Using emails as an effective counter punch to a bad prospect call

Every once in a while prospect calls don’t go to plan. In spite of all the preparation we undertake to ensure that the call goes of smoothly, it just does not. We are either faced with an inattentive prospect or our mind is preoccupied with the hundreds of tasks that we are working on. As a result, we either end up not highlighting the value & benefits of engaging with our company or even if we do it, our prospect fails to see the value & benefits. However, it is very important when these situations occur that we make an effort to ensure that the right message and value we bring to the table gets well articulated to the customer.

To draw an analogy from boxing, the most dangerous boxers are those who can effectively counter punch their way out when against the ropes. There are different techniques of counter punching that boxer’s use; different punch combinations are thrown at the attacker to reverse the trend. When calls go bad I recommend a similar approach to my team.

The first counter punch in this situation is a sharp personalized email. The email should be directed towards delivering your message in the shortest possible length. Make a list of all the things you missed out saying on the call and all the questions that could not be addressed as desired. Draft out your mail addressing all of these and add the core value that your company delivers to customers. However, make sure that all of this in line with what your prospect’s requirements are. A mail blowing your own trumpet (your company’s achievements, etc) will only make the situation worse and you might risk losing the prospect forever. Follow up with a call to gather feedback on the email 2-3 days after sending it out. This approach should help in salvaging that below average call.

NOTE: Stay away from the temptation of attaching files/ brochures/ flyers and all other marketing material in your email. Emails are most effective when kept short and to the point.

Hari Raghunathan
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/salesleads
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/hariraghunathan

Top 5 reasons why Inside Sales campaigns fail!

I was recently a part of a session where we were analyzing why some of the campaigns we undertook last year did not go to plan. The top 5 reasons that emerged were

Incorrect Choice of Market
The first and foremost reason why most Inside Sales campaigns fail are due to mistakes in choosing the target market. Most companies get into campaigns without the groundwork of analyzing past Demand Generation programs to understand
1. The campaign response rates for the past activities
2. Analyze existing customer portfolio & pipeline to gauge common trends
3. Conduct a lost case analysis of all the leads that dropped of the pipeline.
Target Market Lists built based on the learning’s from this exercise have much better results than the ones built looking at a only verticals, geographies and size of companies or your “GUT” feeling.

Wrong Messaging
Deciding on what messaging to take to the market is a critical factor that goes a long way in deciding the success of a campaign. Usually messages are crafted in isolation from market forces based on the capability of your delivery organization and competitive pressures. An important aspect of Messaging is to garner feedback from your calling teams on how the market is responding to the value prop and differentiators you are putting out there. A hands-on approach is then required to tweak the message till you get it right. This is a time & money investment that most Sales & Marketing organizations shy away from when it comes to Inside Sales campaigns.

Poor Timing
Poor timing is a factor that can be completely controlled with some background research or a specialist vendor. It is a well known fact that in the months of July & August most people are on leave in the Benelux, Germany, France and Nordic region. Starting campaigns targeted at companies in these regions during this period is a no brainer. Inside Sales teams are better off working on getting the market, message & intelligence right during this period.

Lack of Coordination
Coordination between multiple stakeholders is critical to the success of a campaign. Whether it is a vendor you are working with or an internal operation you are running, there should be a well defined communication protocol in place. An escalation matrix needs to be in place to ensure that if things are not going to plan; appropriate action is being taken to achieve desired course correction. Single Point of Contacts (SPOC) are very important to ensure that there is a “Go-To” person for all issues and that multiple stakeholders are not driving the campaign in different directions.

Quality of Resources Deployed
Usually the quality of resources that have been deployed on campaigns are the last of the problems faced. There is a ramp up time involved and without that gauging the quality of resources is foolhardy. In the case of Inside Sales, this ramp up time can range from 2 months to 5 months. However, deploying a few recruitment best practices can go a long way in ensuring that the right candidate has been selected to do the job. A good Inside Sales rep will exhibit a structured Thought Process, the ability to articulate Thought, a Sales Aptitude& will be self driven.

Sometimes, in spite of getting all these things right, Inside Sales campaigns fail due to “Acts of GOD” like the subprime crises of 2008 which are completely out of anyone’s realm of control.

Hari Raghunathan
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/salesleads
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/hariraghunathan

Are you nurturing your leads?

Lead Nurturing is the latest buzz word going around the Demand Generation space today. Every Demand generation expert worth his salt is proclaiming lead nurturing as the be all and end all of your Demand Generation program. To understand what the whole fuss around this activity is, we are undertaking a survey later this month to understand Lead Nurturing, the role of Lead Scoring, the adoption of Marketing automation tools and the measures and metrics surrounding Lead Nurturing. We intend on uncovering the top challenges that tech companies face with their Lead Nurturing strategies through our survey.

As a preamble to the survey, I would like to put down my thoughts on what I understand about Lead Nurturing

When I started off as an Inside sales rep about 4 years back, my mentor at that time told me that the only way to succeed at this work was to build relationships. Over the first six months on the job, he went on to teach me how to initiate relationships, win trust, grow them and nurture them to fruition.

Typically relationships with prospects are initiated through a call, an email or a meet in person. The first contact is invariably of a very short duration and the continuity of the relationship completely depends on whether both of you are able to connect with each other in that short duration. I have seen that this is determined not only by business needs but can also happen due to shared personal interests, past acquaintances, common colleagues, etc

Winning trust is a function of genuinely being concerned of issues the prospect faces and trying all means to provide a solution (not your solution). Growing the relationship is a factor of periodically being in touch with the prospect (not only talking about your product/ service) and winning trust time and again i.e., every time the prospect faces a problem and you genuinely try to provide a solution (not your solution)

So what is lead nurturing?

Lead Nurturing is the process of doing all of this till the point of time your prospect is ready to buy what you are selling and even if he/she does not end up buying from you, you have ensured that your product/ service has been positioned to the right person in the right manner.

In a nutshell, Lead Nurturing is all about managing your relationships with your prospects in an organized manner.

I would like to know from all of you out there, what do you understand by Lead Nurturing?

Hari Raghunathan
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/salesleads
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/hariraghunathan

5 guidelines to that perfect Cold Call

Cold calling. Is it a dying art? Do you dread the process?

Most Sales professionals consider cold calling as the most intimidating aspect of the sales process and unfortunately it is a necessary part of a sale today. If you want to win new customers, you have to reach out to prospects on the phone.

I have tried to put together a few guidelines that I ask my team to follow when making calls

Background Research
Good research is the backbone of a cold call. I insist that my team be well read about the prospect, his/her company and the latest updates within the industry & company to be able to engage in conversations with prospects. Starting a call by discussing the prospects business and industry always works better than talking about your own product/ service

Resistance to pick up the Phone
It is very important that you make cold calls when you are fresh, energized & at your sharpest. This for most people is at the start of a working day. I advise my team to line up calls towards the first half of the day and spend time in the second half on research activities, reporting & other administrative work. Also thinking of a cold call to a prospect as a friendly conversation is important. Always believe in the value you bring to the table.

Opening a Call
A prospect will make up his mind in the first 30 seconds of your call on whether he wants to talk to you or not. It is very important to have a good opening statement which you remember and don’t have to read out on the phone. I recommend that my team includes a greeting, an introduction (of yourself & your company), a reference point (ideally about the prospect from your research), one strong value that you bring to the table. It should end with an open ended question which moves the cold call into a conversation

Gatekeepers are your Allies
Secretaries and assistants are the nucleus of all information within most organizations. They are the go to between you and the decision makers in an organization. They can direct you towards the right person, help you understand the latest on goings within the organization, help you with your prospects time availability and in some cases help you understand how your product/ service might be used within the organization.

Focus on Objectives
Always remember the purpose of your call. Primarily it is to qualify the prospect (based on his need & authority), educate him/her about the value of your product/service & come out of the call with a clear actionable (follow up mails/calls or face to face meetings). It is very important that you learn about the prospect and stimulate interest in him/her about your product/service.

Persistence is very important while cold calling. According to industry stats, 80% of new sales are made after the 4th contact, yet the majority of salespeople give up after the 2nd call. Follow up and keep calling.

Hozefa Sodawala
Senior Delivery Manager
QEDbaton

How do 3rd party vendors help with Sales & Marketing integration?

In one of the earlier posts, my colleague, Abhijit touched upon the need for integration between the Sales & Marketing functions within Tech companies. While the post outlined the need for it and the mechanism to achieve that integration, I would like to touch upon how a 3rd party Inside Sales vendor can very easily speed up the process.

Having worked with multiple tech companies over the years, I have noticed that there is an almost cynical attitude sales has towards marketing leads. The attitude stems from the fact that given the constraints marketing faces, they end up passing a large number of leads (primarily from Email Marketing, Web Marketing and similar channels) that are a complete waste of time for Sales managers.

Over a period of time, this leads to genuine inquiries being thrown out by Sales managers just because there is no trust in the Lead Generation engine created by Marketing. Invariably, Sales managers end up depending on themselves to generate the leads they need and when they leave take all intelligence & contact data with them. So how does a third party vendor help with these issues.

In most of the successful campaigns we have executed for customers, I have noted that when our teams are used to qualify leads from all the components of the lead generation engine (Email Marketing, Events, Web Marketing, etc) and pass on only “Sales-ready” leads to the sales teams the effectiveness of the programs (number of opportunities identified to overall number of leads generated) is much higher than campaigns where we are used to only to book time-slots.

However, it is critical that the “Sales-readiness” be clearly defined by the Sales team before the start of the engagement. We recommend that customers use a BANT (Budget-Authority-Need-Timeframe) based scoring model to arrive at the “Sales-readiness” of a lead. Once this is done, the 3rd Party vendor acts like glue between the Sales & Marketing functions. Marketing gets visibility into the Sales process and Sales starts believing in Marketing leads and spends time following up only on genuine opportunities.

Milind Katti
COO, QEDbaton

How do you measure the success of your Web Marketing program?

In a survey we conducted recently, we asked participants how they measured the success of their Web Marketing program. As expected, most respondents measured the sales enquiries they were getting through the website, downloads people were making from their website or landing pages and the unique visitors their websites/ landing pages were attracting. Some respondents wanted to measure the unique visitors their blogs were attracting but did not do it regularly.

It was surprising to see that not a lot of people were measuring qualitative parameters such as number of comments on blogs, repeat respondents to discussions, etc. When we launched our web marketing program a couple of quarters back, we also started out with the same measures. However, we have rapidly found out that there are two elements to the web marketing program; i.e.,

• Quantitative (website visits, downloads, enquiries) typically measured to understand impact of program to Sales
• Qualitative (comments on blogs, repeat respondents to discussions, etc) measured to understand impact of program to Brand Visibility, Thought Leadership, etc

We are now including these qualitative parameters in the measurement of our Web Marketing program. Another key indicator of the relevance of your content to the market you are targeting is measures such as Exit Rate and Bounce Rate. Both of these can easily be measured from Google Analytics and give a good indication of how relevant the content on the website is.

What do you think are the right measures of a successful Web Marketing program?

Hari Raghunathan

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/salesleads

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/hariraghunathan

How Social Media helps small businesses

Bookmark & Share

Your website is your medium of promoting your business on the Internet. Having said that it’s essential to keep your clients and prospects well informed about the developments that happen in your business. So, if you have a website you may as well update it with latest happenings. But the person who designed your website has disappeared and is not in touch with you because it was a one off project for your web designer. You also lack the funds to engage full time with a vendor to manage your website or employ someone to do it. What do you do in a situation like this?

A simple and logical solution is writing a blog.

Now, you may wonder how that can help you. Well, it’s really straightforward – A blog is your best bet simply because

1. It’s free – WordPress and blogger offer free blogs and they can be optimized

2. It’s easy – blogs are easy to sign up for and surprisingly easy to manage. WordPress in particular has a quick step sign up process and it has a brilliant dashboard with widgets and measurability aspect to monitor the blog.

3. It’s measurable – you get statistics if all sorts on a dashboard you know who is reading what and you know where the traffic is coming from. All this information can help you strategize your business accordingly.

Besides all the above you can have new content on your website (because the blog can be linked into your website) which means crawlers will read your info and improve/ retain your rankings in organic search.

Apart from writing a blog you can also participate in the social media space is the form of

Videos: Helps you create a rapport with new prospects & Educates prospects about your services

Every business has a website and every competitor of yours has a website and you all have the same products or services! So why not do something different. Upload videos that speak about your business, talk about everything that your prospect needs to know about you.

Integrating a video about your products services, testimonials or even a video tour of your premises into your website can help building a level of comfort and trust for your prospect. After all if someone watches your video they are getting to know you and you are already doing a bit of initial consultation- basically creating a rapport with your customers using online streaming websites

Social Media Networks: Let’s your prospect know more about you

Social networking has changed the landscape of searching for people and getting to know them. You can list yourself on LinkedIn, Xing or creating a specialized community or simply participating within existing communities. You can also join Facebook and create a community there if you want. Get a Twitter account and send tweets, follow people in your profession. Engaging in conversations with prospects can help you win new business on a long term basis.

Most importantly you can stay in touch with your community and your business will reap its benefits in terms of long term business, rapport building and increased sales.

Nilesh Deshmukh

Social Media Consultant

Working Web 2.0 channels

Continuing from my last post that focused on the impact of Web 2.0 on Technology Sales & Marketing, I feel that Online Reputation Management is gaining importance in this new marketing world order. Customers are posting complaints & compliments which can easily be accessed by search. Users are writing reviews of the new products you are launching and prospective buyers trust and access these reviews to make their decision. What emerged from our last post and the subsequent discussions was that the best way to shape your brand online is to actively listen and participate in conversations that are centered either on your company or your industry.

We advice our customers to follow these guidelines when working Web 2.0 channels

Understand your Social Media channels
Not all Social Media channels will make sense to your organization. Understand where your prospective & existing customers and employees are active and start tuning into those channels.
Join the conversation
Once you have identified the channels that make most sense to you, start participating in discussions that are going on. Instead of waiting for people to come to your website or blog, join conversations wherever they are
Promote Good Content
Do not promote only content you are creating. If you come across interesting discussions, don’t shy away from sharing it within your network.
Use Videos
With more than 100 million video downloads per day, YouTube is too big a marketing opportunity to overlook. Create short videos and post them to YouTube and other video-sharing sites.
Monitor, Measure & Tweak your Program
Evaluating your social media marketing program is not only about counting your website visitor stats. You should measure how well your organization is at engaging your prospective & existing customer base via different social media channels.

Some examples of what you need to monitor are

• How many blog readers do you have?
• How many comments are posted on your blog and by how many different visitors?
• How many people mention your company on their blogs, and how often?
• Is your content bookmarked in social bookmarking sites?
• How many friends and contacts do you have on your profile in social networking sites (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc)?

Hari Raghunathan
Head Marketing, QEDbaton

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/salesleads

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/hariraghunathan

How is Web 2.0 changing Technology Sales & Marketing?

Traditionally marketing has been an extremely controlled process. Messages have been developed, crafted, and delivered by a small group of people within an organization. However, with the advent of Web 2.0, this is undergoing a dramatic shift and online PtoP (Peer to Peer) communication is taking over. Every employee has now become a spokesperson and information from peers is highly trusted.

Web 2.0 is changing the way messages about products and brands are delivered and received. The rise of social media is a dramatic change for marketing. In Web 1.0, Internet marketing was looked at just like other marketing channels. We designed our marketing plan, audience, and choose channels to get our message out: Advertisements- TV & Print, Brochures, Newsletters, etc. Internet ads & Search engine ads were only seen as additional channels.

However, Web 2.0 is making us rethink the entire nature of our Marketing programs. Technology companies are now Blogging, podcasting, video casting, photo sharing, social bookmarking, creating profiles in MySpace and Facebook, and appearing in virtual worlds like Second Life. With Web 2.0, organizations don’t control the message anymore. Everyone contributes to shaping the message.

So what should a marketer do in an era where customers freely discuss your products and services?

Hari Raghunathan
Head Marketing, QEDbaton

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/salesleads

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/hariraghunathan

New rules of Marketing & PR @ the Nasscom India Leadership Forum

Just heard David Meerman Scott’s session (http://bit.ly/bODSso) at the Nasscom India Leadership Forum on the new rules of Marketing & PR. David makes some very good points on how the content you are producing should be in a language your buyers understand. I especially liked the part where he spoke about how employees should be allowed to communicate through mediums they are used to (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc). One big takeaway for me from the session was about Electronic gateways. I never thought that electronic gateways (asking for Email ids, etc) are such show stoppers and impact bloggers from participating in discussions. I am going to go back and try not putting up electronic gateways for our upcoming campaigns and see how that goes.

Marketing is evolving rapidly with the advent of these new mediums and while traditional mediums cannot be ignored, organizations are going to have to think out of the box to achieve effective results from these new mediums. Speakers like David open your eyes to some blatant mistakes we make and some of the new rules we need to keep in mind while executing our Marketing strategies.

What do you think are the new rules of Marketing?

Hari Raghunathan
Head Marketing, QEDbaton

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/salesleads

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/hariraghunathan