act accordingly in terms of zeroing in on corrective actions that need to be taken with individual team members in order to boost their overall sales results.

Running sales by the numbers has never been easier using modern activity measurements systems such as those found in Salesforce.com. The key to setting up those systems is to make sure that you've got a clear understanding of exactly what matrix you want to track prior to designing your system and how they align with the accountability and individual responsibilities that you've assigned your sales team so that the activities that you're tracking are the same matrix that you're holding your sales team accountable for. But that's quite easy to do as long as you do a little advance planning prior to deploying your CRM system and at the time you're actually setting annual sales goals with your individual sales team members.

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Is Your Business Surviving Or Prospering?

Many business owners struggle under the daily grind and they're peddling as fast as they can to try to produce the results they need in order to survive. Is your business just surviving or prospering? That's the difference between working harder and working smarter. Smart companies know exactly how to pin point their best markets and their best opportunities and focus all of their resources on those as opposed to working with all of the customers that get in the way of getting yourself onto the path to growth and profitability. The best companies work smart by spending time on strategic marketing and on lead generation programs that really produce the results. How many programs do you have that you've been doing for years and years to generate leads that just aren’t working anymore? Now is a good time for you to shed those ideas, think out of the box, and think about new guerrilla marketing and sales programs that will allow you to get in front of your best prospects faster with lower cost.

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Make Your Business Run More Smoothly

Work smarter, not harder. What are you doing to make your business run more smoothly? Are you working too hard in your business and not working hard enough on your business? As 2006 starts, it's a good time for you to start thinking about how you can simplify how you go to market and how you sell and promote your products. To make it easier for you to get to the customers that you really want and focus all of your resources and attention on the customers that have the best potential return for you. A lot of companies are peddling as fast as they can, focusing on the wrong markets and wrong customers…those that don't have the revenue potential and the profit potential that they need in order to grow.

Now is a great time to think about how to reposition your company and go after markets and customers that have the best fit with your business. Or you have a unique selling proposition and you can sustain your competitive advantage. This is working smarter and not harder is all about. 2006 is a great time for you to step back and engage in a strategic marketing planning process that will help you to identify who your best target customers are, where you can win against your competition most easily and how you can accelerate your sales by focusing your scare sale resources on those best customers, as well as spend your marketing dollars on lead generation programs that will have the most impact.

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Best Way To Work With Value Added Resellers

The rule of thumb that I've found is treat your resellers and third party distributions channels just as if they were your own employees. Understand how to motivate them, how to get to know them, create relationships with them, spend time with them in the field, make sure that they have the resources and support in order to be effective at their job and you can win the distribution channel and get them selling for you. If you think that you're going to get something for nothing from third party distribution channels, you're probably wrong. The fact is, nothing is free in sales and it certainly implies to the notion of third party distribution channels. We'll talk in subsequent articles about how you can actually improve the management you sell through using some basic techniques of channel management.

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Third Party Channels: Biggest Mistakes Made

One of the biggest mistakes that companies make when they deploy a third party channels however, is to think that the companies that they sign up are going to do the work on their own without any support from you. One of the things that we've seen over and over again as companies spend a huge amount of resource and effort to go start, create, deploy third party system integrated value added reseller networks but they don't provide any resources, any management, any support to them after they come on board.

If your company is thinking about deploying those kinds of third party distribution channels, one of the hidden costs associated with that which you want to make sure that you factor in, in addition to discounts and commissions that you're going to pay, is the amount of sales support, distribution, product support, technical support that you're going to need to proactively supply to those resellers in order to make sure that they're optimized in their sales performance for you.

A lot of companies think that if they can sign up a network of system integrators and resellers they'll go sell on their own. But the fact is, when the distribution channel of the ones that provide active support in the form of lead generation, in the form of sales support, and in the form of technical support training for their reseller, they gain active share from their resellers, so their resellers are thinking about promoting their products verses their competition. All sorts of incentives, rewards and recognition programs are available to be put in place just as you would put in place for your direct fields sales team if you were to have a direct sales force.

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Building & Managing Effective Third Party Distribution Channels

Let's talk about building and managing effective third party distribution channels that can help your company to take itself to the top of its market and beat your competition. Many companies, for years, have looked at third party distribution channels as a vehicle for fast acceleration of their sales. There's a plethora of different types of them out there that you can select, develop and manage for sales success. Those range from value added resellers, to system integrators, to manufactures reps, to OEM's, to distributors, and to agents as well as international representatives. All of these types are immediately available to many companies and can be deployed for a fraction of the cost of a direct sales force. In addition to that, the cost can be very variable and can be absorbed by the actual sales revenue as it's produced, as opposed to being up front, fixed and unavoidable when you deploy a direct field sales team or inside sales team.

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How To Deal With Salespeople Who Talk But Don't Deliver

So, if you've got a sales person like I've faced over my career, who are basically spending most of their time telling you how it's going to be in the future and that success is right around the corner, be suspicious. Tell them you don't want to hear it. Either get them to post the results or get them to move on down the road. By getting rid of or terminating people who are spending all of their time telling you about what they're getting and not doing it, you can free yourself up to have more time to hire great people who can actually go out and get the results.

If you need to hold somebody as a placeholder until you can replace them, that's fine. But don't compromise when it comes to getting rid of those people who really aren't capable of making the sales numbers that you need. Your ability to manage in sales is reflective directly by how fast and how honest an objective you can be in weeding out poor performance and recognizing that if they're selling internally they're really not selling for your company and they're not doing you any service.

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Great Salespeople Don't Talk About Numbers...They Close Deals

This is called: Let the Numbers Speak for Themselves. Ever had a sales person who spends most of their time internally trying to justify how great results are just right around the corner, spends a lot of time slicing and dicing their numbers and their forecasts and telling you over and over how an account is just about to close? Well those are the sales people who ain't going to make it. The best sales people are those who actually spend their time out selling and they're hard to pin down when it comes to the forecasts and numbers because they're so busy closing deals that they don't have time to report. The guy or the gal who spends a lot of their time analyzing and reporting and less time selling is the one that's in trouble and is fighting hard to sell internally to keep their job but not doing a good job of posting the numbers that you need from them.

When that happens, confront the individual quickly and say “ I need to get you back out and producing results, I don't care about the exhaustive analysis, and frankly, I don't want to hear any more about these accounts that you've told me over and over about which aren't seeming to move.”

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Never Hire A "Maybe" Salesperson

Here's a key idea when you're hiring sales people. The title of this is called: If the Answer is Maybe, then It's No.

How many times have you gone through the process of hiring a sales person and you just weren't sure? You've gone through several sets of interviews, you've brought your team together, you've asked all the right questions, you've gathered all of the sales history performance from their past. Maybe you've even taken them through a sales aptitude test or some sort of profile but there's still something about the candidate that just makes you uneasy. You've even maybe checked their references and of course, everybody's references check out perfectly, but for some reason, this candidate, they look like they have the all the right answers, they say all the right things, but is still doesn't quite feel right.

Well, I'm here to tell you that the absolute rule of thumb when you're going through that process and you're about to hire a candidate, is say no. If it doesn't feel right, if there's something that sets you off, that indicates to you that a candidate is less than perfect, that something doesn't quite line up, go with your gut, go with your intuition, understand that that's a much more powerful vehicle than all the data gathering, all the behavioral interviewing, all of the sales testing and profiling put together.

Intuition is the most powerful thing that you have when it comes to choosing which are the good sales people to hire and which ones you need to pass on. So next time you come right up against the edge and you're wondering whether or not you should hire a sales person, stall. Say no or go back to the drawing board and find new candidates. Once you bring some new candidates to the table, if the candidate that you passed on before seems enticing, bring them back into the mix against the other people that you're measuring in the next round and figure out whether or not what you saw the first time was right or not. But the key is, to remember if the answer is maybe, when it comes to hiring a sales person, than just say no.

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90 Day Sales Blitz: Implementation Ideas

A number of ideas that we've seen over the years include short term sales contests and sales bonuses to people who are in marketing for generating the most leads. Also: customer bonuses for bringing in new referrals and doing option upgrades or doing cross sales or up sales. These are all the kinds of things that you can do to create some short term enthusiasm and rally all of your resources in your company around greatly increasing your numbers. So if you need to do something in the short term to stimulate sales, think about a 90 sales blitz.

If you're like many companies out there that have practiced this behavior in the past, you'll find that with the right leadership, the right enthusiasm, the right incentives, involvement of all of the people in your company, you can really move mountains.

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The 90 Day Sales Blitz

Are you worried about your sales slumping as you go into 2006? Are your first quarter numbers looking lower? Is your pipeline looking softer than you'd like it to be at this point even though the economy is strong?

Here's an idea that you can use to quickly pump up your sales. It's called the 90 day sales blitz. The whole premise behind this is to rally the whole company around doing everything it can to support the sales team to close deals, expand the pipeline, get more opportunities into the forecast, and close deals that have been out there languishing for some time.

Create a sales turn around plan with your team by pulling together everybody from sales, marketing, and operations and figuring out where's the low hanging fruit in the short term that we can go pick in order to bump our sales numbers up in the right direction. Where are our best opportunities that can close the fastest and what can we do to create more opportunities quickly through lead generation? How do we do direct mail or outbound telemarketing campaigns into our prospecting list? How can we create a compelling offer that we'd put on our website so that visitors who come through and find us from keyword searches decide that they want to convert and become quick sales leads that can be closed faster. What can they do to incentivize those that are searching for my products and services to call in immediately and speak to a sales rep? What sort of premiums and bonuses can I give to them to quickly bring me new sales opportunities?

So a good 90 day sales blitz starts by getting all of your people together, sitting down and figuring out, how can we, as a team, pull a rabbit out of our hat by bringing together all of the best knowledge and experience and all of the company's energy and harnessing it towards making short term sales.

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Hire The Best Salespeople...Weed The Rest Out

This section is called Hire the Best, Weed out the Rest. If you really want to take your company to the top of the market, why would you compromise when it comes to hiring the very best sales people? Over the span of my career, I've had the privilege of being involved with some of the world's market leading organizations in the robotics industry as well as ship building. And in every case where I've been able to build a market leading company, we've had marketing leading people leading the way in sales.

One of the things that we see a lot of company's do is compromising when it comes to hiring the best. We also see them compromising when it comes to weeding out people who aren't really fully performing. It's one of the biggest mistakes that company's make, because by doing so, they're settling for less than the best. And if you want to be the best you've got to hire the best. Getting to the best sales people means having a passion for being truly excellent at what you do. Having the best products and services, having the biggest market differentiation, having a clearly defined, unique selling proposition, having the best distribution channels, the best customer service, the best technical support. But it all starts with having the very best top talented sales people.

So if your vision is to take your company to the very top of its market and beyond, what's your vision for the kind of sales people that you want to hire? How are you going to get the best on your team and build the A-team that's going to take your company to the top of the market? Hire the best and weed out the rest.

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New Years Resolution: Celebrate Your Successes

Another new year's resolution you might want to consider...if your sales team has worked really hard, what are you doing to celebrate your successes in sales day in and day out, week after week? One of the things that we're doing this year is spending more time doing internal “atta boys” and celebrating and high-fiving for all of the sales wins that we have as a company. Why? Because boosting the moral of your sales people and boosting the moral of your employees around sales wins has a multiplier effect on your sales effectiveness and that's what we're looking to do...improve our sales effectiveness by celebrating more of our successes and recognizing the effects of those people who are working so hard to produce those results that we need in order to power our business up.

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New Years Resolution: Terminate Unprofitable Customers

Another great new year's resolution for 2006 is terminating your relationship with unprofitable customers...meaning those customers that are costing you the most money to service and eat up all of your resources, delay your projects or aren't paying you well. These are the kinds of customers that we all have had some experience with and one of the best things that we can do is find a way to end those relationships as we go into the new year. Ending those relationships is a wonderful, liberating thing for your company and it also allows you to free up the opportunity cost that is associated with spending your resources to serve customers who are unprofitable. You could be going after profitable customers that could really become an engine for growth for your business.

We've all experienced having frustrating customers that end up chewing up a lot of our resources. My feeling is that now is a great time for you to go through a list of those businesses that you're doing and figure out which ones it's time to sever the relationship with. Let them go to your competition. Why? Because then your competition can chew up all of its resources and absorb all of its time trying to serve those customers and that will keep them from going after the best ones that you want for your business.

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New Years Resolution: Invest In Your Own Business

The first thing you should be doing is considering an investment in your own business and making sure that your putting dollars into it first before putting dollars into the owner's pockets or into the shareholder's pockets. Why? Because over time, your shareholder value will increase when you invest in good marketing and good lead generation to accelerate your sales. So that's one of the things we're doing this year in 2006…we’re going to make sure we put our marketing programs first in order to generate the kind of leads we need to drive top line sales growth during the coming year.

Another great new year's resolution is to try something new and different that sets you apart from all of your competition. How is your company differentiating itself...not just through its messaging and positioning, but also through the types of marketing programs that it is doing in order to reach its audience. If all of your competitors are going to trade shows, what about spending more money on search engine optimization or e-newsletter campaigns that provide nurture marketing to your best prospects and allow you to stay in front of your long term customers? Thinking of doing something different and innovating in your marketing and sales programs is one of the best ways to set yourself apart from your competition and be more appreciated by those companies that are looking to partner with you or looking for a partner in your particular product of service area.

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New Years Resolutions: Cube Management

Here are some new year's resolutions that have come up in our company:

First of all, we're going to have a very strong focus on going up market and going after larger customers that have potentially larger projects and larger order value. And we're going to start focusing on disciplining ourselves to shun or shy away from smaller customers that cost us just as much money to acquire but aren't profitable for us.

Is your company thinking about going up market? One of our secondary resolutions in sales for the new year, is to do more networking and become more active and more visible in the community so that we can get more sales referrals and more word of mouth advertising for our company. So we're targeting a number of different trade associations and networking groups where our prospects go in order to build an active and visible presence in the groups that account for our business, where we can make great contacts and hopefully increase the number of referrals that we get.

Another thing that we're doing in 2006 is to make sure that we always pay ourselves first when it comes to marketing programs. You know that old adage about saving? If you consider saving a payment that you make to yourself, if you agree to set aside that payment to yourself first, you'll always make it. The same thing goes for marketing your company.

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Sales & Marketing New Years Resolutions

Happy New Year! It's 2006 and it's a great time to dust off your playbook and think about what your strategic plans are in sales and marketing for the coming year. A good way to start is to start by taking your management team through a series of new year's resolutions. What are your new year's resolutions for sales and marketing? Are you going to boost your lead generation? Are you going to invest more heavily in telesales to reduce your sales cycle? Are you going to commit yourself to double digit sales growth for your company? Are you going to finally invest in search engine optimization in order to improve your company's online visibility using natural and organic search engines? Are you thinking about boosting your performance for lead generation through direct mail campaigns? What about refreshing or developing a new website with better content that's more compelling against your competitors?

These are all new year's resolutions that companies should be considering as they think about how to accelerate their sales in 2006. We're working with a number of companies that are specifically targeting improvements to their sales and marketing programs and now is a great time for you to do that. 2006 is just now getting started and if you get an early jump on your sales and marketing activities for this year you'll have the best results for converting those investments into actual sales growth. What's your sales and marketing new year's resolution?

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Generate More Online Business Through Microsites

We have a client who we've recently deployed a series of website landing pages for in order to help them to generate more online business. We've also done search engine optimization and are now deploying pay per click campaign programs using both Google AdWords as well as Yahoo Search, in order to drive more traffic to this site. The goal of this microsite and its associated landing pages is strictly to drive conversion and drive leads in the door for this company for a specific product that they're featuring right now in the power quality industry. And this microsite was deployed within the last couple of weeks and is now being used as a tool for taking internet searchers from Google, MSN, and Yahoo, who are looking for ways to improve their power quality in their plants and actually driving them to a very specific target site that has only the messaging relating to the product that they are looking for offers a number of free giveaways in exchange for a persons contact information and email address, thus triggering conversion.

The results of the deployment site are too early to be seen, yet we know by the pay per click activity that we're already seeing on the site that we expect it to increase radically the number of leads that this company is already generating. Using microsites or landing pages with very targeted messages for specific conversion of sales leads is a great tactic today and a best practice in internet based guerilla marketing. If your company is interested in using a landing page or a microsite, there are a number of principles you need to follow in order to be really targeted and provide the highest level of information to your prospect so that you can get the highest potential conversion ratio. Well talk about those in a subsequent article.

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Telesales Deployments: Client Examples

We have many clients that have actually produced outstanding results using this kind of operation, including a construction company that hired us to come in and deploy a telesales program so that they could get into major accounts where they could do multiple, ongoing construction projects. As a result of this deployment, their sales have more than doubled in the last two years.

Another company where we recently did a revamp on their outbound telemarketing activity for experienced a 500% increase in their close ratios as a result of doing a detailed assessment, modifying their call approach, hiring additional telesales talent, training them to the process and coaching them to success. So we've seen lots of companies that have been able to greatly increase their telesales effectiveness by bringing in consultants.

Another example is a manufacture of consumer electronic displays that used Cube Management as a telesales consulting function in order to dwindle down the number of dealers that they were using for selling their products and really focus on the ones that had the best potential.

Another example of a company that we're working with today is a software company that develops power quality systems for the utility and large manufacturing industry.

These are all just some examples of how companies are using telesales, telemarketing, and lead generation across a multitude of industries in order to rapidly increase their pipeline, reduce their sales cycle and improve their overall sales efficiency.

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The Telemarketing Implementation Decision

So if you're thinking about setting up telesales or telemarketing or outbound prospecting and lead generation for your company, you should consider whether or not you have the inside talent in your company with proven experience and track record to deploy this kind of function and really make it work.

A lot of companies figure oh, this could be easy, it couldn't be that hard, and then they fail miserably. We've seen many clients that have taken that sort of approach and spent large amounts of investment trying to get their telesales and telemarketing functions to be productive and when they couldn't do it ended up just shutting it down and saying, oh telesales or telemarketing doesn't work for our business. Well the fact is, it can work for any business. Whether it be business-to-business or business-to-consumer, again, the best in class companies are using this sort of approach and methodology to improve their lead generation, drive higher efficiency into their sales force, reduce their cost and accelerate their overall revenue growth.

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Telemarketing Deployment Failure: The Reasons

The first thing is that in telesales, because people who work in this kind of industry face a very, very high level of rejection, they have to have an extreme level of ego resilience and a willingness to rise above getting the phone slammed on them all of time and continue to make calls until they find the magic approach for getting through to potential prospects, warming them up and engaging them. So, a lot of companies hire the wrong people for this without testing and profiling to make sure that they've got the necessary DNA and that they've got high ego resilience.

Second of all, once they hire them, they put them into a back room, give them a list and a phone and tell them to go to work and neglect to coach and manage them.

Third, many times they fail to develop a rigorous process related to the planning, execution, and follow up to each telesales call. And without a strong process, you're just not going to make it in telemarketing and telesales.

Fourth, many times companies fail to provide the effective, day to day and moment to moment management supervision that's required in order to effectively coach telesales and telemarketing professionals to a higher standard.

Fifth, a lot of companies assume that they know how to do telesales and telemarketing but unless they actually have somebody who has a high level of expertise, which most sales managers don't, often times they find out that it's not enough to set up the function. The real magic comes from having somebody who understands the telesales and telemarketing process and who can really micromanage the deployment of that process, the hiring of the correct people, their coaching, the continuous improvement in the call methods and approach until the results are being gained.

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Why Companies Fail At Telemarketing Deployments

Let's talk about the fact that a lot of companies actually fail when it comes to telesales and telemarketing deployments because they fail to follow some of the key principles. What are some of those failures? How you can avoid those if you're looking to employ telesales and telemarketing functions? First of all, a lot of companies assume that if they just bring people in and stick them on a phone, give them a list and stick them in a cubicle that they'll be able to do fine on their own. Telesales and telemarketing is a really, really hard job and it requires a very specific skill set, a lot of unique DNA, which you won't find in another sales person, and also a lot of coaching.

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Telesales Outsourcing Option: Use A Consultant

If you are considering outsourcing, consider a third option: bringing in a qualified telesales pipeline development consultant to actually build out the process for you at your company which includes actually doing the sales process development program document, determining the target customer, the call approach, building your phone script, and actually hiring and recruiting your telesales personnel, training them to the process and then managing them until they are producing the results that you're looking for. Many companies find that this in very advantageous.

We've had several customers that have produced several hundred percent increases in their lead generation and effectiveness by deploying this strategy, using outside consultant to come in and build their telesales function. This is something that you might want to consider. We call it telesales insourcing and Cube Management does a great job at this with great results for many different customers.

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The Benefits of In-House Telesales

What you'll gain in benefit is multifold.

First of all, you will be able to tightly control the process as it relates to call approach, target, message and how to actually gain traction with potential prospects over the phone and through continuous improvement. By having that function close to your company you'll actually gain critical knowledge over time that will allow you to greatly improve your telesales and lead generation effectiveness.

Second of all, you'll gain continuity in your operations. If you ever decide to fire or terminate a relationship with an outsourced telemarketing and lead generation contractor you'll lose all of the body of knowledge that was gained by the individual working for that company the day that you switch off working for them.

Third of all, you'll actually be able to drive improved efficiency into your sales operation because you'll actually be able to reduce the number of field sales people that you have and increase your mix towards inside sales people who are doing early stage lead qualification and development and then passing qualified leads out to your field sales people. This can dramatically drive up your sales efficiency and greatly reduce your total cost of customer acquisition. Why? Telesales people work more efficiently in a highly controlled, repetitious, high volume calling environment and second on all, they cost less than field sales people do; as a matter of fact, typically, about a third of the cost of a fully loaded sales person.

So it makes a lot of sense for you to consider building this kind of operation inside as opposed to outsourcing it.

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Why Your Company Should Outsource Your Telemarketing & Lead Generation Programs

Let's talk about benefits of outsourcing your telemarketing and lead generation programs and the different options that are available to you if you're considering doing this. Many companies in the past have looked to outsourcing companies to handle lead generations for them and in doing so they've lost part of their key strategic advantage, which is to build a telesales and tele-lead generation lead function in their house that becomes repeatable, sustainable, and actually integrated with your overall selling model. It's no secret that the best in class companies, whether they be in software, hardware, technology, healthcare, manufacturing or business services, are using telesales and telemarketing for business-to-business lead generation and complete sales.

Many companies pooh pooh the idea of using inside sales or telesales or telemarketing for the sale of professional goods and services but many companies are using this very, very successfully. As a matter of fact, names like Motorola, IBM, Intel, Symantec - some of the best in class companies in just about every sector of the economy - are using telesales as a part of their sales and marketing mix in order to improve their sales efficiency and productivity and drive better results to the bottom line in shorter periods of time. It's a key component of the sales acceleration effort.

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How To Scrutinize Sales & Marketing Recruiting Firms

Once you find that firm, really scrutinize their process to make sure that it's rigorous and it includes such things as sales aptitude profiling and testing. Profiling the actual sales person's achievement history over the last several years to show how well the person has actually performed against quota and also performing in depth background checks in interviews to really ascertain whether or not the person is capable at the levels that they claim to. These are just some of the things you should think about as you think about engaging a recruiting firm for hiring sales and marketing talent in a full economy.

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Use Sales & Marketing Recruiters To Find Sales & Marketing Talent

Why is it important to seek a specialized recruiting company for this purpose? Hiring sales and marketing people is completely different that hiring engineering talent, IT professionals or other operations or finance types of positions. It's very easy to be fooled when it comes to hiring sales people. Most sales people do a good job of selling themselves through the interview process and as a result, for the untrained eye, it's really easy to make a hiring mistake because, even though they sell themselves well through the interview process, it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to sell well for your company.

So this is one of the reasons why you want to focus on getting a recruiting company that has a specialized practice in hiring sales and marketing talent. They go well beyond asking the typical questions and use advanced behavior interviewing and screening techniques, as well as sales aptitude and marketing aptitude profiling techniques, to separate the "A" players; in other words, the real top producers, from the rest of the field. So if you're going to go out and try to recruit sales and marking talent in a full economy such as what were experiencing now, you should strongly consider using a recruiting firm that has special skills in this area.

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Recruiting Firms: The Best Way To Get Sales & Marketing Talent From Your Competitors

If you're trying to grow your business and trying to add additional top sales and marketing talent, you're going to need to find a way to find and locate those top sales and marketing producers from other companies and convince them to come to work for you. That's the fastest way to take market share from your competition is by recruiting away top sales and marketing people from your competitors.

How do you go about finding a good recruiting firm for this? Well, start by isolating on recruiting companies that really specialize is sales and marketing and the recruiting of those types of functions within companies. There's a lot of generic recruiting and headhunting firms out there that claim to be experts at sales and marketing but when you dig deeper you'll find out they usually don't have nearly as much in-depth expertise for doing sales and marketing recruiting as you might suspect.

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Where Is The Best Sales & Marketing Talent? With Your Competition.

In order to find really top sales and marketing talent, whether it be VP, director level, marketing manager, sales manager, down to entry level telesales personnel, you're going to have to go into your competition and find those people and extract them and get them to work for your company. This is why using a recruiter can really be of value.

If you don't have the wherewithall, the time, or perhaps the desire to go calling blinding into your competition it makes really good sense to bring on a professional headhunting or recruiting firm that can actually perform that activity for you. Headhunters aren't needed, on the other hand, for finding really easy to find or easy to fill positions. But unfortunately, in sales and marketing, it's always a challenge because the top producers are always working. Those people who get results in sales are very hard to come by. Companies covet them and they pay them well and they want to keep them and retain them. So as economy heats up, employee retention is a key element to most company's strategy to growth.

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Important Of Good Recruiting Practices In Hiring Sales & Marketing Talent

Let's talk about the importance of using good recruiting practices to hire top performing sales and marketing professionals in today's economy. It's not a secret that the economy is on a sustained growth path for the last several years. What that has caused is much higher employment. We're down to almost 5 % in Oregon, but even nationwide, the number is less than that.

So, the fact is, most really talented people, particularly top producers in top companies in the sales and marketing fields, are all fully employed. That means it's going to be very difficult for you to hire top A-type producers in sales and marketing from placing ads strictly on the job instead of just Monster.com or Careerbuilder or other such job boards. It's just not possible to find the best candidates and get them to come to work for your company though such tactics anymore.

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The Sales Lead Handoff Disconnect

The next disconnect that happens in generating seamless lead flow into a company for sales acceleration is as follows: Even though leads might be followed up on by a dedicated resource, often times they are not handed off on properly to salespeople and the salespeople view leads coming from sales people suspiciously. They don’t believe that they’re worth working on. Part of the issue is the “not invented here” syndrome that comes from sales people who believe that they are the only ones who can actually find and develop new prospects in their territory so they’re generally pretty suspicious about marketing and lead generation activities. Often, very low priority is given for following up on the leads that do come from marketing.

So, one of the things that needs to be done is you need to work hard to get your sales people to understand the value of those leads from a company, how much a company is investing in generating those leads through its marketing activities, and holding them accountable for following up on those leads and showing activity on them. Sometimes it makes good sense to even incentivize them through spiffs or recognition programs to make sure that they are actually following up on those leads.

But there is a variety of ways to facilitate this. The key is having sales management view the lead flow coming from marketing as being an important source of new business opportunities and hold its people accountable day in and day out, to following up on those opportunities and converting them into qualified sales deals that can be worked on.

Optimum Lead Generation...A Steady, Predictable Flow

A good lead generation and conversion process starts with the notion that leads have to come in the door at a steady, predictable flow through various marketing activities. Our own feeling is that in today’s day and age, you don’t have to be spending nearly as much on traditional trade shows and advertising as you do on more guerilla marketing activities, which are heavily now oriented to the internet - particularly search engine optimization, pay per click advertising using Google, AdWords and Yahoo Search - those kinds of activities are the ones that best produce the best qualified sales leads. And of course, being able to do that you have to have a website that has a strong search engine visibility, strong connections to the keywords that are used for contextual search by your potential customers, and strong offers and conversion mechanisms, once a potential customer gets to your website.

But the first disconnect that happens between many companies is that actual leads that are processed or taken in by web marketing activities or other are not followed up on and many times it’s because a company doesn’t have anybody whose specific responsibility it is to follow up and qualify those leads and provide fulfillment services to them. Second of all, a lot of times when they are followed up on are done too late and on an untimely basis and with the wrong kind of follow up. So when a company spends money to generate leads through its marketing activities, it needs to make sure that it has a dedicated resource, either on a temporary basis or a permanent basis, who’s responsibility it is to follow up on every one of those leads, and incubate them and nurture them to such a point that they actually turn into a qualified prospect for the company.

The Marketing / Sales Disconnect

Let’s talk about how companies can work to improve the seamless connectedness between their lead generation activities and their sales activities. A lot of companies have many, many disconnects between the parts of the organization that actually generates qualified leads for the company, i.e. usually marketing, and those who actually convert those qualified leads into sales opportunities and close new business for the company - in other words, the sales team.

Typically, there is a large disconnect between several functions inside both marking and sales that produce these actual leads and turn them into qualified business opportunities for the company. Part of this problem is cultural. Many companies have a cultural divide between their marketing and their sales departments that produces a rift since often times, these two parts of the organization function with very separate and distinct mindsets. There is often times turf wars and turf struggles associated with marketing, versus sales, in many organizations and there are very few organizations that actually take an integrated marketing and sales approach and truly have a unified culture between the two sides of those two functions. So this can produce rifts and finger pointing and turf wars.

All those kinds of things between marketing and sales and that leads to disconnects in how marketing and sales work together, in terms of taking opportunities and turning them into new business. So for most organizations the number one challenge is getting marketing and sales to take a unified approach. We believe that unified leadership of the marketing and sales effort is the first key to that, and in our own experience, companies that perform best have one single senior executive who are both marketing and sales oriented and have a strong belief in the two. When you have separate VP’s of marketing and VP’s of sales reporting to a CEO, many times those are strong personalities which are advocating for their own resources, sometimes to the detriment of each other, and can lead to breakdowns in teamwork and communication and finger pointing.

Guerilla Marketing: A Winning Online Strategy

Let’s talk about guerilla marketing. In today’s day and age, it’s no longer possible to play by the old rules that most people who are running companies grew up with in the areas of marketing. Traditional approaches to advertising trade shows and other types of mass media programs no longer work in the face of increasingly tightly segmented markets, increased competition, and the need to be very, very focused in your efforts to general leads. Companies that are spending large amounts of their marketing budgets on generating awareness for their company, as opposed to generating leads are missing great opportunities. New tools relating to internet marketing, and specifically search engines, have given rise to a new paradigm shift in the way companies deploy their resources in order to generate awareness preference and drive leads and that can fill the sales pipeline.

In today’s day and age, modern executives need to understand the importance of internet marketing strategies as a foundation for driving leads. And the good news is that the internet can be used in a very effective way, at a much lower cost, to drive more business in the door than traditional mass media, which costs a lot more and is much less efficient. The foundation for any company’s approach today should be a guerilla marketing strategy that uses the internet to generate awareness and drive leads in the door. The foundation of internet marketing strategy is achieving a good presence on search engines so that a company can target its customers with the relevant key words and the relevant market segments that they are looking to generate leads from. And those prospects come to the website where they can be converted into potential leads though compelling offers and conversion mechanisms, otherwise known as calls to action, that are found on a company’s website.

Companies that do a good job of integrating search engine optimization with effective landing pages and website content, which includes compelling offers, are those companies that are winning in the market place today. We see many examples of small companies that are beating much larger competitors by just doing these things well - having an integrated marketing strategy and web presence.

Strategy Leads To Corporate Efficiency

When leaders don’t spend sufficient time defining their go to market strategy, often times the company suffers and resources are wasted. Members of the team don’t understand what exactly it is they are trying to accomplish. Resources are wasted as sales people hunt for opportunities that don’t fit with the company’s core strategic objectives. And in general, a company that doesn’t have alignment on strategy, is under-optimized and wasting time and effort on needless things that don’t contribute to the company’s overall bottom line success and leadership in the market.

It’s the responsibility of a company’s leadership to set the overall strategic direction for the company and make sure that they are keepers of strategy as the company moves forward and evolves. Second of all, to set that and to develop it as a vision for the company that can be projected and communicated outwards to its market place as well as internally with its employees. Good leaders plan. Good leaders have a strong focus on what the company’s strategic direction is and work to align all of the companies constituents, including internal employees, as well as clients, business partners, channel partners, etc. with the company’s overall strategy.

Why Strategy?

Companies that have a good go to market strategy or strategic marketing plan are in a much better position to execute, according to a company’s overall vision and to leadership’s overall vision, than companies that don’t. It’s the job of leadership to provide this vision and set the framework for building a go to market strategy that can allow the company to be successful in its target markets and achieve its revenue and profit objectives over time. Strategy is also important in terms of being able to align the different elements of a business together and make sure that all of the people in your organization clearly understand where the company is going and what’s required in order to get there as well as what role they will play in executing the company’s overall successful strategy.

Importance of Corporate Strategy

Let’s talk about strategy. A lot of companies that we work with spend too much time focusing on tactics and execution and not enough time really determining what their overall strategy is as a business and the impact on spending enough time at the strategic level can really have an stunting impact on a company’s overall ability to accelerate its sales, gain market leadership, and really power up its revenue growth. A lot of CEO’s get bored when it comes to spending time on strategy and they view strategic work as being theoretical or hypothetical exercise that doesn’t add a lot of value to a company. But when you look a little bit more deeply, companies that execute really well usually start by having a strong foundation in their strategic objectives and their strategic plans.

Many companies that do well in strategic planning actually formalize this process and conduct it on a periodic basis and make sure that their strategy is updated and aligned with changes in the market, changes that are going on with their competitors, changes that are going on with their customers in terms of specific needs, preferences, and overall requirements. So, a company that does good work on strategy has a much better change at being successful than a company that neglects this important area. Strategy is all about setting the foundation for understanding how to be successful in a market and how to win.

Strategic Marketing: Summing Up

So why is it important to do strategic marketing planning? Strategic marketing planning is the foundation for developing a successful, well focused sales program. Many companies miss this and go about deploying their sales resources without fundamentally having a sales strategy. A sales strategy comes from your strategic marking plan. What’s your company doing to develop its marketing strategy? How well do you understand your target customers, your markets, which segments you’re competitive in? What is your unique selling proposition? Have you done a thorough analysis of who your competition is and how you plan to win? Does your sales team understand all of these elements as it relates to executing their daily job successfully? If your company needs help with strategic marketing, our company can help.

Strategic Marketing: Solid Messaging

The next step in the strategic marketing planning process, of course, is developing solid messaging - specific words that are crafted in order to provide an exact image of your company’s capabilities and its unique selling proposition among its target audience of buyers and prospects. Messaging is an artful exercise that requires careful attention to the use of words in order to maximize the impact of the marketing message on your customers. It’s not easy to get your messaging right. A lot of companies make mistakes by using the same sort of ho-hum words that all of their competitors are using and thereby lock themselves into a position of unsustainable noncompetitive disadvantage. So, developing solid messaging really resonates with your potential buyers and prospects in your target market is extremely important.

Messaging, if done right, should be developed into a messaging guide as a part of your strategic marketing plan. And this messaging guide becomes a foundation for outputs into your sales materials, presentation, collateral, website, contents, data sheets, all of the proposals that you write for customers they should all be an output from your core messaging guide that is done in your strategic marketing planning process. So messaging guide really becomes the output. Also, to all of your marketing communication programs, whether it be advertising, direct mail and other forms of promotion to generate leads.

Strategic Marketing: Overall Market Position

The next element of a strategic marketing plan is determining your company’s overall position...what is your company’s unique selling proposition and what are the aspects of your business that make you truly unique that you want your buyers and prospects to know first and foremost about your company? Most companies that are trying to rise above the competitive clutter in their market place today do a great job of articulating what their unique selling proposition is and what their value proposition is relative to their competitors. By whittling the USP down to a couple of words that can be easily created, a vision in the mind of their potential buyers in which is easily understandable positioning, is the process of defining how your company is going to position itself in its core market amongst its prospects and its buyers.

Strategic Marketing: Competitive Analysis

Another important element of strategic marketing planning is doing competitive analysis. If your company doesn’t have a strong understanding of what the competitive landscape is in its core markets, how can you possibly hope to win? Good competitive analysis means categorizing each of your competitors in your core segments, understanding their strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats from those competitors and developing a competitive matrix that lines up those competitors in a table and does a comparison analysis between your company and those competitors that are important, according to product, service, offerings, price, product features, service capabilities, geographic reach...all of those criteria you would use in order to see how well you stack up.

If you do good competitive analysis, you’ll have a much stronger understanding of the details of who your competitors are, how to compete against them and that becomes the foundation for developing a good competitive strategy that you can roll out though your company. It has vast implications for the products that you produce, the kinds of services that you provide, and also, probably most important, it becomes a foundation for training your sales people on how to compete against the competition to win and build sustainable competitive advantage. Every company needs to define its unique selling proposition and build a sustainable competitive advantage and the foundation for this is knowing you competition, understanding where they’re strong, where you’re strong against them and how to win.

Strategic Marketing: Target Customers

Strategic marketing planning, in addition to targeting and segmentation, focuses on target customers and profiling those customers in terms of size, industry focus, what their pain is, what needs they have and how those needs align with the company’s fundamental product offerings and strengths. So, a lot of time needs to be spent in the strategic marketing process determining what the profiling is of the targeted customers. In addition, strategic marketing should focus on who the target buyers are inside those prospects in terms of title, in terms of job function, in terms of decision making authority, and seek to understand exactly who those different constituents are, who the champions are, who the decision makers are inside that audience. This works in terms of understanding that target audience inside that market ultimately leads to the company’s ability to develop positioning statements and messaging. It really focuses on the pain and the needs of those specific buyers inside their target companies.

How To Commence Strategic Marketing Planning

Strategic marketing planning starts by defining which target markets you company is after. It also fundamentally requires research into how your markets are segmented and necessitates a breakdown of those segments, in terms of priorities, for your company. If you’re like most businesses, you can’t afford to go after every market segment in your market. What you need to do is you need to focus on those segments that have the best opportunities for your company and align best with your company’s core strengths and competencies and what makes you different. This is the key to building a sustainable competitive advantage.

Many companies engage in what’s called the red ocean strategy, whereby they focus on selling into markets that are highly competitive, where the water is a color of crimson as a result of all the blood that is being spilled amongst all the competitors fighting for the same valuable customers. Smart companies, on the other hand, focus on what we call the blue ocean strategy, which is finding stretches of water where the competition is less fierce and where the company has a better opportunity to win sales and increase its sales win ratio in relationship to a total number of prospects and deals that it’s examining. This is one of the examples of how strategic marketing planning exercises can help a company define those markets that are less competitive and where the company can be more unique.

Examples Where Strategic Marketing Is Needed

We find many companies that are expending resources trying to sell to the wrong markets against competitors who are way stronger than they are. These companies lack fundamental focus in this area as a result of not understanding their strategic marketing imperatives. We see companies that are selling the wrong products with the wrong people to the wrong customers and with strategic marketing planning work could fundamentally alter the odds and gain a much more solid footing in the markets where they have the best opportunity to compete to win. So strategic marking planning has a place in every company. Often times, business owners look at strategic marketing plans as documents that are put on the shelf and never actually put into practice but, if strategic marketing planning is done as an exercise and periodically updated as a part of your company’s business planning process, you’ll have a much better chance of accelerating your company’s growth, winning in sales, and improving your revenue and profitability.

Why Is Strategic Marketing Important?

Let’s talk about strategic marketing planning and why it’s so important to companies. Many companies lack a strategic marketing plan that becomes a guiding source for the focus of their business. A lot of business owner’s view strategic planning, in general, to be a real boring exercise, but without sound strategic planning a company may be expending resources to try to sell that it wouldn’t have to with a more focused strategy.

Strategic marketing planning has a number of different benefits including being a rallying point for all of your internal employees, for understanding and being on the same page regarding the focus of your business, understanding your market in a lot more detail than your competitors, understanding who your competition is, what their strengths and weaknesses are and how to compete with them and develop competitive strategies.

Strategic marking planning also allows a company to define its fundamental focus in terms of target markets, target segments, customers and actual profiling of potential target clients that helps your sales force to be more effective when it comes to selling your products or services. Finally, strategic marketing planning is really the foundation for a successful sales acceleration program.

Internet Marketing: Lower Cost Per Lead Than Traditional Media

Part of the issue with search engine optimization is that many business owners, CEO’s and vice present’s of sales and marketing actually were not educated on the power of internet marketing. It’s almost a generational thing. Business owners who’ve come up through the traditional school of thought and been educated on sound marketing principals still look at advertising, trade shows and other traditional vehicles for generating sales leads. Many of those different traditional marketing programs are being eroded by the power of internet marketing.

The cost per lead for internet marking is substantially lower than it is for tradition trade shows and advertising. The cost per mil in terms of exposure for your company and brand awareness is also much lower using search engine optimization and pay per click than it is using traditional media. In addition, in many cases search engine optimization gets you focused much more on targeting buyers, those who are actually interested in your product or service, as opposed to all potential buyers of all products and services, a small subset of which actually may be interested in your company and what it has to offer because search engines provide users of the internet with contextual search. It allows you to focus in on key words that are only those typed by your potential buyers, which means that a searcher who is using those key words in order to find your product or service is much more valuable because you get a much higher density of searchers who are actually looking for your product or service versus trying to target a particular demographic though mass media advertising.

So if your company isn’t involved in search engine optimization today, if you don’t have a strategy for SEO and haven’t made a commitment to go forward with this program, you should consider strongly, as one of your first new years resolutions for 2006, do you need some help on this subject? Cube Management has the technical expertise and the campaign management skills to help you deploy a successful SEO program and take your company to the top of the internet and beyond its current limitations in marketing.

The Benefits of Internet Marketing & Search Engine Optimization

What are the benefits? First, with the right internet advertising and search engine optimization, a company can gain online visibility that’s largely disproportion to its actual company size versus the size of its competition. That means that even the smallest company, by engaging is sound SEO practices, can actually get an incredible amount of visibility that far exceeds their size or the ability to compete, through traditional sales and marketing channels.

Second of all, search engine optimization, when done right with pay per click and landing pages that are focused on offers related to keywords that your buyers are searching for, can actually generate a large number of lead conversions. When we’re talking about lead conversions, we’re talking about people going to your web site, seeing an offer that is in line with what they’re searching for, such as a free trial or free guide or something of value, filling out a web form, a very brief one, and giving you their contact information in exchange for being signed up for the offer. This is a prime way for capturing and generating leads that you can continue to nurture either through sales activities or through marketing activities such as e-newsletters. So, when companies today think that search engine optimization doesn’t apply to our business, I’m here to say that they’re just dead wrong.

Virtually any business today can benefit from search engine optimization. You don’t have to be an online business. You don’t have to be a technology business. You don’t have to be a company that is only focused on internet sales. All companies that are not taking advantage of this opportunity are really doing themselves a disservice in leaving themselves succeptable to competitors who are following an aggressive approach.

How To Implement World Class Internet Marketing

It’s not difficult to implement world class search engine optimization and pay per click campaign strategies even if your company is very small. It’s also not necessary to be an online company with ecommerce as its sole focus or even its focus at all in order to capitalize on the power of the internet. Only a fraction of the number of internet advertisers who are benefiting from a strong web presence are actually engaged in ecommerce activity, in other words, online sales.

We’ve worked with a myriad of small and medium sized companies to dramatically boost their internet search engine presence. In fact, some of our clients are right at the top of the internet for their organic search terms that are applied to their business. One example is a health care service company based in Portland, Oregon which now has a dominant position in its category on the internet while only having twelve employees. This kind of opportunity can be put to work for any business, and with the right work and attention to search engine optimization can take any company to the top of the web. It doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to do good pay per click advertising and search engine optimization. In fact, the cost of deploying an initial search engine optimization program is a fraction of what a company would normally pay for advertising.

Search Engine Optimization & Sales

Let’s talk about search engine optimization. Most businesses are still completely missing the boat when it comes to using the power of the internet to generate sales leads. Today the opportunity for even small business to capitalize on this opportunity is really quite remarkable. We’ve worked with a number of small companies that are small regional businesses that have propelled themselves to the top of the internet search engines through good search engine optimization and sound pay per click campaign advertising practices. Even if you’re a small company it doesn’t mean that you can’t get online visibility. A lot of business owners still haven’t woken up to this fact.

The fact is, 85% of all business buyers today go first to an internet search engine in order to look for a vendor or provider of services for products, instead of going to traditional advertising yellow pages and other sources. So if your company hasn’t got an internet strategy, a strategy for search engine optimization and getting visibility online, you’re really missing a huge opportunity and you’re missing the vast majority of your potential market.

How To Confront Poor Performing Salespeople

I’ve met many sales mangers over my career who actually avoid confronting their sales people when they see poor sales performance. And sales people need to be confronted in an assertive and healthy and productive environment in order to understand what management’s expectations are,attempt to make correction to their work and take corrective action. So a sales manager’s job is not to apologize or hide from the truth, but to assertively, and in a healthy way, work with their sales people to diagnose the problem, understand what the underlying causes are for the problem, and look for solutions.

The best solutions, often times, come from the salesperson themselves. In particular, most salespeople understand what it is that’s not going right and can reach their own conclusions regarding what they need to do in order to improve their results. So the best way to start any corrective action discussion with the sales person is to ask them what are the causes for not achieving your bookings or revenue targets, what is the competitive environment that you’re in, how much activity is actually being undertaken in order to generate the level of new prospects, qualified deals, and proposals that are going to lead to the sales results that you’re trying to achieve. Often times, salespeople understand the root causes of their own deficiencies, and when given the opportunity, can step up and take ownership and responsibility for making changes in their daily routine, in their approach, in their technique, in their processes in order to fix the problem.

Sales management’s job is to facilitate this and making sure that communication is happening that’s going to diagnose the problem as quickly as it’s understood and take corrective action to accelerate sales and improve overall performance.

How To Improve Poor Sales Performers

The key to managing a poor performer’s improvement is healthy, open, assertive discussions in a climate of accountability, as well as a friendly, helpful and supportive environment. A lot of sales managers come down hard on their people when a person is not producing the right sales revenues for the company. And a lot of times, this is the most destructive thing. Salespeople, just like everyone else in life, need positive motivation and empowerment in order to succeed. So, simply taking a harsh approach to an individual at the outset when the first signs of poor sales performance are occurring is not a remedy for the problem and will often have the very effect on a person’s motivation that you’re trying to avoid. A better way is to sit down and talk with the individual and understand from their perspective what’s happening in the sales process or what their sales strategy or with their activity that is the underlying cause for the poor performance.

Taking Swift Corrective Action Is Key For Sales Managers

Taking swift corrective action with poor sales performers is the key to any sales manager’s responsibilities. Nowhere is it more important than in sales to quickly take action when a sales person is not hitting their revenue targets. Management’s job is to diagnose and detect the underlying reasons for a salesperson not performing and to engage in corrective action in order to correct the behavior, the activity or the results as necessary. Often times, sales managers are too slow to recognize when a sales performance issue is coming to light and waits and hopes that a sales person will sell themselves out of a slump. Only through active engagement with the salesperson can sales management hope to mitigate or reduce the possibilities of bad sales performance and get a salesperson onto a turn around plan that will produce the results they are looking for.

Don't Take Shortcuts In The Hiring Process

Many companies that we do work for try to shortcut this because they really want to believe that a strong salesperson, when they come in to sell, is actually going to be able to sell for their company and so they tend to cut corners. Almost 53% of all sales hires are mishires for this reason.

Another reason why people make mistakes in hiring salespeople is, particularly if they don’t have the same skills set themselves, they can misjudge what a persons true aptitudes and abilities are in this area. So, one of the things to do is to be careful...if you’re a finance, operations or engineering executive and you’re put in the position of hiring salespeople, is to know your limitations with respect to your ability to judge, make those judgments and make the right hires. Hiring good sales people is a difficult and challenging process but if it’s done right, it can be very successful for your company.

Behaviorial Interviewing & Job Description: Very Important

In addition to the actual multi-team process, it’s really important to develop a good behavioral interviewing questionnaire that allows you to get to the heart of whether or not a person has actually demonstrated their skills. Behavioral interviewing is based upon the concept of having a person telling you stories about their past successes, their past challenges and helping you to uncover the keys to whether or not a person has been able to perform in previous jobs. Past experience and past achievement history is an extremely important indicator of whether or not a person actually is going to be able to perform for your company.

Another aspect of a solid process is establishing strong hiring criteria up front and that means defining exactly through your job description what it is that you’re looking for in a candidate and setting out that criteria so that you can build in an interviewing process to uncover how well individual candidates meet with that criteria. We typically don’t hire a good sales person without going through at least four interviews and that requires time, energy and a commitment to the process.

The Hiring Steps

So, there are a number of different steps that are required in order to recruit good sales and marketing talent. They include doing a good job of defining the job description, developing an attractive job posting to promote the position, and actually getting the word out by using career databases, the internet, as well as sending job postings out to your friends and network colleagues so that you can get referrals. Most of the best sales people come through referrals and not through mass advertising.

Additional process steps that are extremely important are having a multistage interviewing process that uncover a person’s skills and talents through a series of interviews, using a team-based process to be able to have different perspectives from different members of your team and uncovering those talents by using those different perspectives and also uncovering the weaknesses of an individual candidates.

Sales & Marketing Recruiting Process

Being a good salesperson is a lot more than just the power of persuasion. There are a number of key skills and traits that are required in order to be a good sales person. When I speak of skills, we’re talking about learned abilities...something that can be trained or taught. When we talk about traits, we’re talking about innate characteristics of the person’s personality or behavior. It is possible through a rigorous process to uncover a person’s traits and skills through the interviewing process and by going through a rigorous set of homework assignments, aptitude testing, sales performance history recording and also behavioral interviewing.

If you’re going to hire good sales and marketing people, you have to have a rigorous process which means defining all of the steps that are necessary in order to understand whether or not a person’s skills and talents are actually a fit with what your company is trying to accomplish and whether or not that person can actually become part of your team, integrate themselves and be successful.

How To Recruit Top Sales & Marketing Talent

Let’s talk about how to recruit top sales & marketing talent: There are lots of people who get into sales and marketing for the wrong reasons. So there are a lot of people out there who actually don’t have what it takes in order to be successful at sales and marketing.

Some of the most important things when it comes to finding good sales and marketing talent are...first of all, having a good system and process for recruiting. Second of all, knowing what to look for in good sales and marketing talent. Third, knowing how to get the word out to broadcast and promote your company to people who have the talent that you need. And fourth, how to actually make them a part of your team.

So we’re going to talk a little bit about the recruiting process first. Recruiting sales and marketing talent is both a combination of art and science. It requires a lot of commitment to process in order to get the right people. There are a lot of companies that hire the first person that comes through the door thinking that they’re going to be a good salesperson for their company when in fact the only thing they’re good at is selling their way through the interview process. Now a person who comes in and sells you through an interview process doesn’t necessarily have what it takes to be able to sell for your company so part of your challenge is weeding out the right people through the interviewing process to make sure that the person has more than an ability to convince you that they are the right candidate but actually can use their persuasion skills in order to be a good salesperson for you company. So what you’re really looking for is somebody who has the ability and the willingness to sell. And that doesn’t come easy.

Sales Leadership: Defined

Of course the best sales performance system is only as good as the people who are running it and when it comes right down to it, running a high performance sales team is all about good leadership. What is good leadership? That’s not the subject that I want to cover here but I certainly do want to say this: Leadership is about passion, about vision, about connectedness, about motivating people, about finding out what it is that unlocks the door to people’s special performance. So in some way, building a successful sales performance management system is a key to accelerating your company’s sales and as your organization continues to grow, it becomes more important in order to achieve high performance scalability and repeatability in your processes.

The Importance Of Sales Training

Providing training for your sales people which is very important. It is a way to make sure that your sales people are always sharpening their saw and that you’re giving them the latest tools in order to improve their sales performance. So typically we work on both sales technique training as well as product training and customer and market training.

Other things to do in sales meetings include providing recognition incentives and rewards. Taking time in your sales meetings to praise and celebrate the successes of your people is a great way of showing them that you really do care about their performance and you’re willing to celebrate those success and give them recognition and rewards as appropriate for the successes that they have. Holding sales meetings is an important part of making sure that you have a motivated, high performance sales team that’s working together and is accountable for its activities.

The more that sales people understand that they are accountable for producing themselves and are held accountable through these different vehicles that we’ve talked about the better your sales performance is going to be from your people. So building and deploying a successful sales performance management system is something that a company cannot live without and needs to be taken very seriously. What is your company doing to enhance sales performance from your people? Do you need help with sales performance management?

The Role Of Sales Management In Sales Performance: Regular Sales Meetings

The other element is, of course, holding regular sales meetings. Some companies only do this on a very infrequent basis and the sales meeting should be a primary component of your sales performance management system. By formalizing sales meetings and holding them on a regular basis, you’re showing your sales team that you’re creating an environment of accountability and information exchange. Sales meetings can be used for a number of purposes including information gathering and finding out how your sales team members are performing.

The Role Of Sales Management In Sales Performance: Frequent Phone Contact

A second element, in addition to regular sales visits, is frequent phone contact with your sales people just to check in with them to find out how things are going, and frequent informal discussions with sales people to just show them that you care and also giving them feedback on problems and challenges that they are facing on specific accounts as they raise those issues to you. Knowing which accounts your sales people are working on is the foundation for asking them questions on a regular basis about how things are going on those accounts and showing your salespeople that you are actually engaged with them in an active relationship and are interested in helping them to find ways to win. When your sales people win, your company wins.