Sales 2.0 Leaders Interview: Characteristics of Sales 2.0 Professionals

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 is the third and final excerpt from my interview with Jim Pitkow, CEO of Attributor, which produces Web-monitoring software that protects publishers’ revenue by preventing unauthorized use of content.

An inside-sales veteran, Pitkow worked with my company, Phone Works, to research his market and customers, as well as test the feasibility of using an inside-sales model, before he ramped up his sales efforts. Like most Sales 2.0 leaders, Pitkow isn’t afraid to try new things, but he is smart enough to test his hypotheses on small scales with pilot programs in all aspects of his business.

Anneke: How are your customers changing?

Jim: They don’t require face-to-face. They’re happy with online and phone communication. We close six-figure deals without ever seeing a customer.

Anneke: There are people who believe it can’t be done — “Not in my market, not my customers” — and sometimes that’s true.

Jim: Yes, I hear that a lot, especially in markets outside the U.S. There is still this rolling wave, an evolution of acceptable business practice. We are constantly looking for as much efficiency as far down the stack as we can to reduce our costs and increase our margin.

Anneke: There are certain types of people — Sales 2.0 professionals — who aren’t afraid to ask for help, aren’t afraid to take risks, do things a little differently, experiment, do pilots, test — and not think traditionally about selling. But there are a whole lot of people who aren’t comfortable with that. Why do you think that’s the case?

Jim: The valley is filled with entrepreneurs and business leaders who feel they have to know everything and do everything. There is a lack of confidence from the business community, as well as their investors, as well as their employees. They feel if they’re not Superman, they won’t be successful.

Anneke: And they feel they’re not earning their compensation plan.

Jim: Right, and the exact opposite is true, at least from my experience: Good management knows where it begins, knows where it ends, knows where its strengths are and where they aren’t. Good management doesn’t have ego around itself such that it can’t ask for help; it can try and fail. There is a mantra these days of, “If you’re going to fail, fail quickly and cheaply.” It’s easy to say. It’s a great sound bite. It’s very hard to do — to sit there and say, “I want 50-grand, 100-grand, and at the end of that I’m going to tell you whether we have a scalable sales business.” To me, it almost seems too cheap. If the answer is actually that simple to find, it demystifies everything. A lot of people have a hard time realizing the answer is that simple and that efficient to get to.

Read the other excerpts of this interview series, “Why Pilot Your Sales 2.0 Programs?” and “When NOT to Build Inside Sales,” or find the full interview in the Resources section of this website.

Tags: inside sales, Sales 2.0, telemarketing, telesales

Social Media and Inside Sales: Time Waster or Money Maker?

Rini Das, CEO of PAKRAGames, is one example of a Sales 2.0 executive who, by all indications, is on the path to revenue-generation by incorporating LinkedIn, Google Alerts and Twitter into her online prospecting strategy. She and her CMO, Michelle Stewart, search for, research and send personal messages to their target audience (often based on the information their prospects provide themselves on their profiles and in their tweets): sales VPs and inside sales executives in selected industries who are either one-degree-removed connections or are those with whom they share a group. By incorporating these outreaches into their weekly prospecting process and religiously tracking metrics, they know how many prospects contacted via these sources will end up in their pipeline. Of the invitations they extend, 72% accept, 36% are are qualified and 21% make it to their pipeline.

But many inside sales leaders – and their managers – are still questioning the value of social media in the sales process.  This was one of the key topics discussed at last week’s Inside Sales Summit, now in its second year and produced by the young but growing AA-ISP (American Association of Inside Sales Professionals). The conference, held in Minneapolis, drew more than 200 executives and managers who manage phone and Web selling and lead qualification teams from companies including 3M, ADP, Apple, Carnival, FedEx, GE Medical, GeneSys, IBM and a host of smaller companies. The panel discussion I led, “Social Media in Inside Sales: Time Waster or Money Maker?” was one of several sessions aimed at inside sales professionals looking for new ways to engage increasingly hard-to-reach and harder-to-please buyers. The panel included senior-level sales executives Brett Wallace from ZoomInfo, Greg Volm from InsideView and Kevin Flynn from salesforce.com, who described how they’ve integrated social media into their sales, marketing and internal team collaboration.

I kicked off the panel by describing “The Inside Sales Social Media Panacea”: What sales managers need to know in order to answer the “time waster or money maker?” question:

-For each of your customers and prospects, you know which social tools they use and prefer (if any), so your team can easily reach them in new ways and stand out from everyone else.

-You have a proven process for using social media in the sales cycle and can track social media outreaches (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), along with calls and e-mails and the associated contacts metrics: connections, qualified leads, forecasted leads and sales.

-You can measure the impact of pre-contact research using social media and networks such as blogs, LinkedIn, Google Alerts and Twitter, and decide if the extra time spent in planning mode, which reduces activity, yields better results.

-You know which leads and which sales came from which social media and networking activities and at what point in the sales cycle, draw conclusions accordingly and spread the best policies and practices across your sales organization.

What other questions are you asking about social media? How are you measuring the success of your social media and social networking programs? What results are you seeing?

Tags: inside sales, social media, telemarketing, telesales