Reenergize Your Sales Meetings

Is your sales staff tired of the same old weekly sales meetings?

Incorporate some basic technology in the form of video and audio taping to stimulate your team, elevate their skills and create more competition.

Just like a swimmer may be taped under water to see how effectively their stroke moves them through the water, reps can highly benefit from seeing and hearing how they execute and close deals.

For Outside teams- Incorporate videotaping into your training. Pair your reps into buyer/seller teams to simulate a typical meeting. Have your reps be prepared to handle a predetermined selling subject. Incorporate power points, lots of objections, unannounced curve balls and some hostile selling environment scenarios to fully leverage the reps learning experience.

Inside teams- Incorporate audio recordings of a typical meeting between buyer and seller. Position your reps so they have their backs to each other. In doing so, tonality is how the buyer and seller read each other over the phone. If you want to take the scenario to the next level, connect a tape recorder to the phone so that your reps can make calls from two separate locations. Add on-line demos to the program where the buyer is in the conference room with the rest of the team and the seller is in a remote office. Have the team make notes on the quality of the on-line demo while the audio tape is running.

Be creative and vary the meeting content/business situations. Design a meeting program that runs over the course of 3 - 6 months. Each month the meetings should progress from 1st meetings , 2nd meetings, negotiations, crisis management to close. Again be creative and adapt this concept to your business model.

Create as much of a realistic selling environment as possible. Conduct all of your taping in separate rooms from the balance of your team.

Throw some twists into the exercise by having an unannounced manager,buying committee member or executive join the meeting. This allows your reps to think on their feet and position themselves for reality.

Once each rep has completed the exercise...hold a sales meeting where the reps have a rating card for each presentation. Have them view/listen/critique and judge the best presentations. The winner receives a cash prize ($ 100 or so). Over the course of the program $600 can be won.

Critique should include:

Tonality, Body Language, Demo Quality, Script, Presentation Process, Engagement/Questioning/Problem Solving Execution, Listening Skills, Closing ETC.

Make the process fun and keep it competitive!

Deals Stalling On You? Don't Hold Your Breath!

Many of you have been faced with the situation where your "HOT" prospect for some strange reason has gone cold.

The scenario is pretty typical and goes something like this.....For weeks you had great communication with your prospect, demonstrated undeniable value, ability to solve a problem and SEEMINGLY on the verge of closing the deal. Suddenly the prospect goes into hiding.

Days and maybe weeks go by where you can't get a hold of your contact causing you to wonder whether the deal is stalled or dead.

We all know there are most likely roots to the cause here...Did you agree on next steps? Were you at the correct level? Did you ever discuss budget? Whatever the reason you are now in damage control mode to determine where the opportunity stands in the funnel.

What should you do? How do you get the buyer to level with you ASAP?

GO NEGATIVE!

That's right..GO NEGATIVE!

The fastest way to determine if, in fact, buyer interest and commitment exists is to call the buyer out and test them on their intentions to move forward.

Give them the easy out to "say no".

Your goal is to initiate a responce and realistic intention.

Here are a couple of ways to address the issue:

• "Your a bit confused as to why you haven't heard from the buyer. Politely mention you were under the impression you were close to having a deal but based on "no response" it is clear that you have no interest in the proposal. Add a line in the message that infers the buyer probably doesn't see a good fit and you will be moving on. Be clear that both of your time is valuable, keep an open invitation for down the road and wish them luck. If there is no further interest it is easy for the buyer to respond to that intention because they do not want to be "hunted" at this point."
  
• Let the buyer know that you have been trying to get in touch with them for (days /weeks) with no response. Politely tell them, based on "no responce" it is pretty clear that this is most likely not the "right timing" and the proposal doesnt seem to have high priority- thus you will be moving on/closing the file. Again, if the buyer intends on moving forward you will most likely get an update on a closing timeline quickly. If NO is the answer, you made it easy for them to opt out.

The point is to walk away from a deal when extensive uncertainty exists. Chasing buyers and dead opportunities wastes valuable time, inflates your funnel and negatively impacts your quota.

Striking a Balance on Lead Generation

The new Sales 2.0 has taken off with a robust burst of steam. The traditional Sales and Marketing process,according to some industry pundits,is on its way to becoming a legacy to make way for a more “cost effective” and “sophisticated” model. Inbound and its cost effective automation is in….Outbound and the proactive connection with the market is out???? Not so simple!

Based on what we have seen distributed through the social media lately, this seems like a logical interpretation of the direction of the industry.

The fact is, inbound marketing and the technology that surrounds this strategy is a credible component when utilized in balance.

Inbound marketing, conceptually, delivers a sales-ready buyer that is primed to be handed to a sales representative. The handoff, theoretically, is a culmination of a prospect that has surfed through your digital blogs, social media sites and whitepapers and proactively announces he is sales-ready for the next step. In a perfect world the sales representative simply needs to walk the prospect through the closing steps of the sale and re-up for the next handoff. Not so simple!

Again, let me reemphasize that I am a proponent of inbound marketing and the value it delivers to the end cause…MORE CLOSED DEALS.

The real caveat here is the consequences of not having adequate balance.

According to a recent survey in HubSpot's The State of Inbound Marketing 2010 larger companies with 50+ employees invested 37% of their 2010 demand generation budgets on outbound marketing ( telemarketing, direct marketing, and trade shows) while smaller companies (1-10 employees) spent 15 %. The larger portion of these budgets were directed towards the inbound component with the goal of leveling the playing field through lower costs. Conversely, according to the survey, the larger companies could not depend on the lengthy conversion rate that inbound programs inherently require. Thus, they have to proactively connect with the market to insure proper coverage and pipeline growth.

Is there a sacrifice smaller companies are making when relying too heavily on potential prospects knocking on the door and having such an imbalance in the outbound budget? Yes. Conversion time, conversion rate, cost per conversion, rep costs and opportunities lost costs, to name a few, all become issues.

According to the 2008 Sales Performance Optimization Survey from CSO Insights
www.csoinsights.com sales reps only spend about 20 % of their time on both following up on leads handed to them by marketing and cold calling to generate new leads.

The results are shocking! Here are the #’s……
Only 20 % of the total leads generated are followed up, 15 % of these leads end up becoming qualified, about 80% become forecastable and only 20 % end up closing!

The question of the day is “can your company survive on the NET OUTCOME of these statistics?” Go ahead..plug your numbers in. Can you make your quota?

In certain cases the answer will lean closer to “maybe”. Organizations with shorter sales cycles, less complex solutions and straight forward decision making channels may be willing to bet on 85 % of their market coverage through an inbound channel. The risk factor being 59 % of companies are reporting significantly longer sales cycle over the last year and into the next year, inbound self educators operate at a slower pace, thus lengthening the cycle further, and finally, evaluation and buying dynamics are constantly in flux requiring a personal relationship through an outbound campaign. The result allows teams to proactively identify shifts in the environment eliminating lost opportunities.

Regardless of the complexity of your product every opportunity is a HIGH VALUE opportunity to your company. Complexity disguises itself in many ways and requires proven processes by “specialists” that builds demand and CRITICAL balance to your demand generation and pipeline.

I’m interested in your feedback….

How are your numbers?
What is it the short come of imbalance costing you?
What type of balance do you have?
Is you 15 % enough? NOT ENOUGH?

It may be time to reevaluate.