Sales Innovation in a Traditional Industry

This is the second excerpt from my interview with Ned Trainor, president and co-founder of BuildSite, an online product database used by the construction industry. It is part of the Sales 2.0 Leaders Interview series.

Ned launched sales in a traditional way in an attempt to meet with the manufacturers who would be his advertising customers. When results didn’t meet expectations, he began working with my company, Phone Works, to design a new way for BuildSite to engage customers by phone and online, track every prospect contact and close sales without leaving the office.

Anneke: Tell us about your customers: Would you describe them as Sales 2.0 innovator types?

Ned: There are a few, but these are fairly traditional industrial companies. Some are divisions of Fortune 500 companies, and they’re big; they do $500 million in sales or more. Others are little chemical companies that have 20 employees. They have tended to be sort of shoe-leather sales people, and they mostly use their own reps or manufacturer reps. It’s a very traditional, automobile-intensive, personal-meetings type of selling.

Anneke: Why innovate in such a traditional space? What’s the benefit to you?

Ned: We had to be innovative — the old way wasn’t working. Our outside reps couldn’t get the appointments with the right people at the right time. A lot of these companies have downsized. No one has any time to do anything.

One of our taglines is, “Look it up on BuildSite … and get it done.” We’re trying to appeal to our users’ desire to just cross one thing off their to-do list. We have to do the same for our advertisers. We have to show up when they want to see us, not when we happen to be in town.

Anneke: What measurable results can you point to from transforming your sales model?

Ned: Revenue is really what we’re looking at. Q1 was our best quarter we’ve ever had, and Q2 is going to be as good as Q1. And that’s because of the new sales model. In terms of qualified leads, we’re not in the Hail Mary mode a month from the end of the quarter, going, “God, I hope this guy closes, or else we are really in trouble.”

It’s, “OK, I’ve got this guy with this probability, this guy with that one.” I’ve got a half a dozen or more that could close within the next couple of weeks, and if half of them do, we’ll have a record quarter. I can see it, I can feel it. It’s OK, and if they don’t do it now, then we’ll get them in July. They’re not going away.

Anneke: If you were talking to another executive about the journey to Sales 2.0, the challenges and the rewards, what advice would you give them?

Ned: I’m lucky. I have an organization of 10 people, so there are no behaviors to change. We knew we had to do something. We didn’t have the resources to try this for six months, and if it didn’t work we’d try something else. But this was the right thing to do, and I had a few people telling me not to do it. I did it anyway.

I would say to anybody that it’s worth taking the risk here. I don’t see any downside. Try it out. You don’t have to change the whole organization, just do it in a corner of it, and see what happens.

Read the full interview with Ned Trainor in the Resources section of this website.

Tags: innovation, Sales 2.0

Sales 2.0 Leaders Interview Series: Prospects Quadrupled with Sales 2.0

I’m publishing a series of Q&A excerpts from my interviews with Sales 2.0 leaders. This is the first excerpt from my interview with Ned Trainor, president and co-founder of BuildSite, an online product database used by the construction industry.

Ned launched sales in a traditional way in an attempt to meet with the manufacturers who would be his advertising customers. When results didn’t meet expectations, he began working with my company, Phone Works, to design a new way for BuildSite to engage customers by phone and online, track every prospect contact and close sales without leaving the office.

Anneke: How have you morphed your business model?

Ned: We had a 1.0 approach to selling: If you keep hitting them hard enough, and we all work harder, we’re going to get there. We knew we had to find the early adopters, so we needed to put a lot more customers in the funnel at the top to get really qualified good ones out the bottom. We were also somewhat resource-constrained.

Phone Works contributed a professional approach to sales management, as well as to actually selling. We’re putting as many as four times as many prospects in the top of the funnel as before. We’re using Salesforce.com as more than a contact manager. We’ve adopted Phone Works’ 7-touch sales process, which keeps the sales funnel full of qualified opportunities and does an effective job of getting the word out and then reinforcing it.

The 7 touches work. We were doing touch 1, and then a month later we’d have touch 1.5, but we never had a deliberate planned approach to selling. Now, I call this person, I send an e-mail, and then I follow up in two weeks, and we leave some voice-mail messages, and we make many phone calls. Suddenly you catch him off-guard on Friday afternoon, and he’s actually interested in talking to you: “Oh yes, I’ve gotten your material. I actually would like to have a conversation.”

The other thing we’ve done is that we’ve almost completely stopped using PowerPoint, which is great. In our “pre–Phone Works era,” as we call it …

Anneke: Is that like the prehistoric era?

Ned: It was back when man had a lot more hair. We had clubs. I swear, that’s kind of how we went out there. If we hit them hard enough, we could get it — but you could only get one animal out of the herd at any given time, so we kind of descend on this one customer, and if we can close these people, we’ll make the quarter — and then we’ll go on and do it again.

So we adopted the 7 touches, and we upgraded our collateral substantially. We had another year of experience with our advertising, so we had the ability to do a true media kit with all the metrics an advertiser is looking for.

Our prior approach was we would get an appointment with a prospect and then we would do a PowerPoint presentation of 20-something slides. We would do the talking, and they would do the listening. We’d say, “Any questions?” and there would be a few, but it wasn’t very engaging, and I found it boring. I think the people on the other end of the line did, too.

Now we send the media kit, and we send a lot of physical collateral out. We mix it up. We send e-mail, and we send them a package, and we have our little BuildSite “Stimulus Package” with a $5 Starbucks card. It adds very little to our cost of sales, and everybody loves it.

… We send out our physical collateral, and then we have a follow-up discussion with them. We just engage in a conversation, which is really the goal of 2.0 selling. We chat them up, so it gives us a lot more time to listen to what their concerns and goals are, and what they’re looking for. We do the research in advance, so we’ve read their corporate materials. We can meet them on their own turf.

It’s better for our customers, and it’s a lot more engaging.

Read the full interview with Ned Trainor in the Resources section of this website.

Tags: inside sales, Sales 2.0

The 2.0 Approach to Video

Of all the videos watched daily on YouTube — more than 200 million, according to Answer.com — I’ve been wondering how many of them are used in sales and marketing to connect with prospects and customers. I’ve also been asking how sales and marketing leaders are measuring the effectiveness of video. Some companies are reporting a 20% increase in response when they incorporate a video link into e-mail campaigns, compared to those without video.

That got my attention.

We decided to produce and test our own video, featuring one of our most loyal Phone Works customers: Dave Holmes, VP of sales and marketing operations at Informatica, our client for the past six years.

We went with a customer testimonial video — with the help of video production company Micro-Documentaries — because we wanted a convenient way to allow our prospects to hear about a customer’s experience with us and the results they achieved, in their own words.  We also wanted to be able to

1. feature the video in multiple places such as on our website and LinkedIn profiles, and in sales presentations, social media and e-mail communication
2. give prospects an easy and immediate way to connect with us following the video if they liked what they saw
3. measure their response

Check out our video (with countless thanks to Dave Holmes and Informatica!):

Micro-documentaries takes a very Sales 2.0 approach to video production: They embed a strategically placed call-to-action button at the end of the video. That call to action is connected to a landing page where prospect data can be collected and tracked. It is precisely that tracking and measuring capability — ideally from the beginning to the end of the sales cycle — that makes this a 2.0 approach to video.

Headed by Phone Works client Natasha Giraurdie, Micro-documentaries has its roots at Stanford University, where many of the company’s young filmmakers studied. They also have ties to the Stanford Persuasion Lab, where research proved the positioning of the call-to-action button within the final video screen — not off to the side — significantly increases response rates. Given that a prospect’s emotional response and willingness to take action is highest immediately following a viewing, sellers and marketers should make it as easy as possible to respond at that moment.

The Micro-documentaries philosophy is also somewhat contrary to the prevailing views of many YouTube movie-makers, which hold that poor-quality, unpolished, “quick and dirty” videos are more authentic than the polished variety.  Micro-documentaries believes an effective video can also be high-quality and visually appealing — even beautiful. All agree that glitzy, scripted videos that often come out of marketing departments are definitely not the way to capture the attention of Customer 2.0.

Instead of a script, Micro-documentaires has a process for capturing the essence of a story. I was directed to a website form and asked key questions about the story (background, context, issue/opportunity, resolution, implication/what lies ahead), as well as location, people, pictures and graphics. The only difficult part about scheduling the shoot was the limited windows of times: sunrise or sunset. It turns out that was well worth it, given the quality of light at those magical times of day that professional film people live for.

Like other content, videos can be re-purposed, so the very reasonable investment of a few thousand dollars can be tested in multiple marketing media and programs. We are eager to start tracking and reporting on our own results, and I will post about how we are doing that, as well as what we find out.

What do you think? Is the video effective? How are YOU using video in your sales and marketing? What are the results?

Tags: Sales 2.0, video

Inside Sales and Field Sales Harmony

I’m publishing a series of Q&A excerpts from my interviews with Sales 2.0 leaders, which will appear in my next book. This excerpt is from my interview with Bill Donellan, vice president of the Americas sales teams for i2, a company that provides intelligence and investigation software for law-enforcement, intelligence, military and commercial organizations.

Anneke: No new Sales 2.0 project is flawless. What were some of your mistakes, challenges or failures?

Bill: We’ve had a lot of challenges as we transformed our marketing. That’s been a big challenge for our inside sales team, because there has been a gap in lead-generation activity.

Also, while the inside sales team has kept the outside reps focused on large opportunities by handling our smaller transaction sales, opportunities in that size range decreased in the past year. With greater focus on larger deals, our outside reps are building bigger deals based on solution selling. Examples include how we position all our products around high growth areas such as fraud and cyber.

Anneke: Did your field sales organization readily accept inside sales?

Bill: (laughs) Field sales reps can’t appreciate inside sales until they’ve had a chance to work with good inside sales reps. Not everyone has had that opportunity, because not every company has a top-notch inside sales team. Besides that, many field sales reps don’t always want to delegate tasks, which makes it challenging for them to work in a team-selling environment. Phil (i2′s VP of the State and Local sales team) and I had to manage through the process and reassure the reluctant members of field sales that it was OK for inside reps to touch the customer first. We got everyone on the phone together to talk about what each sales rep, inside and outside, was doing on every account. Outside reps had to learn that the burden was on them to help their inside teammate come up to speed and let them take ownership — and that it would benefit them in the long run.

Anneke: How did management support the success of inside sales?

Bill: We had to monitor the program closely, listen in on phone calls and coach everyone through the value-selling process. And we had to ensure we had the right comp plans.

Anneke: What are the key things to get right with compensation plans?

Bill: Comp plans shouldn’t create competition in a team environment. They need to reinforce the goals of the program and the company.

Anneke: How long did it take for field sales and inside sales to work comfortably together?

Bill: It took two or three months. After that, field sales realized the value and was reassured the inside reps knew what they were talking about. With new field reps at Documentum (Bill’s former employer), it was the same: It took six months for the field to get comfortable with the inside group. Our goal in both companies was to find a way to work it out with no turnover.

Read the full interview with Bill Donellan in the Resources section of this website.

Tags: compensation, field sales, inside sales, lead generation, Sales 2.0

ERP Systems in a Sales 2.0 World: 5 Key Issues to Consider

Thanks to guest blogger Steve Clark for this post. Steve is CEO of Adept Business Systems Pty. Ltd., an Australia-based provider of business software applications and solutions, including ERP.

Whether you are buying groceries in a supermarket, ordering tyres (tires to Americans) for your car or simply pumping gas at a service station, chances are enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is managing the supply chain and processing the accounting transactions to make all this possible. ERP systems are at the heart of most medium to large corporations, especially those involved in manufacturing and distribution. How, then, can a Sales 2.0-aware company get the best out of an investment in ERP technology? Here are five key issues to consider:

1. Whom is the ERP system really designed to serve?
Most ERP systems are selected and implemented with scant consideration given to the needs of the sales force and marketing. Generally, finance and distribution take the lead, and considerations of business efficiency and cost control are paramount. But since the ERP system stores information critical to effective selling and customer service, it makes sense to involve sales and marketing as early as possible to identify whether tangible sales and service benefits can be realized with the technology.

2. How will sales and marketing benefit?
From the perspective of the sales force, getting the best out of an ERP system largely comes down to improving sales productivity and customer service by providing effective mechanisms to deliver and share accurate, up-to-date information — whenever and wherever it is needed. This may be anything from when a particular product is expected to be shipped through to knowing the level of a customer’s outstanding receivables. For the customer, there’s nothing worse than an “I’ll get back to you” response. An ERP system gives the sales force on-demand access to the transactional history instead of making them wait for account staff to provide the information. Before making a sales call, a salesperson can view the customer’s account status and history. Marketing can use the system to monitor demand and target new business opportunities. This type of functionality can usually be provided through an effective CRM linked into the ERP system.

3. Just how does your CRM work with the ERP system?
To be effective, the CRM should be embedded within the ERP system, so whenever transactions relating to customers are entered in the system, the information becomes immediately available within the CRM. Moreover, the CRM should make accessible non-transactional ERP information such as purchase agreements, service-level agreements and other vital documents. If the information is useful, share it!

4. Can customers self-serve through the ERP system?
To realize the true potential of Sales 2.0, improving the customer’s experience of conducting business with you must be a primary consideration. Using the Internet, you can deploy customer-facing systems to boost loyalty and stand apart from your competitors. The best ERP systems will provide customers with seamless access from the Web to relevant information in the database. Using these systems, customers can review the status of orders, check stock levels, place orders and download copies of invoices — whenever they want.

5. How proactive and creative can you get?
Assuming you’ve made it this far, it’s time to use your ERP system to get creative and proactive. How about checking to see which customers are within 10% of their credit limit and preventing disruptions to orders before they occur? Warehouse with stock that isn’t shifting? Use your CRM and ERP system to drive your customers to a clearance offer delivered through your website.

How else do you use CRM and ERP systems together to uncover sales opportunities?

Tags: CRM, ERP, Sales 2.0