When tackling lead generation you want to make sure you go after companies that have similar traits to companies you are already doing successful business.  These would be some of the lower hanging fruit to go after.  The best way to identify these companies is first take a closer, methodical look at your existing customers.

Start by ranking your current customers using three criteria: gross revenue, profitability and “fit.”

The fitness ranking is more subjective than the gross revenue or the profitability ranking. It identifies the companies you know well, those whose business you are familiar with, those that are fun to work with, those you understand best, and those with which you have—or could have—a great working relationship:

What customers come up near the top of all three rankings?  Evaluate the other characteristics of the companies on this list. How large are they? Where are they located geographically? What are the titles or job functions of their decision makers? Analyze your answers to identify common traits, and use that information to find companies with similar traits.

Tags: Marketing, Sales methodology, Sales Techniques

Sales & Marketing Business Brief offered 4 selling strategies to focus on in 2010 given the state of the economy.  While they seem obvious, I thought it was worth restating.  Times are tuff and being remaindered of certain strategizes never hurt.

1. Maximize your lead pipeline: Now is the time to perform an audit of your sales from the past two years to determine who your high-probability buyers are now (based on SIC, region, executive title, etc.). I would also evaluate who were you most profitable and highest revenue clients in the past.   Once the audit is complete, frontload your pipeline with those leads to give salespeople the best opportunity for success.
2. Sell value over price: Many companies try to win buyers back by offering one-time discounts and bargain-basement prices. That short-term strategy does little to promote customer or brand loyalty. Now’s the time to reinforce the long-term benefits of doing business with your company — and keep salespeople talking to prospects about the return, rather than the investment of doing business with your company.
3. Embrace new marketing channels/modes of communication: Cell phones, e-mail, social networking, web marketing, text messaging, BlackBerrys — they have all changed the way prospects communicate. Sales organizations that capitalize on them will be in a position to gain an edge over competitors. Some companies use Twitter to maintain contact and promote new offers. Others use Facebook or LinkedIn. Many salespeople ask prospects how they prefer to communicate upfront, so there is no confusion about the best way to contact them.  The key is to find small, low-cost ways to use technology and new modes of communication to improve your relationships with buyers.
4. Differentiate your offer: Right now, there are more companies competing for fewer buyers, which mean it has never been more essential for salespeople to convey what separates your offer from competitors’. Sales organizations should be developing their own competitive analysis in light of the fact that prospects now have instant access to competitive prices and low-ball offers thanks to the Web. Creating and regularly updating your own competitive analysis allows salespeople to control the process. It also keeps them on top of what other competitors are offering, as well as where an incumbent supplier may be coming up short. One other approach: Create a sense of urgency by quantifying the cost of not doing business with you.

Tags: crm, Marketing

In a previous post, I talked about the importance of segmenting your customers. It is one of the most important pieces of information for the sales team and the company. By staying diligent, it will allow your sales and marketing teams the ability to do very focused marketing. It also makes sure you are staying focused on your core customer base as well as spot new types of customers.

Segmentation options should be centrally maintained to ensure consistency. To make it easy for reps and marketing it should be a pick list to choose from when entering or editing a new customer or company record. Below is an example of how it would work. Most CRM solutions allow for some level of segmentation. However, company policy drives it.

Once entered, doing mailings and events to specific segments are easy. But you also get to see pipelines and forecasts in terms of your segments. This allows the sales team and management to be more proactive based on certain tends you are seeing in specific segments.

As I mentioned while most CRM solutions will support this field it takes a strong company policy to ensure people are properly entering it. Making it a required field when creating or editing a customer record will help.

Segment Pick List Example

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Tags: crm, CRM Basics

One of the greatest tools for sales reps of the 21st century so far is web conferencing. Products like GoToMeeting, Webex, and Sametime dramatically changed how sales rep work. These products allow reps to avoid costly plane and overnight trips to show a prospect or customer their products and services. It has become the single most important technology in qualifying customers at a fraction of the cost it did before. While video conferencing has been around for a while it was too costly and complicated for sales reps that need speed, simplicity, and flexibility.

Any CRM solution you want to use should have direct integration with a web conferencing tool. The ones I have used like Relavis CRM and SalesForce.com have integrated these solutions directly into their activity management component. When scheduling a meeting within CRM you are able to hit a button on the form that will automatically create the web meeting, place all the connection and phone information into the invitation and mailed to the attendees. It is a great time saver for reps as well as allows you to track these meetings back to a specific lead, opportunity or contact. Web conference solutions keep track of number of attendees, length of time and you can record the entire meeting for play back later.

While I am sure many reps are now taking advantage of this technology with either corporate or individual accounts you should be tying it into your CRM solution so you get to create and track it in one place. It is an amazing time saver especially if you need to go back to review the history of the account. Or if a team member or manager missed the meeting and wants to review what happened.

Prospects and customer find web meetings far less intrusive on their time. It can be done totally at their convenience and at their desk.

Web conferencing should not totally eliminate visiting with your customers and prospects. Remember 90% of closing business is showing up. But it is a great tool for qualify and delivering information quickly and cost effectively.

Example of Web Conferencing Integration When Creating a Meeting in CRM

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Tags: crm productivity

A friend of mine shared an experience he had at the new Yankee Stadium a couple of weeks ago that I felt important to share concerning customer service.

When he arrived at the stadium there were dozens of people with signs that said” Hello, may I help you?” This was the first time he had seen this at the stadium. They were there to help people find their gate and answered any questions they had. My friend did not need this help and proceeded to this gate. Upon handing the usher the ticket the guy said “Thank you, there are people inside that will help you”. As soon as he walked into to the main area someone came up to him and said “Hello, may I help you?” He gave her the ticket and she told him to go down the corridor and take the elevators on the left. When he got to the elevators a person was there that said, “Hello, may I help you?” He presented him the ticket and told to take the elevator to the 250 level and someone will help you. When he was exiting the elevator, sure enough there was person there and said, “Hello may I help you?” That person proceeded to escort him to the suite. Since this was my friends first trip to the new stadium he was looking at all the great pictures and stories that lined the corridor. The customer service person shadowed him far enough behind so that my friend did not feel rushed. When they got to the suite there was a person there that greeted him with, you guessed it, “Hello may I help you?” He was then shown into the suite and given a tour and had all his questions answered. Throughout the entire game he was asked if there was anything they can do.

The story amazed me for two reasons. The number of people visibly out in the open proactively trying to help their guests and the consistent mantra they all were using. There was no question they were all taking their customer service role seriously. When your customer is spending their money and time with you, the Yankees, at least for the time being wanted to make sure you have an easy and enjoyable experience. You never had to look far for help.

My friends totally experience left him feeling really good about wanting to come back for more.

Tags: crm

The demo has been done. Questions have been asked and answered. A proposal has been submitted. So why are we afraid to ask for the deal? Do we think that by asking it will sour the deal? Of course not. Prospects that have identified their need or pain and have a budget in mind are looking for reasons to do the deal with you. They look for reasons to qualify you in rather than out.

As sales people we need to be very careful of our time management. We can easily get caught up in chasing hope rather than substance. We feel that we need to be playing more defense because it feels less threatening and keeps the hope alive. But in reality it is a weak place to be. Games are won on offense. Playing a strong offense with customers builds a lot of credibility and makes the customer feel more secure. Of course it needs to be done sincerely and with a solid business case.

Remember a sales cycle should be driven as a continuous qualification of an opportunity. Each call and meeting is a constant test to see where this deal falls on your qualification meter thus allowing you to determine its priority in your pipeline. It also should tell you when it’s time to ask. A real prospect will never be upset when you ask for the deal. You will not always be the solution for them but they will not look to waste your time any more than is necessary for their vetting process.

Tags: crm, CRM Basics

A great consequence of reps using CRM is that forecasts will always be current (assuming you are using the opportunity mgt component). There is no more waiting for weekly or quarterly updates. As you are updating your deals, your forecasts are coming along for the ride. This not only allows you to have an accurate picture of your deals but also management and production people. It allows everyone to be proactive and in this economic climate that is critical. Waiting until after the fact could lead to missed opportunity, wasted money and people’s time. It also allows for much better planning by your production department so they don’t over produce products and have to incur inventory costs. Or not be prepared with products to meet a customer request. Analyzing pipelines and forecasts are easy when the data is being maintained by the reps. Everyone behind you will be in a much better place to do their job proactively and consistently to ensure a smooth and cost effective transition from sale to delivery.

In order to easily provide aggregates of territory, regions and corporate your CRM solution should allow you to setup a sales hierarchy. This is how the solution will automatically roil-up the numbers depending on your role. So Sales Managers will see the aggregate of their Reps under them; and Regional Managers will see the Sales Managers that report to them; and a VP of Sales will see their Regional Managers, etc…

You might also want to give your production or service delivery group access to parts of your pipeline. This will allow them to be prepared with the right production and delivery levels.

I included some samples below. The complexity and level of detail will vary.

Setting up your Sales Hierarchy

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Managers Pipeline

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Regional Pipeline

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Corporate Product Forecast

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Corporate Opportunity Forecast

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Tags: crm, CRM Basics, crm productivity

I am a firm believer in the power of CRM. But to harness that power you have to be dedicated to its usage. I have come across a lot of sales reps that like some of the features of their solution but find others not workable. For many companies opportunity management seems to lack the sustained support most of the other features have. It is mostly due to the lack of flexibility sales rep wants to manipulate the data. While many CRM solutions allow for ad-hoc reporting it might still fall short and IT does not want to spend time on each reps specific way of wanting to look at the information. For those reps, using Excel continues to be their preference. Just because you go that route does not mean you should not be leveraging the basic features offered in your CRM solution. I have worked with a lot of reps who maintain their deals in their CRM solution but use Excel for their day to day tracking and strategizing.

Most solutions offer easy import and export of data from the opportunity management system. The best way to leverage Excel is to record the basic data required in CRM. This will ensure consistency when others are looking at the account and can see there are opportunities being worked on. It also helps with management reports. The opportunity component is excellent for the weekly and quarterly reports they need at a high level. Once the data is in CRM do a simple export to Excel. From there you can manipulate the data and layouts anyway you want. Some people also attach the spreadsheet to an activity report and update it when changes occur. Another reason people use Excel is they want to track additional fields they like to use. This is an easy way to do it and requires no help from anyone.

So it is ok if you find the need to work with Excel but make sure you either enter the minimum amount of data needed in CRM or attach the spreadsheet as an activity to ensure everyone can be on the same page as you regarding the customer.

Tags: crm, crm productivity

I wish everyone a happy and healthy New Year.

I wanted to make my first posting of the New Year reflective of what I believe 2009 should be about. For me it is about knowledge. The financial crisis has forced me to learn all I can about the markets and to be able to manage my own stock portfolio. I have been in a constant state of learning about stocks, bonds, credit markets, etc… Until 4 months ago I mostly relied on “expert” advice and recommendations. I have now decided that I will not work with any of these “experts” because most never saw this crisis coming or if they did, it was not in their best interest to better position their client’s assets.

I am learning all I can through books, articles, discussions, and collaboration with a group of trusted professionals, friends and family. This has produced a lot of documents that I need to store, share and easily recall.

The same is true for CRM users. We need a place we can easily have access to marketing materials, customer and industry articles, best practices, legal documents, pricing, sample proposals and many other items. The better CRM solutions will have a Knowledge Management component that handles these items. It should be an integral part of your implementation. Besides having the ability to organize and share the information it is a huge win for the reps in getting their acceptance of CRM. The reason is that it usually requires no sales rep input. It is for the marketing group and management to enter information that sales reps can just access. Sales reps initially have their hands full having to enter all their sales information and this is one place they just get to pull information. For that reason, I always try to make Knowledge Management part of phase one for new CRM implementations.

CRM solutions will have their own databases to manage this information and/or interface with third party ones like Lotus Domino Document Manager, Documentum and Sharepoint. But keep it simple initially. Try to stay within the CRM system component and a Sales Library is a good easy start. You can usually publish and categorize the documents pretty easy. As people feel comfortable you can start to use more of the advanced features or third party integrations that will give you things like check in/out and version control.

Whether you are just starting out with CRM, a seasoned veteran or struggling , giving reps and managers easy access to all the peripheral information they need will guarantee you getting 2009 off to a strong CRM start.

Knowledge Management - Sales Library Example (click to enlarge)

Tags: Add new tag, crm, crm productivity, knowledge management

The next two weeks are the perfect time to set up your opportunity management component for 2009. Most CRM solutions allow you to track your opportunity revenue against your quota. You can usually find this option in your profile or preferences tab. See example below. You can also specify a weighted average so you can give yourself some breathing room. This is a great way for you to see all your deals and manage them according to how they are leveraged against your quarterly and yearly quotas. It helps tremendously in deciding which deals you should be focusing on in a given month and/or quarter.

You should set up your dashboard or landing page to show your actual vs. projected numbers and list the top deals you are working on in a given quarter. You will be able to easily see what percentage each deal contributes to the quota.

You can also use graphs and charts. I find it most useful to see a simple display like the one below. If you are working with a CRM system that does not allow you to track against you quota you can usually export your deals to Excel and write a few formulas to do the comparisons and graphs.
This might take a bit of time to work on but it is really worth the effort in that you will be taking out all the guesswork in managing your deals on a day to day basis against your quota. And for managers, once this is set up for your reps, you will be able to see the aggregate numbers in the same way.

Shaving the Yak in this case is worth the effort for the coming year.

Configure Quota (click to enlarge)

Tracking Quota (click to enlarge)

Tags: configuration, crm, crm productivity