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Closing out the year we wanted to look over the content that you have found most interesting and shared most often. 2011 was a big year for sales intelligence and the use of technology by sales teams to be more effective in finding new opportunities and closing more deals.
This is the list of the top 25 sales intelligence posts that people read during 2011
- 25 Influential Leaders In Sales
- How Science is Changing Sales As We Know It
- Why Cold Calling is the Bottom of the Barrel
- 40 Social Media B2B Infographics
- Gamification of the Sales Process
- 10 Reasons You Need a LinkedIn Profile
- 15 Posts on Why Cold Calling Is On Its Way Out the Door
- The History of Apple CEOs
- Bridging the Massive Social Media Gap Between Sales and Marketing
- Have No Fear: Why Sales Teams SHOULD Be On Social Media
- Creating a Sales Plan and Executing It.
- 10 of the Best Sales Sites
- The Death of Cold Calling – Ending the Debate
- 10 SlideShare Presentations That Will Make You a Better Salesperson
- Why Social Media is Important to the Sales Process.
- Top 10 Reasons for using Facebook for your Business
- 20 Awesome Sales Posts You Should Read
- 5 Great SlideShare Presentations on B2B Selling
- The Social Media Landscape – Facts and Figures for B2B Sales (Infographic)
- Should Sales People Be Blogging?
- The Problem with Big Data
- The Future of Social CRM
- Do You Listen to Your Customers?
- 10 tips for Driving Sales Productivity: Tip #1
- A Dip Into Sales Data vs. Sales Intelligence
We partnered with Focus.com to discuss the best practices to leverage social media for sales teams. After talking to eight of the top thought leaders in sales training and sales technology we wanted to bring their insights to you. This is going to be a 3 part series that covers what successful salespeople are doing to leverage social media in lead generation and accelerating their opportunities. Some of these experts are listed in our post on the 25 most influential sales leaders. Much appreciation to these experts for taking the time to address the question “How do your successful salespeople leverage social media for selling?“
- Miles Austin
- Marge Bieler
- Dave Brock
- Barbara Giamanco
- Matt Heinz
- Carlos Hidalgo
- S. Anthony Iannarino
- Craig Rosenberg (AKA The Funnelholic)
The first step and one that was consistent across 100% of the successful salespeople was to get connected.
Use your existing connections and networks to actively pursue new introductions. 
“It’s so easy, on sites from LinkedIn to Facebook and more, to see who your existing ‘friends’ and connections already know. On LinkedIn, for example, you can quickly search for contacts you want to meet based on which of them are already connected to people in your existing network. This is one of the best ways to get referrals and introductions, not by asking your network to ‘keep you in mind’ but, instead, periodically asking for specific introductions. By getting specific, your conversion rate goes up and you’re talking to the people you specifically want to meet and sell to. In your existing organization, there is the sales team, but I’m thinking the rest of the company is a gold mine of potential introductions — especially founders, longtime employees and others who have spent a long time in your industry. They know people, people know them, and they’re more likely to help you make connections and new introductions.” (Heinz)
“Every time they receive a referral, email or leadership content, salespeople can highlight names mentioned in document, then research mentioned leaders, clients and customers — even competition — and send a note or invitation asking to join their conversations via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms. By connecting with each other, you then can offer assistance or referrals and also build a trusted network of individuals to help build your referral base. Most people are thrilled you took the time to reach out to them when reading their books, viewing their videos, etc.” (Bieler)
“Successful salespeople are also using social media to identify the relationships that their prospective clients have to other people they already know. Successful salespeople aren’t afraid to leverage their relationships, to ask for introductions, and to rely on the people they know and what they know to open these relationships. Because these social media connections exist, what was once invisible is now visible; it’s easy to identify relationships and leverage them to find a way in. But it’s important to remember that your prospective clients are also using the tools to learn about you. Recently, I called on a major prospective client. After our meeting, he searched for my name on the Internet and found that we had a common connection on Facebook (his best friend from high school). He called his friend to get a reference on me before deciding whether or not to move forward. Fortunately, his friend recommended my work. Social media is no longer something salespeople can opt out of. It reminds me of what President Richard Nixon used to say about foreign affairs: ‘You might not be interested in the world, but it’s interested in you.’ ” (Iannarino)
Use Twitter and other social channels to build deeper, early relationships with new prospects.
“Here’s exactly how you do it (at least with Twitter, but other social channels can likely be done in a similar fashion). Build a list of the prospects in your territory or market. With the help of an admin or an outsourcing service like eLance, go and collect the Twitter handles of each company and as many of the individuals as you can find. Using your own Twitter account, follow those companies and individuals. Then, using a tool such as HootSuite, set up a separate column where you can specifically watch activity from those prospects. This makes it easier and faster to engage with them on a regular basis. Answer their questions. Share a resource. Retweet their articles. In other words, use their attention to this social channel to build value by interacting where they are already spending their time and looking for information.” (Heinz)
In the last post we explained that most companies deal with some very specific business pressures that slow down the process of finding new prospects and getting them into the sales funnel. Knowledge about your customers, finding new prospects and having a sales process that takes too long is a common pain point for businesses.
- 42% have insufficient knowledge of the business needs of prospects
- 40% do not have the ability to identify the most likely buyers of their product
- 34% complain of having a sales process that is too long
- 21% See an increased customer churn forcing them to focus on filling the funnel
I predict in 2012 that these numbers will not change too dramatically but the results from companies that are actively leveraging technology and sales intelligence as a method of combating them will. Sales managers should be constantly on the lookout for ways to solve these business pressures and based on research by the Aberdeen Group, the top performing sales organizations have built strategies that can drive measurable results in building a sales pipeline and increasing the quality of leads.
- 59% of the best in class companies have leveraged sales intelligence tools to identify or disqualify prospects with more accuracy
- 53% of companies have been able to identify existing customers that have upsell/cross sell opportunities
- 48% of companies have increased the quality of leads intheir pipelines
- 28% use technology to capture and share sales knowledge internally.
- 21% of companies reduce the amount of time doing sales research
This research is important because it’s showing that companies that are having the problems listed above are able to continue achieving results by leveraging sales intelligence in traditional and non-conventional ways. Top performers in lead qualification teams understand that moving less qualified prospects out of their view has more value than dumping a volume of under vetted opportunities on the sales team. By not relying on data but the contextual news and social profiles of the companies and people you are contacting, better decisions can be made on which prospects to pursue and which leads to abandon.
The research study on the science of sales intelligence goes a long way in showing that companies that want to increase revenue quickly with your existing sales team can do so by leveraging technology to speed up the sales process. A strategy around using sales 2.0 applications to identify strong/weak prospects should be a key focus for your 2012 sales plan.
Just a quick poll: Are the issues described above the same as for your company?
The best way to increase sales effectiveness is to speed up the research process and then get regular updates on your prospects and the companies they work for. In an article, Forbes spoke with some leaders in sales and got insights on the sales process and what steps sales managers should take to increase their effectiveness on finding more deals and closing them faster.
The overwhelming observations and advice from Wendy Weiss and Paul Castain pointed to finding the right prospects, being more prepared for the call, having intelligence around the prospects, and leveraging non-traditional communications channels to reach prospects.
Paul Castain,Vice President of Jedi Mastery at Castain Training Systems, says a lot of salespeople research a prospect only once during the process. “Business is moving at the speed of light, and things change constantly,” he says. “When you gather information, review it over and over again before you reach out to the client.”
Finding the right prospects to contact shouldn’t be a painful process. Sales intelligence can give you a fresh group of prospects based on sales trigger events in the industry specifically in your territory. These trigger events give you accurate and relevant news about the company or person you are calling. Since we know that most executives will not respond to a cold call, using connections to get introduced is important. If you can’t locate a professional connection to your prospect, use the intelligence you gather through news sources and social media to understand your prospect and make the connection.
Top sales tips to follow
- Approach them before they are in buying mode
- Focus on finding the best prospects
- Stop calling prospects if they are not responsive. Get creative in communications
- Sales people are expected to know about their prospects before the call
- Only talk 20% of the time and listen the other 80%
- Don’t be afraid to ask the tough questions
- Turn rejection into a learning experience
- Never stop learning how to be more effective
Surprisingly there are still a large number of companies that do not leverage sales intelligence. The Aberdeen study on the Science of Sales Intelligence shows that most companies deal with some very specific business pressures that sales intelligence can help with.
- 42% have insufficient knowledge of the business needs of prospects
- 40% do not have the ability to identify the most likely buyers of their product
- 34% complain of having a sales process that is too long
- 21% See an increased customer churn forcing them to focus on filling the funnel
All of these point to companies needing to be more nimble and enabling their sales teams to move faster with more targeted information. What are you going to different in 2012 to address these business issues?
It’s near impossible to be effective in sales without the use of the internet these days. In the 2011 Sales Performance Study by CSO Insights, they researched how sales people were leveraging the internet to get their jobs done.
On average sales reps will spend 24.1% of their time each week on research and lead generation activities. It’s no wonder why sales people go to the internet for help when almost 10 hours a week is spent researching contacts and companies.
The important task of sales research.
The study found that sales research is still the most important activity of how sales people leverage the internet. This is a positive sign in the case that sales people are now at a tipping point when it comes to understanding that it’s more important to sell to people and not contacts. 77.2% of the sales people must be onto something that makes them better at selling.
Now look at the number of people leveraging the internet to actually move people through a sales cycle.
- 56% conduct webinars
- 48% of their time is in web based meetings
- 46% are giving online demos
Sales leaders should be looking for ways to increase these numbers. The best way to do this is to help your sales team on how to be more effective in sales research and decrease the amount of time they spend in that area.
Two flavors of internet research
Companies fall into one of two buckets when it comes to enabling sales people with sales intelligence. Companies either empower their sales people with technology to aid in this effort or they expect a sales person to do all of this on their own. You can imagine what will have a better impact on a sales teams ability to generate more opportunities and increase revenue. The best in class companies which made up 61% of the businesses surveyed leveraged technology to conduct searches for sales reps while 37% left the work up to the individual sales rep.
Spending 10 hours a week on research obviously takes a toll on winning more deals. Though research is important, companies should be looking at ways to increase the amount of time sales people are actually selling.
Your professional connections can create new opportunities.
To be an effective sales person, it’s best to know how connections you have can get you into new accounts. Instead of relying on more data and names of contacts to call, leveraging intelligence in your sales process can build your pipeline faster. We are expanding further on our lead of people insights of selling to people not contacts. Connection based prospecting is a enhanced way of identifying prospects that you have direct connections to through co-workers, past employers or reference accounts.
Leverage your existing connections for accelerated pipeline growth.
Having connections into a prospect company makes getting in contact with a decision maker much easier. If you foster your professional connections correctly, your network should be happy to introduce you to someone within their company and make a warm introduction. Maybe you are looking for new accounts to contact and you find out that 4 of your coworkers and 2 people you worked with in the past have direct connections to people in a large account you’d like to talk to. That would make getting a warm introduction easier than trying to figure out how to cold-calling into a prospect.
Instead of blindly targeting companies based on contact data focus on getting new customers based on the number of connections you have into the company. People you work with, reference accounts and past coworkers will add a layer of trust to your communication with a decision maker. Leverage those connections to get an opportunity.
We have several new enhancements in our application this month. You can see more about all of them in the InsideView Community.
Too many sales managers are trying to build their business by using methods that have been outdated for a decade. Imagine going to a doctor that is still practicing medical advice from 1990? Sure they can give some insights and may even be able to help you with whatever is troubling you but their ability to make an impact on your health is determined on old information. Wouldn’t you rather have a doctor that is up to speed on the latest medicines, research and technology? (You don’t have to answer that.)
Understanding the science of sales and how sales intelligence can have an impact on decision makers is a major competitive advantage.
Science of Selling
There was an interesting experiment by the Universite de Bretagne-Sud in France that says people buy more from you when you act like them. By mimicking customer behavior, 78.8% of the customers ended up buying the product. Without mimicking customer behavior, buyers only made a purchase 61.8% of the time. Along with increased likelihood of buying, mimicked customers were more complimentary of the salesperson and the business.
The study abstract states: “An experiment was carried out in a retail setting where four sales clerks were instructed to mimic, or not, some of the verbal expressions and nonverbal behavior of the customers. On their way out, these customers were asked to evaluate the sales clerks and the store. Results showed that mimicry was associated with a higher sales rate, greater compliance to the sales clerk’s suggestion during the selling process and more positive evaluations of both the sales clerks and the store.”
Another study was performed on Duke University undergrads where participants were told that its purpose concerned the impression formation, process and marketing of unfamiliar products. The study was set up to see if a decision maker would/could be influenced to make a purchase based on on a sales person mimicking customer behavior when the decision maker is aware that they are dealing with a salesperson. Turns out the decision maker was over twice as likely to buy when mimicking was employed.
One might have expected that a person who is aware that a salesperson is trying to affect their behavior may try to guard against this influence, thereby being less likely to respond positively toward the product promoted by the salesperson. Instead, the mimicry led to more engagement when the salesperson was highly invested. Thus, in this case there was in fact an observed disassociation between the conscious desire to guard against persuasion and the nonconscious tendency to be engaged.
It’s a common understanding in business that people buy from people and not companies. Having a complete picture of your prospect and understanding how to sell to people and not contacts gives a sales person an definitive advantage.
Neuroscience and buying decisions
Inc.com had an article explaining that companies are starting to look at brain activity during sales presentations see whether or not prospects are being convinced. This technology exists now and is being marketed by a company named Affectiva that is run by David Berman, who was president of sales and service at Webex.
neuroscience is now proving what many sales professionals have long suspected: that decision-making, even among top executives, takes place mostly at a “gut” level.
Measuring emotional arousal via skin conductance that grows higher during states such as excitement, attention, or anxiety and lower during states such as boredom or relaxation can be a game changer for companies trying to get even deeper sales effectiveness during negotiations and sales discovery.
How scientific is your sales process?
Do you really know your customers? All of the research points to the massive effectiveness of sales intelligence. Knowing more about your prospects can make a dramatic impact on your revenue. Aberdeen’s paper on the science of sales intelligence shows even further that companies that invest in knowing more about their prospects reap larger rewards when it comes to building a fatter pipeline and closing more deals.
We are seeing more companies investing in things like adding game mechanics to sales teams to drive performance and that dovetails into ways to be more engaging with prospects with the same mechanics. Customers have evolved, has your sales process evolved in a way that mimics them?
What is a sales objection meeting?
At any point of a sales cycle a prospect may have an objection or a series of objections as to why they can’t or won’t be interested in your product. These can range from things like price, or concerns about what you are offering. Most good sales teams will have a list of common objections and how to address them. Having these increases sales productivity. Every product or service has to know how they are positioned against these objections. In some cases the fact is that certain objections are enough to walk away from the deal. The goal is to have a win-win and though you can handle objections some are more about you as a sales person than what is in your customers best interests. A great company goes one step further and holds a regular meeting to go over these.
How often do you have it.
Holding an objection meeting once a month seems to be best. Either make it a part of your regular sales meeting or have a special meeting specifically to cover these important issues. Since the end of the month is typically hectic for sales people and this is when the objections seem to be the highest, having an objection meeting during this time is counter productive. Keep your sales people selling and have your objection meetings at the beginning of the month. This is a perfect opportunity to go over last month’s deals and get the sales team ready for the next month of selling. Having a sales objection meeting in the begining of the month also help a sales team be better at lead generation and lead qualification.
Why do you have it
Getting the entire sales team together to discuss typical objections being given helps on a few levels. First, identifying new objections helps the sales team collectively work through them. The sales manager can reinforce them across the entire sales team at once instead of on a one-off basis. Second, even your seasoned sales people can learn what objections are being raised in other territories and how the other sales people are addressing them. In many cases your seasoned sales people will be able to help the more junior sales people with ways to work with prospects through these obstacles. Third, building a list of common objections and making sure all of your sales people are on the same page keeps a very consistent message across the company.
Handling and overcoming objections constructively is a critical part of the sales process.
You can prepare yourself for objections or queries before the meeting by:
- researching the client with sales intelligence – they may have particular issues to deal with
- writing down a list of possible objections and deciding on your answers
- covering the objections in your presentation
Listening carefully earlier on in the sales meeting will also help you to prepare for questions later on. Try to establish the real reason behind objections – prospects often use them to stall for time or if they are nervous about making a decision.
Make sure you are:
- clarifying what they are unsure of by repeating it back to them
- asking them if they will be prepared to sign the order if you can show a way to overcome the objection
- setting out how you can resolve the issue
- modifying their expectations to a sensible compromise if you can’t fully resolve the issue
Does your company have sales objection meetings? What else should be covered in them?
Leveraging social media during a sales process can make a huge impact on the deals you are working on. Using Twitter for Sales Intelligence gives sales teams some great insights to the companies and contacts you are targeting. Never before in the history of sales have sales people had the ability to know so much information about the activities of a prospect. Where they travel, who they hang out with, even as much information as how they are feeling. Don’t you think it could make a difference on when you call a prospect based on if they are having a bad day or not? If nothing else, it will let you decide how you approach them.
As more companies and employees start leveraging tools like Twitter for communication you have the opportunity to get a direct line of sight on what’s happening within their worlds.
How Can Sales People Use Twitter For Sales Intelligence and Sales Growth
Based on our research, there is irresistible evidence that Twitter should be a component of a B2B sales person’s tool kit. Here are some easy steps you can take to boost sales using Twitter:
- Create a Twitter account.
- Identify the Twitter profiles of your customers and prospects. The easiest method is to look for the Twitter symbol on the website or to run InsideView to search for contacts with Twitter profiles.
- Create a Twitter List of your target profiles. This will enable you to isolate the tweets from your targets (vs. those form your family and friends).
- Use various Twitter search tools (e.g., search.twitter.com)
Here’s a list of some tid-bits of sales intelligence we came across:
- Customer recommendations
- New company initiatives
- Exhibitions at conferences
- Job openings
- New senior hires
- Articles by executives
- New customer wins
- Product launches
- Awards won
It was a busy month and I’m catching up on some announcements. After the announcement of our prize at Dreamforce, a major announcement with our partner SugarCRM, a new product release with some amazing enhancements, I had some other social projects to work on. One of those projects was a redesign of Social Selling University. SSU was created early this year with a focus in social selling for the enterprise. After a great series of webinars and speaking events, it was clear to everyone that Social Selling University was something we needed to invest more resources into. That started with a better looking website.
New Social Selling University Website
Social Selling by definition is the use of sales 2.0 tools to identify and engage prospects to create new opportunities and drive revenue. The biggest obstacles I encounter when talking to sales teams is that even though they are familiar with social media on a personal level, they don’t know where to start when it comes to applying these tools to their professional life.
Social Selling University is broken into 4 main parts that are designed to offer education and resources to sales people that want to know more about leveraging social media for sales.
The amount of content is growing and we are just about to roll out our next series of webinars featuring sales experts and training on ways to make the most out of Twitter, LinkedIn and other social tools that can get you more connected with your prospects.
