A great way to get important information about your products and services from your customers and prospects is to use surveys.  You can allow them to respond anonymously or you can provide them an incentive such as a drawing for a free iPod, PDA or laptop.  I recently offered reduce consulting fees for a certain period.  Your questions should be focused around a single topic with no more than 5 questions.  If you send too many questions, you will lose people’s attention.  Look for a 1-5% response rate.  Offering an incentive people want can increase that to 10% or more.

There are a few companies that offer this service.   I used SurveyMonkey and was very pleased with the ease and functionality it provided.  It also provides good reporting so you can statistically see how well the survey did along with all the responses.

You should feed your responses back into your CRM solution so you can easily share the information with different teams in your organization such as sales and R&D.   If you cannot automate that process, you can do a manual import into your CRM solution.  While the responses will give you great insight into what your customers need and how well they feel you are doing, it is also important to know which customers or prospects care enough to participate.

Doing surveys are a great way to get the information you need to ensure your product, services and customer support are aligned with your customer needs now and into the future.

Tags: crm, Marketing

One of the better ways to generate qualified leads is to do outbound calling with the goal of setting up a meeting with a sales rep.  There are marketing companies that specialize in this and only charge for the meetings they setup.  The charge could run as high as $800 per meeting.  A cheaper and more effective way to do this is to hire a part-time person and give them a script to follow.  We tried this with a college student and our results were better than when we hired an outside firm to do it.  It allowed us to closely monitor the feedback she was getting and make appropriate adjustments to her approach and calling script.  It did not matter that she knew very little about what she was talking about.  Being polite, brief and sincere was the key in getting people to take the meeting.

Tags: CRM Basics, Marketing

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

Your CRM solution is great for tracking leads. It allows you to do a few things. The first is it keeps all your unqualified leads and lists away from your good data. Never mix them into your opportunities or contacts until they are well qualified and you have determined they are worth closer tracking.

If you are buying lists, most CRM solutions will have utilities that easily import and map the data into your system. If no utility is available, get the list into Excel or a COL file. All solutions allow you to import that way as well.

The next thing is being able to easily track all you activities against it. It gets hard to remember conversations you have with so many leads. If you have a different group that qualifies your leads then you will really need for them to record their conversations. Make sure they have the ability to create activity reports so you can easily read up on what they discovered.

You also want to track the source of the lead. It is really important for whoever is qualifying the lead to ask the prospect how they heard about you. There should be a source field on the lead that the information can be recorded. This will be so important for identifying where you are getting the biggest bang for the buck with marketing. Once you have it well qualified, a good CRM solution allows you to click a button on the lead and convert it to an opportunity, an organization and contact. Most fields should be brought over when you convert a lead. If your solution does not automatically convert leads get the IT group to write some custom code to do it. This extra work will pay in dividends from a usability standpoint.

You should have simple reports that can track by source how many leads you got, the percentage that became an opportunity and percentage of ones that closed. This is so easy to do as long as you carry these fields in the entire process.

Whether you are tracking existing customer leads or bringing in cold lists, CRM is perfect for managing the entire effort. Getting IT to stream line the entry and conversion will really help with getting everyone to use it.

Sample Lead Form(click to enlarge)

Sample Conversion (click to enlarge)

Tags: crm, CRM Basics, Marketing

Reach out and touch someone. While Hallmark uses greeting cards, sales reps can use mass mailings.

There are two ways to leverage mass mailings within your CRM solution. One is though the marketing component and the other is at the sales rep level. The marketing component for mass mailing provides more advanced features such as opt-outs and response documents. It is meant for your corporate marketing group to do fairly sophisticated campaigns and events. It requires a more complex setup. Remember, mass mailings can be letters, emails or faxes.

But many CRM solutions allow reps to do their own simple mass mailings. To do this, you would only need to setup a mail template and a segmented contact list. The mail template is simple to setup. You would write the letter/email you want to send and insert variable markers where you want the solution to insert values automatically from the contact data you are running against, e.g., names and addresses. It is an easy way to personalize each individual mailing. You then need to create the list of contacts you want to mail to. You can manually go through all of your contacts and choose the ones you want or you can set up fields to track specific characteristics of the contact such as industry, customer status, geography, products and hobbies. You would then just need to sort your contacts by the segment types you want and initiate the mailing. Most CRM solutions will have a button or drop down menu options to initiate it. You can also set triggers so that the mailing runs on a specific day and/or time.

With the holidays upon us this is a good way for you to send personal correspondence to many of your prospects and customers with very little effort. It is also a great way to keep your contacts informed of special offers or events based on their profile.

Learning how to do this might require a small investment of your time, however, once you do get up to speed, you’ll find that you are not as reliant on corporate marketing to do things for you. Take marketing into your own hands. While the Yak might require a little shaving it is well worth it.

Tags: crm, Marketing

I recently read a book called Made to Stick. It is about understanding what makes things people hear or read stick in their heads. Being in sales you always try to prove to people how your product or service will make a difference to them. We spend a lot of time with PowerPoint slides, demos and collateral. Yet most sales people only close a small fraction of their leads. Most of what we say ends up meaning very little or nothing to our audiences. There is something called the “Curse of Knowledge”. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. It stops us from being able to share our knowledge because we can’t readily recreate our listener’s state of mind. An example they use in the book is tapping out a song you know. It sounds perfect to you but the one listening doesn’t have a clue. When selling we know the benefits, features and functions so well we assume others will see them too. We have the curse of knowledge that stops us from effectively conveying our message to people who have no prior knowledge.

The book talks about six principles of sticky ideas: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions, and Stories. The acronym is SUCCESs. It helps you identify what your real core message should be and not bury it trying to convey everything your product/service does. If you say three things you don’t say anything. People will just not remember.

The key to having your message be remembered is to convey it in a story. Stories are what people remember, e.g., the Jared story where he lost over 200 pounds eating Subway sandwiches, rather than the sandwich has 400 calories, less than 6 grams of fat, blah, blah, blah . Or Art Silverman showing people that a regular sized butter popcorn in a movie has more artery clogging fat than a bacon and eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch and a steak dinner with all the trimmings combined, rather than just telling people it contains 37 grams of saturated fat. People would not necessarily know if that was good or bad or, if bad, then how bad (movie popcorn has since improved due to that campaign). Or an Army Cook in Iraq who believes he is in charge of army morale, rather than cooking for the troops. He gets the same ingredients all the mess halls get but his preparation, presentation and quality makes his food the best in Iraq. Why, because he believes that boosting morale means excellent food Or a drill bit company that doesn’t sell drill bits but quarter inch holes so you can hang your children’s pictures. And from the book, Built to Last, which includes stories about Nordstrom employees who:

• Ironed a new shirt for a customer who needed it for an afternoon meeting
• Gift wrapped products a customer bought at Macy’s
• Refunded money for a set of tire chains even though Nordstrom’s doesn’t sell tire chains

These stories speak volumes about the products and services offered by these companies. They all could have used charts, graphs and statistics to make their points but no one would remember those.

My point is that as sales and marketing people we need better ways to convey our messages and make our presentations. I gave a couple of CRM presentations last week and I stopped talking about how CRM will increase revenue and loyalty. I believe they are too abstract especially with the current financial situation. Instead, I gave examples of how you can do more with less, how to be more visible to your customers and how you should be thinking about surviving over the next 2 years.

I still have a lot to learn. I need to better define my core message and present interesting, unexpected and emotional stories that allow me to stand out and be remembered by my customers and prospects after I walk out the door.

Tags: crm, CRM Basics, Marketing, sfa