Prosultative business

How many things can you link to LinkedIn?

2009-11-19T03:12:00.000-08:00

Look out! LinkedIn is linked in to Outlook! Sorry, I couldn't stop myself.

Twitter

2009-11-12T17:09:00.000-08:00

http://twitter.com/ - it is getting there as an application - follow me, for I am lost too, perhaps a little less than you, who knows? - Mike Pilcher - http://twitter.com/mikepilcher

Finding the right talent just got much harder

2009-08-29T03:59:00.000-07:00

In today’s turbulent markets we still need to hire to replace our professionals. No matter what is happening to our business professionals still move and create openings, these openings need to be filled and in today’s ultra-competitive business environment where everyone is aggressively chasing the same customer budget, you have to have the best of the best in your organisation.

However we are deluged with candidates as business upon business reduces workforces and put more professionals into the burgeoning talent pool. The task of finding the right person, for the right role, in the right place did not get easier, it just got much harder. Your hiring managers and your HR professionals are deluged with professional candidates all trying to position their experience as the right experience for your role. If you are to be successful you have to find a way to sift through these people to find the right person. Inevitably the costs to achieve this increased significantly with the additional pool of people. Now your hiring is going to take longer, cost more and the chance you have someone who is not the perfect candidate increased significantly. This is a dreadful situation given the current environment where every single penny counts.

The solution requires a series of systematic and connected steps that ensure you attract the optimal candidates for your role. First is to put yourself in the right place. If you want to sell a Mercedes Benz then putting your cars in the local supermarket is going to mean you are waiting a very long time for the right person to show up. Therefore you must put yourself in the place where people who are looking to buy cars are. In the situation of hiring professionals, that may have been Universities, Professional bodies, Trade press and other places the types of professionals you are looking for were congregating. The problem with this is it was like hunting for a needle in a haystack. This cost lots of money as you had to be in all the different places your candidates might be. In today’s interconnected world that has become much simpler. People are connected in online communities, using tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. People are talking to each other, sharing experiences and networking for both personal and professional improvement. They are spending their time on line as they want to make their life better. Like any place where people gather they are all different. Some are for fun, some for learning and some for business. You need to put your business in the place where professionals go to improve their professional lives.

Now you put your dealership in the right place to sell the car, you have to make certain you attract qualified candidates for your wares. Targeting who those people are and then getting their attention is the key to accelerating the process of finding the right person for the key role you are trying to fill. This is no simple process. The candidate you are looking for may be ready to make a move, and very possibly, the best candidate you want is working and may well not be looking to move. You have to attract that person with a string call to action. Targeting messaging to them based upon the criteria you know you care about that professional means you can find that precise person you want. If the person you want has a certain type of experience, with specific companies in their background, and has other experiences you value, you want to be able to target them and attract them to your company. Failure to do so is going to take you back to randomly spending money on multiple channels and possibly finding the right person. If you want to bring someone to your Mercedes dealership, someone who in the past has bought a BMW is likely to be the sort of person you are looking for.

The solution is to place your brand in the place where professionals are looking. With a combination of targeted messaging, direct outreach and a personalised experience, you can attract the candidates you want. Attracting and refining the business professionals you need to hire the right professional. Without this approach you are doomed to expensive, slow results with limited success. By leveraging networks you will get the right person.

How to collect a paycheck while sitting on the beach

2009-04-11T11:57:00.000-07:00

Given the dire state of our 401K’s, savings, pensions and the price of our houses, retirement which once seemed a long way off has ridden off into the sunset on a stolen horse. While many have been worrying, I have been continuing to plan for my early departure from the work farce however this time I plan to do it while still collecting a pay check.

Now we have entered the age of Obama, or the Obamaera, I have decided like all good Obamerites to lay out a multi-step plan for success. It will sound simple, while at the same time be so incomprehensibly detailed your employer will never be able to see through it. I call this Geithneromics. Due to my current focus I will start by helping marketers join me in this quest, I may help sales people in the future, thought I will be selective. Those that helped themselves for the last decade, riding high in corporate jets, collecting fat bonuses and generally living it up will have to help themselves as all the additional thought I have had to put was wearing.

The secret to success is to do more with less but not be seen to be doing anything differently.

Rule #1 – Be in when you are out.
Buy the following items to leave in your office.
Identical Blackberry to your regular one – you don’t need a plan, just a phone (please see Rule #4)
3 spare jackets
Laptop

You must leave the Blackberry and your laptop plugged in at all times, leave your jacket on the back of the chair. This way when anyone comes by your office (OK, I know. That is so last century. When they come by your open plan, open topped, not-a-cube more of a “zone”; it will appear you have just run out. Who leaves their Blackberry behind or without their jacket? You will need to move the items whenever you are in the office and occasionally swap out the jacket. This not only allows you to appear as if you are in the office, in addition you appear to work early and late.

Rule #2 – Say you are triaging leads old school but don’t.
Print out lots of leads from your salesfarce automation system. Get a magic marker and randomly write “A”, “B”, “C”, in the upper right hand corner of the first 20 or so in the pile. If you want to do well at our next HR review, come up with a color code, red for “A”, orange for “B”, etc. You will appear really efficient; color-coding? This person’s a genius, give them a bonus. Now the good news is people expect this process to take forever and be a full time job so if you automate it using a tool like Marketbright you can tell people you are manually updating your salesfarce automation system while it actually happens automatically while you are sitting on the beach.

Rule #3 – Re-use content mercilessly
Use a marketing automation system that is template-centric and provides for re-use of content. When you are creating nurture emails, re-use and re-purpose the same content. You know less than 2% of the people are reading it, they aren’t going to notice if it is the same content they didn’t read last time. Those people who are reading them are only reading the subject lines anyway. This is a tremendous time-saver and if your vendor has the world’s best HTML editor and a template-based approach, you can even edit the content a little and do what used to take your agency months in a few minutes.

Rule #4 – Get a Blackberry
I am sure it is true of iPhone’s too in terms of functionality, but in terms of looking like you mean business a Blackberry is invaluable. The key to the success for this plan I propose is looking like you live, breathe and mean business. Putting TwitterBerry, Facebook, LinkedIn and all other social media applications on a Blackberry couldn’t be simpler. All you have to do now is take the content you post on one, and re-post it everywhere else. Personally I recommend setting up a work alias for all these accounts and just having these logins on your “post-work still-paycheck” Blackberry. Then you don’t run the risk of Twittering, “Just dropped my Blackberry as my hands are greasy with sun lotion.”

Rule #5 – Funding the project
We all know marketing has the most fungible budget of virtually any department. Always amuses me that sales has zero budget but all the headcount, and marketing has all the budget but relatively little headcount. This is a huge asset to you in your attempt to be on the beach while collecting a paycheck. (By the way, you don’t actually need to go to the beach, this is just an idea. You may want to walk in the park, go to a quilting festival, or run naked through the woods. It is not really important, other than the last one as a) you don’t have anywhere to easily put your Blackberry; which is a critical part of appearing to be perma-on-line and b) if you are going to do this please let me know in advance and whether you are attractive or not as that will dictate whether I avoid said woods or not.) The fungibility (Ahh, you have to love it when marketing makes up new words.) of your budget means you can implement a system to deliver Rules #2, #3 and #4, and so long as you put it under “Trade Show” or “Agency” in your budget, no-one will ever know.

I hope you find this helpful. I certainly have found it to be so. I am currently on a beach in Barbados, though if you check in my office I think I may have just popped out for lunch.

ProSultative Selling

2008-09-20T10:18:00.000-07:00

There is a significant change taking shape in business-to-business selling. As we see a fundamental shift to China becoming the World’s dominant economic power supplanting the USA, so we are seeing in business the rise of Marketing to supplant Sales’ dominance. It is a dramatic and rapid evolution changing the way suppliers and buyers initially contact, interact and then transact business.

Business sales are becoming simpler, easier to conduct, cheaper to manage, and more agile. Customers are demanding more of suppliers including giving less of their time to evaluate products before the sale and expecting the supplier to prove the value of the investment before closing a sale.

The utopian sale one in which the customer fully self-serves and self-sells. Most organizations recognize this utopia is unattainable today, but strive to achieve the vision of a zero-friction sale with no impediments, reducing time to close and increasing the value of sales.

A business buys products with a belief those investments will propel its own business. As each business strives to differentiate itself in the market, it acquires materials to help make its own products, and make them unique. This requires proof the product helps the unique requirements of the buyer’s business. Proving an understanding of customer needs, mapping these needs to the product, and explaining how the product performs better than the competition. This process requires some level of interaction, consultative needs matching, and the use of consultative sales processes.

To reduce friction we must take the best of the low-friction techniques from the business-to-consumer market where selling is a one-to-many relationship, and applying them in the business-to-business market of selling one-to-one. In business-to-consumer selling the one-to-many approach demands proactive articulation of a product’s benefits to as many people as possible. Actively reaching out to a buyer and providing the information required to make a buying decision. Driving this proactive approach into business-to-business sales, delivers dramatic and positive results.

Proactive + Consultative = ProSultative

ProSultative Selling requires an interactive dialogue and interaction between buyer and supplier across all channels of communication. Website, blogs, trade shows, sales team, support, customer counsels, social network marketing, and touch points which have yet to be conceived, every touch point must be integrated, consistent and proactive.

This is not the first dramatic shift in business-to-business sales and will not be the last. A ProSultative Business sells as proactively as possible while proving to the prospect their needs are being listened to and understood. The ProSultative approach benefits both parties in a sale by minimizing the interactions required to make a buying decision.

The lines between sales, marketing and product blur. The role of sales management shifts further toward process management and constant improvement. The role of marketing evolves to managing the messaging in a constant, iterative, consistent dialogue. Even the make-up of the sales team is changing with less focus on the road warrior and more on office-based teams. As with any change, some will feel threatened by these changes, others will embrace them.

There are significant gains waiting on the early adopters. ProSultative Selling is more than a sales process, it is a change in the way a business thinks, acts, makes and sells its products to its customers. In this new commercial model, the entire business orients around one common idea; that of every employee striving to make the business easy to do business with, and removing friction at every step in the relationship.

http://www.amazon.com/ProSultative-Selling-Death-Consultative-Salesperson/dp/0615224350/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1221944409&sr=8-1

Sales and Marketing in 2009 - Hugging the New Austerity

2009-03-19T01:02:00.000-07:00

It is evident that politically 2009 is the year of change, and commercially this is the case too. This is the year of pocket change. Trying to find a way to sell more with less, stretching less of last year's marketing dollars to meet more of this year's sales. Welcome in the New Austerity. We can try to run from this, or we can choose to embrace it. I suggest as we have no option, rush up and give the New Austerity a big hug. You don't need to do lunch on a diet of curried squirrels cheeks, deep fried in ginger aspic and tricolore organic wild mushroom risotto washed down with California's finest. There's nothing wrong with hamburgers, or simply McDonald's for that matter. Dunkin Donuts makes perfectly good coffee, begone no-fat, half-caffe, semi-tepid, sugar-free, vanilla substitutes, no foam, soy lattes. Begone I say.

The Siberian Winter has arrived and is here to say. At least for the next couple of Quarters anyway. So let's make the most of it. We cannot enjoy unfettered budgets if we don't at first accept and enjoy fettered, ham-strung, tiny budgets. Think TinyURL but for budgets. We must hunker down and find new ways to sell to people. We must get creative and find ways to sell more with less.

Here are some ideas for working within today's new market.
1. Requirement. Spend less yet make more leads. This always sounds great, especially on a slide set for Senior Management. It is an interesting dilemma, embrace it in which case we may as well run the halls stating we were wasting money historically, or we can reject the idea which will quickly result in someone else sitting at our desk with the aforementioned PowerPoint.

a) Option A. Sit in the basement of your building with an alchemist's wand and a large cauldron of boiling, mystical goo. Stay here until you have converted lead to gold, water into wine, and Contacts into Sales Qualified Leads.

b) Option B. The challenge with many businesses today is they seek a silver bullet, one thing that will solve everything. In this case, focus in on the lead generation activity you delivered in the past that directly produced the greatest return. It would be great if you had a system like Marketbright and could press a button to find this data. More companies do not have Marketbright than do (hurry up and fix that, it saves time later on), anyway chances are you can't press the Marketbright Easy button. Sit down with sales, track it back, trust your instinct. Spend on those programs that generated the majority of business last year. (Seems obvious? Do any of your budgets show trimming of activities you know should in your heart should be stopped altogether?)

2. Requirement. More better (thank you GW we will miss you in 2009), qualified leads passed to sales people. The problem with this is we usually allow Marketing to define what they see as qualified. Then we allow Sales to decide whether it was qualified or not dependant on whether the lead closed, sales' mood, whether the Sun was in Uranus, or if Punxsutawney Phil sees his own reflection (or something like that. I am British after all. At least I can spell Punxsu........once is enough).

a) Option A. Let only Sales define what is and what is not a Qualified Lead after the close. That way we can declare victory and the sales team can go to the local bar, drink beer, eat meat and start fires.

b) Option B. Sales and Marketing sit down together and jointly decide what the end of the funnel should look like. Work their way back toward and initial contact both acknowledging and accepting some prospects will qualify out, some will be lost and there will not be a 1:1 close ratio. (Seems obvious? Please forward to me the document that Sales and Marketing both signed up to detailing the lead pipeline metrics and the expected conversion rates. I will issue a prize for the best one. N.B. both means Sales AND Marketing, not just sales declaring Independence and calling it done.)

3. Requirement. Accelerate the pipeline. (Blame Marketing for Lead Quality if any sales cycle goes beyond 31 days). Every sales cycles takes too long, in fact every business cycle takes too darn long. How long did it take you to interview your last hire? Then how long did it take you to get the offer letter out? Too darn long. We simply to have to move faster.

a) Option A. Prove the New Improved Sales Cycle has a 48 hour pipeline close time (as in, you have 48 hours and then it's your badge). This can easily be achieved by taking the time from when the sales person starts working on the final order form, adding two weeks, then adding a week for safety, then adding a Quarter just in case. Start counting from there. You will not be far off and Senior Management will be amazed at the truncated pipeline. (You can also try putting buckets of oil over the door to the sales office. I have found this doesn't do much to grease the pipeline but it sure is funny.)

b) Option B. Work with sales to identify those accounts that have the greatest propensity to move through the pipeline. Get ProSultative. (For those whose Christmas was a void due to the artful book ProSultative Selling being sold out on Amazon, this is when you are proactive with the delivery of information during a consultative sales process). Find out what is the minimum amount of information you need to give to a prospect to make them a customer and give it to them proactively. (Seems obvious? When did you last sit down with your counterpart in Sales or Marketing and really understand what was the least you had to do to covert a prospect to a customer?)

There is no point in anyone pretending 2009 is not the year of the New Austerity, therefore we may as well make the best of it. This does not mean buying all your work clothes at the local good will (though I have seen some start-ups where apparently this is a requirement), it does mean accepting the situation and applying your best judgment as to how to become more agile, more creative, and above all not to ignore the data that is sitting in our businesses. Find out what worked, do more of it. Accept what didn't. Don’t do so much of that.
http://www.amazon.com/ProSultative-Selling-Death-Consultative-Salesperson/dp/0615224350

Demand Discovery - Lead Generation's new black

2009-03-19T01:03:00.000-07:00

I suggest that the old ways of Demand Generation need to be rejected. Marketing Sherpa says 80% of your prospects find you. They do so with nudging from traditional methods like cold-calling and telemarketing, however the final step when they move to becoming an engaged prospect is now delivered by the prospect searching for a solution to their problem.
This means we need to place marketing breadcrumbs in front of the prospect so when they are ready to start picking them up you guide them toward your company as quickly as possible. I suggest this means thinking about a new concept. Demand Discovery. We are now trying to find out where the demand exists.

In the days of consultative selling we really did generate demand. We would find a problem we could solve. Find someone that cared about it. Articulate the problem. Articulate the solution. Articulate the value of our solution. Then we financially justified it. We were essentially generating demand. Now we must find the the demand that already exists.

This moves us to putting a much heavier focus on using email marketing, analysts, SEO/SEM, Social Media, Webinars. Proactive marketing where we are putting breadcrumbs in our prospect's paths. If we want to be successful in this new world we need to think differently about what we are trying to achieve.

Social Technographics and Demand Discovery

2009-03-19T01:04:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading a great blog by Laura Ramos of Forrester entitled The Social Technographics Of B2B Buyers

(http://b2bmarketingpost.com/2009/02/23/the-social-technographics-of-b2b-buyers/#comment-37).

It caused me to start thinking about what Laura had to say and think about the dynamics of why Social Marketing is starting to take off at such a rapid pace. The following is based on my response to Laura's posting.
We are seeing in Social Marketing a reflection in the online world of the way the offline world used to work. If you wanted to meet Stanford sports fans to watch a college basketball game, you would go to a sports bar near the Stanford campus, not Berkeley.

What we are seeing in the market is driven by the same business forces we used to see, closing more revenue, more quickly. This desire in today's world of instant expectations means we need to find those people who are ready to buy and buy today. When we can find a qualified buyer with budget, we close quickly and if we can keep new prospects flowing we close more often, ultimately driving more revenue.

This means marketing has to put itself in the place where the ready buyer is at this moment. That means finding which places these people are in and going there. Like the Stanford example, there will be many sports bars to go to watch a game, so you start with the largest one. Then you find there are some people who want to watch a game but they like a certain food, or a quiet place. You then expand the marketing reach to go to these places and spread your message.

As marketers we need to find where the people that are ready to buy are congregating and go there not wait for them to find us. We don't have the time to deliver the demand generation activities of the past, we need revenue and we need it now. The best way to deliver this is to find a well-qualified prospect who is ready to buy. Find out where they are discovering information about the problem they face, add value to their discovery and lead them toward your solution.

Prosultative versus Sales 2.0

2009-03-19T01:06:00.000-07:00

I have been asked this a number of times what is the difference between Prosultative selling and Sales 2.0? First we need to define Sales 2.0 - you only have to visit the Sales 2.0 conference site http://www.sales20conf.com/2009/ to see it is all about sales, sales, sales, and I think I mentioned sales. Prosultative is about blending sales and marketing into one organization. The end of the never ending and pointless debate about Sales are from Mars and Marketing from Venus.
We are all here to generate revenue. With Sales 2.0 you will see lots of talk about leads. Prosultative selling is about qualified prospects. Marketing helps sales by doing much of the work sales used to do. The result is smaller, more focused sales teams and marketing teams who are discovering where buyers are, how to qualify them, how to bring those prospects to the sales team that are ready to buy, and how to keep those that will be ready to buy informed until they are ready. Finally how to identify those people who will never buy and discover if there are other products and services we can sell them.

This is not a case of tomato / tomarto - this is apples and oranges.

The 4 S's of Automated Nurturing

2009-03-19T01:09:00.001-07:00

It was Marie Antoinette who said "There is nothing new except what has been forgotten". Everywhere I go I hear Nurturing as if it is some new concept that we have never heard of before. Sales people have been nurturing prospects for years. There is a word that is missing. Automated.

My issue is if you ask a Marketer how automated it is to target a segment,

identify a message, craft some creative and then time its delivery, especially one who is using one of our competitor’s tools and is knee deep in HTML I think they will tell you, "Yeah. Not so much". I see a lot of our competition trying to make this sound complex. I think for them it may be. If you only ever worked in Marketing, then you don’t know what sales did and vice versa. Our team is a blend of Sales and Marketing professionals and with a view from end to end we see the world somewhat differently.

If we are to maximize the returns from the multi-channel, automated nurturing that Marketbright does we have to understand what nurturing actually is. This is not new, ask any B2B sales person from the mini-computing days. Ask any poor soul who tried to manage their day and prospects with a Time Management System – anyone remember those? It is not a Black Art. There are four key attributes to Prospect Nurturing.
SegmentedIf you are selling more than one product, at more than one price point, across more than one vertical, and more than one geography, you better be targeting your message down to the most personal segment. Think about what every senior sales person has had to learn and should have a copy of in their bookmarks http://www.vitoselling.com/. Tony Parinello coined the phrase selling to the VITO – the very important top officer. What was the core element? Making the messaging targeted to that person. What is today’s equivalent when you get marketing to deliver this messaging? Segmentation. Take your products, your price points, how you plan to promote them and identify how best to promote them based upon your prospects. Email marketing is great if you have single products, single price point, single vertical products. If you want to be more personal than that you need to identify the best promotional tool to deliver your message. If you are Dior you want to get stars to wear your product. If your target is a C Level executive they are not going to respond to an impersonal generalized email.

Unless there is only one decision person influencing the choice of your product you need to build a systematic plan for Nurturing patter to the organization you are targeting and then to the people within it. Some will respond to email, some to SEO/SEM, some to direct mail, some to dimensional mailers, some to telesales, partners, analysts, etc all go to create the pattern you are going to create. Precisely the way sales people used to do this, you now automate the process using marketing, segmentation and personalized messaging. Not simply personalized emails, personalized promotions dependent on the prospect. This is at the core of prosultative selling, the transfer of tasks, activities and actions from sales to marketing and in the process their automation. Segmenting your messaging to the right person, to deliver the right content, at the right place using the right medium is a key part of Automated Nurturing.

The Second "S" of Automated Nurturing - Systematic

2009-03-19T01:08:00.001-07:00

Systematic

As any successful salesperson used to do every Sunday night, the optimistic ones ironing 5 shirts at the same time, they would sit and plan their week. What meetings did they have and what could they do with the rest of their time. Who could they call, who would they send a VITO letter to, which partner would they work with? When I was at Oracle one of my most successful partnerships was with the HP sales team. We were targeting a prospect base that was almost 100% IBM. IBM saw no benefit in working with me, HP wanted to break in. I would spend time understanding which salespeople to work with at HP, and doing joint account planning. We knew if we called someone last week and they told us to call them back in six months, we would touch base with them in three months. We would look out for trade shows where we knew we may meet someone. Salespeople systematically sat down and worked out how to balance their time. What was wrong with this? Good ones were good at doing this and bad ones? Yep, they were bad at it.

Now in a prosultative selling environment with marketing automating this process must be systematic and process-oriented. We will take the best practices of the best sales people and replicate them across every account. If we do this we find a way to systemically replicate best sales practices to every prospect dramatically increasing our chance of success. You need a tool like Marketbright to deliver this across all channels and all segments. However, the concept is not new and if your marketing vendor actually involved sales people in the design of their tools, you would have something useful, like Marketbright. You need Marketing to understand who to target, how to message, when to do it, you need sales to help understand what best practices have worked in the past.

"S" number 3 for Automated Nurturing - Standards

2009-03-19T01:10:00.001-07:00

Standards

What was it that used to make Marketing people insane with salespeople? OK well other than the long list we can all rattle off, let’s start with taking the creative, ripping it up and sending out what they liked. What was the problem with this? Nothing when it worked and everything when it went wrong. We didn’t know what was working or why other than who went to Club Trip. It seems that every Club Trip/President’s Club I went on it was always the same folk. Yet I never had anyone ask us what we were doing right. I can tell you we were all doing very much the same thing. We were taking the best of our messaging and positioning and we would share with each other (not while on Club Trip but I think you get the point)
If we are to be consistently successful across the organization, we have to be consistent. Consistency requires standards. Prosultative selling takes the best of what the best sales people are doing; marketing then creates personalized messaging for the prospect in a structured, standardized format. This standardization is not about restricting salespeople, it is about empowering the organization to leverage branding standards and messaging that is consistent and effective.

Sell Sell Sell - It is all about Sales - Automated Nurturing #4

2009-03-19T01:11:00.000-07:00

Sell

All this Marketing Automation and we still need to sell? How dull. Yes, it is all about revenue. Not about really cool messages, not about lead volume, not about even qualified leads, it is all about revenue. If Marketing is truly to usurp the power base of sales, the way Prosultative selling predicts, then Marketing has to understand this key point. Any marketer that tries to claim success by ever mentioning the number of leads they have created without being able to track how much revenue they delivered just handed the power back to sales. If marketing can prove what they do actually delivers revenue then the power base shifts. People don’t want to talk about this so I see the political elephant in the room getting larger and leaving its unique smell and presents there for all to enjoy.

There’s an elephant. Here it is. Someone is going to own this prosultative process. It used to be sales because the revenue was easily seen to be associated with them. If marketing is to take control of the process, they must prove the work they are doing is directly responsible for the revenue. Sales becomes a closing machine for marketing, into a lead generation department for sales. Prosultative selling becomes the future of B2B sales. Why is no-one telling you this? Well sales aren’t sharing as they don’t want to lose their power base. Marketing doesn’t have the data to prove this and so it just goes unsaid. Marketbright delivers the integration for sales and marketing to work together and see every aspect of the sales and marketing process and understand the ROI. Who wins this battle is down to you, that it is happening is irrefutable.

Lead Scoring best practices

2009-03-19T00:55:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of discussion about the best practices for lead scoring. Simply, the best practice is to automate the process. This may appear at first glance overly-simplistic, however, I suggest you look at your organization and first ask yourself if the process for passing leads to the sales team is fully automated or not. If it is not fully automated then you are not gathering all the data you can to learn from your prospect and customer interactions.

Once fully automated you first define the current best practices currently implemented. Understand why they were implemented, where they seem to be working and where they are not. The rules must be specific to your business, so find a product that guides you through defining the rules, then provides for quick and rapid change once lessons can be learned.
Implement the lead scoring rules and then start to monitor. Test different outcomes. Test different results. Some vendors will state there is one optimized way to deliver lead scoring rules. They are right in principle, there is one way, but that way is your way not the way their tool works. Your business is unique in the way it interacts with its customers, and therefore you must understand your business' specific rules that optimize the chance for converting a prospect to a customer.

Once implemented continue to monitor the rules and improve them. Your business changes every day, change influenced by new products, new verticals, new pricing, changing macro-economic conditions, new competitors. Your prospects therefore will change and require a different dialogue to convert them to customers as products mature, prices change and your company expands.
Lead scoring is one part of Lead Management, Lead Routing is another critical part. It is not enough to know how to next interact with a prospect, it is essential to know when, why, and to ensure when an instant response is required it is acted on immediately. Moving the prospect through the dialogue intelligently and engaging them in a conversation dramatically increases the probability for conversion for customer to prospect.

In summary, there is no one way to deliver Lead Management to meet your business' requirements. What you need is to automate the process, manage it centrally and consistently using the best practices your business learns as it interacts with more and more prospects.

New Prosultative Selling article published in DemandGen Report

2009-02-24T07:36:00.000-08:00

A new article by Mike Pilcher in DemandGen report on Prosultative selling and the changes that are impacting sales and marketing in B2B today.

http://www.demandgenreport.com/archive.php?codearti=1220

New Prosultative Selling discussion group

2009-02-22T22:21:00.000-08:00

We have started a new forum hosted by Mike Pilcher to discuss the changes to consultative selling. The group can be found below.

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=1810845&trk=anet_ug_hm

Prosultative Selling Blog moving to a new location

2008-11-01T11:25:00.001-07:00

Thank you for all the positive feedback and comments on this blog. I am migrating the blog to my company's blog as I believe we can get a livelier forum and debate by bringing the audiences together.

See you there.

There is a direct link from the title of this post.

http://blog.marketbright.com/

The book can be found at:-

http://www.amazon.com/ProSultative-Selling-Death-Consultative-Salesperson/dp/0615224350

Selling in a down economy

2008-10-17T01:16:00.001-07:00

First thing I would say about selling in a down economy is don't panic. Our houses may be worth less than they were, our 401K's and pensions diminished, there may be talk of recessions and even depression.

Having lived and sold in down economic conditions before I can assure you of three things.

· People will still buy things

· People will still sell things

· There will be less of both of them

The question you should be asking yourself is, "How do I get them to buy them from me?". There's no doubt some sales people will suffer in this economy. There's also no doubt some people will not. The solution to managing this risk is simple. Fuller pipelines.

Before anyone yells out - "Fuller pipelines in a down economy? You are nuts!" The solution is better use of your demand generation funds. Like the complex financial derivatives that helped push the economy into the state it is in, there are many similarities with Lead Generation. Trying to get to the bottom of a CDO is like trying to find where a lead came from. Did the prospect register on the web site because of a mail campaign from marketing, because a sales person cold-called, or because they heard about your product from another customer? Part of the reason sales and marketing often don't see the world the same way is constant disagreement on what is a lead, where did it come from, why aren't there more?

There are some things we do know. Certain types of demand generation are expensive and focused on small, well-qualified populations. However, there is much higher risk associated with high cost in-person events. In a down economy it is better to use your marketing dollars to expand your reach, get everyone working harder and smarter, most importantly working together. Leverage email, webinars and virtual conferencing to expand your reach.

As sales people, get creative and take ownership of the problem too. Work with Marketing to create your own campaigns targeted directly at your target market. Create your own webinar, invite your own prospects. Focus on finding more prospects so you can afford to lose some, which the down economy will inevitably cause you to do.

Marketing, start working with sales to create micro-campaigns they can execute. Extend your reach and power by working with the sales teams to leverage the work you are doing already. Your sales team on the ground knows what their prospects need to generate interest. Work with them to find out what that is and give it to them.

Seems obvious doesn't it? How many people in your sales organization gave a webinar to help lead generation last month?

Is your business ProSultative?

http://www.amazon.com/ProSultative-Selling-Death-Consultative-Salesperson/dp/0615224350/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1224440247&sr=8-1

Where is my SalesForce.com salesperson?

2008-09-28T10:25:00.000-07:00

A number of people have told me I am wrong about ProSultative Selling.

First I should establish, ProSultative Selling is more than simply about sales people, it is about the changes we are seeing in business today that impacts salespeople. I have an example from ten years ago, and one from last week.

Do you remember when you used to book a flight and needed a travel agent? Now you self-serve frictionlessly over the web without thinking twice. It would be easy to respond, "What I sell is much more complex than booking a flight. You don't need a consultative salesperson for that." I used to spend hours on the phone with someone asking me where I wanted to go to, did I care more about direct flights or cost, when did I want to come back, and understanding all the things I cared about to get me the solution I wanted. Ultimately using the agent that understood me the best and gave me an upgrade or got me home early, whatever was most important to me personally at that time.

The recent example happened last week when my SalesForce.com salesperson evaporated to be replaced with an "Order here" button. The requirement to use a sales person to place an order was removed and replaced with a shopping basket. I can now order my SalesForce.com licences without a need for a salesperson. The easy response to this is, these people weren't selling, they were order-taking. I have to ask you, have you never made Quota taking an order by this definition? If you have, then part of your job is eroding.

A fair debate is to ask, doesn't that just make my job more consultative? I say no it does not. What it means is for you to stay as productive as you were when you had a blend of consultative sales and order-taking to get you to Quota, now you have to sell more to stand still. You can't sell more in a consultative style. Consultative selling is time-consuming and reactive. You have to manage more opportunities which means you must have more opportunities to sell to, and you must be more proactive in the sales process to accelerate them.

There is a plethora of new tools enhancing the volume of opportunities a sales person can manage. These tools manage functions typically managed by Marketing, it could be assumed that it will be Marketing that will feel the pressure. The core to the success of using these tools falls into skill sets more commonly associated with Marketing. From prospect identification to prospect contact, lead scoring and lead management, all are traditional Marketing skills. Salespeople must embrace these tools and wrest control from Marketing or see their job evolve with only the smallest number surviving.

Before salespeople take the position there will be no change to the way they do business, check your customers and tell me the last time they knew their travel agent by name when they went to book a flight.

http://www.amazon.com/ProSultative-Selling-Death-Consultative-Salesperson/dp/0615224350/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222644369&sr=8-1

The Sales climate is warming up

2008-07-17T00:39:00.001-07:00

This blog is about the dramatic changes impacting Business to Business sales today. A number of factors are driving these changes and will force an upheaval on the industry of sales and marketing with the lines blurring between each function.

The battleground is laid out. It will be the salespeople that understand how to embrace change and are fleet of foot that will survive. The others are dodos.