Tools, Tools, Tools – How do you choose?

With all the web-based sales tools out there, it’s hard to figure out which ones are most useful for your sales organization.  Some of the organizations we’ve worked with recently are in “tool overload”. They’ve embraced sales tools, but with so many point solutions, their Reps are spending all their time surfing from one tool to another, without an effective strategy for prioritizing their activities. It’s another form of a very common problem – spending too much time researching prospects and not enough time calling them. Or worse they aren’t using the tools at all because they view them as cumbersome, or a waste of time, thus they are just throwing money down the drain.

Determining the right tool strategy for your organization requires a thorough assessment of your Sales Reps, marketing resources, go-to-market strategy, and prospect behavior. For example, if your prospects are mid-level HR Managers, you might utilize tools that increase you phone interactions, as these folks might be more likely to give you 5 minutes on the phone, whereas IT Managers might prefer email interactions. Take a serious look at your sales organization and assess what areas can benefit the most from automated sales tools. There is no set formula that says you must purchase 5 tools to be successful; you don’t even need to purchase one from each of the categories below. Find the one tool that you think would have the most impact on your biggest sales challenge, and start there.

If you are already using a slew of sales tools, but still aren’t seeing the productivity from your Reps, consider scaling back, or swapping some of your existing tools for new tools. Figure out the most important tool based on prospect behavior and coach your Sales Reps on how to utilize the tool in a time-effective way.

Also, talk to your high-performing Sales Reps, find out what tools they are using that may or may not be provided by your company. Ask the Reps where they have had the most success in the past, and how they feel about tools you are considering using in the future. Involving the Reps as much as possible in these discussions can significantly improve user adoption of the tools.

Below is a list of the commonly used tools we’ve come across, and a brief summary of what they can do. Use this list to figure out the best tool strategy for your sales organization. For the purposes of this post, we are going to focus on tools related to lead qualification since filling the front end of the pipeline is a persistent problem.

Automate Lead Generation

Eloqua (www.eloqua.com) – A marketing automation platform for building and managing your prospect database, scoring and routing leads to sales, and measuring marketing’s impact on the business. There are modules for campaign management, lead management, contact management, and marketing measurement.

Marketo (www.marketo.com) – A marketing automation platform that allows users to automate demand generation campaigns and deliver high quality leads to Sales. Marketo helps Sales understand, prioritize and interact with the hottest leads and opportunities.

Silverpop (www.silverpop.com) – Provider of web-based marketing tools for creating, automating, and delivering online messaging. The platform also scores leads and measures campaign ROI.

Genius.com (www.genius.com) – A demand management software platform that automates marketing workflows and provides real-time sales alerts on qualified lead activity. The platform includes solutions such as email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, website tracking, instant alerts, and closed-loop reporting capabilities.

Find Prospects

ZoomInfo (www.zoominfo.com) – A subscription based database of company and individual profiles. Allows you to search by geography, title, company size, industry, or keywords; build lists for finding and nurturing leads; or find comprehensive profiles for select individuals.

Jigsaw (www.jigsaw.com) – A database of contacts and company information that allows users to buy or trade contact information and research companies for prospecting activities.

InsideView (www.insideview.com) – A sales intelligence application that aggregates and analyzes relevant executive and corporate data from thousands of social media and traditional editorial content sources to uncover new sales opportunities.

Dow Jones (www.dowjones.com) – A subscription-based database that allows Sales Reps to search company and executive profiles, build lists, and get notifications of important changes within target companies that might signal buying activities.

Hoovers (www.hoovers.com) – A subscription-based database of proprietary business information available through the Internet, data feeds, wireless devices, and co-branding agreements with other online services. You can search contacts, build lists, and view organization hierarchies.

OneSource (www.onesource.com) – A subscription-based database of proprietary business information solutions, including company, executive, and industry intelligence. You can search contacts by title, industry, geography, and company size, and build lists for marketing campaigns..

Improve Phone Connect Rate

ConnectAndSell (www.connectandsell.com)– Enables Sales Reps to connect with more prospects in a given timeframe than they would otherwise be able to reach. This is done through a combination of patented switching technology and virtual sales agents that connect your Rep to live prospects. The company guarantees at least 5 connects per hour, or the hour is free.

Find Mutual Connections to your Leads

PeopleMaps (www.mypeoplemaps.com) – Allows Sales Reps to use their contacts and the contacts of their coworkers to find warm connections to prospects and companies.

Create Sales Presentations

ClearSlide (www.clearslide.com) – Allows Sales Reps to give virtual presentations via a url address, and track the viewing of those presentations for follow-up.

Brainshark (www.brainshark.com) – Provider of on-demand, multimedia-rich presentations. Users can easily create content, deliver their presentations, and track the viewer’s behavior to measure the effectiveness of the presentation.

Outsource Sales Activities

The Lead Dogs (www.leaddogs.com) – A provider of outsourced sales services for lead generation, lead nurturing, inquiry management, and customer base selling. They produce qualified leads for your sales team.

Tippit (www.tippit.com) – A demand generation program that delivers Highly Qualified Leads, through 3^rd party information sources, on a pay for performance basis. Through their Content Syndication Platform, Tippit drives prospects to your organizations white papers, webcasts, and online advertising.

Rainmaker Systems (www.rainmakersystems.com) – A provider of outsourced sales and marketing solutions for converting web visitors to leads, generating appointments, increasing sales of subscriptions/warranties, renewing maintenance contracts, telesales, etc. via their Revenue Delivery Platform.

BAO, By Appointment Only (www.baoinc.com) – A provider of outsourced lead generation services that call prospects and set up meetings on a pay-for-performance basis.

Improve Sales Enablement

iCentara (www.icentera.com) – A sales enablement software platform allows users to create intranet sales portals along with extranet channel partner and customer portals that deliver a consistent marketing voice across the entire organization and beyond.

SAVO Group (www.savogroup.com) – Sales Enablement software that connects employees from every department – Sales, Marketing, IT, Subject Matter Experts – with the best materials, insights and expertise.

Kadient (www.kadient.com) – An on-demand sales enablement platform for creating sales content, developing sales playbooks, and tracking sales performance analytics.

By: Kristina McMillan, Sr. Project Manager, SalesRamp

So you’re in sales, what’s your lead generation strategy?

It’s critically important for inside sales to be tightly tied to lead generation. The Inside Sales Manager should work closely with the lead generation team to set a strategy, manage campaigns, and measure the results.

Consider this: Do your reps know what your prospects are currently doing to address their pain? Are your prospects using a competitive solution? What triggered your prospects to recognize that they had a problem in this area? Are your reps able to create pain for prospects that don’t know they have a problem?

As an Inside Sales Manager you need to have a clear understanding of your prospect’s pain and priorities, and how your solutions fit into their needs. This will help you determine which strategies, campaigns, messaging, etc. will resonate most with your prospects. To gain a better understanding of your prospect, work with your marketing team to:

1. Understand the status quo – Often, the biggest competitor in a market is the status quo. This may include older versions of competitive solutions, your own solutions, or home-grown solutions.  Understanding what your prospects are doing now to address their pain is crucial. If prospects think their home-grown solutions are good enough, you need to figure out how to show them the cost of not changing.
2. Identify trigger events – know what causes a prospect to feel the pain you solve. There may be specific events that trigger this pain, such as a change in leadership, downsizing, reorganizations, mergers, acquisitions, customer trends, industry trends, legislation, or any number of events that cause a company to reassess how they do business. Build campaigns and messaging around these events to help prospects understand how you solve their pain.
3. Train Reps to create urgency – How often do you get a lead that is “just looking” or “still doing research”? Train your reps to create urgency with prospects.  Reps must take a careful approach, or they can risk aggravating a prospect and turning them off of your company. Help them understand the costs of not acting, but don’t be pushy if the timing is still not right. This is part of the lead nurturing process.
4. Define the criteria for lead qualification – Be sure to have a solid lead-qualification process in place so that only sales-ready opportunities are passed to your sales team. Establish a definition for a qualified lead from marketing. Better yet, pass all marketing leads to a Lead Qualification Group, so that they can further qualify leads and generate Qualified Sales Opportunities (“QSOs”).
5. Don’t ignore prospects – It’s good to target certain segments or verticals, but don’t ignore prospects who are genuinely interested if they are not from your target market. You may uncover a new market or segment that you hadn’t considered before. Study customers from non-target segments to highlight key indicators they demonstrated in the buying process that can be used to generate rules for following up on new prospects from non-target markets.
6. Track relevant information – Create. Measure. Adjust. Repeat. Track as much relevant information as possible for late stage opportunities and closed deals. Information about the prospect’s pain, existing solutions, and triggering events can help you understand who to target and their level of qualification based on these indicators.
7. Use marketing automation – If your marketing team isn’t already using marketing automation, encourage them to adopt an automation strategy. Marketing automation allows you to connect with prospects often and efficiently, to nurture them with relevant and targeted campaigns, and to measure the effectiveness of your marketing activities.

Following these steps will help you figure out the right lead generation strategy for your team. That said, it is just a place to start. The right mix of lead generation strategy and activities will fluctuate as your market changes, but the basic principles (the steps above) remain the same.

Post comments of what you are doing – your lead gen strategies, what’s working, what’s not – we’d love to hear from you!

By: Kristina McMillan, Sr. Project Manager, SalesRamp

Back to Basics: Sales Fundamentals

In a world of on-demand tools and automation, it’s easy for Sales Reps to get overwhelmed and lose sight of the most basic fundamentals for success. It’s our job as Sales Managers to help our Reps sort through all of the tools and automation, and to determine how to be most effective with their time. We need to keep the basic fundamentals at the forefront of our minds while also seeking to improve prospect intelligence and hit rate through tools and automation.

These fundamentals are:

Volume of Activity: There must be activity to generate quota or revenue. Simply, if your Reps aren’t making calls or sending enough emails to reach your prospects, no amount of tools or automation will help. Set reasonable and measureable activity goals for your Reps, such as number of completed calls per day, number of conversations, number of emails sent

Knowledge: Ensure your Reps know your products and services better than anyone. Test their knowledge through role playing and product discussions.

Articulate and Concise Communication: Besides knowing what they are talking about, Reps should know how to articulate their knowledge about your products and services. Monitor calls and do roll playing to see how your Reps communicate your messaging.

Awareness: Making sure that your Reps can listen to and understand what prospects are communicating is crucial. Your Reps should not just be telling your prospects about your products, but seeking to understand the prospects needs and relating those needs to your solutions.

Strategy: Every Sales Rep should know the basics of sales strategy: how to navigate to the right prospect, how to uncover the prospect’s pain, how to qualify a prospect, how to position against competition, and how to close. Monitoring your Reps calls is the best way to find out their areas for improvement.

Attitude: A positives, enthusiastic, and professional attitude is one of the most important assets of a successful Sales Rep. Cultivate an environment that supports this type of behavior and discourages the contrary. Work with your Reps, through role playing and call monitoring, to improve their professional demeanor.

By: Kristina McMillan, Sr. Project Manager, SalesRamp