The crutch of e-mail campaigns
E-mail, which is well into its teens, is still viewed as a cheap, yet effective marketing channel. But as the medium starts to mature, sales and marketing teams may have to ramp up spending on their e-mail programs in order to separate their brands from the pack, reach new prospects and cultivate existing clients.
However, devoting more of your budget to e-mail campaigns is just half the battle to garnering decent returns. Many companies tend to create one-size-fits-all e-mail programs that get blasted regardless of who the end-user may be (like a howitzer being deployed to shoot an army of gnats).
“You need to segment and target appropriately and often it takes more time and resources to make that happen,” said Nicholas Einstein, director of strategic and analytic services for Datran Media, a marketing services and technology company whose clients include Entrepreneur.com, Lycos and ValueClick. E-mail programs need “to be a) automated, b) segmented and c) perfectly integrated with [your] Web site to ensure you’re getting people right when they’re signing up.”
Overall, 58% of marketers said they planned to increase their e-mail budgets in 2009, according to a survey released in April by Datran Media. The company took the pulse of more than 3,000 industry executives from Fortune 1,000 companies and interactive agencies.
Einstein, who blogs at “the other einstein” (hats off), said that e-mail programs should feature relevant content, such as white papers, links (and invitations) to Webinars, information about upcoming virtual events “or any drivers of leads.” But smart packaging of content is a nonstarter unless it is properly segmented.
Indeed, segmentation is key. Open rates for segmented versus non-segmented campaigns are as much as 20% higher on average for the first 30 days, according to MarketingSherpa’s “Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008.”
Click rates for segmented versus non-segmented campaigns are doubly high for the first 30 days, with a slight increase for 60-90 days, while click rates for segmented versus non-segmented campaigns are five times higher the last 90 days of the year, the study said.
Because they are on the front line, sales execs can be the innovators of new e-mail programs depending on the audiences’ needs. But executing and managing the execution of email campaigns is a job that’s increasingly being left to marketing.
Einstein said he is seeing more and more e-mail campaigns that are centralized. Clients “are taking away some autonomy sales teams have had in the e-mail space, because, quite honestly, you get into situations about compliance and CAN-SPAM issues, and it can get hairy having sales teams sending out promotional messaging” to people who have potentially unsubscribed to the material.
The happy medium is when IT can integrate sales and marketing and provide a bridge between inbound and outbound efforts. “We have seen a lot of success launching triggered and serialized messaging programs based on behavioral targeting,” Einstein said. “When prospects are taking action on a Web site, it’s important to leverage this behavior to target relevant messaging that nurture the lead and help foster sales.”
Leveraging lost deals into sales opportunities
Guest Blog | Maria Pergolino
Deals are lost for many reasons. Sometimes, it’s simply because your product may not be the right fit for a prospect. But other times, deals die because of lack of budget, lack of influence within the buying chain or because the pitch is made too early in the decision-making process. But many of these “lost” deals could very well turn into legitimate buying sometime down the road, and it’s crucial that sales execs do everything possible to keep these opportunities from falling out of the sales funnel altogether. Because sales execs can dedicate only so much time to “lost” deals, it would go a long way to have a system in place that notifies sales reps that buyers who may have initially been considered “lost” may now be interested and worthy of follow-up. Such a system could include:
Keeping information up-to-date – Lost accounts often fall out of sight, with no updated activity or prospect information. This does severe damage when trying to re-approach these accounts. Make sure to do regular maintenance on potential accounts, even if lost in the past, updating information about the company such as staff titles, e-mail and phone numbers.
Pay attention to personnel changes – A change in personnel in the department considering the buy means that influencers who may have previously had other priorities may now be freed up and in a better position to buy. Put a system in place to capture these changes and alert the sales staff that it’s time for a refresh.
Use lead nurturing to keep your product top-of-mind – Lead nurturing is often thought of as something that is done when you first get information about a lead. But nurturing can be used many times during the sales cycle, including while sales is interacting with the lead and even after the deal is “lost.” Create nurturing programs that are triggered to begin when a prospect doesn’t make a purchase or when a lost prospect visits your Web site after a lapse in interest. These programs should automatically be delivered on a semi-annual basis to remind prospects of the value your product provides as well as to update information.
Use lead scoring to notify sales to reengage – Adjust lead scores when factors like an influencer’s title changes (demographic information) or when prospect start visiting your Web site or increasing their attendance at industry events (behavioral information). Separately, a visit to an event or new contact information may seem trivial, but by looking for patterns in an increasing lead score you may be able to identify the precise time when a prospect may have just received budget or has a new objective to buy.
Put systems in place to update information – Sales can’t be responsible for manually making updates to all demographic and behavioral information about prospects. Use systems that update contact information in the CRM and track online activity with a marketing automation system. Make sure the tools you select to update this information integrate fully with the CRM to ensure ease and frequency of use by the sales team.
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Maria Pergolino is senior manager of inbound marketing for Marketo Inc., which provides software tools for sales and marketing automation. She can be reached at maria@marketo.com.
Motivating the sales force
Guest Blog | Dave Kurlan
Do your salespeople have the desire and commitment to do whatever it takes – every day – to reach their goals? Here are several tips for how sales managers can motivate, inspire, cajole and incent their sales teams to make their numbers and then some.
Goals – Raise expectations in order to celebrate superior performance. Don’t forget two crucial items: First, you need a forecast and plan derived from goals (not the other way around) and second, goals are derived from the individual’s income requirements.
Incentives – If an individual has the goals but the company’s compensation isn’t designed to reward superior achievement, the incentive to perform can’t be maintained. If the company has a rock-solid compensation plan but the goals are lame, the personal incentive to perform will be missing.
Managing the pipeline – The key to managing the pipeline effectively is working with your critical ratios. Use the Monthly goal, closing percentage, average sale and length of the sell-cycle You need to determine for your sales team how many new opportunities must enter the sales pipeline each month; how much the opportunities need to be worth and strict deadlines to reach the goal(s).
Accountability – You must hold each salesperson accountable to something measurable every day, such as the number of conversations required to schedule the number of sales calls required to identify said opportunities. Perhaps more important, you must have consequences (like no gas reimbursement) for failing to meet those requirements and consistently follow through whenever necessary. Develop the nerve for full accountability and you’re nearly there.
Skills – The more the better, but let’s focus on the most important skill sets for overachieving. Your salespeople must be able to hunt for new opportunities, identify the most qualified and be able to close them. Anything else they can do is bonus.
Urgency – Your salespeople must have enough urgency to get their opportunities closed, when they become closable, even when their prospects are using stall tactics. Prospects may have had compelling reasons to buy in the first place, but people have short memories. The time away from dwelling on the problems desensitizes prospects to the problems they had intended to solve. Successful salespeople won’t let that happen because they bring a sense of urgency to things while unsuccessful salespeople are afraid that if they make repeated follow-up attempts their prospects will feel pestered.
Weaknesses – Unfortunately, there are weaknesses among individual sales reps that will neutralize all of the previous eight factors. A few red flags: non-supportive buy cycle; a need for approval; a tendency to become emotionally involved and money issues.
Coaching and sales training – Your coaching must support any training initiative and help salespeople overcome their weaknesses, develop skills and master the selling process. While most training will be conducted by sales development experts from outside your firm, the coaching absolutely takes place from within. Pre-call strategizing and post-call debriefing, with every salesperson, are daily requirements.
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Dave Kurlan, CEO of Objective Management Group, is author of “Baseline Selling: How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know About the Game of Baseball. ” Dave blogs about sales management at Understanding the Sales Force. He can be reached at dkurlan@objectivemanagement.com.
Adding ‘fun’ factor to sales networking events
Q&A | Adrian Miller
Adrian Miller has had enough Merlot. “Sometimes standing around [at an event] holding that stupid glass of wine gets very tiresome,” said Miller, founder, president-CEO of Adrian Miller Sales Training, which offers executive-level consulting and sales training. At your garden variety networking event, “people may be engaged in a conversation and not know how to extricate themselves, or not want to extricate themselves because they’re scared to go onto to the next person,” Miller added.
When it comes to pressing the flesh these days, sales managers must take pains to separate their events from the pack. For instance, Miller recently hosted an event for her clients at Bath Junkie, in lower Manhattan, where guests were able to concoct their own lotions, creams and bath cleansers. “It’s a chemistry lab for adults,” Miller said. “It’s much better to have a common activity and something that can be shared. By sharing activities, people can wind up having very substantial conversations.” Miller, whose clients include Cotronics Corp. and Lonely Planet, offered some other tips on effective networking for sales execs.
ZoomInfo: What’s your strategy for online networking?
Miller: Primarily to build visibility, credibility and recognition not only for my company, but personal brand. The strategy is to deploy appropriate articles, links, event notices and other relevant information that would contribute to the reader drawing an impression of – and a feeling for – who I am and what I do. Used strategically, [online networking] should only be able to help, and certainly not hurt, what sales execs are trying to do. People need to make sure that they don’t allow things to appear [online] that would necessarily be contradictory to the image they are trying to grow.
ZoomInfo: When it comes to live networking events, what are some of the ways that sales executives can distinguish their companies?
Miller: The way companies can stand out from the outrageous clutter of networking events that are around 24/7 is to be very careful about who they invite and what’s the ultimate deliverable they want to provide. Is there an informational component, say, bringing in a speaker to address a topic relevant to that audience, coupled with time at the beginning [or end] for focused networking? Should there be facilitators working the room, helping to put peoples’ hands together? Should there be follow-up and follow-through? Make it different (see above) and make it worth somebody’s $50.
ZoomInfo: What’s your take on social media as a networking tool?
Miller: It levels the playing field to a certain degree. It can start the relationship, but no one does business with someone who they know only through some Facebook conversation. No one selects a vendor because they saw a name on LinkedIn. It requires a lot more work, but [social media] enables sales execs to access untold number of people and companies that they didn’t have access to before. It gives sales execs the ability to expand those contacts and connections that, through nurturing, will lead to something more substantial.
ZoomInfo: What are some of the most chronic mistakes sales executives are making in networking, online or offline?
Miller: They spread themselves too thin and then do not stay on the grid of all the people they’re meeting. They shake a hand, they take a card, maybe they follow-up once, but they totally forget that business development is a process and a long-term engagement. It may be better to do less, but more [with contacts]. The other thing is [sales execs thinking it’s all about them. They’re a lot of people who will take your time and tell you who they are what they do and never will the conversation circle back to, ‘And by the way, what can I do for you?’ The biggest mistake is not having a really good touch-point management system in place so that sales execs can ultimately turn all those contacts they’re making into business, instead of a nice card that’s scanned into your computer.
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Adrian Miller has a lively online network at Adrian’s Network. She can be reached at adrian@adrianmiller.com.
In scoping out prospects, sellers need their own GPS systems
Guest Blog | Sharon Drew Morgen
Finding out whom the right decision makers are is one thing. Being a part of the team that chooses a solution is another.
Because we are focusing on solution sales, we aren’t addressing the most confusing, necessary job of the buyer: recognizing and managing the behind-the-scenes, internal issues that must be managed privately before they can buy. Interestingly, even they don’t know all of these elements at the beginning of their search for excellence.
As much as we attempt to understand our buyers, it’s virtually impossible for us to be aware of all of the off-line issues – the relationships, the vendor issues, the partner problems, the historic issues that have been problematic – that buyers must address before getting internal buy-in for a purchase.
Indeed, we are terrific at the solution and vendor choice, but I’m suggesting we add a new skill set to the front end of our sales skills to help the buyer maneuver through their off-line issues: sort of a GPS system that dispassionately leads buyers through all of their internal stuff they must manage anyway. Buyers must do this – with you or without you – and the time it takes them to do it is the length of the sales cycle. Until there is internal buy-in, they won’t be in a position to buy anyway.
Buyers don’t buy because they have a need, or they would have fixed their problem long ago. They buy because they have a business problem that can’t be resolved with their current choices – if we recognize that there are actually two phases to the buying decision. First is the behind-the-scenes issues and people that must buy-in to change, and, secondly, the actual choice of solution and vendor.
If we can position ourselves first as a GPS system leading buyers down the route of change and decisions, if we see ourselves has playing the role of a dispassionate guide, a neutral navigator, we can view the prospect as the car, and our solution is the destination. Note that when in the car, the ‘driver’ sees the scenery, makes pit stops, has a fight with the kids in the back seat, and pulls over to fix the flat – and we are not a part of this.
Once we can separate out our skill sets and support them in a way other sales folks don’t, they will begin trusting us as true trusted advisors, and bring us aboard without objections, and quite efficiently. Then we’ll not only find the right decision makers, we’ll be one of them. Even after a cold call.
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Sharon Drew Morgen, founder of sales consultancy Morgen Facilitations, is author of “Dirty Little Secrets” (Why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it). She can be reached at www.sharondrewmorgen.com.
How to fire up cold calls
When cold calling, sales execs shouldn’t be so quick to nuke the prospect’s voice mail; there may be some valuable information in the message about how to move forward. Don’t be afraid to cultivate relationships with executive assistants, for they are often the key between getting in the door or getting shut out. Take time to build a ‘nurture library,’ or a package of relevant news, research and information that may persuade prospects to carve out some time to meet with you.
The various actions are subsets of the ‘Seven prospecting rules that produce leads,’ a guest blog that was written by b-to-b sales specialist Brian Carroll, who is CEO of InTouch and author of “Lead Generation for the Complex Sale” (McGraw-Hill) and the B2B Lead Generation Blog.
Since we introduced Follow the Lead late last summer, Brian’s blog has been one of the most popular items among readers.
With that in mind, we approached Brian about participating in a Webinar in which he could delve into the seven prospecting rules. As Carroll made clear during the Webinar, no one element of the seven rules should be thought of in isolation, but, rather, the rules should be considered an integrated way of establishing a relationship.
The Webinar is chock-full of best practices for sales executives who rely heavily on the telephone to drive sales. Despite the ongoing lurch to a digital age, Carroll offers a ringing endorsement that – with follow-through and additional homework – cold calling works. We’re eager to get your feedback.
Revisiting the ‘Seven Prospecting Rules that Produce Leads’
Brian Carroll, one of our favorite guest bloggers, will present a free webinar tomorrow, Nov. 3, 2 p.m. ET, on the “Seven Prospecting Rules that Produce Leads.” https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register
Virtual sales training shouldn’t be fleeting
Sure, the concept of team selling has been burned into the brain of most every salesperson. But in the trenches, when closing a sale is on the cusp of becoming a reality, it’s still to a large degree about individual success and sole reward. Not so at the management level – and certainly not in a digital age – where success is often defined by the success of subordinates.
“The biggest challenge when companies try to promote sales pros to sales managers is that sales pros are used to operating independently,” said Norman Behar, CEO of Sales Readiness Group, which provides sales management training programs. “Sales managers can only achieve success through others. They need to be able to shift from the role of individual contributor to being a team motivator, coach and mentor.”
With travel budgets curtailed, companies are increasingly opting for virtual classrooms to help groom their top producers for management gigs, according to Behar, who shared some of the benefits of virtual training compared with traditional, in-person training.
Behar’s recipe for virtual sales training stems from what he calls “spaced learning,” in which sales professionals and sales managers attend a series of training and have the ability to apply skills in between work sessions. “It’s the difference between event-based learning – a two-day national sales meeting with a fixed timetable – and spaced-learning, which consists of a series of 90 minute online-training sessions,” Behar said.
Behar also pointed out the difference between “concurrent engagement,” which is a key element in virtual classrooms, compared with “serial engagement,” which is manifest in physical environments, he said.
“The concept being that in the virtual classroom everyone can participate at the same time (e.g. chat pod or white board exercise) whereas in a physical classroom participants respond to questions sequentially,” Behar said. “As a result, participants often echo what others have already said, as opposed to contributing their own thoughts.”
Indeed, social dynamics is another factor to consider when weighing the differences between virtual sales training and in-person presentations. “In physical settings, there may be certain people who tend to dominate the conversation,” Behar added. “Some people are more apt to engage than others. In a virtual classroom, everyone has an equal opportunity to share their views and you see a much higher level of participation.”
Virtual classrooms work best with small groups of, say, between eight and 15 people, according to Behar. “This allows for a very high level of engagement by the participants and allows the facilitator to make sure everyone is able to comprehend and apply the skills”. He also recommends the use of workbooks – sent as PDF files in advance of the class – that include tools, planners, and exercises referenced in the presentation.
Perhaps most important in this equation is audience involvement. Role play and peer-to-peer learning should be encouraged. “Five minutes shouldn’t go by without action from the participants,” Behar said. “It cannot be a ‘Presentation,’ or people will zone out.”
Yet despite increasingly sophisticated technology in virtual sales training, there are still myriad benefits to bringing sales teams together for in-person training e.g., pressing the flesh and getting some face time with colleagues and/or managers. Any gaps in virtual training should be filled by human interaction.
Constantly thinking about sales quotas? Come on, be honest
A fresh perspective on what percentage of salespeople should achieve their sales goals, via Sales & Marketing Management.
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