Ken Krogue » Selling Strategy

Jigsaw, Gatling Guns, and the Power of “Combined Value”

Ken — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 17:01:40 +0000

Like a lot of inventions, the gatling gun was really just a re-imagining of the existing technology of the day.

(One shot musket) X (lots of shots at the same time) = a better weapon.

And when Salesforce.com issued a press release last week discussing the integration of its recently acquired Jigsaw contact database into the Salesforce family of applications, it served as a fascinating reminder of how in business, the same concept applies:

An old, treadworn idea can take on new life simply by recombining, or re-imagining it from a different perspective.

In the interest of disclosure, our own lead generation team uses Jigsaw’s contact database, and we’ve been impressed with the results. Our dialer software is an incredibly powerful tool for sales and prospecting, but it requires as much good “ammunition” as our marketing team can provide. Without good leads, making prospecting calls becomes an exercise in luck, rather than sales skill and science, and Jigsaw’s database provides powerful ammunition for our dialer “gatling gun” that has helped our team qualify more leads. Jigsaw also continues to be a client of ours, using our PowerDialer for Salesforce system as part of their own outbound sales initiatives, so if I sound like a fan rather than an objective observer, forgive me.

However, setting my personal biases aside, it’s not much of a stretch to see why Salesforce would be interested in Jigsaw’s product—it gives Salesforce users access to a massive, on-demand contact database that can prove invaluable for prospecting.

But even more interesting is that none of Jigsaw’s “core concepts” are new ideas, they’re just old ones recombined.

At its bare bones, Jigsaw is a giant, online Rolodex—but it takes that decades-old idea and turns it on its head by making it hosted, user-generated, and real time. On their own, none of these ideas is particularly compelling; put them together and it’s a home run, as Jigsaw’s 14 million active contacts and $142 million purchase price attest.

Another example: when we built our PowerDialer for Salesforce software, we realized that by itself, a dialer is a good, but not altogether compelling tool. But mix a dialer with a management database and the results are dynamite. Our PowerDialer for Salesforce is the #6 most popular app on the Salesforce Appexchange, which we’re rightfully proud of—but the true value isn’t the dialer itself, it’s the synergy between the two elements (and now we throw in some Jigsaw “dialer ammo” and increase the synergy even more).

Ultimately, the real lesson of Jigsaw is that it gives us 142 million reasons to think about how the best ideas aren’t always “new” or “groundbreaking,” but a re-imagining of something that’s more than the sum of its component parts.

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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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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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Bridge Group’s Inside Sales 2010 – Inside Sales Continues Growth Trend

Ken — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:30:34 +0000

First of all, let me be up front and say that Trish Bertuzzi is a colleague and a friend of mine, so take that for what it’s worth.

That being said, her company, The Bridge Group, Inc., recently released a fascinating research study on the state of inside sales organizations in 2010.

Even the shortened, “highlight reel” version on Bridge Group’s blog, found here, shows some keen insights into the direction that companies are going with their sales teams.

A couple of highlights:

Per-rep quotas are up across the board—but the percentage of reps hitting their quotas is low (40 percent or less).
The average number of calls to marketing-generated lead has dropped 43 percent. Think there’s any correlation to this and the fact that reps aren’t hitting their quotas? (Our ground-breaking MIT research study has some answers to why fewer phone calls = a bad, bad thing for sales teams.)
Of the 115 companies surveyed, the average organization’s inside sales team had grown 280 percent since 2007, in terms of total people employed.
89% of respondents said outbound phone calling was a primary function of their inside sales teams.

What does it all mean?

Mostly what we’ve been saying for for a little while now, that inside sales is quickly going to become Inside Sales—no longer just an “outlier” sales department whose primary function is lead gen and nurturing, but will be the heart of the 21st century sales team.

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3 Lead Generation Strategies – When to Call… When Not to Call

Ken — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:22:55 +0000

Gerhard Gschwandtner - Founder of Selling Power Magazine

A friend of mine, Gerhard Gschwandtner, the founder and owner of Selling Power Magazine, just took some time and wrote a post on his blog about when is the best time to call back on leads.

The post he wrote came from our landmark research study conducted with Dr. James Oldroyd of MIT that was originally presented in October of 2007 at the MarketingSherpa B2B Demand Summit 2007 in both Boston and San Francisco. This study was the genesis for the new industry called Lead Response Management; a subset of Lead Management that focuses on responding immediately, continually, consistently, and optimally to increase contact and qualification rates of web-based leads. The interesting information involves the incredible changes in your ability to reach people by calling on the best day of the week, time of the day and most importantly, calling back immediately; as in 5 minutes!

BEST DAY OF WEEK TO CALL

To quickly summarize Dr. Oldroyds research: Tuesday is the worst day to call, while Thursday is best. In fact, if you call on Thursday you have a 49.7 percent higher chance of reaching a prospect than on Thursday. Monday and Friday are almost as bad, but Wednesday is nearly as good as Thursday.

BEST TIME OF DAY TO CALL

The next stage of the research was focussing on the best time of day to call. Early in the morning (8am to 10am) and late in the day (4pm to 6pm) are much more productive than calling between 10am and 4pm. By calling at 8am your chances of making contact go up 164% versus calling at the worst time of the day, which is from 1pm to 2pm.

IMMEDIATE RESPONSE HAS THE BIGGEST IMPACT

Day of week and time of day make noticeable impact on contact rates, but calling back within 5 minutes versus even waiting 30 minutes increased the odds of making contact BY 100 TIMES. And possibly more important, the ability to qualify or set an appointment also went up BY 21 TIMES.

In summary… Call back NOW!

This information has changed the lead response management strategies that companies have put in place. It has become clear that in an internet age people want information now; they don’t want to wait. Their attention spans are shortening, so you had better reach out to them immediately. Don’t let a lead sit in an inbox for even half an hour; that is a big problem when most sales reps don’t even attempt a first phone call for 24 to 48 hours and only make 4-5 attempts to reach a lead. If the average contact rate is 10% (which our research among 450 clients shows it to be) then that means only 45% of all leads ever get contacted!

When we learned this internally at InsideSales.com, we immediately designed our dialer and lead management CRM technology to capture the lead on a website, look up which rep should get the lead, dial the rep, get them on the phone, and start dialing the lead… all in 8-10 seconds on average. We couldn’t get our own reps to be able to do it by hand fast enough by just asking them (or even mandating) to call the leads back fast enough. The best they could seem to do was about 30 minutes, which missed the whole window of opportunity. So our phone dialer software was the key ingredient that launched a new industry that is getting the likes of Gerhard and Selling Power Magazine, the premier media provider for solutions for sales management to recognize it as a key ingredient in the Sales 2.0 initiative.

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