Many sales organizations these days are struggling to achieve organic sales revenue and profit growth.

According to the TAS Group, 67 per cent of salespeople do not achieve their sales targets.

Thanks to the internet, buyers now have more information available to them than ever before. This easy access to knowledge is putting sales reps into a weak position, as it empowers buyers to take charge of the sales process. Buyers now carry out extensive online research before feel ready to contact a vendor. Thus, now the Buyers decide WHICH VENDOR they will contact, and WHEN they will do so. If your organization is not among the chosen ones your reps may never know that the buyer even existed. Yes, we are in the era of the buyers journey.

Now the Buyers decide WHICH VENDOR they will contact, and WHEN they will do so. If your organization is not among the chosen ones your reps may never know that the Buyer even existed.

As illustrated below, there are three distinct windows of opportunity in the buyers journey to influence the buyer towards our brand and our goods/services:

1. Opportunity To Create Desire

In the early stage of their buyers journey sellers have the opportunity to create desire in the buyers’ mind to consider our offerings, whether it be a new car, a new pair of shoes, or a complex IT system.

2. Opportunity To Influence The Buyer

Later, we have the opportunity to influence their decision-making and lure them away from competitors and towards our brand and offerings.

3. Too Late To Influence The Buyer

But, unfortunately, once they have made up their mind about what they want to buy and which vendor they want to buy it from, there is little opportunity left for vendors to change the buyers’ mind. They simply have come too far down the track towards making their buying decision to change tack now. Unless, that is, you have a very compelling argument or information that they had not considered (see the section on Challenger / Disruptive / Provocative Selling below).

Obviously, waiting to be contacted by a buyer is not a great sales strategy. We need something more pro-active, and we need to focus on the first two windows of opportunity that I mentioned above.

Obviously, waiting to be contacted by a Buyer is not a great sales strategy.

Over time, several options have become available to restock the sales and marketing arsenal that has been depleted by the buying journey and by the modern buyers. They can be used in any combination to help you reach your sales targets. Here are some of the more commonly used ones:

1. Cold Calling / Warm Calling
2. Content Marketing
3. Social Selling
4. Storytelling
5. Account Based Marketing (ABM)
6. Challenger / Disruptive / Provocative Selling

Let’s now look at the above options in more detail:

1. Cold Calling / Warm Calling

A lot of articles have been written about the pros and cons of cold calling. Tony J. Hughes, has written extensively on the subject, largely promoting cold calling as an effective sales technique. Personally, I am not a huge fan of calling somebody out of the blue, interrupting whatever they are doing and expecting them to drop everything to listen to your sales pitch. The only time this has half a chance of working is if you really have something significant up your sleeve that is of vital importance to them and to their business. If you have something like this then please feel free to go straight on to the section below on Challenger / Disruptive / Provocative Selling.

Otherwise, my recommendation is to stay away from cold calling. Instead, warm up your prospect with Content Marketing or Social Selling (both described below) before making direct contact. In this way, at least they know who you are and that you have something that is worthy of their time, or not.

2. Content Marketing

This strategy requires marketing to issue content that entices and compels buyers to our business. This content is usually published to the website and online generally, and complementary material is issued to the sales team. Content may comprise white papers, thought leadership articles, client success stories and lead generation campaigns. The key to success is that marketing continuously monitors the performance of its content and actively seeks feedback from the sales team about how prospects and customers react to it. Equally, sales reps must actively provide their front line intelligence to marketing so that the performance of marketing content can continuously be improved.

Success depends largely on a highly collaborative feedback loop between sales at the customer-facing front and marketing at the online front.

3. Social Selling

This is a specialist version of content marketing which is practiced by individual sales reps. The idea is that we want to attract buyers not only to our brand but also to individual reps who have built a reputation of being subject matter experts.

The way it works in many organisations is that marketing provides the right content to the sales force for them to promote their personal subject matter expertise on social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. In other words, individual sales reps attract the buyer through their personal brand, as well as their employer’s brand.

Again, the success of this initiative largely depends on close collaboration between marketing and sales, if the content is to match the individual, and vice versa.

4. Storytelling

Storytelling is very powerful. Ever since humans were living in caves we sat around the campfire and told stories. Before the written word was invented stories were the way that we acquired information and learned new skills, such as how to hunt, gather and grow food. Even today, us humans remember stories much better than mere facts or figures.

When salespeople engage with a prospect or client they will have much deeper impact when they convey their information through a story. Storytelling also has the advantage that it doesn’t feel like selling. Just telling a story or an anecdote feels less intrusive to both the buyer and the rep. So, go ahead and tell the story of how a past client found themselves in a similar situation to your current prospect and how your solution helped them to overcome their challenges and to succeed.

Your marketing team should arm your sales force with stories to regale your prospects and customers.

5. Account Based Marketing (ABM)

ABM is nothing new, but modern sales and marketing technology has elevated it to the latest “must-have”. The reason is that it can be very powerful, if executed well. Imagine you want to win a new key account or retain a major client that is at risk of moving on to a competitor. Wouldn’t you want to give them the attention they need to help secure or retain their business ? So, you create a specialist team, let’s call them a “hit squad”, to identify the key stakeholders in your account, i.e. the decision makers, influencers and gate keepers, and you identify what makes each of them tick, their likes and dislikes, challenges and opportunities. Then you provide each of them individually, through whatever means necessary, with the information that they need to make an informed decision on why they should buy from your organization. This is so that when they all meet to decide which vendor to go with, they will discover that they all miraculously agree that they should go with your business.

This “hit squad” must consist of a multi-disciplinary team, comprised of marketing, sales, product management and communications experts. So, once again, close collaboration between marketing and sales is the key to success here, too.

6. Challenger / Disruptive / Provocative Selling

I have previously written about this type of selling and why it is not suitable for every rep. However, if your sales force has people with the stature to challenge your prospects’ or clients’ thinking then it can be very effective. The idea is that you disrupt their thinking with some new information that they either did not previously possess, or that they had not yet considered. Something that stops them in their tracks. The neat thing is that, because this particular insight was brought to them by you and only you, it gives you instant credibility over and above your competitors and turns you into a trusted adviser. It should be easy from there on to close the deal.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are a myriad of options to engage your prospects and clients, but waiting to be contacted by a Buyer is not a great sales strategy. And, given the myriad of alternatives, there is also no need for cold calling.

Regardless of which of the above sales techniques you choose to go with, much of your sales performance and success will depend on how well your marketing and sales teams work together to engage the Buyer and to differentiate your business from that of your competitors.

Ideally, your teams will collaborate across the entire 360 degrees, as illustrated here.

You are invited to talk to us about your business challenges and we’ll do our best to help, if we can. Go ahead, what have you got to lose ?

The post Six Sales Prospecting Methods, Including Cold Calling. appeared first on Head Of Sales.

There has been an insidious trend in professional selling.

It is a misinterpretation of the term ‘social selling’ where people cruise along doing non-selling tasks sprinkled with researching, emailing and grooming their social platforms… all while treating the phone like it’s covered with spiders.

The only thing that works in new business development, whether for inside sales or in the field, is the right combinations of effective activity… and lots of it!

Any sales floor that sounds like people are snoozing is in trouble. I was talking with someone last week who told me that all sales people had to book a ‘booth’ to make prospecting calls so that they do not disturb others on the sales floor! You’ve gotta be kidding me… “bring back the buzz!” So many businesses and sales people have confused ‘social selling’ with ‘social marketing’. Social platforms certainly play an essential role for research and creating a strong personal brand that sets and agenda and evidences insight and credibility. But selling is all about engaging the buyer in a meaningful two-way conversation and the human voice is like nothing else for achieving just that. If ‘outbound’ activities do not culminate in lots of phone calls then the methodology for creating sales pipeline is just a recipe for failure.

Every sales person must personally ‘own’ and masterfully execute these 3 things if they are to succeed in high-value, or any form of business-to-business, selling:

1. The Right Narrative

2. The Right Combinations

3. The Right Mindset

The first BIG prerequisite for elevating the way we sell is to create the right ‘value narrative’. Instead of leading with who we are and what we do, we should instead lead with why a conversation should matter to the other person. We need to hook interest with the worthwhile business or personal outcomes that we can help them achieve.

The call you make should have been preceded by social marketing activities in the days or weeks prior where you’ get yourself into the orbit’ of you prospects without any hard-sell. Then first thing in the morning, before the others snoozers arrive at the office, you’re hammering away with your COMBO outreach strategy:

• Phone their cell/mobile and if you don’t get a live voice on the other end …
• Leave a voicemail. Confident, to the point and without mentioning your products or solutions… just the value for them in having a conversation.
• Then immediately send a LinkedIn InMail or connection request (with context, not ‘cold’)
• Then send them an email.

Two to three minutes per contact maximum on your pre-prepared list. Ideally, you’re working from your CRM or ‘dialing software’ but a sheet of paper will do the trick. Never blame technology for your failure to drive the necessary level of intelligent activity required to achieve the success you need. Here is a step-by-step guide on using these advanced techniques leveraging the power of Sales Navigator.

Join the phoning revolution where ‘social selling’ goes back to the future to save businesses from revenue atrophy!

Next, we need the right mindset… just like Arnie who is very smart but also has always been highly driven, inquisitive, disciplined and ambitious. We need a minimum of two hours every single day doing outbound prospecting where we seek conversations and meetings with potential clients. We MUST do this regardless of how ‘successful’ we are with current revenue and no matter how busy we become with existing clients. Before you go home each day, make sure you have your list of 30-50 calls to make first thing in the morning.

I cannot tell you how many salespeople I meet who just won’t accept responsibility for the creation of their own pipeline. Treat leads from your website, channel, marketing or inside sales team as a bonus. You’ve gotta own your own success, fight for it, work for it, change inside to be worthy of it. Be your own SDR and time-block 2 hours EVERY day for proactive outbound prospecting where you focus on the phone. Use social media and LinkedIn to support your sales strategy but don’t use it to hide like a coward from the phone.

Click here to download keynote slides

The video interview below discusses where ‘social selling’ has gone wrong. Can you believe that one company is cited for removing phones from the sales area altogether! Wow…complete lunacy in my view. On the other hand, no-one should be doing pure cold calls because ‘warming a call-up’ is an incredibly easy thing to do today with fast pragmatic research tools such as LinkedIn or using your CRM properly.

Build your personal brand in non-selling time.

Yes, you need a strong personal brand because 75% of people research us online before deciding to engage or buy. Get it done in your own time at night and here are some tips. Have a professionally friendly photo with a headline that is your ‘promise of value’ to the customers you serve. Show you personal values and also what you deliver in terms of business outcomes in your Summary. Tailor your URL and include your contact details… you’re in sales so forget privacy and instead make it easy for people to reach you!

Should you be publishing content? Yes, but not during selling time. If you can’t write, just focus on sharing content that your clients will value. Create a free Buffer account or use your company’s Hootsuite, Hubspot or other content curation software. Publish content that gets on the front foot to head objections off at the pass. If prospects say they’re too busy to meet you, write a post about how 20 minutes with you saves 10 hours and reduces risk… writing it will be the best sales training you’ve ever had.

The ‘Neptune’ release of LinkedIn is designed to dial-down your narcissism and ramp-up your sales effectiveness. Boolean search is gone in free or Premium… time to buy Sales Navigator on your own credit card if the boss won’t buy it for you.

Stop treating LinkedIn as a vanity tool. It’s a valueable marketing and sales resource!

Beyond the big three of 1) an insightful value narrative that is relevant to the buyer, 2) the right effective combinations of activities, and 3) the right mindset where you absolutely take personal responsibility for build three times your target in qualified pipeline… you need these things to be successful in sales:

1. Intrinsic value and ‘market fit’ in the product, service or solution you offer
2. Passionate belief in the value you offer and the people you work with
3. High EQ for people skills and above average levels of intelligence
4. Genuine curiosity and desire to learn (about your customers and about how to be successful). Stop telling people about your company and products and start talking about your customer’s problems and opportunities, and the business results you passionately believe you can deliver for them.
5. Courage and discipline the size of mountains to get out of your comfort zone and do what is necessary… forget merely doing your best
6. A phone. This is the most powerful of all social selling tools
7. A LinkedIn Sales Navigator account. Like the phone, it’s a basic tool of trade and you’ve can’t survive without it.
8. A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system integrated with marketing automation and lead nurturing
9. A boss who will believe in you and hold you to account.

Is everything on this list essential? Is there anything on this list you could actually live without in your professional life and still be successful? Or is there something you think I should add?

The post The Rise Of The Silent Sales Floor​ Is Killing Business appeared first on Head Of Sales.

Calling is the top skill you should be developing to gain an edge, not just for prospecting and landing meetings with C-Level decision makers, but at every stage of the funnel. Especially when Artificial Intelligence (AI) is imminently threatening your job. Let me rest my case:

• Social Selling is an epidemic. But it’s not social to hide behind your computer, Neo. Reach out and touch someone! There’s no doubt LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are the most addictive, mind-numbingly fascinating, voyeuristic paradises ever constructed since the Matrix. That being the case, I go into world-renowned technology companies to advise on new sales, and can’t help but witness the chilling silence. Not just “digitally native” Millennials have embraced the only digital approach while rocking “Spotify” in their earbuds full blast, lazy managers have drunk the social selling only Koolaid as job security.
• Cell phone penetration will exceed world population. Multiple devices per human is coming and with the Internet of Things (IOT) there will be 25 digital ways to reach a prospect, even their refrigerator. Wouldn’t you rather be the signal in all that meaningless noise? How can you miss communicating in an ‘always on’ medium that’s physically on every person?
• One-third of the global salesforce will be obsoleted by AI in the next ten years. Gerhard Gschwandtner made one of the boldest predictions ever about all sales being gone by a not too distant future date and we’ve seen all sorts of doomsday prophecy emanating from the Gartners and Forresters of the world. Trusted advisors are built to last and will not be affected. Conversely, they’ll most likely be more in demand than ever. “Help me buy a jet share vs. help me buy a Blu-ray player.”
• Human beings lack discipline and 250 times a day checking phones proves this fatal flaw has never been more acute. It’s not just Schwarzenegger proselytizing this to combat “flabbiness.” If you can be excellent at interrupting prospects out of the blue, you will always work. If you can do this at “sick levels of massive action” a la Grant Cardone, nobody who cares about “REVENUE” with a capital R at your company will ever forget your full name (including middle) or let you leave the building to go to a competitor!

• The top SVPs and GMs of Sales I’ve ever seen, still pound the phone at least 20 times a day, leading with massive action from the front. Yes, even today! Don’t you see this? Aren’t your CEO and CFO always talking about that networking event where they saw the prospect CEO and they’re going to make a warm intro. The Masters of the Universe are doing cold calls face to face all day. How about Zuckerberg and Sean Parker raising the initial funding round for Facebook (an insane! Matrix-like idea at it’s time) by going and cold calling Peter Thiel’s (of PayPal fame) office? They got to the top of Sales, entrepreneurship and rode the light beam into the corner office of CEO matriculating to Board Member with a let’s take action, take no prisoners, philosophy of “doing.”
• Artificial intelligence cannot make jokes, shoot the breeze, kibitz and relate. Until AI has EQ, you will keep your job. The rapport step is everything. You can’t respectfully Challenge or SPIN a person who hates your guts. You can’t make someone like you because you comment on their whitewater rafting photo above the desk. It’s certainly off-putting when you stalk them on Facebook and let them know you’ll be at the Sydney Opera House the same Tuesday afternoon. (Yuck!) There is no inflection in text mediums, so again the neuroscience-backed power of tone in the human voice is transcendent. This is why a simple 90-second Video E-Mail or Voicemail slaughters advanced level Sales AI. Elementary, my dear Watson AI!
• Pre-revenue KPIs will protect you. If you are building 1.5 – 3X pipeline at an alarming clip while all the other Lost Boys are sitting feet up on the desk swiping their Tinder, they are getting kicked-off the island first.
• Cold calling builds confidence within and in every other sphere or your life. You lose the awkward silences. It’s therapeutic and life transforming to put yourself out there and become forged in the fires of rejection, a diamond, secure from within. Like Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire, you’ll jump the couch radiating an aura of cool! People love to be around confident people, it sets them at ease emotionally. Calm executives like to buy things and open up their vulnerabilities, lowering the veil! You will become as Abraham Maslow and Dr. Wayne Dyer opined, “Independent of the good opinion of others.” That life state is self-actualized and near invincible for a seller or professional of any ilk, for that matter.

• It’s unpopular to be a sanitation engineer but they make a glorious living. Again, nobody wants to do “cold calling” so if you embrace it, you will be known for it at your company. You’ll soon be coaching the CXOs, the SDRs, and have the CEO knocking on your cubicle. Trust me, I smell PROMOTION.

• Mid-Funnel and bottom-funnel CLOSING depend 1000% on phone skills. If you can’t gain the first commitment, as Iannarino says, you’re never going to gain subsequent commitments. If you can’t ask Giselle for her phone number, there’s no picket fence Mr. Tom Brady!

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like’ button and also share via your Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook social media platforms. I encourage you to join the conversation or ask questions so feel free to add a comment on this post.

The post 10 Reasons Why Calling Is the #1 Skill You MUST Master appeared first on Head Of Sales.