Just read a great short article in RainToday written by Jill Konrath about sales reps who move too fast!
Absolutely worth a read
This is an article that was posted by Al Davidson. Its about 4 things to do better in 2012 to manage your sales leads and your pipeline.
Definately worth a read!
Some people think that the cold call is headed out the door. They couldn’t be more wrong, but it is evolving.
Check out this article on Eyes On Sales about Evolving the Cold Call
Over a month ago, I scrambled to provide a synopsis of a Linked In conversation that asked the question: “Is cold calling dead or just a misunderstood tactic for lead generation?”
The conversation was a great one, with a wealth of different people coming at the question from the perspective of their own often wildly divergent business experiences. Oooops. Did I say “Was?” That should have been”is” because this conversation is still going strong and while there is a fair bit of retreading over old ground, new people have joined the discussion and continue to introduce new ideas.
The conversation has migrated a little bit away from the question – does cold calling work and towards ideas on how to make cold calling work. Granted no two people seem to totally agree on what constitutes a cold call, but it’s clear that the telephone is still a critical tool for building any real rapport with a new company or contact. That won’t change as a true dialogue is a better source of information than a monologue.
The most consistent argument against cold calling is the simple fact that buyers (potential and actual) have the tools at their disposal to conduct a great deal of research before engaging with sales staff. I have found that much of the backlash against engaging with a sales team is the direct result of the old gate keeper mentality that said – if you want to know if it will work for you and what it might/will cost – you need to engage with the sales team. And you might as well get used to the fact that they’re gonna keep on calling you with helpful questions like – “Are you ready to buy yet?”
Personally, I don’t think that picking up the phone and introducing a helpful and hopefully relevant new idea to a stranger is such a terrible thing and so I don’t believe that cold calling will ever die. What will die though, and the sooner the better, is the school of selling that tries to push people into a corner, bully them into decisions they’re not ready to make and dishes out the information they need in dribs and drabs as a reward for putting up with a bunch of self serving (ok management serving) follow up calls.
If you’re using emails as a way to initally break the ice and provide some information about your offering to a new prospect, don’t hold your breath thinking that anyone is clicking through to your links.
That’s especially true if you’re selling to the Technology vertical.
An article on Marketing Profs reports that the average click through rate on emails sent to Tech Companies is a measly 1%.
On the other hand, if you’re selling to the Insurance vertical an 8% click through rate is a lot more promising. The report also talked briefly about a decline in open rates, but I’ve never been all that confident in the accuracy of the open measurements.
As a sales person, selling into the Tech Sector and using email as a way to begin to establish a relationship and eventually get a call scheduled with a contact, what can you realistically do to get some value?
First, be aware of that 1% benchmark so you can plan realistically.
Second, if you want someone to open a link and look at some in depth information make sure you’re sending something with at least a good likelihood of being of interest to them.
Keep your email short! Too many sales reps tend to ramble and that’s always a sales killer.
Here’s something else you can try to get a better response to your emails -a voicemail campaign. A simple message introducing yourself and the reason why a new contact will want to read and click on your email can boost response rates.
I just read an interesting post 12 Most Important New Sales Strategies
I’ve been following a discussion lately about why Sales People hate CRM’s and reading many of the comments, it makes me wonder just how pervasive the changes that I’ve witnessed over the last two years in B2B sales really are.
Many of the sales people posting to this discussion still promote the idea of the sales person as someone who should be able to do pretty much whatever they like as long as the numbers come in. I don’t read into their comments any real interest in change or any agreement that they are functioning in an environment that is radically different than that of 5 years ago.
But it seems that the author of this post agrees that the world of sales is changing and is looking at the different strategies that we can employ to really make it work.
Cold calling is a great discussion topic amongst sales and business managers because there are so many different opinions. I like to follow the discussions, on social groups – particularly Linked In – but they can take some time and also be a bit of a distraction.
Here’s an interesting time saver of a post that talks about different opinions on cold calling and its value as a lead generation tool.
Sales people love leads. This seems to defy logic when so many leads are not followed up – or at least not thoroughly or quickly. But that really isn’t fair since one of the biggest ongoing battles between sales and marketing is what exactly consistitutes a lead worthy of follow up and whose job is it to create them.
Personally I think its everyone’s job, but that discussion is a real rocky road. For now though, lets talk very briefly about the role of a sales person in following up on event generated leads.
What is expected of the sales person in this respect will vary considerably given the company and the alternate resources available within the company to follow up, score and qualify the lead. Following the discussion boards, its obvious that there is a HUGE diversity of businesses, processes and resources out there, but let’s say for now that you are the person who needs to be the point of contact for the initial follow up on trade show and other event leads.
I’ve come to believe that in addition to taking a measured ( and I mean it literally) approach to all sales follow ups, the single most influential factor for making the first contact is the speed with which you follow up and frankly you almost can’t follow up too fast.
So what are you going to do with 500 new follow ups?
Here’s a post with a link worth checking into:
Events and Your Bottom Line
How can a sales rep make a credible impact on the social marketing for a business without messing it all up by acting like ….. well, by acting like a sales rep? For those in sales who want to actually have a career 5 years from now, change is inevitable, but it isn’t any easier than its ever been.
I believe that a few years from now we will see a merger that’s bigger than any takeover the market has yet witnessed. It will happen in just about every company that is selling anything that can’t be closed on a single call. Sales and marketing are poised to merge as business functions and as departments. Instead of Marketing finding and managing leads to hand over to Sales to close, I think we’ll see teams with different specialists and one of them will be the sales specialist whose unique skill will be an ability to actually talk to all the buying influencers and the decision makers – one on one- and finalize the details of the agreement. (You’ll notice I didn’t say “close the sale”. That was no accident.)
Having sold for many years, I am of the firm opinion that the skill known as “Closing” is over-rated. It’s a throw back to a different market. Having shoved my foot in the door of heresy, I’ll take it one step further and say that the biggest reason that sales reps, their managers and the entire sales hierarchy resist the change and cling to the notion of hunters and farmers and closers, is they simply won’t concede that they might have to share the commission checks with others – like marketing. Concepts like that make change very painful indeed!
But the one particular point of change I mean to talk about now, is how sales reps can bring themselves front and center to the new buying structure, where a lot of decisions are being made informally through online peer discussions and research. I see a role for sales people in becoming the faces and voices that actually represent their organizations – as they have always been – but the difference is that we need to be more interested in helping, advising, consulting and discussing and a lot less focused on selling.
In that respect, we need to hold back our natural impulse to pitch in all but the most subtle ways. We need to be willing to concede that there are alternatives to what we offer and act far more objective that has ever been thought possible.
I can assure you that every Linked in comment I make where I’m not at least slipping in one reference to the superiority of the service my company offers feels like a missed opportunity. Like a cold call where I got the guy on the line and then got tongue-tied and let him slip away.
But on the same hand, if sales reps can’t learn to moderate their past conditioning and evolve into a role that suits the current and apparently future needs of the market and fits with what the buyers are apparently demanding, they/we/I/you will be left behind. Consigned to the Museum of Business History.
So, unless you’re ready to retire, its time to think about the new skills you need to develop so that you’re seen as a change leader who can contribute a unique skill set to the sales and marketing team and quarterback the transition. The alternative is to refuse to believe that the market has changed this much, refuse to let go of your entitlement to sole ownership of the commission check and become an obstacle to change within your company.
I attended a wonderful webinar this week on adding the human touch into your lead nurturing.
Maintaining the human touch in sales is important to me and in particular I’m passionate about combining automation (which is necessary to increase reach and efficiency) with the power of the human voice to improve communications and sales results. It was great to hear high profile marketers like Brian Carroll of MECLABS and Jon Miller from Marketo – speak out to support the benefits of real human contact, when the rest of the world still seems obsessed with email automation.
As a sales person who makes a lot of cold calls and leaves a lot of messages, one point that truly resonated, was the idea of using my messages to start a conversation- between colleagues in the organizations I want to talk to. It’s a brilliant concept and I’m actually a little embarrassed to say that – as a messaging goal – it had never crossed my mind.
But, how can we do that?
I think we need to start by doing a really good job of reaching out to contacts as individuals – by segmenting messages. It’s something I’ve written about before (maybe even here.) But in addition to that, we could try to employ one of the favorite old school sales tools in s lightly different way. Enter the open ended question.
As a sales tool it was always designed to initiate a meaningful dialogue, but this time it’s a dialogue without the sales person actually in it. But what a great way to add real value to your own messaging by trying to initiate a conversation amongst your contact and their colleagues that expands the scope of the benefits you can deliver. For example, what if you left a message that asked a question like “When sales can double the accuracy of their projections, what improvements will that drive in production?” or “When you can boost your profits by 10%, where will your company invest that money?” I hope
If you want your contacts talking about you, what can your sales and marketing messages do to actively initiate a conversation?
Selling2business