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Phase I: Instrument Your Sellers
Phase I is about getting better data, and we do this by instrumenting the team. Instead of having the team use their desk phones, we have them use a connected system to make phone calls. Instead of letting emails go back and forth under the cover of night, we track them. With phone calls and emails automatically logged -- even the calls and emails that go unanswered -- the data becomes pristine and useful to AI.
Phase II: Optimize Your Buyers
With clean data, CRM now becomes useful to our AI efforts. AI wants basically four categories of data:
Descriptive data--who are the prospects, and what characteristics do they have?
Activity data--what actions have been taken? (calls, emails)
Contextual data--what are the prevailing conditions at any given time (weather, economics etc.)
Results data--what have been the outcomes of our activities?
Phase III: Optimize Your Sellers
For the sales leader who wants to build a team that can reliably hit quarterly targets, it’s important to understand who they have in which seats. AI can instantly evaluate the historical performance of thousands of reps, identifying the behaviors and attributes that separate one group of performers from the next. Phase III relies on data from Phases I and II, but it flips the unit of analysis from the buyer to the sales rep.
Phase IV: Custom AI
With good data on buyers, good data on sellers, and good data on how opportunities make their way through the sales cycle, the remaining opportunities to leverage AI for revenue lift fall into the catch-all category of “what else?” These answers can be broken up into two categories:
More data / data sources
Different questions
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1. The Key to Outbound Sales Success – Understand the Problems & Pain You Are Solving With Your Product
2. Is Your Product a Vitamin or a Painkiller? Critical vs Nice to Have.
3. Status Quo and Alternative Solutions
4. Master Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and Buyer Personas
5. Tailor Your Sales Pitch
6. Objection Handling
7. Cost of Selling & ICP Segmentation
8. You Have a Sales Qualified Lead – Now What?
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Created by Process Street in partnership with PersistIQ, this study uses an archive of over 1,000 sales emails and voicemail transcripts from some of the world…
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SlideShare has been an important tool for marketers and salespeople for several years now, but some business leaders are still unsure how to get the most value out of this powerful platform.
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1. Don’t bury them with sales follow-ups.
2. Most people hate putting their phone numbers into content-download forms.
3. Your website must have thorough contact information.
4. Understand their needs and where they are coming from.
5. “We don’t do that” is a legitimate answer.
6. Your messaging needs to be clear.
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- A seasoned salesperson came on board briefly last year. After extensive training, she sent 75 cold outreach emails–um yes, spam. We had zero responses.
- This year, my company MarketSmiths outsourced the role. We had one person research leads and another send them. Over four weeks, 40 emails were sent. These got three responses and zero new clients (so far).
- In between these episodes, I sent 25 cold outreach emails–meticulously researched, laboriously customized, individually targeted. Out of the 25, 15 people responded, resulting in six meetings and one major project, with another in the works.
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In summary:
- Follow up at least five times
- Space your follow-up emails several months apart
- Listen closely during the initial call or conversation to make sure you understand how to offer your customer value
- Make your prospect’s life better with every email you send
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1. Ask for guidance on the best way to follow up with them while adding value and not being annoying.
2. Ask what their preferred form of communication is and if they will respond.
3. Make sure you always end each conversation with a clearly defined next step.
4. Summarize your conversations and get written confirmation.
5. Always have a specific reason to contact your prospect. NEVER just call to ‘touch base’ or ‘check in’.
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1. The consultative selling method
2. The empathetic yet strong parent method
3. The competition comparison method
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To maximize the power of consultative selling, we have to move beyond a simplistic view of solution selling. It’s not about grilling the buyer but rather engaging in a give-and-take as the seller and buyer explore the client’s priorities, examine what is in the business’s best interests, and evaluate the seller’s solutions. Asking questions is part of this engagement process, but there’s a right way to do it. Here are some important pitfalls to avoid:
Avoid checklist-style questioning.
Avoid asking leading questions.
Avoid negative conversational behaviors.
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Having more information doesn’t always make it easier to decide. Consider what’s happened with travel: With the explosion of internet travel sites in the 2000s, consumers took charge of their own travel, and travel agencies hemorrhaged business. Fast forward to today. According to the travel and leisure marketing firm MMGY, the use of travel agents increased by 50% from 2014 to 2015. Why? Because consumers, overwhelmed by information and inundated with choices, are again turning to travel agents to take the work out of travel planning.
A similar sequence has happened with B2B buying. Just as with travel, a wealth of easily available information has made it possible for buyers to do much of the work themselves. By 2012, our research shows, nearly 60% of a typical B2B purchasing decision — researching solutions, ranking options, benchmarking pricing, and so on — was happening before the buyer even had a conversation with a supplier. But just because customers can research their purchase doesn’t necessarily mean the process is going smoothly. The torrents of information, expanding array of options, and growing size and diversity of purchasing groups are leading to a kind of purchase paralysis: Customers are taking longer than ever to make purchases, and abandoning them more often. At the same time, second guessing and post-purchase regret are on the rise, while loyalty is falling. As purchasing becomes ever more complex, it’s becoming harder and harder — and buyers are now looking for sellers who can make the process easy once again.
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Build Awareness at the Top of the Funnel: An assessment tool helps your prospects define their business problem and shows how they measure up to industry benchmarks and best practices.
Get Conversions to the Middle of the Funnel: A value calculator shows prospects how much money they’re losing by working around their pain points instead of resolving them, so they’ll be more likely to evaluate your solution.
Closing the Deal at the Bottom of the Funnel: A Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) tool allows them to compare your product with a competitor’s. Another powerful motivator towards closing the deal is a return on investment (ROI) tool, which shows your prospects how quickly their investment will pay off.
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Chart of the day: Website lead response management research If you're involved in a business where you collect leads from your website you will know the im. Marketing topic(s):Lead generation analytics. Advice by Dave Chaffey.
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"Know exactly what you need from a prospective client, from first contact to close
Effective cold emails are a balance between science and art: A popular rule of thumb to follow is the “10-80-10” rule. Start your email with a personalized greeting, then insert your cookie-cutter message, and then end with another personalized message.
Do your research before the conversation
Cold calling and social selling go hand and hand: At the end of the day, social selling helps to turn a cold call into a warmer call and it can be as simple as commenting on and sharing your prospects’ posts, or as complex as revamping your entire LinkedIn and Twitter presence."
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Insight #1: The “Talk-to-Listen Ratio”
The average B2B sales rep spends between 65–75% of a call talking, leaving only 25–35% of the call for listening. 43/57 seems to be the golden ratio.
Insight #2: When, and How Often, Should You Discuss Pricing?
The data tells us pricing should come up roughly 3–4 times during a call(preferably after value has been established). When pricing is discussed too early in a call, less than 3 times, or more than 5 times, the odds of closing the deal tend to shrink.
Insight #3: Prospect Timing Signals
There is a positive correlation between winning the deal within your forecast, and the customer responding to the timing question with the word “probably.” When a prospect responds to your timing question with some variation of “We need to figure out X”, there is a negative correlation of getting that deal closed within your estimated forecast.
Insight #4: Use Risk-Reversal Language
When sales reps remove the risk of purchase by touting customer-protecting terms, the probability of closing the deal skyrockets by 32%.
Insight #5: Coach Salespeople with Real Calls
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Our research shows that sales operations has converged around seven major accountabilities, which include:
- Strategy and planning.
- Sales intelligence. Development and distribution of information and insights about prospects, customers, sales activities and assets that improve sales performance.
- Process design and management.
- Support and administration.
- Deal pursuit. Design and administration of sales opportunity related activities that result in higher win rates and increased profitability.
- Technology. Selection, implementation and administration of sales technologies that deliver user and business value
- Project management.
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It probably comes as no surprise that the departments most involved in B2B purchase decisions varies by industry. Recently-released survey data from LinkedIn provides some insight as to the departments that wield the most influence, and those industries in which the greatest number of departments are involved.
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Many B2B marketers may feel that this is a risky move — giving up control and resisting the urge to email or call every prospect who lands on your site and guide them along a carefully crafted content path — but after more than a dozen conversations with vendors and their customers to create my report, I’m more convinced than ever that this is the right thing to do. This is true for lots of reasons, which I cover in the report, but the most important one is that we’re all digital consumers now. So the self-service habits we have all learned over the last decade or so are now preferred behaviors — even for B2B buyers, who now just want to be left alone to find the content they need.
It’s also clear to me that the implications of this trend for B2B marketing include more than just self-service research. For example, it will have an impact on how much and what kinds of content B2B marketers make available “free” on their websites versus requiring prospects to complete a form to get access, and how vendors engage with their prospects in the discovery phase of their buying journey — two topics I’ll be covering in reports later this year.
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1. It starts with the subject line
2. Keep it short
3. Make one “ask”
Your ask should be extremely clear and singular. If you want a call, ask for the call, and don’t leave your prospect scrambling to answer a bunch of questions. They’ll end up answering none of them.
4. Leverage content
5. Be yourself
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All B2B marketers know what an MQL is, but what's an MPL? It's the Marketing Personalized Lead and it reflects the needs of the individual sales resource to whom the lead will be distributed. This requires marketing to apply the same science to understanding the needs of the sales channel as it does to any external audience.
Sales buyer's journey analysis could be the single most powerful way to align marketing and sales. Marketing should think of sales as "buying" its leads. The buy is acceptance, follow up and entry into the pipeline. When sales ignores the leads they are not buying. The reasons they buy or not are very much the same as any other buyer. The lead (offer) does not fit their current agenda (sales attention.)
IDC defines sales enablement as getting the right information to the right sales person at the right time in the right format in order to move an opportunity forward.
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1. Don’t Use Templates
2. Start with Them
I’d much rather hear about why you’re interested in talking to me specifically and what it is about my business that makes you a good fit to solve a need for a service or product.
3. Show You’re on Top of Trends
4. Don’t Get Too General
Make sure that your emails are tailored specifically to each recipient’s vertical in some way.
5. Include a Strong Call to Action
6. Keep It Short
7. Add Another Touchpoint
If you have a contact’s phone number take the time to give them a follow up call to see if they got your email and if there is anything you can do to help them in person.
8. Pleasantries are Odd
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Step 1: Do something great.
If you were looking for an easy way out, content marketing is definitely not the right approach for you. You still need to do something great. Doing great things leads to knowing great things. And knowledge equals money.
Step 2: Write about it.
It doesn’t really matter if you like short form or long form content. The goal here is that you need to write something great and the length of the content needs to reflect the subject matter as well as the intended audience.
Step 3: Promote it.
- Get involved and be an active member in industry forums (ex. Inbound.org, growthhackers.com, and Hacker News)
- Grow your own network on social media (ex. Socedo, Narrow.io, and Crowdfire)
- Reach out to influencers in your niche. Buzzsumo is my favorite tool for this
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Digital document signatures have really expedited sales. No longer do we have to print out the document, sign it, and either scan or fax it back to the original sender. But while this capability may be a godsend, there’s one problem a new startup called GetAccept wants to highlight: It still is not enough for actually closing the deal. The company has an offering it says will give firms more control over their sales document workflow.
Sixty percent of proposals never get signed, according to cofounder Mathias Thulin. He attributes it to a lack of structured workflow for salespeople: “They don’t know where to follow up or are lazy.” GetAccept aims to automate the process to convert more missed opportunities into signed deals. It incorporates different behavioral decisions you’ve made to push the deal forward, such as sending your sale an email or SMS reminder, along with retargeting display campaigns.
This Y Combinator-backed company also has a feature to help salespeople craft proposals — you can create a video presentation to supplement your standard sales proposal. The idea is to make the process more fun and engaging so it stands out, perhaps making the whole experience a bit more human. There’s also a dealboard that displays the status of all your potential deals, giving you a complete picture of what additional work may be needed. marketingIO: One Source for All Marketing Technology Challenges. See our solutions.
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![How the Sales Team Has Evolved [Infographic] - Profs | The MarTech Digest | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/T7uni7vr5pBgLL82zLeBC_L6dadsvGA8m9WNoVsbzkY=)
Using AI For Sales? Forget The Hype - Forbes
Of course, this all assumes you HAVE AI capabilities.
This news comes to you compliments of marketingIO.com. #MarTech #DigitalMarketing