Brian has an interesting little fable that he wrote about thirsty sales people and dirty water. Funny.

I disagree, a bit. Thirsty salespeople (at least those that you SHOULD have hired) are like particular cats. Even if they're extremly thirsty, they're not going to drink crap. They want fine filtered water, just your sales people should demand fine filtered and qualified, univerally defined leads. If they're not demanding pure leads, and you're not giving pure leads to them, you have problems at both ends of the drinking fountain. Upon finding this out, you should:

1. Fire those sales people that settle for mediocrity. If they're drinking crappy water and liking it, imagine what they're feeding to your customers
2. Raise the standards of your lead gen staff. You customers can sense what's going on inside too.

Brian's got some good ideas on ensuring that sales leads are followed up on. Time and time again I've seen this issue in lead development departments. Usually, it's a failure a leadership and process.

7 major stages of effective lead management:
1. Lead Generation
2. Lead Qualification
3. Lead Refinement
4. Lead Distribution
5. Lead Follow-up
6. Lead Tracking and reporting
7. Lead Nurturing

The media often talk about marketing, whether it is about branding or CRM, but very few pay too much attention outside the marketing arena to the hard work of salespeople and how the two functions should work more and more together. So with an eye on encouraging people to think outside the box, Andrew Dugdale, the managing director of Intellectual Capital Development Limited (ICDL) and a member of the Marketing and Sales' Standards Setting Body (MSSSB), recently developed a strategic partnership with the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management (ISMM) to Inform and Educate salespeople.

After reading the press release 3 times, I still don't really get what all of these organizations are doing, and moreover, why the hell don't we have something like this going on in the US? Seriously, it looks as though they are working on an unprecedented sales training tool called "The Sales Accelerator" which, allegedly, "is flexible enough to accommodate the idiosyncrasies that users might need, whilst being structured enough to provide an audit trail through a robust sales' process for corporate governance purposes. Its ability to integrate with marketing and service functions is also attractive."

The idea is that this tool will assist salesforces by enabling them to take more responsibility and ownership of their daily tasks, while providing them with motivational tools and a link to the marketing communications' message. The audit trails, which are a key part of the Sales' Accelerator's capabilities, allow each individual and team to see how they and their companies can benefit. The key to success, he believes, is always going to be down to understanding the customers' pains: how you can cure them, and thus encourage loyalty and advocacy.

Alas, any myriad of consortiums that are working on the goals that these organizations have bears mentioning.

For more info, you can check in with any of the following acronyms

ICDL - Intellectual Capital Development Limited
ISMM - Institute of Sales and Marketing Management
MSSSB - Marketing and Sales' Standards Setting Body

Hi folks, I'm wondering if any of you have experience in working with corporate customer visits and can shed some light on the issues highlighted below, and address some of the questions posed. Thanks!

The Challenge:
The current state of the customer visit experience, that being, when customers visit the corporate headquarters for account reviews or similar meetings, is workable, and we get customers through the building with some efficiency, but there is a great deal of friction between the host, the speakers, the customers, and the process that binds them all together to provide a positive customer visit experience.

The Goal:
I am seeking to gain insights from others on how they handle their customer visits at their companies and what makes them successful. To that end, I have a few questions below that I hope will prime the pump and get the juices flowing on what makes a 'world-class' customer visit experience.

The Questions:
1. If you have a form or system that you use to collect information from sales people when they request a customer visit, what data do you collect from them?

2. What do you feel is the most unique element of your company's customer visit experience?

3. Who in your company is responsible for overseeing the customer visit experience?

4. How do you 'market' the value of the customer visit to the sales force?

5. How do you hold your hosts, presenters, and executives accountable for timely submission of their deliverables such as presentations or agenda items?

6. What indicators does the host receive throughout the customer visit
planning process to indicate that everything is being taken care of and that there will be no surprises on visit?

7. What are the different reasons that you would have customers visit your facility? Prospecting, issue resolution, account reviews??

I'm working on a project where a company is creating a mission/vision for their sales operations team, but is challenged with defining some of the functional areas that typically fall within the sales ops realm. They're seeking this information for the purpose of long-range planning and to get a sense of where to shoot for in terms of world-class sales operations performance.

My questions:
- What are some of the basic functional areas of your sales operations department?
- How does your sales ops team collaborate with other teams in the organization?
- Any ideas on resources for best practices in sales ops?

Below are some ideas that I have on the 'functional areas of responsibility' of sales ops, as fuel for the conversation.

Sales Operations Functional Areas of Focus
* Sales support
* Sales forecasting
* Sales communication
* Sales compensation & remuneration
* Sales Management Operating System (SMOS)
* Sales metrics
* Sales productivity
* Sales technology / SFA / CRM
* Sales processes & sales process change management
* Sales milestones
* Sales reporting (up to management & down to sales, customers, vendors, partners)
* Sales Training
* Sales/Customer information management
* Sales information portals

Thanks!

Justin just dropped a little present in our email boxes on some of the basics on really tracking lead conversion from acquisition to closure. These are absolute imperatives if you want to ensure the effectiveness of your lead generation efforts. It's pretty amazing how few companies actually know, I mean KNOW their conversion rates for leads along the sales cycle, and are doing something about actively improving both the process and the subsequent results.

It is critical that your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system not only support customer retention but the cultivation of lead conversion. This double duty helps tune your efforts to increase lead quality with less effort.

For CRM to track lead conversion efforts it must:

1. Track lead sources at the point of first contact. Collect everything you need to know to match a lead with a marketing effort; including ad codes, medium, and lead source. These details help you determine the return on specific marketing investments.
   
2. Record every interaction from lead to point of sale. Track everything you do to qualify a lead for a certain solution so that you know what made a sale. Use contact histories to build an understanding of what makes a good lead who becomes a customer.
   
3. Connect with your accounting system to place transaction values on leads. Use real accounting information to gain a clear picture of your cost per sale. This value tells you how much you can invest in lead generation to remain profitable.
   
4. Use reporting to understand the value of a customer across all lead sources. If you're not using a customer profitability scoring system, then at least have reports for Recency-frequency-monetary (RFM) measures. Identify your most cost effective lead generation sources that are most likely to produce a conversion.
   
5. Clearly define your sales pipeline early. Track leads into a sales pipeline with a standard means of developing accurate forecasts. It's critical that you always have a clear picture of potential cash flow as it pertains to your lead generation efforts.
   
6. Sales, marketing, and service departments must all use CRM. Often only pockets of customer-facing professionals use CRM when everyone should use it. Customize each group's access to serve their needs, combine departmental databases into this single interface.
   
7. Make CRM a universal collection point for all interactions. Often today's unqualified leads have a high potential to become buyers later. Use one system to create the most complete picture of everyone who interacts with your organization.
   
8. Let CRM assist in literature fulfillment to new leads. Track marketing materials sent to each lead and how they respond. Most companies don't know which information has influenced a purchase decision; use CRM to make this clear to you.
   
9. Create a single source for all customer account details. From lead generation to repeat purchase, your CRM system can track every detail. Use this system to track customer history as they cycle through your company into leads for other products.
   
10. Maintain and clean your data regularly. You'll save money, resources, and time if you update all your records regularly with standardization tools. If possible, quarterly correct addresses, verify phone numbers, and update demographic information with third party sources.

Forrester reports that only 165,000 out of 1.8 million online sales leads are closed by the auto industry each month. This is a problem with lead processing technologies and follow up. Forrester suggests better performance could increase online vehicle sales by 40%. The auto business simply doesn't acknowledge that their customers are interested in shopping for vehicles online.

From a cost per lead perspective, not paying enough attention to the web is foolish. Just look at these cost per lead numbers from Safa Rashtchy.

Thanks to Fred the VC for the link and John Batelle for the image.

What is amazing to me about the chart is not that paid search is the lowest cost direct marketing medium, we all know that. It's that email is right behind and almost as cost effective. If that's the case, why is paid search growing so much faster than email (CAN-SPAM, fear, etc...???)?

This is one measurement of how cheap the leads are, which is easy to understand. However, you have to look at the closure and conversion rates of each lead type, the average revenue/order size from each lead type, and the profitability of each lead type to ensure that you're getting positive, measurable ROI from each lead source.

This issue of lead follow-up and a lack of detailed lead knowledge is probably the same for a lot of companies out there. Have you looked at the conversion process and conversion rates for your leads recently?

[via BeConnected]

Dave at B2Blog asks "Why pay sales reps commission?" To which, I submit the following reply. Some of this post won't make sense out of the context of his, so please have a gander at what he has to say as well...

...................................................
You can argue this a number of ways, but those in the 'sales compensation' circle will argue that persons in the traditional sales function are, by nature (or nurture?) driven in part by a variable financial elememnt to their work.

Whether or not it is 'bad' for a client to call a rep to ask questions is another matter, and one of role definition and how you've equipped your reps to effectively deal with the customer, and lastly, the customer - the element in the equation over which you have the least control. At the heart of your questions is the question "What is the purpose of the sales force?" To which, I pull an answer from Neil Rackham's "Rethinking the Sales Force" - Your sales force exists to "communicate the value of your offerings to the consumer." Vague, I know, but in essense, they have that direct contact with the customer to do just that.

Typically, sales reps are compensated with variable financial rewards for the value they bring, but that in and of itself is an inssue sustained over time, in large part, to sales' reluctance to engage in a value-driven process approach, leaving us to continuously question what sales is for, how to pay them, and how to quantify their efforts, while in contrast, we wouldn't dare think of challenging our manufacturing engineers and technicians with the same questions because we have relatively quantative answers for those questions.

Your issues, as I see them, are ones of process. Certainly, politics and history trump process if you let them, but if you clearly define and adhere to sales processes, like you adhere to manufacturing processes, you're on your way to answering many of the questions you posed.

So, I've been travelling with some of our finest sales reps for the last couple of days, doing my best to assess what it is that they do in the field, and how I, as the sales operations dude can help them. I realized today after some discussion that I had never really explained the 'role' of sales operations to the sales manager, nor had anyone else for that matter. I realized at that point that we might need to start even further back up the food chain by properly positioning my team and my counterparts for the salesforce. Seriously folks, if a 20 year veteran of your company has no idea what your dept does, and it's your job to help them, you have a bit of a communication issue.

The greater question that I had, as I was explaining my sales operations team, was:

What, exactly, IS Sales Operations? Or, better yet, what is Sales Operations at YOUR company.

Lori, the Sales Process Diva, brings up a couple of good points about lowering your SG&A, namely, using the phone more effectively and asking better qualifying questions of your customers. I agree that these are positive steps, but these are things that most major sales teams have down (I hope). Many sales teams could benefit significatnly from raising the bar on how they view which customers they will pursue and keep, and how they will go-to-market with their sales & service offerings.

More Profitable Face Time:
Instead of focusing on face-time with customers that merely have an interest in your product (as opposed to those who don’t because you didn’t ask them if they did), your sales management should be better focused on whether or not these customers are going to be profitable for you to take on. Moreover, each sales manager should be looking at his team’s book of business and ranking customers by profitability and trimming or shifting (more on that in a bit) an arbitrary percentage of bottom feeders on a regular basis.

The discipline to do this does not happen overnight. In fact, it’s a lot of hard work. However, when I’ve talked about managing your customers like a stock portfolio, this is exactly the type of action you can take with that level of discipline in your data. Further, you will start to develop certain predictors (SIC code, inflection points, management changes, regulatory influences, and the like) which predict how prospective customers might fit into a more profitable book of business for your team.

Bound By Channels:
Maybe your customers aren’t profitable because it’s costing you too much to service them through your direct sales force. Time that your field sales people spend on the phone is time away from customers, and it’s still costing you the same. If you really want to get sales people in front of the most profitable customers, a few changes are in order.

• Move prospecting, qualification, lead generation and appointment setting to an in house corporate channel
  
• Shift sales of a certain profitability metric or size of sale into channels with lower transaction costs
  
• Arm sales management with the appropriate tools to coach a sales team on how to seek out and retain the most profitable business for their channel
  
• Offload or outsource non-value-adding or non-value-enabling tasks from the sales force onto sales support teams.
  
• Diligently craft effective and thorough customer communication processes to ensure that sales people are always on target with their message and not explaining away the latest corporate disconnect.

These are but a few thoughts on fostering a culture of productivity and profitability within your sales organization.

Jill Konrath puts an excellent spin on the concept of rejection in sales prospecting. I like the approach because it is along the lines of how I'll be approaching my lead development processes for a position that I'm hiring for.

With a "market research" perspective in your mind, you're then free to explore other options because it's not about you. It's simply about how they reacted in a given set of circumstances which can easily be changed.

Viewing their behavior as data, enables you to test a variety of approaches. For example, you might want to test:

- A different value proposition.
- The time of day you called.
- The flow and structure of your phone call.
- Various responses to "We already have a supplier."

A market research perspective on rejection gives you the freedom to experiment with multiple sales strategies.

I've been working on some ideas for boosting salesforce morale and have come up with the following things that some of you might find interesting. Additionally, I'm looking for ideas that you all have on which tactics you've used in the past in the face of flagging morale in your sales teams. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Basic Strategies:

1. Monthly and weekly success, wins & recognition communication
   
2. Periodic one-on-one calls from executive leadership to reward individuals
   
3. Sales SPIFS (sales performance incentive fund) and contests to drive behavior
   
4. Team building events – training and trust building
   
5. Sales team involvement in process design & corporate change initiative teams
   
6. Sales team scoreboard - % to goal on sales, initiatives, and qualitative data on successes

1. Weekly sales team voicemail/call in with highlights of sales person successes rolled up from managers
   
2. Develop a communication matrix for individual sales and corporate leadership recognition of each sales persons’ wins.
   
3. Team building events for regional sales teams led by their manager.
   
4. Sales VP roadshow where the VP of sales had a dinner and a morning meeting with a regional sales team. Candor and informal discussion are encouraged.
   
5. Involve sales team in corporate change initiatives and process design teams where processes touch the sales force
   
6. Sales team scoreboard with monthly updated metrics on sales performance, big wins, % to goal on current initiatives, and narratives on positive performance or issues for discussion.
   
7. Monthly ‘fun’ award for the salesperson who did the most ??? during the month (can be moved to quarterly, based on commitment).
   
8. Create a quarterly close-ended SPIF or promotion to incentivize sales for accomplishing the top initiative of that quarter.
9. Recognize the top X # of sales people for their performance against plan.
   
10. “Drive-time” calls with a member of sales leadership or support team leadership on a monthly basis. A subject matter expert leads the sales team through a ½ hr topical discussion on handling an acute issue that they’re facing in the field.
    

If anyone knows of some great weblogs on sales, sales technology, & sales process, please put them in the comments. My new role has me seeking out these sources of information, and I'm hard pressed to find as many on those topics as there are on some other topics like Internet Marketing.

So far, I've got a couple in the blogroll like the B2B Lead Generation blog and the new weblog by Jill Konrath, called the "Selling to Big Companies Blog."

Hiring salespeople for a small business is always a tough gig. There are soooo many duds, and unless you have systems and processes in place for them, you're going to be treading water for a while. Sitepoint had a great article today on The Care and Feeding of Sales People for web design businesses, which covers how to get them, and how to keep them - productive. It's a great piece overall, and applies to much more than web design businesses.

[via SitePoint - The Care and Feeding of Sales People by Andrew Neitlich]