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Archive for the ‘Sales’ Category
Thursday, February 23rd, 2012
 Yesterday’s Sales Ops Forum meeting in Palo Alto, CA, sponsored by KickStart Alliance, featured a panel discussion on how to optimize inside sales (IS). Moderating the panel of three leading Silicon Valley software companies was Anneke Seley, Evangelist and Founder of Phone Works, and co-author of Sales 2.0. – Improve Business Results Using Innovative Sales Practices and Technology. Here are key take-aways from the discussion:
Role of Inside Sales:
IS teams carry quota just like field sales reps, but perform their selling primarily via phone and email. It is a proven and cost-effective selling model. In addition to IS, most companies also have teams responsible for prospecting and following up on marketing leads, but who do not carry quota. Names for these teams include direct response (for inbound inquiries), inside marketing reps (IMRs), sales development reps (SDRs), and teleprospecting reps. These functions are often a mix of internal and outsourced resources. At one company on the panel, the field required inside resources to assist them in their territory, often with administrative tasks. So the company created Inside Sales Assistants (ISAs), a role that does not carry quota. This gives the field the help they need without burdening quota-carrying IS reps and offers a career path into IS for entry-level employees.
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Tags: Anneke Seley, Inside Sales Optimization, Phone Works, sales 2.0, Sales Operations Forum, Sales Ops Forum
Posted in Sales | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, September 20th, 2011
There were several key announcements by Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, at this year’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. Over 45,000 people attended the event while 35,000 streamed it live. It was the first time I had to wait in line to cross Howard at Fourth to get to the keynote.
The theme of the conference was the “social enterprise” – showing how social media and new collaboration tools are changing the way we do business. According to the Salesforce.com press release issued on August 31st, the social enterprise leverages …”social, mobile and open cloud technologies to revolutionize companies’ relationships with their customers.”
Here is a quick summary of a few of the announcements made during the keynote that sales and marketing professionals will find of interest. All offerings are scheduled to be available in late 2011. (more…)
Tags: dreamforce 2011, salesforce.com
Posted in Marketing, Sales, Social Media | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 15th, 2011
 Are you doing the right things? Are you doing things right?
Selling methodology and selling systems need to adapt quickly to accommodate changing business strategy. Product management priority should focus on portfolio responsiveness, where the portfolio is your collection of product, services and solutions. Marketing’s magic of messaging must adapt to changes in buying patterns and market needs. Sales can often be a bottleneck between the multifaceted vendor portfolio and the complex customer world. (more…)
Tags: customer centric selling, Forrester Research, outcome selling, Sales, sales enablement, Scott Santucci
Posted in Marketing, Sales | No Comments »
Monday, March 14th, 2011
At last week’s Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, I attended the panel discussion “Practices & Technologies used by Top-Performing Inside Sales Organizations” led by Anneke Seley, CEO and Founder of PhoneWorks and co-author of Sales 2.0. On the panel, Sales 2.0 co-author, Brent Holloway, Regional Sales Director, Verint Systems; Matt Benelli, Group Vice President – Sales, OracleDirect; and Jennifer Brandenburg, VP Corporate Sales, Good Technology. Here are some of the key points from the discussion. (more…)
Tags: good technology, inside sales, oracle, phoneworks, sales 2.0, sales development, verint
Posted in Sales, Social Media | No Comments »
Thursday, March 3rd, 2011
Is your sales force getting the company to reach its strategic objectives? Most CEOs say NO. At the Forrester Research “Technology Sales Enablement Forum” in February George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research, talked about the problems that sales faces, how CEOs would intend to fix the problems and how Sales Enablement can help.
CEOs say that there are five major problems faced by sales in achieving objectives: 1) keeping up, 2) calling too low, 3) presenting price and not value, 4) they have the wrong people in the sales organization and 5) sales is not growth oriented. (more…)
Tags: CEO, Forrester Research, George Colony, outcome selling, Sales, sales enablement, sales technology
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Wednesday, February 16th, 2011
Today I attended the Silicon Valley Chapter of the Sales Operations Forum. The topic “Unlocking Sales Manager Value” was filled with best practices for both sales managers and the sales operations managers that work with them. The session was hosted by SAP & Baker Communications with sales directors from VMWare and Black Box providing real world practical insights. Below are my notes on Sales Manager Best Practice (SM-Best) and Sales Operations Best Practice (SOps-Best) to support it.
SM-Best: Coach in the day and in the moment. Coach one-on-one. Coach one-on-many in team meetings. Help reps prep for sales calls.
SOps-Best to support coaching: Provide real-time access to information. For existing customer accounts historical purchasing patterns are vital. To support new prospect coaching, supply buying patterns for first time customers, industry segments, business demographics, key applications or other relevant data. Dashboards of team and rep performance are coaching basics.
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Tags: coaching, pipeline, recognition, sales manager, sales operations, sales process
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Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010
 What? Sales helping Marketing? That’s not the way we generally think of the marketing-sales relationship — We expect that marketing’s role is to help sales sell. Well, yes, that is marketing’s primary responsibility, but the relationship isn’t strictly one-sided. There are a number of things sales reps should be doing to improve the quality of Marketing’s deliverables.
Why is this in Sales’ interest? First of all, sales people are in conversations daily with customers. The knowledge that they obtain can be key to the success of marketing’s communications, because the audience for most of marketing’s deliverables is, after all, customers. Who knows them better than Sales?! But that knowledge is more valuable if Sales shares it with Marketing, where it can be used in many ways:
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Tags: customer based selling, marketing-sales relationship, sales cycle, sales strategy, Social Media
Posted in Marketing, Sales | No Comments »
Friday, May 14th, 2010
Shortening the sales cycle produces “more sales in the same amount of time,” according to Janet Gregory in her article Shorten That Sales Cycle, and “accelerates every function in the company that touches customers.” In this blog post, I focus on the sales process of qualifying to shorten the sales cycle. Often times we refer to “qualifying” as a single step in the sales process. In fact, qualifying should happen continually. By constantly assessing the fit between a customer’s need and your product or service offering, and only pursuing those opportunities that are mutually beneficial, you can increase productivity and shorten the sales cycle. Sales reps can fall into the trap of continuing discussions if the prospect returns phone calls or their pipeline is weak. But results will suffer. Let’s take a look at how qualifying fits at each stage of a typical B2B sales process:
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Tags: qualifying, sales cycle, sales stages, shorten sales cycle
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Monday, April 12th, 2010
Last week I attended a SalesCraft roundtable hosted by Sharon Little, Director of Global Field Communications at VMware. SalesCraft is a forum for Silicon Valley sales leaders to talk about strategies and trends for empowering successful sales teams. The topic: “PlayBooks – A Top Trend for 2010.” Presenters included Larry Ball, Sr. Director of Global Sales Development at POLYCOM, and Jenine Young, Sr. Manager of Field Enablement at VMware. Here is a brief recap of how these two Silicon Valley companies are deploying PlayBooks to arm their sales teams with information, processes and best practices to drive productivity and revenue.
POLYCOM, a global leader in telepresence, video, and voice solutions, is a $1B public company with over 700 sales representatives.
- Sales Enablement Challenge:
- Improve consistency among its sales organization and implement a more prescriptive selling approach.
- PlayBook Vendor:
- POLYCOM selected Kadient – an on-demand sales enablement application that combines Sales Playbooks, Dynamic Sales Content, and Sales Performance Analytics—all embedded within a CRM system.
- PlayBook Implementation:
- POLYCOM had an aggressive schedule, launching Kadient with 12 PlayBooks in just 3 months. Each PlayBook has either a vertical market or strategic partnership focus. Content is organized around the company’s selling stages and links to content stored in an online portal. Partners view the content in a separate partner portal.
- PlayBook Benefits:
- Drives repeatability in the sales process
- Pushes content at the right time based on the sales stage and vertical market or product focus
- Includes “check-points” within each sales stage that reps should complete before moving to the next stage
- Integrates into the Salesforce.com Opportunities tab
- Provides management with visibility into the selling/buying process through standard Salesforce.com reports and dashboards
- Learnings:
- Identify content owners to oversee and manage the content. POLYCOM is unique that it has a VP of Marketing, and owner of content, reporting into the Sn. VP Global Sales.
- Develop templates to keep content consistent – down to the font size
- Roll-out and reinforce the PlayBooks through ongoing training, communication and top-down executive mandates
- Be prepared to revisit or revise corporate and product positioning and messaging and the sales process. In POLYCOM’s case, the project forced them to quickly develop solution-based content versus product-based.
- Results:
- Although just released in February 2010, the PlayBooks have helped align sales and marketing and have become an invaluable tool for sales – especially in ramping new hires and getting reps up to speed on new solutions and competitive issues.
VMware, provider of solutions for business infrastructure virtualization that enable IT organizations to energize businesses of all sizes, had revenues of $2B in 2009.
- Sales Enablement Challenge:
- With over 2,100 field reps and roughly one acquisition per month, VMware was looking for ways to help reps sell newly-acquired products and solutions outside their comfort zone. It started by consolidating content from over 700 SharePoint sites into one sales portal to make it easier for sales reps to find the information they needed to drive deals. The project was such a success that the Sales Enablement team rallied management support to develop PlayBooks as a next step in making the content more actionable and relevant based on the sales process.
- Playbook Vendor:
- VMware selected SAVO, a sales enablement application that allows salespeople to be more efficient.
- PlayBook Implementation:
- VMware implemented five PlayBooks based on product areas. The content is organized by sales stage. The solution is not currently integrated into a CRM system as the company is transitioning from Siebel to Salesforce.com.
- PlayBook Benefits:
- Provides the most relevant and up-to-date content for a given sales opportunity
- Flexible – content and layout are easily modified using HTML
- Sales “Flight Plans” or summaries of key selling strategies are featured in each PlayBook
- Learnings:
- Involve the sales organization in building the Playbook. VMware selected 10 successful reps to serve as a beta group to suggest content and identify content gaps. This “built by sales for sales” concept has also paid off during rollout and training to boost user adoption.
- Set guidelines on the amount and length of content with content owners.
- Have a solid rollout, training and communication plan. VMware’s process has included podcasts from the VP Sales, VMware Radio spots by Geo heads, discussions via conference call with regional sales teams, and newsletters.
- Results:
- Feedback from the beta team has been very positive. Reps appreciate the structure and content and offer suggestions to make the PlayBooks even more useful.
Although POLYCOM and VMware have implemented PlayBooks in different ways, these two leading Silicon Valley companies are demonstrating that the days of the Sales PlayBook in a binder (that is out-dated as soon as it’s published) are over. Leading companies will continue to experiment with online PlayBooks that give sales the information they need when they need it so they can have meaningful conversations with prospects and ultimately, drive productivity and revenue.
Tags: sales enablement, sales guides, sales operations, sales play books, sales playbook, sales tools, sales training
Posted in Marketing, Sales, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Saturday, November 7th, 2009
Customers don’t live in a one-size-fits-all world. Customers expect you to deal with them as individuals… individual unique companies with differentiated needs and distinctive requirements. To be successful your company should not have a one-size-fits-all sales process.
BUYER BEHAVIOR is the first step to defining your sales process. Build your sales process around how your customers make decisions. There are many buyer-behavior defined sales process, here are three of the most common.
- Vertical markets – create sales process around common industry buying behavior, like Federal Government, retail, or other key industries that purchase your product. These buyers want to work with vendors that understand their business process.
- Commodity buyers- set up sales process to best address buyers that want detailed comparative analysis of features, function and price. Best practice incorporates informative websites, self-service and inside sales. These buyers are looking for vendors that fit well with their existing operations.
- Change agents - establish a fresh new thinking sales process to help these early adopter buyers make innovative changes in their business. Create use cases. Allow for trials, pilots and proof of concept. These buyers are looking for a vendor that will partner with them to make successful changes to their business.
RELATIONSHIP sets the rules of engagement for the buyer-defined sales process. The level of connection established with a customer defines the distinct process, like the four outlined below.
- Discovery - uncovering the initial connection between the customer needs and your products and services. Qualifying.
- Initial Engagement – establishing the first business transaction which could be a trial, a pilot or the first sale. This is the first buying decision.
- Maintaining - building mutual trust for a comfortable and confident long term service and support relationship. Selling support services.
- Developing - creating new opportunities that expand and enhance the existing relationship. Up-sell, cross-sell and repeat-buy.
Sales process is not static. Define it. Refine it. Tune it. Keep it fresh for your sales people and for your customers and you will win market share and long term business relationships.
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