Many technology vendors leverage the channel to power their growth and use one model or a combination of selling models for demand generation:

Vendor Led Selling

A small number of technology companies initiate all outbound calling internally.  Once qualified, the tech vendor will pass the leads to partners for engagement.   For example, one fast-growing $1 billion tech vendor avoids funding partner outbound calling but rather centralizes all outbound prospecting within their call center.   Another $1.5 billion tech organization calls against lists shared by partners and only passes leads to partners once qualified.

Vendor led demand generation can move very quickly to focus on high potential segments, leverage high quality and well targeted lists, and deliver on-target messaging by well-trained sales reps.

However, very few tech vendors use this model singularly due to the costs, resources and talent required.

Partner Led Selling

Tech vendors offer partners a menu of marketing programs and tactics that enable partner to generate leads without the tech vendor participating in the calling.    Like many tech organizations, Microsoft and Cisco enable thousands of their partners to create lead generation programs through self-service marketing portals.

By leveraging partner sales teams, tech vendors can lower their cost of sale, expand coverage and leverage partner customer lists.

Collaborative Selling

Tech vendors often team with their partners on selling.

Co-selling takes many forms: telesales, face-to-face sales meetings or at events, where both vendor and partner participate.

For example, one large software company runs a call blitz day that includes over 1,500 sales people at 300 partners.

Call blitzes provide tech vendors and their partners with a singular and compelling event to collaboratively generate demand.    This urgency and purpose drives sales activity and results.

An effective approach to align tech vendors and partners is in co-selling through a call blitz.    The collaboration is accelerated when training, coaching and incentives are included.

This model includes many of the advantages associated with vendor and partner led demand generation but does require mutual planning.

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The moment of truth arrives when a prospect is engaged in a meaningful interaction with your organization.

For B2B marketers that key point is the response generated from a marketing effort through direct, online or social media marketing.

For sales, it is the sales conversation: that defining moment when a prospect is engaged, qualified and profiled through a dynamic dialog.

The sales conversation is being shaped by a number of strong forces:

1. Buyers increasingly prefer online and telephone discussions rather than face-to-face discussions.  By necessity or due to communications and online research preferences, buyers have moved away from face-to-face meetings.   For more on this, read the post: Selling to the Digital Buyer.
2. Buyers don’t find value in sales discussions.   Surveys of buyers identify a crisis in the sales conversation:  McKinsey found that the two most destructive sales behaviors were inadequate product knowledge and excessive customer contact. In IDC‘s 2010 IT Customer Experience study, over 50% of IT sales reps are showing up to their prospect and customer meetings ‘unprepared’.   Forrester Research reports that only 15% of executives believe that sales meetings live up to expectations.
3. New offerings lower buyer risk and the need for face-to-face meetings.     Buyers can take lengthy free trials and upgrade to a fully functional solution later (i.e. the freemium model).    Products can be purchased is small quantities (i.e. online data) or rent, rather than buy, a solution that is hosted off-premise (i.e. SaaS, hosted solutions).
4. The weak economic outlook is causing organizations to economize on sales models.    Creating less resource intensive selling models is a priortiy for many organizations.

The nature of the sales conversation changes depending on the type of sales: inside sales, outside/field sales and hybrid sales – a combination of both inside and outside sales.

One of the largest beneficiaries of changing nature of the sales conversation is the inside sales function.   

CSO Insights,  a B2B sales researcher, recently released their 2010 Telemarketing Inside Sales Optimization survey. 

According to Barry Trailer, Managing Partner for CSO Insights.

There’s a great deal happening in Inside Sales and it’s all very exciting.  The adoption of enabling technology, higher percentage of leads being generated by marketing, and anticipated growth in telesales teams this year all suggest this is going to be an increasingly important segment of companies’ overall revenue mix.

The research indicates that one in seven firms plans to increase telemarketing/inside sales reps by more than 20%.

Last year, in a brief entitled ‘The Rapid Rise of Inside Sales’, SiriusDecisions, a provider of B2B research and advisory services in sales and marketing, is bullish on the prospects for inside sales predicting a doubling of the revenue contribution of inside sales to overall corporate revenue.

For buying models that require face-to-face interaction, the opportunity is not to eliminate face-to-face but  judiciously mix telephone and online dialog with face-to-face meetings as the buying cycle dictates.

Stuart Armstong, in a comment on my earlier blog post, pointed out some research from Forbes Insight indicates that the majority of business owners and CXO level executives prefer face-to-face meetings (albeit that the research brief is slanted to appeal to the hotel industry and seems to fly in the face of the analyst research listed above).  One of the conclusions by Forbes Insight drawn from the research is that:

Web-, video- and teleconferencing have their role, but the executives in the survey do not expect them to make the need for face-to-face meetings obsolete. Rather, many see the ideal as a mix of face-to-face and technology enabled meetings and conferences.

Question:  How do you perceive sales models and the sales conversation changing?    
 

Related Posts
Selling to the Digital B2B Buyer
Destructive B2B Sales Practices
Insights on the Outbound Renaissance

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Buyers who are at ease in researching, communicating, collaborating and buying on the internet are choosing to do business differently.  

And I am not referring to the ‘Lost Generation’: those dying breed of executives who ask their executive assistants to print out their emails.  

In a recent blog post, Steve Woods notes that:   

As the emphasis on face-to-face interaction as a way to build trust decreases in lieu of other ways of building trust, the need to be “in the field” also decreases.  

With the recession, corporations are pressured to cut sales costs.  Steve Woods cites a stellar blog post from David Skok that compares the relative efficiency of different B2B selling models.  

But if B2B sales teams reduce the amount of face-to-face selling time in favor of more efficient sales models using the web and telephone, will B2B buyers be receptive?  

In fact, B2B buyers have been driving this change for some time and the pace is accelerating:  

1. The buying process starts online and so do sales meetings -  Given that most buying is initiated with online search, buyers are naturally becoming more accepting of interactions with sales via web conference, email and online chat.   These buyers expect a fast response from an informed sales rep and will not wait for the time it takes to schedule an in-person meeting.
2. The digital buyer prefers data to voice -   The social B2B buyer is more than likely on Facebook at home and at work,  on email and LinkedIn.  The buyer favors producing content that  is written (data) and not spoken (voice).  This week Facebook announced that  it has reached 500 million users. LinkedIn has over 70 million members worldwide.  Not only is this communication data-driven but it is now mostly mobile: mobile data eclipsed voice traffic in December 2009.
3. The buyer is not at the office – How you can you meet face-to-face when your prospect is not at the office?    The B2B buyer’s office is often in motion (e.g. plane, trains & automobiles) or a home office.    The door to your customer is opened through their mobile device and not a fixed position PC.
4. The buyer is time-starved – Buyers face inordinate demands on their time.  Meeting face-to-face is becoming less frequent due to jam-packed schedules.   The Corporate Leadership Councial found that the “average ‘job footprint’ (what a worker is expected to do) has increased by a third since the beginning of the recession” (see the Economist for more details).   In  the new book “Snap Selling“, Jill Konrath diagnoses the buyer as suffering from:    Frazzled Customer Syndrome, a debilitating condition brought on by excessive workloads, 24/7 availability, information overload, lack of sleep, and job-related stress.
5. The World (of Buyers) is Flat – Evaluation teams are dispersed across the country and even around the world.     Meeting face-to-face with all team members is not a possibility given the dispersed nature of buying teams.

Do you sense that buyers are less reluctant to meet in-person?   What are you seeing out there in the market? 

Related Posts By Robert Lesser 
Destructive B2B Sales Practices 
The Buyer is Alway’s Right. (Not!) 
Use Outbound Marketing to Target these 5 Buyer Types

In my first post, I described five buyer types that are best reached through outbound sales and marketing.

Then I reviewed the benefits that accrue to marketing from outbound marketing: ROI, market insight and a robust database.

With marketing contributing at most 40% of sales’ leads, outbound lead generation is critical for most organizations.

It is rare to find a sales team that achieves its goals only based on inbound inquiries and referrals.

Despite the noise in the marketplace, most B2B marketers are looking to develop an optimal mix of outbound and inbound marketing, where each type of marketing works together to enhance results.

But let’s face it…outbound sales is a thorny activity saddled with negative connotations.

Inbound is simple in its elegance: build relevant content and they will come.

However, it’s not that straightforward.

The reality is that most inbound marketers conduct outbound marketing. Yes, even HubSpot has a large, outbound calling telesales team.

It’s important to differentiate between responders and inquiries. Responders have indicated interest in an offer while an inquiry is requesting a sales call. A responder is probably more interested in your offer than your solution.

Inbound marketing will engage many prospects but only a small fraction will ‘raise their hand’ to speak to the sales team.

Sales is then engaged to call responders to identify the buyers vs. the information gatherers amongst highly scored prospects.

This is outbound, unsolicited calling. The responders did not request a call nor did the responders expect to receive a call from your sales team.

Sales organizations are always cold calling. Sales people cold call every day. To expand business in an existing account, a sales person asks for a referral to another division. A sales person calls a new account that shares key pain points with a current customer.

Some would call these efforts ‘warm calling’. Not so. This is a vendor-centric view that recognizes that the sales person is ‘warmed-up’. From a prospect or customer-centric perspective, there is no direct relationship. Rather, the prospect recognizes that the sales person is an ‘informed stranger’ who is conducting a cold call.

Account-Based Marketing is rifle-shot outbound marketing. If your organization sells gear to telcos, the global target market is approximately 40 accounts. Account-based marketing or marketing to accounts as a single market favors precise sales and marketing outbound strategies.

Alignment to sales territories favors outbound marketing. Similar to account-based marketing, the definition of a finite list of named accounts will yield a market that can be communicated to with outbound, customized messaging to unique segments. For example, an organization could target five verticals with 1,000 accounts in each vertical with vertical-specific messaging. Email, direct mail and outbound calling are often successfully deployed here.

Outbound sales and marketing play a vital role in complementing inbound and filling gaps that inbound cannot address. With optimization of the mix between inbound and outbound, B2B organizations will enhance the alignment between sales and marketing and build better demand generation programs that meet buyer needs.

Photo Credit: Robert Lesser

A few weeks ago, my firm was invited by a large California-based tech organization to respond to a telesales RFP.

Given the terms & conditions that were included, the client’s legal counsel was involved in the creation of the RFP.

Yet, this organization requested that each bidder record all calls.

The irony for this tech company in California calling Californians, is that their request could create a legal liability.

If your telesales team is making calls from the USA to California, it is illegal under California law to call record and call monitor without the consent of all parties on the call. See an excerpt below from the California Penal Code (Note: for appropriate interpretation of the law, please seek legal counsel as this blog post does not constitute legal advice. Sorry my one college course in business law doesn’t cut it.)

632. (a) Every person who, intentionally and without the consent of all parties to a confidential communication, by means of any electronic amplifying or recording device, eavesdrops upon or records the confidential communication, whether the communication is carried on among the parties in the presence of one another or by means of a telegraph, telephone, or other device, except a radio, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500), or imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding one year, or in the state prison, or by both that fine and imprisonment.

There are eleven other states that require this consent from all parties on a call: Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Washington. (For an overview by state and by country, see Wikipedia’s coverage of telephone recording laws).

Beyond the legal implications, there are nagging questions about the business case for call recording and whether viable alternatives have been adequately considered.

I sense that many executives believe that all front office contact center functions should record calls. However the nature of the beast is very different for inside sales versus technical support and customer service.

Certainly those customers with a strong relationship could be judiciously targeted by inside sales. A customer would be more receptive when notified of a call recording.

Here are a few reasons why I believe that recording calls is a poor practice for inside sales when calling prospects (rather than customers).

Announcing the intent to record the call will address telephone recording laws but will leave prospects cold. When a customer calls tech support or customer service, most customers are willing to be recorded as common practice and as a reasonable exchange for having their issue addressed. Imagine outbound calls to prospects from inside sales that would be prefaced by: “This call may be recorded for the purpose of quality assurance and quota attainment” . Prospects will have no patience or inclination to cooperate with inside sales by agreeing to record the call, especially when their relationship is marginal at best.

Listening to call recordings is drudgery and unproductive. Any manager with a team quota and a sense of priority will minimize the time spent on listening to recordings.

Prospect satisfaction is not on the corporate radar screen. Technical support and customer service are critical to customer retention. Call recording is standard procedure for these two departments. But for inside sales, is prospect satisfaction a priority? Win/loss analysis is common but I have yet to find an organization that survey’s its prospects early in the buying cycle to gauge the impact of inside sales.

Let’s take a closer look at some alternatives to call recording:

Call Monitor, don’t Call Record – for the states where this is permissible, monitor the calls of inside sales but do not record the conversation.

Role Play – if the goal is to train and coach inside sales, role playing is preferable to recording calls. It is very beneficial for inside sales reps to role play with internal staff who have customer insight. An even better approach is for inside sales reps to role play with cooperative customers. We have found this to be invaluable given the rich feedback provided instantaneously by the customer.

Exception-based Assessments – rather than measuring the activity (i.e. conversations), focus on measuring the results (qualified, sales-ready leads, pipeline impact, closed sales). Leakages from the pipeline should be tracked to determine trends. Interviews can be conducted with prospects who ‘leaked from the funnel’ to see if buyer needs were addressed and if the telesales rep was successful in meeting those needs.

For example, the field sales team at one our clients complained about the quality of the leads that we generated. According to sales, the prospects were not evaluating.

An audit of those leads by my firm indicated that not only were those prospects evaluating but the leads purchased a solution from a competitor to our client.

When presented with this information, the sales team sheepishly admitted that those leads were never contacted.

The moral of the story is that a call recording of our initial conversation would not have addressed the issue raised by our client’s sales team. Only by conducting a post-mortem lead audit, could we uncover the truth.

Are the penalties and enforcement of call recording laws inconsequential to you?

Or have you implemented alternatives to call recording?

Photo Credit: Matti Mattila