David Ramos

Why do you need to change? Because sales leaders that are field facing and front line sales professionals in the trenches know that using past approaches – approaches that may have been successful before – will no longer work in today’s selling environment. Given many factors (the economic slow recovery, anemic buying, and customer risk aversion), sales people need to be working with customers in a new and different ways.

In this article, we will examine ten ways sales organizations can accelerate the progression from cold to close and accelerate change in their organization. From improving marketing results through pinpoint prospecting to making sure sales and marketing are on the same page, here are some tangible steps you can take to move faster from cold to close.

1. Improve marketing results through pinpoint prospecting
1. “Pinpoint prospecting” means taking the time to identify and locate the right markets, companies, and titles. Market intelligence and advisory firm IDC also categorizes this focused approach under sales enablement, and defines it as “the delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format and in the right place to assist in moving a specific sales opportunity forward.”
2. 2. Refine territory lists and messaging: broader is not better
  1. Savvy marketers are improving results by carefully identifying prospects and then gearing marketing efforts to them. It’s pinpoint prospecting applied to lists and messaging.
  2. Too often, B2B sales professionals and organizations are tempted to follow consumer marketers by casting their net as wide as possible. This not only leads to inefficient sales spend, but also wasted time from the sales team chasing unqualified leads. Industry leaders are driving higher conversion rates by going narrower and deeper into high profit potential prospects. By knowing the right contacts and pain points within those target accounts, the engagement process accelerates and close rates improve.
  3. 3. Convert inquiries to leads through nurture
    1. The industry benchmark for moving a response to a lead qualified by marketing is typically between 4 percent and 10 percent. Even small improvements in conversion rates at this phase of the funnel can have a big impact on deal close rates and top line revenue for any business. In addition, some companies are drilling down into leads which have previously disqualified and finding new opportunities through a new contact or new messaging. As any sales organization knows, this kind of qualification cannot be automated; it must come from a human, usually in the form of an outside sales or teleprospecting team.
    2. 4. Improve response rates through analysis and segmentation
      1. By using highly targeted information about prospects and leads to slice and dice the demographics, large and small B2B companies have been able to deliver relevant messages to targeted buyers. This not only drives ROI in terms of closed deal, but makes the marketing spend more efficient due to fewer bounce-backs and better response rates.
      2. The more time you invest up front identifying your target and buttoning down your message the more efficient your sales process becomes and the better your ROI. B2B companies who know how to segment properly will enjoy better response rates because they’re reaching the right people.
      3. 5.       Increase the relevancy of your marketing content
        
        Listen to your customers. Use simple tools like Google Alerts, Twitter Search, LinkedIn, or OneSource product i-Sell with LinkedIn integration to figure out what your customers and prospects are struggling with. Target important keyword phrases and follow the conversation. Topics should appear that show trends and the need to expand on key issues. If that’s not enough, ask them. Call them up and talk to them. Visit them in person. Use online survey tools. Your customers want to share this information because they, in most cases, want to solve their challenges. If you can help, that’s great for them.
        
        Knowing the pain points of your top prospects increases the likelihood that you will deliver relevant messaging, whether it is via an e-mail, voice mail or direct mail campaign. Experienced sales and marketing teams are using insights from published material and speaking engagements to learn more about the hot button topics for hard-to-reach C-level executives.
        
        6.       Build a repeatable sales process
        
        A repeatable sales process is fundamental to everything else a sales organization does. The reality is, if you don’t have a strong, repeatable process, the money that is spent on sales automation is wasted. It’s essential for sales organizations to establish sales process milestones. For example, when leads are passed from marketing to sales, that status must be clearly known. Once sales goes through the process of accepting the leads, they are committing to following up on them. By creating repeatable, reliable processes such as this, everyone knows what to expect and both efficiencies and effectiveness increase throughout the organization. A repeatable sales process also means examining and replicating everything that works within the organization.
        
        “Einstein noted that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is insanity. But doing the same effective thing over and over again is genius because it saves steps and repeats successful techniques. The result: shorter sales cycles, higher win rates, and larger deal size.
        
        7.       Leverage trigger events to shorten the sales cycle
        
        In today’s economic environment, shortening sales cycles has taken on a new importance. After all, the shorter the sales cycle, the more sales the organization can make—and the faster revenues can start coming in. But, according to CSO Insights, the sales cycle has become 32 percent longer as buyers are taking longer to consider their decisions.
        
        What is a trigger event? It’s an occurrence that creates an immediate need for your products or services. Internal trigger events include reorganizations, mergers, acquisitions or new product introductions. External triggering events could be new legislation, hurricanes or announcements of new technology.
        
        Being first in can be invaluable to winning a deal. By responding to trigger events such as changes in management, a merger or a new product launch, leading B2B players are gaining trusted advisor status and are not only edging out their competition, but they are also positioning themselves for future cross-sells.
        
        8.       Use lead scoring and routing to increase close rates
        
        Sales close rates can be affected by a number of factors—many of which cannot be influenced by marketing. But that doesn’t mean that marketing cannot increase sales effectiveness. Gartner Group Research found that “following improvements in lead, content and proposal management, close rates could be expected to increase, on average, by approximately 5 percent to 20 percent per salesperson.   The most dramatic example of the economics of the sales and marketing funnel comes when you look at the close rates of different organizations. The average close rate for B2B organizations is less than 25 percent, according to SiriusDecisions.   One way to increase close rates is to find contacts and decision makers who can be champions within target companies. These referral sources are invaluable when it comes to making a business case for a sales cycle.
        
        9.       Find like-minded buyers
        
        Every good customer can lead to other good prospects. SiriusDecision’s Joe Galvin sums up the power of reference selling: “If I have sold inside an organization to a given buying center, I can use them to refer me to someone else,” he says. Galvin advises sales organizations to build ‘profiles of success’—a description of needs, criteria, roles, and responsibilities based on previous sales success and using these profiles to identify like-minded buyers. “If you’ve sold well into a certain part of an organization, then you know that they are more likely to buy than someone in a slower growth industry, or a less progressive company.
        
        In refining their contact databases and cleaning up their pipeline, sales organizations large and small often start by identifying target companies and decision makers. By digging deeper into their latest announcements and researching key business events they attend (networking), sales teams are able to identify common connections between their needs. Some companies are even developing persona-based marketing, which develops specifics strategies around common profiles.
        
        10.   Get sales, service and marketing on the same page
        
        The 2008 Miller Heiman Sales Best Practices Study found that only 37 percent of respondents agreed that their sales, service and marketing organizations were aligned in what their customers want and need. Here are some essential steps you can take to get your organization on the same page.

i. Start Using ‘We’ Stop Using ‘They.’ Alignment starts with a companywide commitment that together we stand, divided we fall.

ii. Marketing Needs to Take Accountability for Influencing the Buying Cycle. Marketers should take full ownership of the buying cycle. Marketing material and campaigns should be structured to address each phase in the buying cycle and help educate and influence prospects. Don’t have a marketing dept? Outsource it.

iii. Increase Quality and Decrease Quantity by Scoring Leads. Organizations should be focusing on the quality not the quantity of leads that are passed from marketing to sales.

iv. Integrate Sales and Marketing Technologies. By integrating CRM and marketing technology, reps can gain a comprehensive view of how marketing interacted with an account. The goal is to deliver value to reps in the vehicle they are most accustomed to using on a daily basis; CRM. For this reason, integration is critical to empowering sales and marketing with data that both functions can use to increase effectiveness.

v. Set Up Periodic Meetings Between Sales, Service and Marketing. Sales, service and marketing should be meeting periodically to review successes and failures. Alignment means the three functions are working as a team, so if processes or practices are not yielding expected results, something needs to change.

vi. Measure What Matters. Measurement is probably one of the most important components to aligning sales, service and marketing effectiveness. How can you improve if you don’t know where you’ve been and how do you know where you’ve been if you don’t have measurement? Metrics allow the organization to understand how much to spend on marketing to acquire a new customer and more importantly where to spend those dollars to acquire, retain, and up-sell to prospects and customers.

With deals taking longer to close and more executives influencing the buying cycle, sales and marketing are playing a larger role in gathering intelligence into the changing needs inside target organizations. Companies that align marketing and sales early in the process are able to quickly identify key decision makers, nurture them with the right messaging and then accelerate them through the different phases of the sales funnel.

About the author: David Ramos is sales operations consultant for Strategy Development, an industry management consulting and advance sales training firm providing sales, service & MPS information, including workshops for the BTA as well as a MPS Sales eLearning program with InfoTrends. He also instructs a selling skills workshop called “Sell With Success”. You can reach him at www.strategydevelopment.com or ramos@strategydevelopment.com.