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Posts Tagged ‘Sales Effectiveness’

People Buy from People

Monday, December 7th, 2009

Sales Enablement: People Buy from People
Craig Nelson, CEO, iCentera

Here’s a story from my past that I’d like to share. A gentleman by the name of Len D’Innocenzo said something to me once that has stayed with me over the years.  At dinner, we were discussing what it took to effectively sell in any market, good or bad.  After a big Italian meal, Len says, “Craig, it’s this simple — people buy from people.”  My response was. “That’s it?”  With all the sales methodologies and techniques, positioning and presentation skills, negotiation skills, and other sales disciplines that Len promotes as part of his firm’s sales training, the bottom line is that… people buy from people? 

 

But, given Len’s deep experience in the world of sales, I knew I had to stop and think about what he was saying.  Len had real-world background, he had sold for many years carrying a quota, had managed sales, and had then launched a successful sales training firm.  He went on to say that, in his long career, there was one truth:  if the buyer doesn’t trust the seller and doesn’t believe that the seller is credible or adds value to the selling process, the buyer will not buy from that seller.

 

Len also pointed out that the second most important thing to a buyer is the credibility of the company that the sales person represents.  My response was, “Well, that’s interesting, but you still haven’t mentioned anything about the product.”  Len said with a big smile, “Actually, the product is a distant third in importance to the buyer during the sales cycle.”  He repeated those words — that, from a buyer’s perspective:

            •           People buy from people

            •           Then they buy the company

            •           Then they buy the product

 

That conversation with Len took place more than 10 years ago, and I think it’s fair to say that, in these times, Len’s wisdom is truer than ever.   Most markets today are very competitive, and the threat of being outsold by a more credible and better informed sales rep that adds value to the sale is a very real possibility.  Given today’s tight budgets, a “no” decision results in many deals staying hung up in the sales funnel.  Accelerating new business now requires a well informed sales channel.  Today, information really is power. 

 

If you don’t buy in to this point, stop and think about how well informed today’s buyers are because of the research they do on the Internet before they even connect with your sales channel.

 

Want to impress Len?  Call your customer 3-5 minutes prior to the meeting start time, and be prepared to start the discussion with your insight on the market as it pertains to the customer’s needs.  At the end of the call, clearly differentiate from the competition, expand on the merits of doing business with you and your company, and then confirm your product’s value proposition based on the customer’s needs.  And the key?  Do this every day of your selling career.  

 

If you are in marketing or a product management role, be sure that you have packaged the marketing material and supporting knowledge in a way that can be easily consumed and understood — then track it, measure it, to see if it makes a difference.  If the marketing material doesn’t help to advance the sale, retire it.  If it does, keep it current.  In the end, if the proper knowledge transfer from marketing and PM to sales, and then from sales to your customers daily, you will dramatically improve your sales channel’s ability to add value to the customer’s buying decision. 

 

And if you agree with Len, which I do, this will happen with your own vendors as well.  If a sales person adds value to your day, you will most likely call that person back and, in turn, begin to build a lasting relationship. 

 

No question: people do buy from people. It is that simple.

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Realize the Potential of Social Media to Enable Your Sales

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

Sales Enablement: Realize the Potential of Social Media to Enable Your Sales Channels
Craig Nelson, CEO, iCentera

Today’s best-in-class organizations are coming to understand that their Sales Enablement Platform must incorporate mainstream social media tools and controls to monetize, track, control, and promote best-selling practices to their targeted audiences, including sales, partners, and current customers.  For marketing, this is one more way to “build your bench” of content providers in a controlled way.  Hey, who isn’t looking to do more with less these days and for those that have worked in enablement roles we know all too well that content must evolve to be of value in an ever changing market.   

Here’s what a social-media empowered Sales Enablement Platform can provide for you:

  • A single point of entry to aggregate content from many social media tools, while delivering content that adapts to each user’s profile
  • A controlled and collaborative environment to harness the power of the organic social media content created by field sales, subject matter experts, partners, and customers, without losing the company’s core value proposition
  • A wizard-driven method for creating targeted communities to collaborate across workgroups and organizations
  • Built-in authentication and role-based content management to filter and govern access to sanctioned content, while reducing the concern of unsanctioned information in the hands of sales, partners, and customers
  • A controlled way to capture and publish best practices and their associated tags to aid in locating the content in the context of a sales scenario

A key by-product of introducing social media to sales enablement is the improved collaboration between marketing, sales and ultimately your customer.    Many organizations foster interaction and communication via community portals, discussion forums, embedded chat, content rating, and other disciplines.  But many are now demanding that they expand beyond simple content dissemination to better align marketing and sales using collaborative social media capabilities.  The payoff?  Research shows that sales metrics such as Bid-to-Win Ratio, Revenue per Account, Time-to-Quota, Market Share, and Sales Margins all improve when you effectively embrace social media as part of your marketing and sales efforts. 

What’s your take? Are you seeing the benefits of social media yet within your company? I’d love to engage with you to discuss the topic further.  Please post your comment here.

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The Organization’s Role in 360 Sales Enablement

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

Sales Enablement: The Organization’s Role in the Success of Sales
Craig Nelson, CEO, iCentera

As a sales rep, you learn very quickly the degree of support your organization has in place to enable your selling success.  I’ve had the opportunity to be part of companies that truly believed that, in the end, there are only two kinds of people in a successful company:  1) those who sell; and 2) those who enable sales.  Nowhere is this organizational trait more apparent than within emerging growth companies – firms where every person is working towards the same goals:

•           building great products

•           crafting an easy-to-pitch value proposition

•           creating sales-ready marketing material

•           putting in place a collaborative team-selling environment to make it all work

If you’ve worked for a company like this, you know how exhilarating it is — there’s no time to watch the clock, and the “it’s not my job” mentality simply does not exist.   What we’ve learned having worked for similar companies is that a belief in the need for sales enablement along with technology plays a big part when it comes to making enablement work.  And what we’ve learned at iCentera is that a technology services platform geared to drive sales enablement gives any size company the opportunity to put in place an environment that will bring the weight of their entire organization to every sales call.

Given the current economy combined with a savvier buyer, selling processes and enablement tools must change.  The days of a sales rep equipped with an CRM/SFA tool and static sales intranet portal are over.  The timing is right to do more on the enablement front, but to create a sense of urgency for any new initiative such as sales enablement, may require justification including a quick time-to-value for the business.

Given the need to sell more with less, we are certainly finding there is no shortage of justification for sales enablement today.  A recent research report entitled Uncovering the Hidden Costs of Sales Support, Scott Santucci of Forrester Research tells us there are golden opportunities to improve sales effectiveness, while reducing the cost of sales.  His findings speak for themselves:

•           Technology vendors are spending, on average, 19% of their selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) costs — or $135,262 per quota-carrying salesperson — to support-related activities.

•           Few are aware of this enormous amount because the costs are hidden — tucked away in many different budgets dispersed throughout the organization.

•           Corralling these “random acts of sales support” presents a golden opportunity.

•           By creating a strategic sales enablement program, marketers and sales can drive significant cost savings in the short term, while improving their companies’ competitiveness to thrive in the new growth cycle.

In future blog posts, I’ll cover the building blocks required for sales enablement along with examples of best practices from companies that embrace this notion of true sales enablement, permeating through the entire organization.  Day-to-day, these companies are thinking about the success of sales — or, as one of our customers put it, “Channel First.”  If your organization has a true sales enablement solution combined with the right mentality to enable your channel, both your top and bottom lines will certainly see a positive impact.

What can we do to help you leverage the sales enablement revolution?  Please use the comments section of this blog to ask questions or give us your perspectives. And we’d love to hear from you by phone or email as well.

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360° Sales Enablement

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Sales Enablement: Where We’ve Been, and Where We’re Going
Craig Nelson, CEO, iCentera

Welcome to our new blog! I look forward to engaging with you here whether you are a potential customer, an existing customer or someone who is interested in reading more about sales enablement and the iCentera solution.

As the CEO and co-founder of the company, I believe it’s important for you, our readers, as you’re looking to commit to the deployment of a critical solution like Sales Enablement, to understand how the concepts behind the solution were developed and refined.  In the end, if the solution doesn’t provide real value to the business, and if the end user isn’t involved in the evolution of that solution, then its value to the individual and the organization will be marginal.

The founders of iCentera first introduced in 1991 what we called at the time the “Sales Enablement Website,” while building a U.S. presence for a European CASE Tool Software Company.  Over the past 18 years, a tremendous amount of thought has been put into the fundamentals required to support an expanding sales model.  During the course of building out several companies in the ’90s, the founders of iCentera determined that enabling a sales organization ranging from just six people at the start to 600+ after going public, required much more than simply selling a great product that people loved.  The sales people had to be better, do more, learn on the fly, present value over price, and, if done right, in a sense bring the power of the entire company behind them to every sales call!  If you can do this for your direct sales and channel sales functions, your organization’s ability to ramp in the good times, while maintaining business in the bad times, will also be possible.

Fast-forward to 2009: the opportunity to put in place a Sales Enablement solution is much easier — and really has become mandatory in today’s environment.  We’ve all heard and read more than enough about current economic challenges — the question is what you and your company are doing to ensure your direct and channel sales organizations are successful.  Some of our most successful customers will tell you: you are either in sales or enabling sales.

In the past, the idea was to simply hire a really talented rep with a deep Rolodex.  That’s all changed.  The buyer is now smarter than ever, more cost-conscious than ever, and more risk-averse than ever.  You get the picture:  selling can no longer be an art.  Each sales discussion — whether by phone, web conference, or in person — must be a dialog that adds value to the buyer.  Prospects already know you, your competition, and to some degree the desired solution — before the first call.  Both the sales and buyer’s games have changed.

I appreciate the saying “a rising tide lifts all boats.”  Applied to business times, the late ’90s saw high tides, and almost anyone wanting to sell boats could be in the boat business.  Today, the tide is down for many but, interestingly enough, it is up for a few.  During Q2 2009, we surveyed our customer base of more than 100,000 subscribers to determine, when enabling sales, what is considered high priority going forward.  We found of course that budgets and priorities had dramatically changed during Q1 to respond to difficult economic conditions.  High on the list was to focus on a discipline that we believe is critical to scaling any business: enabling sales and doing so at a lower cost to the business.

Our survey results uncovered the following five items critical to driving sales in 2009:

  • Enable sales productivity
  • Reduce cost of sales
  • Maintain revenues while potentially decreasing “feet on the street”
  • Reduce or eliminate new IT costs required to manage a Sales Enablement solution
  • Empower the business user to manage the solution with quick time-to-value, and gains to be recognized in 2009

Much more will be written about Sales Enablement over the coming months and years as companies look for ways to impact deals sitting in pipelines and forecasted sales that simply aren’t closing.  And we will be adding to that body of knowledge here on our new blog with a concept that we feel is uniquely different and powerful, 360 degree Sales Enablement.

Again, welcome, and we hope you’ll engage with us by commenting on our blog posts, or contacting us by email or phone.  We look forward to being of service.

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