If you want to know how your sales team's outbound calling performance compares with that of your peers you’ll want to read our new Sales Performance Benchmark Blog, focused on helping sales managers better understand benchmarks and metrics related to prospecting and sales calling campaigns.
We launched the new blog today, asking the question: what really happens to your prospect calls? The answer might surprise you. You'll want to check it out for yourself and subscribe to get our regular insights into sales benchmarks and metrics that can help you optimize your sales performance.
Benchmarks are a big deal. When I worked for Ziff-Davis and IDG in the tech publishing business, benchmarking is what could make or break a product based on its performance. We built and used testing applications that served as a consistent standard way to measure and compare computer performance across configurations and manufacturers. A few years later I co-founded a company that applied this idea to build a benchmarking application that helped IT optimize their systems. In the case of computers for example, you could measure response time and throughput to get a baseline measurement, then change some part of the configuration like the number of CPUs or memory capacity, and measure again to see how much performance gain (or loss) resulted.
Now you can baseline your outbound calling against other companies to see how your business compares. And that's just the beginning...then you'll want to start testing your own sales organization, systems, and processes by altering variables like lists, training, scripts and more to optimize your sales performance.
- Tom
I’ve been calling our customers the last couple of weeks to see who’s up for telling their ConnectAndSell story to the world -- and even if they don’t want to tell the world, I want to hear their stories as told in their own words. We’re lucky because our customers genuinely want to tell us their stories…so much so that I have to pace my outreach so I can get to them on a timely basis (nice problem to have.)
The process is simple. I look at our customer list, pick a bunch of companies that look especially interesting or that I already know, and ask the respective account owner if they think their account is a good story that would consider working with us on the PR front. I set up a call for 30 minutes with the named individual, take copious notes on the call, and share my notes with the entire company on Salesforce Chatter.
Customers say the darndest things. Here are three anecdotal stories I heard today from Bojana Bowermon, Inside Sales Manager for ScienceLogic. Her stories should inspire you to start calling your customers post-haste to begin building your own war chest of customer stories:
- "I had a sales person on my team get a lead from a marketing campaign in May of last year. The person wanted more info from us by email, wanted this and that…so, from May until January (7 months) my rep went back and forth with emails—probably 20 digital conversations in that period. Then this sales rep started using ConnectAndSell two months ago and got this person on the phone, live. It took ConnectAndSell to finally get him live, and move him to a meeting…it went on to a proof-of-concept once we had that demo."
- "We identified a key account that fit our profile, uploaded the CEO’s contact information, and sent him an email, he opened that email several times. We immediately created a task in our CRM so he would be in our next ConnectAndSell calling session. He picked up, and said our call was 'perfect timing,' we’re about to sign a proof-of-concept with a competitor. He said let’s look at your product, then he delegated to someone who asked for a demo. This all happened within a week which is amazing."
- "A team member on my inside sales team, his number of meetings scheduled were so-so...I encouraged him to create good lists, go through his tasks, and make sure they have good subject lines for ConnectAndSell sessions. He did, and he cleaned up his lists and now he has 14 meetings in January alone when his quota is ten…all fourteen came from ConnectAndSell sessions."
These are great stories that illustrate the power of live conversation automation and the great things that can come from a very simple act: calling your customers.
- Tom
What’s your relationship with your CRM app? I’m a Salesforce.com user who falls somewhere in the middle between love and hate—a pragmatist who mostly gets what I want out of it. Most of the people I know in the tech business are more in the grudgingly-go-along camp. The true SFDC haters hang out at websites like this. Perhaps the biggest SFDC fans are the consultants helping companies undo months or years of data plaque that built up over time from poor hygiene. I have experienced at least one SFDC implementation that was so messed up after eight years of bastardization that the business would have been better off scrapping it and starting over with a new instance of SFDC. Instead, they limped along with too much data, orphaned fields and insanely complex logic that cost them dearly.
Lauren Carlson, a CRM analyst with SoftwareAdvice inspired me to take on this topic after she pointed me to her latest blog entry about sales force automation – “now every rep’s best friend.” I would think it would be really hard to find any sales rep who actually likes using a CRM. Sure, you can find a sales operations director, or a marketing ops person who may think of their CRM as a friend—but a sales rep? Not. What sales rep likes feeding the CRM beast when they can be on the phone having live conversations with prospects and customers (hint: a bad one). Show me a sales rep who relishes in colorful dashboards, spreadsheets and reports and I’ll show you a wannabe sales ops manager.
I ran into a former co-worker a few months ago at the Sales 2.0 conference who runs a business devoted to fixing broken SFDC implementations. His problem? He told me he can’t find Salesforce.com talent fast enough to meet the demand. I don’t blame SFDC for the sad state of affairs because it’s the nature of the CRM beast that’s to blame. Sales force automation is complex, no matter how much you try to make it easy to administer (I think SFDC does a pretty good job here considering the scope of what it can do and the breadth of the markets it serves). The biggest and most consistent challenge I’ve faced with SFDC is data quality and integrity…neither of which have anything to do with SFDC. No matter how much you crank SFDC down, train your reps, or append and cleanse the data, your CRM data and logic are bound to drift off course. My confidence in the data coming out of SFDC is only as good as my belief that I’ve understood the data enough to trust how I am getting it out for reporting. Even when I am 99% sure I have it right, there’s that 1% chance that my assumptions are wrong or the data isn’t what it appears to be. Things can get even dicier when you roll marketing automation into the picture. Now you have two complex applications that have to play well together: More data elements, more data relationships with rules, triggers, content, users…you get the idea.
When you consider what these systems are capable of, and how accessible they are to a broad set of business uses, it’s simply astonishing compared with the state of the art 15 years ago. The real story here isn’t about why you should love or hate any sales and marketing application, it’s about having realistic expectations, goals and a plan to make them work for you—not against you.
- Tom
It’s the end of internal emails for the 72,000 employees at France-based Atos. CEO Thierry Breton has been getting a lot of attention since declaring his “zero email” policy that aims to do away with internal emails. Here’s my take on what’s in it for Atos:
- Employees can communicate better because all internal communications occur in channels dedicated to employees—no more comingling internal with external
- Real-time mechanisms like instant messaging encourage shorter back-and-forths that resolve more quickly
- Content can be shared, managed and therefore better leveraged across the company
- A big chunk of their four to five billion email messages received annually that suck up time and resources will simply go away
- As applications like Salesforce.com Chatter get broader adoption, including support for customers and partners, resistance will be futile
Email had a good run—and it isn’t going away any time soon—but it’s best days are behind it. Who likes opening their inbox and finding hundreds of new messages to sort through every day? How many times do you blindly hit the delete button on emails you get from companies or people you don’t know?
You have to wonder if shifting email to other forms of digital conversation will really be more efficient. After all, texting and instant messaging have their downside too. What’s missing in all of this should be obvious: where do live conversations fit into the ebb and flow of inbound and outbound b2b communications? The dynamics of a live phone conversation are very different than a typewritten conversation—a simple fact too often lost in an era when the popular thinking is whatever’s digital must be better.
Breton told the WSJ “Emails cannot replace the spoken word. If people want to talk to me, they can come and visit me, call or send me a text message.” The next time you start to fire off an email, try letting your voice do the talking instead of your fingers.
- Tom
It seems like my family talks with Siri more than they talk with me since we traded up to iPhone 4S. It’s not because they have more to say to Siri—no, it’s all the times when Siri is “having trouble connecting to the network” so they have to try Siri again and again, or Siri gets their questions wrong and they have to restate the questions a different way. Whether their conversations with Siri are more digital or human depends on the severity of their frustration…the louder and longer they grumble when Siri falters, the more human the conversation.
To be fair, when Siri works it (she?) can feel a little bit like you’re talking to a person. Not that Siri will replace live conversations any time soon, but Siri takes the notion of digital conversation to another realm that’s bound to evolve and improve. Try to imagine how a really good natural voice recognition/response system could be used for sales and marketing. I bet it isn’t as far off as you think—for better or worse.
The Harvard Business Review published a piece last week that got me thinking more about the current state of digital vs. person-to-person live conversations. In his article “Don't Send That Email. Pick up the Phone!” Anthony Tjan describes the downside of hiding behind digital communications, particularly email. Although his article directed at one-to-one business communications, I think his ideas hold true for sales and marketing. In its short lifespan, email has de-evolved quickly to a current state where:
- Emails can have unintended consequences because you can’t accurately predict how the recipient will interpret the content
- When you want to get information from someone in order to have a relevant and meaningful discussion, email threads can go on and on ….and often go off the rails anywhere along the way
- It’s easier to ignore, delay or delete an email than answer it
- We’re in an era of MAD--mutually assured defense when spam filters and email management tools makes it harder and harder to reach someone by email
- The medium is the message and with email, that means impersonal. No matter how well constructed or “targeted” an email it’s still an email
But the biggest drawback to email compared with live conversations? You can’t adjust the course of the dialog based on a real-time back-and-forth where you have to think, listen and respond. No two conversations are alike because everyone has a different way of starting a conversation and every individual takes a different path based on background, personality, job, mood, etc. That’s the power of live conversation at work. Now go pick up your phone and make something happen.
- Tom
What if parents nurtured their kids the way marketing automation “nurtures” prospects and customers? Tag your kid with a cookie, track his/her behavior and off you go. Here’s how it would work: When your 10 year old daughter turns on the TV and watches Wizards of Waverly Place you subtract 10 points (no redeeming value there); when she brushes her teeth before bed without being told you add 20 points…and so on.
With your scoring rules in place you can set and forget your parental responsibilities. When she hits 60 points in a 24 hour window, you text her “great job brushing your teeth without being told!” When her score dips below -20, you auto-send her friend’s mom an email cancelling her play date. Once your rules and scoring algorithms are dialed in, you can sit back and count the returns -- never having a real live conversation with your kid again.
Does Parenting 2.0 sounds like a bright future? No more than a purist view of marketing automation as a panacea where digital conversations replace--rather than drive quality live conversations. Devon McDonald of OpenView shares her perspective on this in her blog: “I don’t care how good your marketing automation system is — a prospect knows the difference between a personalized touch point, or one generated from marketing and sent out with a blast.”
She quotes Cindy Modzel of Sigma Marketing Group who says “true lead nurturing is about relevant conversations and consistent follow up. Pre-set messages and e-mails may hit a few prospects with appropriate information or catch a prospect with an immediate need, but the real truth is that the more conversations the salesperson has, the more likely they will uncover a pain point or true need.”
If you want to reach someone and have the best chance for a meaningful conversation, would you rather have their mobile phone number or email address? I know what I’d want.
- Tom
Save time or make money. Those were the must-haves and only-ways that Intuit drilled into me when we created the blueprint for “mapping” our business unit’s messaging. Nothing made the message map unless it explained what we did in a way that helped customers save time or make money. That seems simple enough, but the tech industry is notorious for droning on about the “how” and “what” about products instead of why anyone should care.
At the Sirius Decisions Summit 2011 Europe in London this week, Managing Director and co-founder John Neeson suggested a third way to describe value: competitive advantage (John called it competitive impact). I think this is an idea worth pursuing in the B2B world. Would you buy a product or service on the basis that it will help your company grab more market share faster and better than the other guy? I bet your competitors would.
Yes, you could translate competitive advantage capabilities into how they save you time or more money, but I think there’s something important lost in the translation. Fierce competition is a way of life in the tech business (look at all the Groupon look-alikes that sprouted up like weeds). There’s even a term for it: time-based competition. What CEO wouldn’t jump on a product or service that would help their business outrun, outmaneuver and outsmart the competition?
Maybe Sirius Decisions is into something here…marketing and selling products and services on the basis of how they deliver competitive advantage. If there’s one place where the idea may get legs it’s here in Silicon Valley where there’s no such thing as unfair competitive advantage – only winners and losers.
- Tom
Hey--sales and marketing executives and practitioners out there—a question for you: how did you hear about that new idea or hot technology that might be good for your career and your company? Maybe a peer or co-worker mentioned something to you in passing that sparked an idea. Or maybe you heard something at a conference…or your boss or subordinate mentioned something to you. Here’s the harder question: how do you sort through all the noise to decide which big ideas to give a cursory look or those that merit a more serious tire-kicking? Hundreds of companies look to Sirius Decisions, the Gartner of sales and marketing expertise to help them grapple with these questions. Last week, ConnectAndSell joined the club—we too are now on the roster of Sirius Decisions clients.
As a client, the door swings open for us to join the conversation among Sirius Decisions analysts and clients. We signed on because we believe that what ConnectAndSell offers to the world of sales and marketing is game-changing—so much so that we think it would be almost criminal for Sirius Decisions analysts and clients to remain in the dark about us.
If you’re a Sirius Decisions client, keep an eye out for ConnectAndSell in their content, conversations and at their conferences. Ask about us--we’re the guys changing how business conversations happen. We’ll be at the Sirius Decisions Summit Europe 2011 October 5. Until then, here’s a peek at our new ad that will run in the conference program.
Before there were umpteen ways to connect with someone—voicemail, email, text, mobile phones, VOIP, etc.—when you wanted to reach someone you called their phone (unless, maybe you could knock on their door). For business, that typically meant calling a business number, for home a home number. Have all the new methods and channels for reaching us made us more reachable—or less?
Frank Bruni of the New York Times takes on this subject in this op-ed piece “Sorry, Wrong In-Box.” He says in spite of “how instantly reachable we all are, how hyperconnected, with our smartphones, laptops, tablets and such…the maddening truth is that we’ve become so accessible we’re often inaccessible, the process of getting to any of us more tortured and tortuous than ever.”
If you’re a sales rep calling customers and prospects, you know better than anyone how hard it is to get someone live on the phone. ConnectAndSell system-wide connect rates as of October last year show that it took 22 dials to get one live conversation with the actual person you’re targeting—that’s not an assistant, voice mail or wrong number.
And although Mr. Bruni is addressing consumers, he makes a solid case for how difficult it is for anyone to connect with anyone for any reason any more. ‘“Try his cell first, then shoot him an e-mail,” says a bigwig’s assistant. “Or circle back to me. Here’s my cell, and my e-mail, and ...”’ Sound familiar?
- Tom
P.S. - check out some of the comments on the NYT article
Whether you love or hate marketing automation, the rapid pace of adoption should have your attention. According to Marketing Automation Times as of May 2011 there were about 7,500 customers split across seven known vendors and a small slice going to "other." My experience with Marketo taught me that success or failure has less to do with the application and much more to do with what goes into the application--leads, content and rules to make it all work. If you put garbage into Marketo (or Eloqua, Genius, or any marketing automation application for that matter) then swirl the garbage around, guess what comes out? Yep, garbage.
It takes a lot of work and planning to put the right stuff into a marketing automation system to get qualified leads over to the sales team—not to mention smart people who “get” data and applications and a good understanding of who will buy their products and services and how to engage them. When everything goes right (and there are a lot of places where it can go badly wrong), marketing automation should help you get more of the right leads to the right sales person at the right time. Here’s the big idea in all this: all that time, effort and money can’t find its way to revenue until a sales rep is talking to the prospects and customers surfaced by marketing automation.
It should be obvious that the connection between a marketing lead and a sales rep talking with the person defined as a lead deserves a lot of care and attention. After all, the huge amount of work and effort required to get to a live conversation comes together at the point where the conversation occurs. Some of the most valuable insights to guide a business come from talking with and listening to this channel.
A sharp sales rep/customer told me a few weeks ago that he doesn’t use the scored leads his marketing department assigns to him for his ConnectAndSell sessions because the leads “are a waste of time.” Instead he does his own research to build his own list that gets him to about fifteen live conversations an hour. What’s the disconnect here? Nobody in marketing is paying attention to what the live conversations (or lack thereof) are telling them…except the sales rep who’s moved on.
Marketing automation brings measurement to online behavior to help marketers test, learn and leverage insight into what works and what doesn’t. ConnectAndSell brings measurement to live conversations so you can see, understand and act on what you learn...a feedback loop that helps you grow your business faster and better.
If you don’t understand what’s happening at the point of live conversations you can’t tell whether your marketing automation is helping or hurting sales. You should hear what you're missing.
- Tom