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

Photo Credit

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

The day long event featured provocative presentations and success stories on innovative approaches for sales to better meet the advanced needs of buyers and lower the cost of lead generation and selling.

Geoffrey James, blogger of the Sales Machine, proved his mettle as the ‘Blogging Machine’ by publishing a ‘running update’ of the conference. Check out this unbelievable recap of the Sales 2.0 Conference.

In the afternoon, I sat at the blogging table (distinguished by having its own power supply) with Ardath Albee who authored these two posts on the conference: here and here.

By the end of the day, the bar was open and David Thompson, co-founder/CEO Genius was doing stand-up Sales 2.0 comedy (read David’s post on the success of this Conference series).

As we were packing up, Ardath and I reflected on the challenges that attendees will face in implementing many of the compelling ideas.

It’s with this in mind, that I thought I would share a perspective on making the most from this thought-provoking conference:

Make sure the basics are covered – Sales & marketing alignment continues to be a thorn in the side of Sales 2.0. Ensure that sales and marketing agree on target marketing, messaging, lead definitions, SLAs, key metrics and demand generation workflow.

Fit to Strategy – How do these tools and practices fit to your organization’s strategy? Increase sales conversion? Lower costs? Given that many of the Sales 2.0 tools are SaaS based and easy to deploy, there are few obstacles to get up & running. Fit to strategy will be the one of key considerations.

The best ideas can be mapped on a grid with High Impact on one axis and Ease of Deployment on another. This will help prioritize what might be a lengthy list and plan for a rollout of your ideas over a longer term.

Customer Insight – It all starts with the customer and now the customer is in the driver’s seat. Without customer insight, we substitute our personal opinion as a proxy for that of the customer leading to inappropriate conclusions and costly mistakes.

Culture – This may be the most substantial obstacle. With this economy, many organizations may be unwilling to experiment or innovate or do anything that will take away from lead generation and closing deals.

Or perhaps senior management will not buy into Sales 2.0 and refrain from providing the top down momentum to drive Sales 2.0 realignment.

Scott Santucci, Senior Analyst Forrester and speaker at Sales 2.0 San Francisco, wrote this recent post on the significant issues that sales leaders face in instituting change. As a follow-up to the Sales 2.0 Conference, don’t forget to register for Scott’s complimentary teleconference “Are you Mounting a Value-Selling Engine on a Product Selling Chassis?”

The best of success to you in rolling out your Sales 2.0 initiatives!

Photo Credits: Robert Lesser

Top Photo: Chicago skyline from Millennium Park
Middle Photo: Dave Fitzgerald, VP Sales, Brainshark & Dan Demko, President, SBTV.com
Bottom Photo: Kevin Hooper, VP, Technology Solutions Group, Hewlett-Packard Company

I spoke with Travis prior to his appearance on a panel discussing ‘Sales Lead Management 2.0′ at the Sales 2.0 Conference in Boston.

Network Solutions has expanded its offering beyond domain registration to online services in such areas as search marketing (SEM), ecommerce, website design and hosting with customers spending from $500 to $50,000 per month. Approximately 300 direct sales reps target small businesses across the US.

One of my questions to Travis concerned buyer dissatisfaction. According to a recent survey, a large issue for buyers are sales reps who make promises that are then broken when the prospect becomes a customer.

Travis admitted that Network Solutions is still working on aligning sales and service. Travis believes that buyer dissatisfaction with broken promises is a problem with most sales channels, especially those selling complex products.

At Network Solutions, a significant amount of training is conducted with sales reps on how to set customer expectations.

A wiki has been created with Salesforce.com, Network Solutions’ sales CRM system, that helps reps find answers to their questions. All collateral and training materials are posted to Salesforce.com including a one page cheat sheet with FAQ.

With Travis sitting in the middle of sales and service, he has found that he can cut through the ‘BS’ (note to reader: Travis is not referring to the balance sheet).

Network Solutions tracks all cancellations by reason and by solution. Travis’ team can quickly determine if training is the root cause of an issue.

Travis discussed with me some of the Sales 2.0 tools that have improved his team’s decision-making, lowered costs, enhanced customer value and allowed Travis to manage a widely-dispersed and mobile workforce:

For more on Travis’ panel at the Sales 2.0 Conference, tune in to this blog or my tweets at www.twitter.com/RobertLesser.

At the Summit, the brainpower on the podium and in the audience was in stark contrast to the barren, rocky hills and deserts of Nevada.

SiriusDecisions has created a unique event that draws both senior sales and marketing management to the latest research and lead practitioners in B2B sales and marketing.

Fortunately the Sirius folks mostly stick to standard industry lingo with only a few exceptions (e.g. waterfall vs. the sales funnel and demand creation vs. demand generation).

The speakers were all top notch, with the exception of one marketing executive who bored the audience with superficial content. A hallmark of the calibre of the presenters was that not one presenter stood behind the podium, but rather all walked the stage.

Go hear Don Friedman speak. Don is Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at CA, who I previously met at the Frost & Sullivan Summit last summer.

Don can be given credit for turning around CA’s marketing organization.

When he joined CA a few years ago, twelve former CA executives had been ‘charged or wearing ankle bracelets’. There was no strategy, no budget process, 135 customer databases, multiple ERP systems and over 1,600 products – to name just a few challenges.

The customer insight that propelled Don’s vision was that customers were overwhelmed by complexity.

Don knew that he had developed a compelling solution when the new product developed by CA elicited ‘utopian’ comments from customers.

After his presentation, I asked him if he was challenged by senior management and had to make compromises on his marketing plan. Don replied that this was a daily occurrence.

Prior to her presentation on the following day, I sat next to Heather Loisel, VP of Marketing Operations, SAP for dinner. We discussed why B2B marketers were struggling. Heather compared Tom Hanks in the movie `Big` to tech organizations. We had grown so fast that our infrastructure couldn`t keep up.

Heather`s can-do attitude was highighted in her presentation as she imparted such advice as:

• Demonstrate value by providing insights that others don’t have and initial, don`t expect
• Balance program mix with projects that don`t rely on IT
• Create a dialogue of progress with regions & stakeholders
• Ask yourself: who is responsible for the change that you advocate? If you don`t know, nothing will happen.

After two days of top notch presentations, I retired to the pool to play a fiercely contested battle of pool volleyball with Rich Eldh, Managing Director and Co-Founder of SiriusDecisions and his team. I call for a rematch in Arizona next year…..how about it Rich?