Does Cold Calling Still Work?

Mike Volpe (HubSpot’s CMO), Ken Krogue (insidesales.com’s President) and I will engage in a live Google + Hangout debate on this popular topic on Wednesday January 30 at 11 AM PST. To join us and watch online, visit our host’s Google + page (Software Advice’s Managing Editor Derek Singleton.)

Here are some key points I plan to make:

1. “Cold calling” is an unfortunate, outdated and stigmatized term that I’d love to see banished from our sales vocabulary, along with the equally cringe-inducing term, “telemarketing.” In the Sales 2.0 world, we’ve moved beyond the boiler room. Old school expressions like “pounding the phones” and “smiling and dialing” – along with “cold calling” – belong to the Sales 1.0 era we’re leaving behind.

2. Modern sales organizations have highly specialized and segmented sales forces that include inbound and outbound organizations usually known as “Sales Development” (or “Lead Generation”) as well as quota-carrying sales teams that don’t travel (or limit face-to-face meetings,) typically called “Inside Sales.”

3. Inbound Sales Development responds to and follows up with leads generated by marketing. Outbound Sales Development teams are the ones that prospect (“cold call.”) Their goal is to add incremental qualified leads to the pipeline. The good ones do this via intelligent outreach (not generic and irrelevant pitches) to buyers most likely to become customers, use multiple media for reaching contacts (e.g. phone, e-mail, social media), and are supported by ongoing marketing programs.

4. Sales Development teams that follow Sales 2.0 practices can measure the contributions they make to the company’s pipeline, forecast and revenue. And the best ones show significant business return.  In our last survey, we found that the average contribution of Sales Development teams was 55% of U.S. revenue. Brent Holloway and I include a case study of the ROI of Sales Development in the Sales 2.0 book that showed a return of over 1,000%.

5. Best-performing companies minimize the amount of outbound prospecting done by quota-carrying reps, either in the field or “inside.” (I dislike that term, too. But that’s the subject of another blog post…)

What contribution does Sales Development make in your company? Can you quantify the pipeline, forecast and revenue impact?
 

One Big Idea for 2013: Test One New Sales Initiative

A condensed version of this post appears this week on the  SAP Sales Effectiveness blog, along with additional Big Ideas from Hank Barnes, Sales Benchmark Index, Dave Brock, Bob Apollo and the SAVO Group. We were asked to answer this question:  “If you were having a  conversation with a friend and they asked you for one thing they should do, or focus on, in 2013, what would it be?”

My advice for 2013 is to identify and try at least one new thing in your sales approach next year.

I know from personal experience that running a sales organization is demanding.  The pressure to deliver sales results quarter after quarter is all-consuimg. There aren’t enough hours in the day to hire and onboard new reps in a growing organization. Keeping existing reps focused, on message and consistently following your sales processes and using your systems is a full time job. Management and the Board require regular forecasts and other reports or have other special requests, often at a moment’s notice. And keeping customers happy advocates is another top priority. However, in order to stay competitive in today’s sales and marketing reality, sales managers cannot get stuck in the mode of doing the same things every day, every quarter and every year. To avoid the risk of losing customers and our quota-carrying reps, we must continuously look for ways to improve, innovate and change, as their behaviors, preferences, and expectations change – and we know for certain from numerous industry research sources that business is changing.

In order to stay ahead, we need to adopt what we’ve described in the Sales 2.0 book as a Sales 2.0 mindset. Sales 2.0 is a measurably better way of selling for both the buyer and the seller that’s enabled by technology and integrated and aligned across an organization so the customer’s experience is consistently positive and relevant. Those who have embraced Sales 2.0 combine the art of selling – creating meaningful long-term and mutually profitable relationships with customers – with science – establishing measurable and scalable sales that are predictable.

What does this mean for your organization in 2013? For organizations that are evolving from Sales 1.0 to Sales 2.0, there are always new opportunities to test that can improve your company’s results, but it can take some discipline to get out of your status quo, business as usual comfort zone. By talking to customers,  peers and subject matter experts across industries, attending networking events and conferences, reading blogs, watching videos and following innovative thinkers on social platforms, or just leaving the office to give yourself time to think, you can identify just one new thing that will make the difference in your 2013 performance.

Some examples  showing encouraging results that are being tested or fully implemented today by forward-thinking organizations include:

• Personalizing customer contact with measurable, scalable social selling, especially when integrated with  phone & e-mail outreach (aka “inside” sales)

• Finding those customers who are most likely to buy and are most profitable, using data and analytics – and prioritizing and personalizing contact with those buyers

• Customizing your sales team’s Incentives and approaches to motivation, enabled by gamification

• Optimizing recruiting and hiring using Sales 2.0 practices and technology to stand out from the crowd of companies with sales team growth goals

• Accelerating onboarding and insuring consistent Sales 2.0 process using robust sales playbooks that cover everything from messaging to systems to step-by-step checklists for customer contact and frequency

• Leveraging sales team productivity with automated, consistent and personal content marketing

• Optimizing sales performance while improving responsiveness by adding specialization and segmentation to your sales organization (e.g. With Sales Development/Lead Qualification, Inside Sales, Renewal Sales, etc.)

What new sales initiative are you planning for 2013?

Tags: analytics, content marketing, data, gamification, hiring, onboarding, Recruiting, Sales 2.0, sales playbooks, sales process, sales segmentation, sales specialization, socail selling

Why are we so afraid of calling Sales ‘Sales’ ?

Anneke’s Note: This post is by my colleague John Philpin, who asks really thought-provoking questions. Enjoy!

Have you ever thought about how caught up we get in titles and departments and naming things? For example, someone once described their role to me as follows …

“Actually I am in Sales. Specifically Inside Sales. Well really – when I say Inside Sales – I am a Senior Outbound Telesales Executive, with responsibility for the digital acquisition of Western Region Customers.”

Say What ?

I was reminded of this today when I heard a discussion around the need to rename inside sales. Apparently ‘we need to rename inside sales to remove the stigma and old thinking around that term.’ Terms raised included Virtual Sales, Digital Sales and  Social Sales.

How about just calling calling it ‘Sales’ ?

Here’s my take.

The differences between venerable institutions such as ‘sales’ and ‘marketing’ are hardly understood – much less “Virtual Sales, Digital Sales, Social Sales”.  The world is all about the customer – not how we organize.
How we do that (the orgs, the teams, the people, the hierarchy is meaningless to anybody outside a company – they don’t care – and nor should they.)

I firmly believe that
- introducing more new terms is self defeating
- forever subdividing internal orgs with meaningless terms is self defeating
- continuing made up separation of organizations is self defeating
- continuing to use terms that border on the ‘pejorative’ is self defeating
- focussing on the organization – not the customer – is self defeating

What do you believe ?

John Philpin is Chief Social Business Strategist with Reality Works Group: he makes Social Business work for customers, partners and your organization. He is also an entrepreneur (founder of 3 companies) and has held CEO and other C-level positions (in Sales, Business Development, Marketing and Customer Management – though he shuns those names!) in both start-ups and large companies including Citibank and Oracle. You can follow John’s thought-provoking thinking at: http://beyondbridges.net/  on Twitter @fractals or the old-fashioned way (on e-mail or phone): jphilpin@realityworksgroup.com, (808)344-2914.

Tags: digital sales, inside sales, Sales, social sales, telesales, virtual sales

The social revolution is a trust revolution

Credit: theage.com.au

“The social revolution is a trust revolution.”

This statement appeared on the 9^th slide of Marc Benioff’s opening keynote, “Business is Social,” during his kickoff of Dreamforce 2012 last week. It followed some compelling statistics proving that the trends toward social media adoption in business are undeniable:

1.3 Trillion in value can be unlocked through social technologies – McKinsey Global Institute

123% growth in social customers – Google Social Media Analysis Study

150 million conversations per day – Twitter, Visible Technologies

As your customers, employees and partners become increasingly connected online, this raises some interesting questions, opportunities and risks in regards to trust:

• Will we have some kind of open and universal access to ratings and reviews for B2B sales and service professionals as we now see on consumer Internet sites for professionals like doctors? Will enterprise products – and the companies that produce them – be subject to a proliferation of eBay or Yelp-like reviews?
• How will this impact how we treat one another in business? Will those with the most loyal, helpful and honest behavior be recognized and rewarded? For example, will buyers search not only on solutions but also on the reputations professionals who represent them in marketing, sales and services (and even product development, accounting, HR….)? Will the deceitful, insubordinate, or lazy lose customers, jobs or promotional opportunities? Will companies that stretch the truth in marketing materials or products that don’t perform as advertised be shunned and avoided? Will we be able to measure that economic impact by corrollating some sort of  truth index with market share or financial performance?
• How can we automate and encourage the process of recommendations and reviews for B2B customers, coworkers or managers at the moment when they have a positive experience? Is “gamification” – providing some kind of recognition or reward such as privileges or prizes for participation – appropriate when it comes to ratings? Or will incentives beyond just doing the right thing skew results?
• How will we defend ourselves from inappropriate, inaccurate or competitive attacks on our reputation? Will we all need products like reputation.com to defend against career-limiting online content?

Rachel Botsman, one of the speakers at this June’s TEDGlobal conference, thinks like Benioff. She says that the currency of the new economy is trust and reputation in your most valuable asset.  Botsman writes, speaks and consults on “the power of collaboration and sharing through network technologies, and on how it will transform business, consumerism and the way we live,” according to her TED bio.

As examples of the real value of reputation, intention, capabilities and values, Botsman references the following in her talk:

• Uberhosts at Airbnb

High scorers draw more overnight visitors and make more money

• Super rabbits at TaskRabbit

Popular and efficient part-time workers are more likely to find jobs and command higher rates.

How will the social revolution-  a trust revolution – impact your business in the future? What are you doing about it?

Are the Best Sales People Introverted or Extroverted? The Answer May Surprise You.

I just finished reading Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking. Most of us already know if we tend toward introversion or extroversion based on whether we feel drained or energized after networking events, days full of meetings, or even dinners out with friends. If you want to know for sure, take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (R) test. An INFJ pretend-extrovert myself (a personality type I apparently share with the late Ronald Reagan,) I was eager to delve further into Cain’s research and discover how, if any, the data on extroverts and introverts is relevant to sales performance. Much to my delight, Cain makes several specific references to sales in her book. You may be surprised by her findings.

Introverts Outperform Extroverts in the Call Center

When most of us are asked to describe the best sales people, we typically use words associated with extroverts: persuasive, outgoing, high-energy, gregarious.  Citing a study on personalities of call center employees conducted by Wharton professor, Adam Grant, Cain calls these notions into question. She quotes Professor Grant:

“The extroverts would make these wonderful calls…. but then a shiny object of some kind would cross their paths and they’d lose focus.” The introverts, in contrast, “would talk very quietly, but boom, boom, boom, they were making those calls. They were focused and determined.”

It turns out that in high-volume call center environments, persistence, a quality typically found in introverts, was more important to success than social prowess, often attributed to extroverts.

Top Salesperson’s Success is not Tied to Extroverted Qualities

Cain uses the example of top salesperson, Jon Berghoff to illustrate how introversion helps rather than hinders his sales ability and references the work of Professor Avril Thorne at University of California, Santa Cruz, to help explain this. What qualities make Jon so successful?

• He easily adopts the role of advisor rather than persuader
• He asks a lot of good questions
• He listens closely to the answers

Cain quotes Berghoff:

“I discovered early on that people don’t buy from me because they understand what I’m selling….they buy because they feel understood” and “A lot of people believe that selling requires being a fast talker, or knowing how to use charisma to persuade. Those things do require an extroverted way of communicating. But in sales there’s a truism that “we have two ears and one mouth and we should use them proportionately.’ I believe that’s what makes someone really good at selling or consulting – the number-one thing is they’ve got to really listen well.”

Makes good sense, no? This is just one more example of how challenging traditional thinking in sales can open up new possibilities…and improve your results.

For a lot more on how Cain’s ideas and calls to action have applicability outside of sales, watch Cain’s TEDTalk, which I had the pleasure of seeing live earlier this year at the TED conference, or read her Manifesto (#s 3, 12 and 15 are my favorites. What are yours?)

Is your sales team made up of extroverts, introverts or both? Who are the best performers? How can you apply these findings to your future hiring practices in sales?

Tags: Extroversion, hiring, Introversion, Myers-Briggs