Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine With The $100 Million Best Practices Of Salesforce.com

by Aaron Ross

Second: What is your plan for a client’s ongoing success? Do you have a role in your company dedicated solely to helping customers become successful in using your product or service? It’s easy to want to push all the responsibility for success onto the customer, but it is equally your responsibility to help them succeed, because happy customers will help your business. It’s both the right and the profitable thing to do.

“Pick a niche, get rich.” If your marketing and sales efforts aren’t focused on your Ideal Customers, you will spend way too much time and energy on prospects who don’t really need what you have to offer (or they don’t understand yet why they need it).

No Sales Process Do you have a sales process? If you don’t – get one. ANYTHING is better than no process. A consistent process that isn’t working well is better than no process, because you can improve consistent systems; you can’t improve random systems.

In pipeline reviews or one-on-one coaching sessions, be merciless in finding out how much energy reps are putting into mapping out decision-making processes and people. If they aren’t directly in touch with decision makers, how can they help their Champion or main point of contact sell for them? (Never assume your internal champion knows how to or sell internally for you!) When doing outbound sales, start high – one or two levels higher than your decision-maker. Have reps practice role-playing with people at your company who can think and speak like decision-makers. It will give the reps confidence, and teach them how to have better conversations with senior people. How can you position your product and marketing to resonate and sell higher?

If your prospect (or market) has an average six-month buying process, there’s no point in getting impatient at month three. “What’s your usual process to evaluate and buy products like this?” “What would it take to close in [30/60/90] days?” (Or by a certain date?) “How can we get this done?” (Later in a sales cycle)

Instead of telling them how great you are, or what a leader your company is, how can you prove it? For example, a trial can create a first point of entry in the “getting to know you” stage and give buyers a sense that you have the credibility to help them. Don’t just throw free stuff at them. Tailor what you’re offering to whatever their needs or problems are, or else it’s likely to be a waste of time for both parties.

Now, the “decision-making process” is more important than “the decision-maker.” Avoid questions like: “Who is the decision-maker?” “Who signs the check?” Ask questions like: “How have you evaluated similar products or services?” “What is the decision-making process?” “Who is involved in making the decision?” “How will the decision be made?” “What are the steps to have a check cut or funds released?”

In other words, sales reps shouldn’t wimp out and avoid trying to build a relationship with the decision-maker, but it’s not always urgent to get there from the beginning (though it is a big help). Is reaching the ultimate decision-makers any less important? No! Win over your internal champions and coaches first; build the case. Then you’ll be perfectly positioned to win over the final decision-makers. You do want to build a relationship with the decision-makers early, but don’t “sell” them until you’ve begun winning over the influencers – or at least until they’ve begun to agree with the value of your business case. Build some credibility and understanding of the business first.

Busy salespeople tend not to ask enough questions (or ask bold enough) around how the prospect’s internal processes work. If you’re a salesperson: With your current top five deals, how well have you mapped out their internal buying process? If you’re a sales executive: If you sat down with your team and had them talk about their own top deals, how clear are they – not just on the current status of the deal or the next step, but also the prospect’s actual internal process to get to a decision?

If the trial is successful, then what? Answer that question before you begin the trial.

Most success comes from expectations – did you over-promise and under- deliver? Or vice versa? Expectations are incredibly powerful, and can make or break trust with your prospect… and make or break the sale.

Just as important as sales cycle length is how many hours of selling time per rep does each sales cycle require? How can they be much more efficient and effective, in order to handle more deals with higher close rates?

Step 1: (15 Minutes) First Contact: ‘Is This a Waste Of Time?’ Imagine you are referred to someone, or get a response from a prospect and have a first chat with them. You can take fifteen minutes with them to figure out whether or not it’s a waste of time to speak further.

Step 2: (One Hour) Qualification/Discovery Call: ‘Is There A Fit?’ This is a call with one or two of the prospect’s point people, the ones that usually check out new vendors. They want see if they like you and what you’re doing enough to spend more time on your company and introduce you to more people involved in their evaluation. You are qualifying or disqualifying them as well – remember, if it’s not a good fit, you should move on!

Step 3: (Two Hours) Group Working Session: ‘Should We Work Together?’ In this session, you want to create a joint vision together. Walk them through a design process on how they can and will become successful with your product. Coach the vision out of them rather than telling it to them.

Killer Salespeople Uncover True Problems Behind Desired Solutions When asking prospects about their challenges, their pain, they will usually in fact actually tell you their desired solutions, which sound like problems: “We need a new marketing system,” or, “Our marketing system is dysfunctional,” is not a true problem, it’s a solution masked as a problem. What they are really saying is, “We want a new marketing system.”

Here is a sample of how asking “Why?” or “Why is that important?” or “So what?” can lead you to the true business problem: “We need to integrate our financial and sales systems.” That is a desired solution, not a pain or challenge… Why? “Because our reporting is inaccurate.” Still not a root challenge yet… Why? “Because our executive has presented reports to the CFO that later turned out to be wrong.” Aha! Now that is a real pain: unable to make effective plans or business decisions because of inaccurate reporting.

Prospects Should Earn Proposals Does your sales team give out proposals and quotes like one of those people standing on the street handing out flyers? “Here, please take one!” There is a cost to giving out proposals or paperwork too soon – the prospect doesn’t value it or your time, and you lose the chance to set up a specific next step that would help them earn the proposal. Example: You do a demo. At the end of the demo, they ask about pricing or a proposal. You say you’ll include a proposal with a follow up email. They say, “Thanks.” You send the materials. You never hear from them again.

If you’re not winning at least 50% of the proposals you’re giving out, you’re too easy. Instead, the next time a prospect casually asks about pricing or getting a proposal, don’t give it to them until you know they want it. Tell them you’d be happy to, and to do that, you’d need to set up a scoping call with them and the key people, to ensure the proposal is accurate and meets their needs. If the prospect declines, then either they aren’t a great prospect, or you didn’t prove your value to them in your prior calls or demos.

The most common mistake is lumping all the types of leads into one bucket and then making future projections based on past results.

Seeds take a lot of time to cultivate and to ramp up, but once they get going they are unbeatable, with the highest conversion and close rates. Seeds are created by developing happy customers, organic internet search/SEO, public relations, local user groups, most social media, and publishing expert content.

Nets: Nets are classic marketing programs, in which you’re trying to cast a wide net and see what you get, whether through email marketing, conferences, advertising, or some forms of Internet marketing (PPC).

Spears involve targeted outbound efforts (such your classic “hunting”) that require some individual human efforts (such as business development, “Top 10 Targets” programs, and Cold Calling 2.0).

Prospects (or names) A database of names or a list that you are marketing to, in which people have not responded positively yet. If you buy a list from a place like InfoUSA, Data.com or Hoovers, this is a list of prospects (or names), not “leads.”

Leads A lead is a prospect that has responded positively in some way to show their interest in what you have to offer, such as registering for a white paper or attending a webinar. Whether or not they are a high-quality lead isn’t the point – if they’ve registered for something, they are a lead.

Opportunities After someone has qualified a lead through email or the phone, and the lead meets your set of qualification criteria, it becomes an oppo...

Clients They have given ...

Champions A champion can be a client or non-client who has referred business to you, offered a testimonial, or has actively supported you in a...

Go With It – Let Prospects Do the Work! Instead of resisting this trend and staying attached to how potential customers used to or “should” get to know your company, just go with – it and give the prospects the control over how they want to get to know you.

If you see prospects getting stuck somewhere in your “layers,” consider redesigning your next-step offers. What is the next “juicy morsel” they would want if you showed it to them, that would help them take another step forward? What new layers, content or products can you create that are compelling and relevant to who the prospect is and where they are in their evaluation and buying cycle?

Inbound leads are leads that come to you, typically registering on your website in some way or asking to be called back. They are the ones that find you before you find them.

Which Inbound Marketing Methods Work? Each of these activities is ranked in order of its ability to generate leads more easily: Referrals Free Tools/Free Trials Organic Search Engine Optimization Blogging Email Newsletters Webinars PPC (pay-per-click marketing) Affiliate Marketing Social Media However, all the activities are complementary and can be hard to separate from each other. For example, blogging helps SEO and email newsletters. Collectively, they create an inbound marketing strategy in which each piece complements the others. Also, pretty much every one of these methods is responsible for doing two important things in inbound marketing. They attract new prospects. They help nurture existing leads.

It’s the same way with a blog. It’s imperative to be a resource for people and to pro-actively network with your blog by reading other blogs, linking to other blogs, and leaving comments on other blogs, if you want people to do the same thing for you. It’s not necessarily the law of reciprocity, but it’s the law of participation. Set a simple goal, such as meeting one new blogger per week.

Permission-based direct email marketing is still THE most important marketing technique, both to develop new leads and nurture old ones. Email marketing is important to establish your expertise, build relationships and trust with your audience, promote your webinars or live events, and promote your products.

Webinars Webinars are a great lead-nurturing practice. Webinars get them coming back and interacting and learning from you, and offer an easy and compelling reason to spread the word to their friends about what you’re doing. 80% of webinars are not for selling but for teaching: TEACH people something useful in the webinar. How can you help them do their jobs better? Webinars establish credibility and communicate what you do in an educational and neutral setting. Webinars are especially valuable as part of a series, where people know to keep looking for the next piece of your story and can tell their friends about it, too. Make webinars “bigger than you” – make them about the attendees, not your company. An ideal format: hold webinars in which customers are the presenters, and they are sharing with your audience lessons learned in your area of expertise. Some of these lessons are related to your product, and some lessons are not.

Studies have shown that less-educated people tend to click on pay-per-click ads, while more-educated people click on organic search results. While PPC sometimes can be a source of leads-on-demand, be careful to track their quality in terms of conversion rates to qualified opportunities and to closed deals.