Ken Krogue » Best Practices

Quick Sales Tip – Don’t Forget the Gap in “Big Account” vs. “Small Account” Technology Needs

Ken — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 17:10:47 +0000

The guys and gals up at SEO.com recently announced that they were partnering with Boostability.com to address a “hole” in their service offerings. Recognizing that up to this point the bulk of their clients had been high-level enterprise, SEO.com felt that they needed to add a service offering for locally focused, small-to-medium-sized businesses to continue growing their market share.

My initial thought was, “Good for them.”

My second thought was, “I hope they know how to successfully target local businesses’ technology needs to get the results they want from the initiative.”

I say this because one of the biggest challenges InsideSales.com has faced has been differentiating our offerings between enterprise and small-to-mid-sized businesses.

In a perfect world, we’d never have to have our sales reps working both enterprise and small business deals. We’d separate the sales team by deal size, and “big account” closers and “small account” closers wouldn’t ever have to cross channels.

The reality, however, is that sales reps often have to work both types of accounts—and in technology sales, one of the biggest mistakes reps make in this situation is that they fail to adapt to the differences in technology readiness of smaller accounts.

The problem typically reveals itself in two related ways:

Reps consistently overestimate small business’s ability to provide high-level technical expertise.

Especially in today’s market, where many typical business services can be easily and cheaply outsourced (payroll, legal services, tech support, CRM), many small and mid-sized businesses purposefully go out of their way to avoid potentially costly IT expenses—but the rep still approaches the sale as if the prospect had their own IT department standing by to take care of their every technology whim.

As a result of #1, reps fail to do an appropriate needs analysis, because they forget / don’t recognize how many other “touch points” their technology solution requires.

Because reps assume small businesses have access to technical expertise they don’t have, they lose sight of the fact of just how much IT infrastructure will actually be required.

For example, even something as seemingly simple as our PowerDialer system requires a correctly installed and configured phone system (which anyone in telecom will tell you can be a total crapshoot based on the type of equipment used), a PC with the right software and add-ons, a working knowledge of basic Web architecture, and a “scrappy manager” willing to mold the system to produce the best levels of results—and that’s just for a relatively basic technology that increases productivity while making outbound sales and marketing calls.

If the product or service is even more complex than that, it only exacerbates the problem.

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Inside Sales Tip of the Day: “Interest is Often the Counterfeit of Need”

Ken — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 23:36:04 +0000

It’s one of the sales industry’s oldest maxims, and I told it to my lead gen reps last week:

“Interest is often the counterfeit of need.”

When a B2B purchaser buys it’s because they have recognized the importance and necessity—the need— of solving a particular problem, and doing it now.

Interest can, of course, be a step to producing need—but interest alone doesn’t generate the impetus to make a purchasing decision.

“Need,” as I define it, is “a compelling, actively perceived problem that the prospect believes can be solved with the right product or service.”

Using this definition, I told my sales reps that one way to transform “interested” prospects into “buying” prospects is to use the three elements within the definition itself: compelling reason, active perception, and a belief that the problem can be solved.

One: Accentuate the need by demonstrating the compelling nature of the problem. Even if buyers recognize a potential need, they often don’t clearly see the value of fixing it quickly. The prospect must have a accurate picture of not just the need, but how fixing it, and fixing it now is a far preferable alternative to the status quo.

Two: Active perception. A compelling problem isn’t a problem if no one recognizes that it is. Or as occasionally happens, a need gets identified, but by the wrong decision-maker. Good sales reps understand that knowing where a problem resides on the corporate “food chain” is critical. And sometimes “creating need” requires just that—creation. The “Smoking Gun” approach is a powerful sales tactic; when you can visibly and realistically show a prospect a problem they didn’t know they had, it acts as a motivating force and build trust.

Three: Once recognized, a prospect must believe that their problem has a solution (and that you provide it). Often a prospect has already attempted other solutions to their problem before they spoke to you, and will be skeptical that your solution is better than the ones they’ve already tried. Sometimes this step is about overcoming objections, but not always; in many cases it’s about educating the prospect on how your solution works better. This is when having case studies, research, and customer testimonials can have real impact and value.

Remember:

Interest makes conversations, but need makes sales.

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Inside Sales Best Practices – The Web Marketing “Mass Disconnect” Continues

Ken — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 18:17:30 +0000

Sales industry researchers CSOInsights stated recently that after a “flat” budget year in 2009, marketing budgets are increasing in 2010 and beyond, and that the top three items for additional budget allocations were:

Web site design/content (65% stated they were increasing budget allocation)
Email marketing (54%)
Web search optimization (51%)

Great news, right? Good to hear that the economy is picking up, and that smart companies are following current trends in effective Web lead generation.

So why did my “Massive Disconnect” alarm start going off almost immediately?

Here’s why: because indicators show that the majority of companies are terribly, horribly un-optimized to take advantage of the leads their Web marketing activities generate.

Even though the article states that 75% of sales organizations now use a CRM tool of some kind to track and monitor sales activities, MIT research shows that most of them still aren’t following good lead management practices to get the most from their increased marketing spend.

For example, how many of the companies surveyed are currently responding to their incoming, “hot” Web leads in 10 minutes or less? Because if they aren’t, MIT’s research shows they’re potentially losing 20 times the total effectiveness of the leads they generate. Even worse, the research shows that 45% of companies don’t even respond AT ALL to new Web-generated leads—let alone in 10 minutes or less as best practices suggest.

So let me get this straight: the top three increased marketing budget allocations for the next year are all based on Web marketing—yet nearly half of companies don’t respond AT ALL to incoming Web leads.

Hmmmm.

Furthermore, of the companies surveyed, how many call/contact attempts are they making to reach their new Web leads? MIT’s research shows that barely 7 percent of companies make at least 6 total contact attempts by phone and email to incoming Web leads.

Yet according to The Bridge Group, the average number of “touches” needed to convert a new inquiry into a prospect is somewhere between 6 and 7—and dead “touches” like no-answer phone calls don’t even count towards that number.

So tell me again—why are companies increasing Web marketing budgets when statistically only 7 percent of them are even meeting the absolute, barest of bare minimums to get the value they want from their leads?

My “Massive Disconnect” alarm just went into overdrive.

Is it any wonder that in spite of progress, Propelling Brands says that sales and marketing still have a long way to go to align their processes?

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15 Time Wasters vs. The Desperate Three Percent

Ken — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 21:46:42 +0000

I don’t normally like to do shameless self-promotion of my company on this blog, but Steve Watts, one of my chief marketing gurus, posted something interesting today on the InsideSales Insider. He brings up an article from CopyBlogger discussing Chet Holmes’ book, The The Ultimate Sales Machine.

Having read Chet Holmes’ books for a number of years now, I was interested to re-read the principle of the “Desperate Three Percent,” and immediately associated it with “The 15 Time Wasters of Marketing and InsideSales.”

The “Desperate Three Percent” are the three percent of buyers—in any product category or market—that are specifically ready to buy.

But as CopyBlogger points out, there’s a whole bunch of people not ready to buy who can be nudged into buying with the right approach and strategy.

And one of the ways you can start “nudging” is to stop marketing broad and shallow.

Here’s what I mean.

In “The 15 Time Wasters,” I talk about the fact that when you market yourself broadly, it becomes too hard to differentiate yourself in all of your target markets. It’s better to serve one market fantastically well than to serve 10 or 12 markets “mediocre-ly.”

The solution is instead of trying to reach 15 different markets and verticals, start with one, and conquer it.

Narrow but deep, not broad and shallow, wins today’s marketing battles.

Whether that market is a physical location (”I own the city of Billings”), or a specific vertical market (”I’m the number one solution for road bike enthusiasts”), the principle is the same—word of mouth flows from market leadership.

When you own a market, people naturally gravitate to you. It means you’ve proven that you can solve one real, specific problem for that market.

And if you can solve one problem, people assume, it means you can solve more than one.

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Sales Management – “Hello, Massive Disconnect? This is Your Friend, Crappy Performance.”

Ken — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:45:50 +0000

I bumped into this post on The New Sales Economy, and thought it was a worthwhile read on inside sales best practices (thanks to Trish Bertuzzi for the link).

Using The Bridge Group’s data, author Chad Levitt asks nine highly relevant, incisive questions about the current state of professional inside sales.

I was particularly interested in one of the questions—”Is there a disconnect between sales management and front line sales reps?”—because in my experience, even the best organizations occasionally have holes, or disconnects in their sales process.

For example, when we did our 2008 Lead Response Management Study, we were shocked to discover that 45 percent of the top 500 companies in terms of Web marketing budgets didn’t even respond a single time to a Web-generated lead.

So why do disconnects like this happen?

Most of the time the root causes are very simple:

Organizations simply don’t understand the value of the action they’re not taking (e.g., immediate response to Web inquiries = dramatic increase in qualified leads).

There’s no incentive for someone in the organization to monitor the activity (i.e., because no one understands the value, there’s no expectation of accountability).

The process they have in place is too inefficient to get the expected benefit (lack of automation, inability to get information to the parties fast enough).

Changing the process seems like it “takes away” from “more important” activities (i.e., “We need our sales reps and managers selling, not managing leads”).

The bottom line becomes massive disconnect, sales reps not hitting quota, and managers griping about sales performance.

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Sales Best Practices – Seth Godin Vs. The “Faceless Factory”

Ken — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:50:55 +0000

Seth Godin is a pretty smart guy. I own several of his books, and I typically enjoy reading his blog to get interesting snippets of marketing conversation.

His posts are usually short and aren’t always earth shattering, but they always have a clear underlying message, and they almost always get me thinking.

Today’s blog entry was no different, but I wanted to add a small corollary to his post.

As he has stated on many occasions, Seth’s message was once again that the company that “wins the battle” is the one that creates new and unique ways to interact with their vendors and customers, the one which doesn’t act like a “faceless factory.”

Here’s my addendum: You need to be a “faceless factory” before you can be anything else.

Let me explain what I mean.

Most of the time, in a business-to-business environment, we want a product or service that we never have to think about. 99 percent of the time, I want my cell phone vendor to be “faceless” because I want to simply know that it works. I want my service to work, I want my phone apps to work, and I want to have as many “bars” in as many places as my chosen plan affords me. Without that, my ability to “engage” with that company is meaningless.

Now it’s not that I don’t care at all about the “face” of the company. If I’m forced to work with their customer service, I expect to be treated well. But the fact is, no matter how stellar the customer service is, any time I have to deal with “the face” means I’m dealing with my cell phone vendor, and not doing something else.

Now I think Seth would agree with me that once you reach that “99th percentile” of trust, then you’ve got a shot at reaching out to your customers, to reach out in unique ways that make you valuable. Create a sense of loyalty that leads to lasting engagement.

But “lasting engagement,” or “customer loyalty” doesn’t exist if we haven’t reached the “99th Percentile of Trust.” Become an efficient, solid, reliable “faceless factory” as fast as you can—and then start building your “brand.” When Dave Elkington and I founded InsideSales.com in 2005, we knew that “long term marketing strategy” was going to be about #8 or 9 on our Top 10 Start-Up Actions List.

If 15 percent of your “customer engagement” is working like crazy to get them to ignore the fact that your product stinks, offering discounts and unique “buy ins” isn’t likely to motivate them.

I’d rather every cell phone company take every dollar and cent they spend on “customer loyalty” programs, and put them towards making the most efficient, well-run, high-impact call center they can—since it’s the real “face” I have to deal with on the rare occasions that I interact with them.

And the next time I think about blowing some money on a pet marketing project, maybe I’ll talk to the COO, and see if that money can go towards making our product better instead.

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4 Quick Tips for Creating a Good B2B Marketing Email

Ken — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 17:11:54 +0000

A few months ago, I talked a little bit about the question, “Is leaving a voice message an effective marketing or sales strategy?”

The answer is a definite yes—it’s very effective, especially when it’s combined with other modes of contact, email, calling, faxing.

I wanted to follow-up with another small set of tips for creating good B2B marketing and sales emails.

The day of the “awesome marketing email” is pretty well gone. Remember those days when the Internet was still new, and you’d get a pretty email with pictures, and colors, and swirls? At the time it was cool. Now we’ve been trained to tune them out, because we know that it’s “corporate.” Unless it’s from an email list that we actively subscribe to, we generally ignore the corporate stuff.

The day of the simple, targeted email is here. Keep it short, keep it simple, stupid. If you’re going to template-ize your emails, make them look like they just came from your desk, like it’s something you whipped up in three minutes. “Hey this is Dave, just following up on some info you requested. Feel free to call me, or shoot me an email back.” Done. The End. Believe it or not, we’ve even found that strategically placing a small typo in the body of the email gives the impression that it was a “personal” email, not a junket, and can increase response rates.

If you’re using a sales or lead management CRM (if you’re not, you should be), strategically include some small bit of information from their file. Most systems will merge data fields from the CRM directly into the body of the email. “Hey, I see you came across us at our booth at (insert XYZ Trade Show from the CRM data here).”

Remember, the goal of an email is not to sell your product on the spot. The goal is to get the decision-maker to respond.

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Inside Sales Top Method for Lead Generation in 2009 according to Forrester and MarketingProfs

Ken — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:34:33 +0000

Laura Ramos is perhaps the most recognized expert in lead generation research for B2B. She is a Vice President and Principal Analyst for Forrester.

Laura has been studying what she calls the “Marketing Effectiveness Index” which are the most effective methods used by B2B businesses to generate leads since early in 2006.

She uses responses from surveys to give grades from 1 to 5, with 5 the highest, for different methods of lead generation. Click here to see a chart of her results for the last three years.

Another study for 2010 is coming out soon, but her most recent rankings in 2009 are as follows:

Inside Sales / Telemarketing
Executive Events
Trade Shows
Webinars
Email Marketing
Search Marketing
Direct Mail
Video, Podcasts, etc.
Blogs
Other Web 2.0

The big news in 2009 was that Inside Sales surpassed Executive Events and Email Marketing moved ahead of Search. Trade Shows hung strong even with significant cutbacks in corporate travel budgets.

The rankings for 2008 were:

Executive Events
Inside Sales
Search Marketing
Trade Shows
Webinars
Email Marketing
Direct Mail
Video, Podcasts, etc.
Blogs
Other Web 2.0

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How Well Does Your Website Convert Clicks to Leads?

Ken — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 23:21:10 +0000

If 100 people go to your website, how many of them fill out a form or buy something? If 2 out of 100 fill out a form, then you have a 2% conversion rate. This is slightly better than the average for most corporate websites. We were lucky (or blessed) to get the name InsideSales.com and tap into a large flow of web traffic from our very first day. In fact, we got 8 leads their first day we turned up our website.

The process of converting visitors to leads or sales is the process of website conversion. And designing your website to do this well is called conversion design. Most companies make a fancy website that looks like a nice electronic brochure but hardly generates any leads at all.

I just spent an hour on the phone with Tim Ash, the founder of http://www.sitetuners.com as he walked me through an express review of the home page of InsideSales.com.

The good news is that we have lot’s of room for improvement. We convert leads at 3-4 times better than the average. The sad news is that our previous website, though not nearly as good looking, converted somewhat better than this one does. Hmmm, look or conversion? Definitely conversion.

Of course the best is to have a great look with a high conversion rate. That is our next adventure.

Why is this important to us? More leads.

Our dialer technology is like a Gatling Gun, leads are the ammunition. One of the first three questions we get asked by our customers is, “How do I get more leads?”

This is one great way. Design your site to convert leads better. How do you do it? You continue to test and tweak your site by changing different things constantly. I was first introduced to this concept by a company called LowerMyBills.com while at my last company, UCN (now inContact.) Then I met Mat Greenfield, the founder of http://www.ConversionResults.com. He has helped many smaller and mid-size companies design or redesign their website to increase conversion.

A free and simple way is to use Google Website Optimizer and do what is called “A/B Split Testing” where you make two versions of your site; Version A and Version B. Then Google sends half the visitors to A and half to B. We then watch the conversion rate on both pages for a few days or so. Let’s say Version A converts at 5%, and Version B converts at 10%, we’ll obviously turn off Version A and focus on B and do another split test to keep getting it better. Google is free, it just takes some time and effort.

Our friends at SiteTuners go to the next level beyond Split Testing of two variables, they can test lots of variables at once; this is called multivariate testing. In fact, SiteTuners is a considered a Multivariate Testing Website Optimizer. They help clients like Google, Facebook, Verizon, etc.

We will let you know more later about how well the help from SiteTuners has had on our overall lead management process.

You will probably see our site change in lots of little subtle ways.

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What is Lead Response Management?

Ken — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 17:59:43 +0000

Lead Response Management is the process of responding to leads at the optimal time to achieve the highest contact and qualification rates.

Recent research shows that quite often the ‘optimal’ time is immediately. But many companies spend thousands of dollars monthly to generate clicks to their website. These same companies invest tens of thousands in building a website to attract visitors. They use analytical tools to analyze how to convert these visitors to leads. Then they send the lead to the sales department.

The lead often sits 24 to 48 hours before it gets called back.

A recent survey done by Dr. James Oldroyd while at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University shows that the majority of companies expect 4 to 5 attempts are made by their reps to contact a lead.

Why spend thousands of dollars on generating clicks, high conversion websites, and powerful analytics if you are going to let your leads sit for 2 days and only contact roughly half of your potential prospects?

The question is almost insulting, yet that is what most organizations do.

More research by Dr. Oldroyd shows that calling back a lead quickly has dramatic effects on actually making contact with and qualifying that lead. His research says that if you can call back a lead within 5 minutes, you are 10 times more likely to contact a lead, and 6 times more likely to qualify a lead than by waiting even 30 minutes.

And if you wait more than 20 hours to contact a lead, you actually hurt your chances of contacting and qualifying your lead with each successive attempt to make contact.

Technology now exists that can trigger callback attempts within seconds.

Technology can also schedule callback attempts at different times of the day and different days of the week to boost contact rates above 85%. Also, these solutions can automatically market to leads and continue to generate prospects every 3-4 weeks for 2 years or more.

We at InsideSales.com coined the phrase ‘Lead Response Management’. To us it means wringing every last ounce of value out of leads by responding quickly and consistently. Interestingly, sometimes responding at just the right time is more important that responding quickly.

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