I was on a flight back from San Francisco last week. I was coming home from working with a Fortune 1000 client on improving their sales and marketing integration. On the flight, I happen to sit next to a person who was a professor of art history at a local Philadelphia university. She was amazingly well traveled. Had been all over the world and has interacted with dozens upon dozens of different cultures and societies.
I was in awe of her experiences and it made my life’s travels seem so small.
She asked me what I do for a living. So I gave her my 30-second elevator response. I expected her eyes to roll over and to immediate disengage me. She did the opposite. She started to relate what I do for a living to some of her own experiences. Here was the learning moment for me.
Like countries, all companies have their own culture. Being able to learn the culture, adapt to the culture and to engage at a human level that brings together cultures of independent groups like sales and marketing was how she related my role to her experience . And she’s right. Sales and marketing integration is not just about aligning content, messaging, technology, delivering better leads, etc. It’s also about understanding each other’s culture, needs, points of view – so that collaboration and ultimately teamwork is achieved. This is best stated as – aligning the human side of sales and marketing.
A company can purchase the best marketing automation technology, deliver the best leads and have an aligned communication plan, but in the end, it’s about teamwork and the interaction of human beings in the achievement of common goals. Do not forget culture and the human element when you are embarking on improving your sales and marketing alignment.
Friday, November 19, 2010
Monday, September 13, 2010
Build a bigger pipeline - WRMR Radio
On September 9th, 2010, I had the privilege to be interviewed on the Pedowitz Group's WRMR (Revenue Marketer's Radio) program. What a great program for marketing people to participate in. Every week, Pedowitz's Debbie Qaqish interviews leading revenue-focused marketing executives and engages them in a very open conversation on how best-practice demand generation teams are building pipeline.
If you are a marketing professional who is responsible for demand generation and pipeline contribution, you need to visit:
http://revmarketer.pedowitzgroup.com/WRMR-Registration.html
I hope you find the content as rewarding as I do.
Frank
If you are a marketing professional who is responsible for demand generation and pipeline contribution, you need to visit:
http://revmarketer.pedowitzgroup.com/WRMR-Registration.html
I hope you find the content as rewarding as I do.
Frank
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Your CRM or Your Salespeople? Understanding CRM Performance Beyond Just Features and Functionality - continued....
A couple of weeks ago, I started a discussion on the fact that many companies are not seeing or receiving the true value of a CRM system. The question that I started to answer was: Is it your CRM or your sales people. Before reading the rest of this blog, make sure you get up to speed by reading the first one.
Let's now continue this discussion.
CRM systems don’t come with a best practice sales process and methodology. A sales process is the steps that your Salespeople take from prospecting to closing an opportunity, to then managing and expanding that account. A methodology is the combined “what” the Salespeople will do in each step of your process to achieve the desired results.
A good way to understand this is to look at an example. If you have an Eight-Step Sales Process, it should be embedded in your CRM system where your Salespeople are held accountable for following the process and entering the necessary data that is required to manage opportunities. This provides your team with the consistency in both behavior and data gathering that you need to improve your sales performance, forecasting, and success. As you can see in the example below, the process is embedded in the opportunity management screen where the Salespeople are held accountable for completing specific fields or “gates” of information before an opportunity can advance from one stage of the process to the next.
This creates a consistent opportunity management process and the required data for improved deal, pipeline, and revenue forecasting. But just building process and functionality into the screens is not enough. Your team members need training on how to follow the process, use the new screens, and understand the data requirements to grasp how all of this will benefit them directly.
Technology
Your CRM system more than likely does a good job of managing customers and opportunities – keeping current contact data, scheduling of events, and tracking specifics of opportunities. But does it also offer integrated sales tools that help Salespeople to accelerate opportunities, plan for client meetings, collaborate with their team members, and be coached by their Managers – all supporting your sales process and methodology? These additional technology tools allow them to hit their personal goals of getting to quota, going to club, and flat out making good money - thus giving your team members the value they need to see to want to use your CRM system.
Here are some best-practice examples of technology tools that can be integrated into your existing CRM system:
A Sales Call Planner. This particular tool is used for Salespeople to prepare for and execute successful sales meetings. It is supported by a best-practice sales methodology, embedded learning assets, and is delivered on a platform that allows Sales Managers to provide pre- and post-meeting coaching.
An Opportunity Accelerator. This technology tool is used in conjunction with the Sales Call Planner to ensure that Salespeople are following a best-practice sales process, have a tool to manage the strategy of an opportunity, and are able to collaborate with a deal team or their Manager on the execution of the opportunity.
People and Data
By having your sales process and methodology embedded in your CRM and providing technology tools to enhance value, your Salespeople will begin to change their behavior in how they use the CRM system. Additional training needs to be supplied to your people that will allow them to understand their business. When the proper process and tools are in place, and training and coaching have been delivered, your CRM system will start generating data that, when properly reported, will give you and your team insight into how everyone should be managing their business – or better said, their pipeline.
Providing reports centered on the sales process and how opportunities are flowing through the process are an important part of adding the final “value” to your Salespeople. This will allow them to see how their behaviors are affecting their business. This requires the reporting of key analytics that are then provided to your Salespeople and your Sales Managers that will allow them to see patterns in sales behaviors that need to be changed through additional training and coaching.
Let’s take a look at what a baseline list of these pipeline management analytics should be.
If your Salespeople do not have access to their key CRM metrics, they will not know how their behaviors are impacting their business. They will also not know how to properly forecast and develop the necessary action steps needed to improve their personal pipeline.
If we go back to our Eight-Stage Pipeline graphic (shown below), we can look at the main ways that Salespeople should manage their business. First, they should manage the prospecting and nurturing of leads – as shown in the L1-L5 section #1 of the pipeline graphic. This depicts a five-stage lead nurture process that is either driven by Marketing, Inside Sales, or the Field Sales Team. These are the leads that come into your company that are not yet qualified to be added to your pipeline. There are two key analytics that your Salespeople need to learn about these leads: their lead conversion ratios (how many leads make it to the pipeline) and their acceptance performance against leads that are provided to them by their Sales Team.
In section #2 of the pipeline graphic, the Sales Team needs to know their full pipeline conversion information (how many opportunities enter the pipeline in the first stage and conclude in sales). They also need to see the volume of what they are entering and the velocity (how fast) they move through the pipeline. This data needs to be compiled for each stage of the sales process.
The next set of analytics exist in sections #3 and #4 of the pipeline graphic. It is important to have analytics for the top and the bottom of your pipeline. Not all Salespeople are good at prospecting (hunters) and closing or managing accounts (farmers). It is important to understand individual performance levels in each section. With this data in hand and with each Salesperson trained on how to read and understand their personal analytics, Managers will be able to collaborate with their team members to coach against the sales process and pipeline behavior. This will drive consistency, better forecasting, and improved opportunity execution for your overall Sales Team and individual Salespeople.
By combining an embedded best-practice sales process and methodology, tools to support the process, and the reporting and management of pipeline performance, you will have developed a revenue management system that will help you to achieve your corporate and personal goals.
How Can Richardson Help?
The Richardson Sales Readiness Service focuses on helping you develop and implement best practice sales processes and methodologies that drive the consistency and efficiency of your Sales Team. We will also work with you to build the necessary KPIs and embed it all in your CRM system so it can be reported, tracked, and managed. Our Pipeline Management courses build the business knowledge your Sales Team members need in order to improve how they manage their business and deliver your Managers the skills they need to coach to pipeline improvement.
To sustain behavior change, Richardson offers CRM-integrated tools that become part or your team’s everyday workflow and drive the consistency you need to succeed.
Visit Richardson’s website at www.richardson.com for more information on how Richardson’s Sales Readiness Service can help your Sales Organization reach their objectives.
Let's now continue this discussion.
CRM systems don’t come with a best practice sales process and methodology. A sales process is the steps that your Salespeople take from prospecting to closing an opportunity, to then managing and expanding that account. A methodology is the combined “what” the Salespeople will do in each step of your process to achieve the desired results.
A good way to understand this is to look at an example. If you have an Eight-Step Sales Process, it should be embedded in your CRM system where your Salespeople are held accountable for following the process and entering the necessary data that is required to manage opportunities. This provides your team with the consistency in both behavior and data gathering that you need to improve your sales performance, forecasting, and success. As you can see in the example below, the process is embedded in the opportunity management screen where the Salespeople are held accountable for completing specific fields or “gates” of information before an opportunity can advance from one stage of the process to the next.
This creates a consistent opportunity management process and the required data for improved deal, pipeline, and revenue forecasting. But just building process and functionality into the screens is not enough. Your team members need training on how to follow the process, use the new screens, and understand the data requirements to grasp how all of this will benefit them directly. Technology
Your CRM system more than likely does a good job of managing customers and opportunities – keeping current contact data, scheduling of events, and tracking specifics of opportunities. But does it also offer integrated sales tools that help Salespeople to accelerate opportunities, plan for client meetings, collaborate with their team members, and be coached by their Managers – all supporting your sales process and methodology? These additional technology tools allow them to hit their personal goals of getting to quota, going to club, and flat out making good money - thus giving your team members the value they need to see to want to use your CRM system.
Here are some best-practice examples of technology tools that can be integrated into your existing CRM system:
A Sales Call Planner. This particular tool is used for Salespeople to prepare for and execute successful sales meetings. It is supported by a best-practice sales methodology, embedded learning assets, and is delivered on a platform that allows Sales Managers to provide pre- and post-meeting coaching.
An Opportunity Accelerator. This technology tool is used in conjunction with the Sales Call Planner to ensure that Salespeople are following a best-practice sales process, have a tool to manage the strategy of an opportunity, and are able to collaborate with a deal team or their Manager on the execution of the opportunity.
People and Data
By having your sales process and methodology embedded in your CRM and providing technology tools to enhance value, your Salespeople will begin to change their behavior in how they use the CRM system. Additional training needs to be supplied to your people that will allow them to understand their business. When the proper process and tools are in place, and training and coaching have been delivered, your CRM system will start generating data that, when properly reported, will give you and your team insight into how everyone should be managing their business – or better said, their pipeline.
Providing reports centered on the sales process and how opportunities are flowing through the process are an important part of adding the final “value” to your Salespeople. This will allow them to see how their behaviors are affecting their business. This requires the reporting of key analytics that are then provided to your Salespeople and your Sales Managers that will allow them to see patterns in sales behaviors that need to be changed through additional training and coaching.
Let’s take a look at what a baseline list of these pipeline management analytics should be.
If your Salespeople do not have access to their key CRM metrics, they will not know how their behaviors are impacting their business. They will also not know how to properly forecast and develop the necessary action steps needed to improve their personal pipeline.
If we go back to our Eight-Stage Pipeline graphic (shown below), we can look at the main ways that Salespeople should manage their business. First, they should manage the prospecting and nurturing of leads – as shown in the L1-L5 section #1 of the pipeline graphic. This depicts a five-stage lead nurture process that is either driven by Marketing, Inside Sales, or the Field Sales Team. These are the leads that come into your company that are not yet qualified to be added to your pipeline. There are two key analytics that your Salespeople need to learn about these leads: their lead conversion ratios (how many leads make it to the pipeline) and their acceptance performance against leads that are provided to them by their Sales Team.In section #2 of the pipeline graphic, the Sales Team needs to know their full pipeline conversion information (how many opportunities enter the pipeline in the first stage and conclude in sales). They also need to see the volume of what they are entering and the velocity (how fast) they move through the pipeline. This data needs to be compiled for each stage of the sales process.
The next set of analytics exist in sections #3 and #4 of the pipeline graphic. It is important to have analytics for the top and the bottom of your pipeline. Not all Salespeople are good at prospecting (hunters) and closing or managing accounts (farmers). It is important to understand individual performance levels in each section. With this data in hand and with each Salesperson trained on how to read and understand their personal analytics, Managers will be able to collaborate with their team members to coach against the sales process and pipeline behavior. This will drive consistency, better forecasting, and improved opportunity execution for your overall Sales Team and individual Salespeople.
By combining an embedded best-practice sales process and methodology, tools to support the process, and the reporting and management of pipeline performance, you will have developed a revenue management system that will help you to achieve your corporate and personal goals.
How Can Richardson Help?
The Richardson Sales Readiness Service focuses on helping you develop and implement best practice sales processes and methodologies that drive the consistency and efficiency of your Sales Team. We will also work with you to build the necessary KPIs and embed it all in your CRM system so it can be reported, tracked, and managed. Our Pipeline Management courses build the business knowledge your Sales Team members need in order to improve how they manage their business and deliver your Managers the skills they need to coach to pipeline improvement.
To sustain behavior change, Richardson offers CRM-integrated tools that become part or your team’s everyday workflow and drive the consistency you need to succeed.
Visit Richardson’s website at www.richardson.com for more information on how Richardson’s Sales Readiness Service can help your Sales Organization reach their objectives.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Your CRM or Your Salespeople? Understanding CRM Performance Beyond Just Features and Functionality
A CRM system is much more than just customer relationship management. CRM systems have become the “work stream” whereby revenue management happens. So, your CRM system is really a revenue management system. Customer relationship management, though extremely important, is now a sub-activity in the overall requirement of managing revenue.
CRM systems are now a big part of every Salesperson’s day. It’s their workflow. The CRM is the freeway that enables the management of the lifeblood of your company – your sales. As a Sales Manager, you get this. As a Salesperson, you might not get this. Why? The value seen by using a CRM system has typically been at the Manager and Executive level – many times, the value does not make it to the field level.
If you are experiencing poor CRM adoption, corrupt client and forecasting data, and an overall feeling by your Sales Team that your CRM system is just flat out broken, it might not be your CRM system that is causing the problems. It could be you and your people. When a company purchases a CRM system, many times, 95% of the budget is spent on the technology and only 5% on the training of the users. Why? Because the technology is the most tangible part of the solution...but it only comprises 20% of the solution. The other 80% of the solution is not so tangible.
That 80% is made up of people and process. A CRM system is only as good as the people using it and the processes they need to follow. If the behaviors of your Salespeople are not aligned to a consistent process and specific expectations, then it does not matter how great your CRM system is, your people will not effectively use it.
To improve the effectiveness of your CRM system, focus on four things: Process, Technology, People, and Data.
Process
CRM systems don’t come with a best practice sales process and methodology. A sales process is the steps that your Salespeople take from prospecting to closing an opportunity, to then managing and expanding that account. A methodology is the combined “what” the Salespeople will do in each step of your process to achieve the desired results.
In the next two weeks, I will post more thoughts on this topic and cover the remaining sections about technology, people and data.
Thanks for your time.
CRM systems are now a big part of every Salesperson’s day. It’s their workflow. The CRM is the freeway that enables the management of the lifeblood of your company – your sales. As a Sales Manager, you get this. As a Salesperson, you might not get this. Why? The value seen by using a CRM system has typically been at the Manager and Executive level – many times, the value does not make it to the field level.
If you are experiencing poor CRM adoption, corrupt client and forecasting data, and an overall feeling by your Sales Team that your CRM system is just flat out broken, it might not be your CRM system that is causing the problems. It could be you and your people. When a company purchases a CRM system, many times, 95% of the budget is spent on the technology and only 5% on the training of the users. Why? Because the technology is the most tangible part of the solution...but it only comprises 20% of the solution. The other 80% of the solution is not so tangible.
That 80% is made up of people and process. A CRM system is only as good as the people using it and the processes they need to follow. If the behaviors of your Salespeople are not aligned to a consistent process and specific expectations, then it does not matter how great your CRM system is, your people will not effectively use it.
To improve the effectiveness of your CRM system, focus on four things: Process, Technology, People, and Data.
Process
CRM systems don’t come with a best practice sales process and methodology. A sales process is the steps that your Salespeople take from prospecting to closing an opportunity, to then managing and expanding that account. A methodology is the combined “what” the Salespeople will do in each step of your process to achieve the desired results.
In the next two weeks, I will post more thoughts on this topic and cover the remaining sections about technology, people and data.
Thanks for your time.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Sales Behavior and Your Sales Pipeline
So the other day, our marketing team came to me with an idea for a pipeline management video. They wanted to try a new green screen that they ordered and could not think of a better and more willing victim than me.
So, I jumped in head first and here is a link to a video about how your sales behavior impacts your sales pipeline. Enjoy. Oh, the camera does add 5 pounds!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGJ0ALaoQs8
So, I jumped in head first and here is a link to a video about how your sales behavior impacts your sales pipeline. Enjoy. Oh, the camera does add 5 pounds!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGJ0ALaoQs8
Friday, April 30, 2010
Warm call - it still works
The phone is not dead. At least my phone is not dead. A balanced demand generation strategy should leverage all media channels - as you never know which media a person will respond to. Let's talk about the phone for a moment.
Yep - it's that old piece of technology that is still on your desk. Probably has dust on it and is surrounded by those stacks of paper that you have been meaning to read for the past year. Well, put that bad boy right back in front of you, dust it off and introduce it to your computer. They are a match made in heaven.
The following is not a new tactic by any means. It's one that still works. But the success is all in the execution. This is a refresher. Take a read....
1. Send out 75 emails a week to prospects and dormant clients. You should include a solid educational asset that is not a product pitch and one that helps the recipient do their job better.
2. Plan a dialogue that you want to have with these contacts. This is not a script, but think through what you are going to say to the contact. How are you going to open the conversation? What questions are you going to ask? What new idea or value are you going to position? What objections can you foresee and how are you going to over come them? How are you going to close - what will give value to the contact and what do you want as the next step?
3. Expect that it may take you 5-7 attempts to reach the person. Don't give up after the first try.
What results can you expect? If you send out 100 emails, you can expect 3-5 of those people to actually read the asset that you sent. That's why you need to call them. By adding your old friend the phone to the mix, you will most likely up that to 15-20. Of those 15-20, you should expect 5-7 to engage you in meaningful dialogues and most should result in pipeline opportunity. If your average deal size is $50K, then you probably just got yourself $250K plus in early stage pipeline.
Now, where this breaks down is in the phone follow up. You have to dedicate yourself to dialing that phone. Set aside regular time to do it. If you do not, then your busy and hectic day will kill your ability to turn this tactic in to a effective way to build pipeline.
Hope this helps you.
To Learn more about Richardson's sales training and sales performance improvement solutions, please visit us on the web at http://www.richardson.com
Yep - it's that old piece of technology that is still on your desk. Probably has dust on it and is surrounded by those stacks of paper that you have been meaning to read for the past year. Well, put that bad boy right back in front of you, dust it off and introduce it to your computer. They are a match made in heaven.
The following is not a new tactic by any means. It's one that still works. But the success is all in the execution. This is a refresher. Take a read....
1. Send out 75 emails a week to prospects and dormant clients. You should include a solid educational asset that is not a product pitch and one that helps the recipient do their job better.
2. Plan a dialogue that you want to have with these contacts. This is not a script, but think through what you are going to say to the contact. How are you going to open the conversation? What questions are you going to ask? What new idea or value are you going to position? What objections can you foresee and how are you going to over come them? How are you going to close - what will give value to the contact and what do you want as the next step?
3. Expect that it may take you 5-7 attempts to reach the person. Don't give up after the first try.
What results can you expect? If you send out 100 emails, you can expect 3-5 of those people to actually read the asset that you sent. That's why you need to call them. By adding your old friend the phone to the mix, you will most likely up that to 15-20. Of those 15-20, you should expect 5-7 to engage you in meaningful dialogues and most should result in pipeline opportunity. If your average deal size is $50K, then you probably just got yourself $250K plus in early stage pipeline.
Now, where this breaks down is in the phone follow up. You have to dedicate yourself to dialing that phone. Set aside regular time to do it. If you do not, then your busy and hectic day will kill your ability to turn this tactic in to a effective way to build pipeline.
Hope this helps you.
To Learn more about Richardson's sales training and sales performance improvement solutions, please visit us on the web at http://www.richardson.com
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Why is it so difficult?
I just came back from a business leadership event. The attendees were mostly sales executives. There was a session at that event around improving sales and marketing alignment. It was a panel discussion and the first question the moderator asked the panel was "Why is sales and marketing alignment so difficult/hard?".
The panel and the audience did not find it difficult to answer. The answers were all across the spectrum from lack of communication, behaviors, process to compensation modeling. What became difficult in the session was getting clear direction and understanding on what to do about it.
As a participant in the audience, I felt as though the panel really struggled with this topic. The attendees and panel never really got beyond the old "sales vs. marketing" dilemma. It did not help the cause when the moderator asked the question "What about that other (your sales or marketing) person frustrates you and why".
Near the end of the discussion, the panel was starting to put some meat on the bone with some content around aligning KPI, tighter accountability, and having a strong process. But these are solutions to symptoms of the problem and not to the overall problem at hand.
It would have been great if they would have talked about "one team, one goal". No longer should it be sales and marketing teams - but looked at as one revenue generation team. Frank, are you saying that there should no longer be "marketing"? Nope, that's not what I'm saying. There needs to be branding, advertising, public relations and the other very important parts of our marketing operations. That's not the part of marketing we are talking about. We are talking about the part that is responsible for demand generation - filling that pipeline.
Revenue generation is like a relay race. Every team member is accountable for their role in the process - from the first runner (generating responders/leads) to the last runner (the last few stages of your pipeline). The hand offs of the baton (lead or opportunity) need to be flawless. In the end, it's about winning the race and everyone has a vested interest in winning that race. If not, the whole team loses. And that's not difficult to understand.
For more information on sales and marketing alignment, please read the rest of this blog if you have not yet done so. Tons of tips and other great stuff are buried in that copy.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
To Learn more about Richardson's sales training and sales performance improvement solutions, please visit us on the web at http://www.richardson.com
The panel and the audience did not find it difficult to answer. The answers were all across the spectrum from lack of communication, behaviors, process to compensation modeling. What became difficult in the session was getting clear direction and understanding on what to do about it.
As a participant in the audience, I felt as though the panel really struggled with this topic. The attendees and panel never really got beyond the old "sales vs. marketing" dilemma. It did not help the cause when the moderator asked the question "What about that other (your sales or marketing) person frustrates you and why".
Near the end of the discussion, the panel was starting to put some meat on the bone with some content around aligning KPI, tighter accountability, and having a strong process. But these are solutions to symptoms of the problem and not to the overall problem at hand.
It would have been great if they would have talked about "one team, one goal". No longer should it be sales and marketing teams - but looked at as one revenue generation team. Frank, are you saying that there should no longer be "marketing"? Nope, that's not what I'm saying. There needs to be branding, advertising, public relations and the other very important parts of our marketing operations. That's not the part of marketing we are talking about. We are talking about the part that is responsible for demand generation - filling that pipeline.
Revenue generation is like a relay race. Every team member is accountable for their role in the process - from the first runner (generating responders/leads) to the last runner (the last few stages of your pipeline). The hand offs of the baton (lead or opportunity) need to be flawless. In the end, it's about winning the race and everyone has a vested interest in winning that race. If not, the whole team loses. And that's not difficult to understand.
For more information on sales and marketing alignment, please read the rest of this blog if you have not yet done so. Tons of tips and other great stuff are buried in that copy.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
To Learn more about Richardson's sales training and sales performance improvement solutions, please visit us on the web at http://www.richardson.com
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Seven ideas that will help you coach to a pipeline
Studies have shown that within 90 days of initial training, 87% of the training impact is lost if it is not reinforced. Coaching plays an important role in ensuring adoption of the processes, knowledge, and skills required to be successful at the top of the pipeline. Here are seven ideas that you can immediately use to help you coach to a pipeline.
First, coach as early in your funnel as possible. Right at the top - at the handoff when opportunities enter stage 1. Management should be reviewing these opportunities every other week with each Sales Representative.
Second, spend more time motivating individual team members. Set pipeline goals. If your close rate is 50% and quarterly quotas per sales person are $100,000. Salespeople need a constant $200,000 in pipeline. Use these goals to motive and provide individual focus to each team member.
Third, lead by example. Sales Managers need to know pipeline details all the time. Speak to the numbers and ensure that their teams know they are focused on it.
Fourth, Managers should know the critical indicators of pipeline health. The answers to all of the questions that were noted earlier in this blog thread for each of the pipeline leakage points should be reported and reviewed with Sales Management during every JBP call.
Fifth, partner with Salespeople on key accounts at the TOP of the funnel. Don’t wait to coach deal-to-deal when or if they get to the final stages. Show the Reps that you are focused at the top of the pipeline.
Sixth, influence other departments. Show the Team that you mean business by leveraging the indicator data to get other groups in alignment. Groups like Product, Finance, Sales Operations, and Marketing should be driven by your involvement.
Seventh, communicate often. Every two weeks report pipeline status and health to the team. Call out successes, failures and repairs that have been engaged.
These seven steps will maintain engagement with your Sales Team members and ensure that they remain just as focused at the top of the funnel as they are at the bottom.
Now that you have invested a good chunk of time reading this installment of my blog and the previous four blogs, it would be a shame if I did not call out the action items that you should take the moment you conclude reading this blog. Here are the action steps broken down by role:
Marketing Leadership
Ensure you have an SLA and JBP with Sales
Review your nurture leakage points
Train to improve leakage
Offer tools to sales to improve “will”
If needed, invest in sales training for Sales
Sales Leadership
Ensure you have an SLA and JBP with Marketing
Demonstrate your support of the SLA
Train all of your Team to improve follow-up
Coach to the top of the pipeline
Drive balanced feedback to the Marketing Team
L&D Leadership
Take action by asking questions
Make recommendations
Be the facilitator when necessary
When all else fails, try something new. We covered many new ideas in this blog since last December. I encourage you to try a few.
First, coach as early in your funnel as possible. Right at the top - at the handoff when opportunities enter stage 1. Management should be reviewing these opportunities every other week with each Sales Representative.
Second, spend more time motivating individual team members. Set pipeline goals. If your close rate is 50% and quarterly quotas per sales person are $100,000. Salespeople need a constant $200,000 in pipeline. Use these goals to motive and provide individual focus to each team member.
Third, lead by example. Sales Managers need to know pipeline details all the time. Speak to the numbers and ensure that their teams know they are focused on it.
Fourth, Managers should know the critical indicators of pipeline health. The answers to all of the questions that were noted earlier in this blog thread for each of the pipeline leakage points should be reported and reviewed with Sales Management during every JBP call.
Fifth, partner with Salespeople on key accounts at the TOP of the funnel. Don’t wait to coach deal-to-deal when or if they get to the final stages. Show the Reps that you are focused at the top of the pipeline.
Sixth, influence other departments. Show the Team that you mean business by leveraging the indicator data to get other groups in alignment. Groups like Product, Finance, Sales Operations, and Marketing should be driven by your involvement.
Seventh, communicate often. Every two weeks report pipeline status and health to the team. Call out successes, failures and repairs that have been engaged.
These seven steps will maintain engagement with your Sales Team members and ensure that they remain just as focused at the top of the funnel as they are at the bottom.
Now that you have invested a good chunk of time reading this installment of my blog and the previous four blogs, it would be a shame if I did not call out the action items that you should take the moment you conclude reading this blog. Here are the action steps broken down by role:
Marketing Leadership
Ensure you have an SLA and JBP with Sales
Review your nurture leakage points
Train to improve leakage
Offer tools to sales to improve “will”
If needed, invest in sales training for Sales
Sales Leadership
Ensure you have an SLA and JBP with Marketing
Demonstrate your support of the SLA
Train all of your Team to improve follow-up
Coach to the top of the pipeline
Drive balanced feedback to the Marketing Team
L&D Leadership
Take action by asking questions
Make recommendations
Be the facilitator when necessary
When all else fails, try something new. We covered many new ideas in this blog since last December. I encourage you to try a few.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Plugging The Leaks In Your Pipeline
For the past few months, building and managing a pipeline has been a really hot topic. To build and manage a successful pipeline, you need strong marketing and sales execution. This is what I call demand generation. It’s a cohesive action and it requires strong process, skills and communication. It’s all about sales and marketing integration and the main topic of this blog.
In my previous blogs, we discussed how to integrate the teams in to one demand generation unit. We also reviewed how to uncover leakage points in your pipeline. For this installment, we are going to dig a bit deeper in to those leakage points and start to uncover ways for you to fix yours. Let’s start by chatting a bit about opportunities.
Well, all opportunities are not the same. It’s critical that everyone understand this. What if opportunities were baskets of different fruit?
would provide nutrition, possibly both grow on trees and be good for you – but still be very, very different from each other. This is the case with opportunities. There are actually two types – at first glance,they look similar, but in reality are very, very different. The first one is the Sales-generated opportunity. Key characteristics include:
* Are known to the Salesperson
* A time investment has been made
* Are focused – possibly from a specific sales-driven campaign
* Are warm in temperature – already a nearly full BanTT
* Have a specific “trust” level – they know where they came from
* Sales is responsible for them - accountability is apparent
On the other side of the fruit we have the Marketing-generated opportunity. Key characteristics include:
* The opportunity is unknown to the Salesperson
* There’s no investment made by Sales
* It may not be in focus – not what the Rep needs at this time or in line with Sales demands
* Is cold or possibly warm – deemed to need more qualification
* They come with a low trust level – they have historical baggage
* Marketing is responsible – Sales Rep has little or no accountability
Sales Teams need to be skilled to handle both. They need coaching to handle both. They need tools to handle both. If there is any part of this paper where we need to be on the same page, it’s this point. If you do one thing after reading this blog today, you will immediately review your types of opportunities and find out how you can improve the follow up.
When you jump right into understanding your leakage points, it would be helpful to have a set of questions to start from. Here are my best practice questions that are great starting points for each part of the nurture and upper pipeline leakage points:
Top of the pipeline leakage – following up and nurture to received leads
* What % of my responders convert to nurture phase?
* What % velocity rate do I have in each nurture phase?
* Where are most of the leads discontinued?
* Why are they discontinued?
* How long do leads stay in each nurture stage?
* What is my cost per lead nurtured?
* How many attempts does it take to BanTT a lead?
Top of pipeline leakage
* What is the average follow-up time for an opportunity?
* What is the opportunity volume?
* What % are immediately discontinued?
* Why are they immediately discontinued?
* What are the immediate follow-up costs per opportunity?
Middle of pipeline leakage
* What is the conversion rate from Stage 1 to Stage 2?
* What is the age of the average opportunity in Stage 1?
* What is the quality score of an opportunity in Stage 1?
* Why are opportunities discontinued?
* What is the average opportunity size?
* How many opportunities are in Stage 1 with no value?
* What is the forecast accuracy?
Once you have many of the answers to the above questions, then compare the results between Sales-generated opportunities and Marketing-generated opportunities. I think that you will immediately see some very interesting reasons for your leakages.
So now what do you do? After you have successfully analyzed your pipeline leakage points, corrective actions need to be taken. It would be a shame to come this far and now fall down on the implementation. Corrective action comes in the form of behavioral change and corresponding tools that will reinforce those changes. Let’s begin with skills training.
It’s safe to say that your Responders may not be jumping for joy to hear from you. When your inside Sales Team or your designated Nurture Group picks up the phone to contact the Responders and begin the nurture process, they need skills, they need tools, and they need the will to make the calls! Let’s take a look at the follow up or nurture leakage.
Let’s start with the dialogue. There are six critical skills where they need training:
Presence – Relating – Questioning – Listening – Positioning – Checking
Second, they need to be able to overcome objections. Objection training is critical, because they will get every possible objection thrown at them. If they do not learn how to successfully react to the objections, their dialogues will be short and the only leads they will advance will be the lucky ones that they stumble upon. The following objection skills should be trained:
Acknowledgement/Empathy, Questioning, Positioning, and Checking.
And the last step is to train every team member how to BanTT. We covered BanTT in my previous blog – so read that first if you are not familiar with BanTT. There are best-practice questions and a particular flow to determining a BanTT score. Every member of your Nurture Team should know the questions, be trained on how to ask the questions, and leverage their objection training to ensure successful BanTT performance.
The training to improve leakage points in the top and middle of your pipeline should happen at the same time. They have the same goal to be “Sales ready”. Sales ready means being equipped with the skills, knowledge, and processes at a point of interaction with a client or prospect that drives an effective dialogue. It is my experience that there are four major tactics that need to be employed to improve these leakage points.
First, we have skills training. Understand the current skill levels of your Sales Team. Perform diagnostics on your Team to understand core strength and weaknesses. Develop skills training and implement the training in accordance with the results from your diagnostics. Make sure you cover the same fundamental six skills that we discussed in the first leakage point – presence, relating, questioning, listening, positioning, and checking.
Second, teach follow-up fundamentals. This is critical. Getting ready to follow up on a lead is like paining a room, 80% is preparation and the remaining 20% is the actual phone call or live meeting. Start with teaching the Sales Team how to do Research:
* Provide them with information to understand the opportunity history, the person, the problem, the company, and the industry. The goal is to find a “hinge” that will create a meaningful call. Leverage tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, and other popular social networking sites.
* Plan for the call. A best practice is to use a call planner to map out or visualize the dialogue, collaborate with Team Members before the call, and ultimately archive the planning for future coaching and learning.
The third item on our sales readiness list is to lower the barriers to making the actual call. The goal is to improve the Will of the Sales Representatives who don’t like this work.
* Examine existing processes – streamline for efficiency and productivity – make sure everyone knows the flow and has adopted the process
* Improve touch tactics – Marketing needs to help here with items like personalized and integrated e-mail, point of contact notifications, spiffs, and leader boards to promote Responder success
* Leverage web intelligence tools that can aggregate information and mash-up social networking sites. This can speed up the research process greatly.
The final training is to ensure that Salespeople are capturing and recording data. CRM training on critical CRM data fields and adoption reporting is critical. Without Sales capturing data points like recording contact attempts and why opportunities are discontinued, there will be no way for Marketing and Sales to have insight in to how the top of the pipeline is performing. Sales Management will also be lacking critical data that will allow them to coach each Sales Rep on how to improve their individual performance.
For my next blog, I will cover coaching to the pipeline.
In my previous blogs, we discussed how to integrate the teams in to one demand generation unit. We also reviewed how to uncover leakage points in your pipeline. For this installment, we are going to dig a bit deeper in to those leakage points and start to uncover ways for you to fix yours. Let’s start by chatting a bit about opportunities.
Well, all opportunities are not the same. It’s critical that everyone understand this. What if opportunities were baskets of different fruit?
would provide nutrition, possibly both grow on trees and be good for you – but still be very, very different from each other. This is the case with opportunities. There are actually two types – at first glance,they look similar, but in reality are very, very different. The first one is the Sales-generated opportunity. Key characteristics include:* Are known to the Salesperson
* A time investment has been made
* Are focused – possibly from a specific sales-driven campaign
* Are warm in temperature – already a nearly full BanTT
* Have a specific “trust” level – they know where they came from
* Sales is responsible for them - accountability is apparent
On the other side of the fruit we have the Marketing-generated opportunity. Key characteristics include:
* The opportunity is unknown to the Salesperson
* There’s no investment made by Sales
* It may not be in focus – not what the Rep needs at this time or in line with Sales demands
* Is cold or possibly warm – deemed to need more qualification
* They come with a low trust level – they have historical baggage
* Marketing is responsible – Sales Rep has little or no accountability
Sales Teams need to be skilled to handle both. They need coaching to handle both. They need tools to handle both. If there is any part of this paper where we need to be on the same page, it’s this point. If you do one thing after reading this blog today, you will immediately review your types of opportunities and find out how you can improve the follow up.
When you jump right into understanding your leakage points, it would be helpful to have a set of questions to start from. Here are my best practice questions that are great starting points for each part of the nurture and upper pipeline leakage points:
Top of the pipeline leakage – following up and nurture to received leads
* What % of my responders convert to nurture phase?
* What % velocity rate do I have in each nurture phase?
* Where are most of the leads discontinued?
* Why are they discontinued?
* How long do leads stay in each nurture stage?
* What is my cost per lead nurtured?
* How many attempts does it take to BanTT a lead?
Top of pipeline leakage
* What is the average follow-up time for an opportunity?
* What is the opportunity volume?
* What % are immediately discontinued?
* Why are they immediately discontinued?
* What are the immediate follow-up costs per opportunity?
Middle of pipeline leakage
* What is the conversion rate from Stage 1 to Stage 2?
* What is the age of the average opportunity in Stage 1?
* What is the quality score of an opportunity in Stage 1?
* Why are opportunities discontinued?
* What is the average opportunity size?
* How many opportunities are in Stage 1 with no value?
* What is the forecast accuracy?
Once you have many of the answers to the above questions, then compare the results between Sales-generated opportunities and Marketing-generated opportunities. I think that you will immediately see some very interesting reasons for your leakages.
So now what do you do? After you have successfully analyzed your pipeline leakage points, corrective actions need to be taken. It would be a shame to come this far and now fall down on the implementation. Corrective action comes in the form of behavioral change and corresponding tools that will reinforce those changes. Let’s begin with skills training.
It’s safe to say that your Responders may not be jumping for joy to hear from you. When your inside Sales Team or your designated Nurture Group picks up the phone to contact the Responders and begin the nurture process, they need skills, they need tools, and they need the will to make the calls! Let’s take a look at the follow up or nurture leakage.
Let’s start with the dialogue. There are six critical skills where they need training:
Presence – Relating – Questioning – Listening – Positioning – Checking
Second, they need to be able to overcome objections. Objection training is critical, because they will get every possible objection thrown at them. If they do not learn how to successfully react to the objections, their dialogues will be short and the only leads they will advance will be the lucky ones that they stumble upon. The following objection skills should be trained:
Acknowledgement/Empathy, Questioning, Positioning, and Checking.
And the last step is to train every team member how to BanTT. We covered BanTT in my previous blog – so read that first if you are not familiar with BanTT. There are best-practice questions and a particular flow to determining a BanTT score. Every member of your Nurture Team should know the questions, be trained on how to ask the questions, and leverage their objection training to ensure successful BanTT performance.
The training to improve leakage points in the top and middle of your pipeline should happen at the same time. They have the same goal to be “Sales ready”. Sales ready means being equipped with the skills, knowledge, and processes at a point of interaction with a client or prospect that drives an effective dialogue. It is my experience that there are four major tactics that need to be employed to improve these leakage points.
First, we have skills training. Understand the current skill levels of your Sales Team. Perform diagnostics on your Team to understand core strength and weaknesses. Develop skills training and implement the training in accordance with the results from your diagnostics. Make sure you cover the same fundamental six skills that we discussed in the first leakage point – presence, relating, questioning, listening, positioning, and checking.
Second, teach follow-up fundamentals. This is critical. Getting ready to follow up on a lead is like paining a room, 80% is preparation and the remaining 20% is the actual phone call or live meeting. Start with teaching the Sales Team how to do Research:
* Provide them with information to understand the opportunity history, the person, the problem, the company, and the industry. The goal is to find a “hinge” that will create a meaningful call. Leverage tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, and other popular social networking sites.
* Plan for the call. A best practice is to use a call planner to map out or visualize the dialogue, collaborate with Team Members before the call, and ultimately archive the planning for future coaching and learning.
The third item on our sales readiness list is to lower the barriers to making the actual call. The goal is to improve the Will of the Sales Representatives who don’t like this work.
* Examine existing processes – streamline for efficiency and productivity – make sure everyone knows the flow and has adopted the process
* Improve touch tactics – Marketing needs to help here with items like personalized and integrated e-mail, point of contact notifications, spiffs, and leader boards to promote Responder success
* Leverage web intelligence tools that can aggregate information and mash-up social networking sites. This can speed up the research process greatly.
The final training is to ensure that Salespeople are capturing and recording data. CRM training on critical CRM data fields and adoption reporting is critical. Without Sales capturing data points like recording contact attempts and why opportunities are discontinued, there will be no way for Marketing and Sales to have insight in to how the top of the pipeline is performing. Sales Management will also be lacking critical data that will allow them to coach each Sales Rep on how to improve their individual performance.
For my next blog, I will cover coaching to the pipeline.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Complimentary Webinar
Aligning Sales Talent to Maximize Results:
When you look at your sales organization, do you see a perfect fit between your Sales Professionals and the roles they are expected to fill? Are Hunters hunting and Farmers farming? As salesforces have been right sized, customer expectations have risen, and competition has become more fierce, the question of "right role, right fit" has become top of mind of Sales Leaders in every industry.
Join Richardson's Harry Dunklin for a 60-minute webinar to learn how world-class organizations, Align Sales Talent to Maximize Results.
Click here to register today.
When you look at your sales organization, do you see a perfect fit between your Sales Professionals and the roles they are expected to fill? Are Hunters hunting and Farmers farming? As salesforces have been right sized, customer expectations have risen, and competition has become more fierce, the question of "right role, right fit" has become top of mind of Sales Leaders in every industry.
Join Richardson's Harry Dunklin for a 60-minute webinar to learn how world-class organizations, Align Sales Talent to Maximize Results.
Click here to register today.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Where's the Leak?
It's my hope that you have started your 2010 demand generation plan with a solid alignment between your sales and marketing organizations. You should now be one seamless system - a demand and revenue generation team. If you are not - then go back and read my previous blogs to get ideas on how to immediately improve that alignment.
Generating demand is a three-step shared ecosystem — find the leads, nurture them to opportunities, and win the opportunities. I say shared because both Sales and Marketing need to participate in all three steps – but not necessarily own each step. Let’s explore these steps in greater detail:
Step 1:
Find the leads – whether you are B-2-C or B-2-B, you need to get people interested in buying your goods and services. I think that we would generally agree that this is Marketing’s role. We could spend a lifetime discussing lead generation - but let's keep our focus on undestanding pipeline leakage points.
Step 2:
Nurture those people that are interested in your goods and services. A best-practice is to implement and follow a lead nurture process. It’s where you leverage tele response, email and other nurture tactics to engage your leads, score them based on a quality scale and convert to opportunities when they have a specific score. A best practice scoring model is to use the BanTT process. BanTT stands for budget, authority, need, time frame and trust. By using BanTT you weigh each part of the process and send the lead to Sales once it hits an agreed upon threshold – like 75 out of 100 available points. This scoring should be outlined in your SLA and the threshold score should be agreed upon. This is a major part of the SLA. It’s the quality check. If Sales agrees to follow up on all leads that score above a threshold, and then do not and complain that they are not really opportunities – Sales is in breach of the SLA and research needs to be performed to find out why.
Step 3:
Win the opportunities. For the sake of this discussion, I'm going to assume that you have a documented pipeline management process. See the attached graphic as an example.
What goes in at Stage 1 are validated opportunities and we all know the game – get them to close in revenue. Marketing should be well-versed on the process and is should also be documented in the SLA. They key to understanding these steps is to make sure you have a valid, documented and reported nurture and pipeline process.
Measure and report to ensure that you are capturing data at all steps of the ecosystem. This is vastly important – it’s how you find out about your leaks. What is a leakage point? It’s an area in your nurture phase and pipeline where deals get stuck or there is a large amount of discontinued or lost opportunities. Most leakage points occur at transition points – from marketing to the nurture phase, when marketing hands off an opportunity to sales or when sales moves an opportunity from a proposal stage to a presentation/finals stage.
Where are your leakage points? If you don’t know, I recommend that you take immediate steps to find them. When you do find them, you can then implement solutions to plug the leaks. That’s where we will continue with the next installment of this blog – fixing the leaks. Until then, always remember that sales and marketing are one continuous demand and revenue generation team.
Generating demand is a three-step shared ecosystem — find the leads, nurture them to opportunities, and win the opportunities. I say shared because both Sales and Marketing need to participate in all three steps – but not necessarily own each step. Let’s explore these steps in greater detail:
Step 1:
Find the leads – whether you are B-2-C or B-2-B, you need to get people interested in buying your goods and services. I think that we would generally agree that this is Marketing’s role. We could spend a lifetime discussing lead generation - but let's keep our focus on undestanding pipeline leakage points.
Step 2:
Nurture those people that are interested in your goods and services. A best-practice is to implement and follow a lead nurture process. It’s where you leverage tele response, email and other nurture tactics to engage your leads, score them based on a quality scale and convert to opportunities when they have a specific score. A best practice scoring model is to use the BanTT process. BanTT stands for budget, authority, need, time frame and trust. By using BanTT you weigh each part of the process and send the lead to Sales once it hits an agreed upon threshold – like 75 out of 100 available points. This scoring should be outlined in your SLA and the threshold score should be agreed upon. This is a major part of the SLA. It’s the quality check. If Sales agrees to follow up on all leads that score above a threshold, and then do not and complain that they are not really opportunities – Sales is in breach of the SLA and research needs to be performed to find out why.
Step 3:
Win the opportunities. For the sake of this discussion, I'm going to assume that you have a documented pipeline management process. See the attached graphic as an example.
What goes in at Stage 1 are validated opportunities and we all know the game – get them to close in revenue. Marketing should be well-versed on the process and is should also be documented in the SLA. They key to understanding these steps is to make sure you have a valid, documented and reported nurture and pipeline process.
Measure and report to ensure that you are capturing data at all steps of the ecosystem. This is vastly important – it’s how you find out about your leaks. What is a leakage point? It’s an area in your nurture phase and pipeline where deals get stuck or there is a large amount of discontinued or lost opportunities. Most leakage points occur at transition points – from marketing to the nurture phase, when marketing hands off an opportunity to sales or when sales moves an opportunity from a proposal stage to a presentation/finals stage.
Where are your leakage points? If you don’t know, I recommend that you take immediate steps to find them. When you do find them, you can then implement solutions to plug the leaks. That’s where we will continue with the next installment of this blog – fixing the leaks. Until then, always remember that sales and marketing are one continuous demand and revenue generation team.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Richardson Launches TalentGauge™
Richardson launches TalentGauge™ - an online assessment tool that enables sales leaders to identify the behavior and talent necessary to improve candidate selection, employee and organization development, and to profitably increase sales performance.
To Learn more, please visit - http://www.richardson.com/What-we-do/Curriculum-Overview/TalentGauge/
To Learn more, please visit - http://www.richardson.com/What-we-do/Curriculum-Overview/TalentGauge/
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