There’s a very thought provoking post by Bruce Wedderburn (EVP Channel & Enablement, Huthwaite Inc.) and re-posted by Donal Daly about how rock star sales people will best perform in 2012 within the rapidly evolving online environment.

The traditional method of sales engagement (and as Donal puts it) followed these steps:

1. Diagnose the customer’s pain
2. Uncover their needs
3. Craft a targeted solution that meets the customer’s stated needs

Traditionally there was a good chance that a sales person would engage with the prospect very close to the beginning of the buying process - or ideally initiate it. This was especially the case when the customer was somewhat isolated and got a great deal of their information from trade shows and their trusted vendor sales reps. When this was the case, the conversation would start from the beginning of the investigation and the sales person could move the prospect through the process by asking really good questions and engaging.

As the business environment accelerated, and the proliferation of information on the web went through the roof, the timing of the engagement and the model for engagement has shifted tremendously. Although I couldn’t find the original report that Daly quotes, there was a study done by the Marketing Leadership Council that found that of the 1,460 respondents in their survey, vendors first contacted the prospect when they were already 57% of the way through the purchase decision making process. At this point of the engagement, the traditional sales person is in a bad position looking to explain features and essentially offer discounts.

Merging the Disciplines of Marketing and Sales

What this calls for is what we’ve already seen emerging in a number of companies and industries out there - a closer integration between marketing and sales, and a merging of the two disciplines within the sales process.

As the prospect is already gathering information and evaluating solutions on the web, marketing needs to be creating materials and making available opportunities for engagement where the customers are. This falls into two modern disciplines of Social Media Marketing and Content Marketing.

This evolution takes the marketing person beyond the role of branding, awareness creation, and lead generation, and well into the space of lead qualification and education. In effect, the marketing person is doing far more “selling” than they used to. To put it another way, the role of marketing is evolving into what has been traditionally been referred to as “inside sales”.

The Impact on Software Sales

The impact of this trend on software sales is profound. For those companies that still organize their marketing efforts around tradeshows and press releases and only dabble in social media, a huge hole in the sales process opens up. Fewer leads are generated and the sales person is constantly in “discount” mode as they try to “sell” a prospect that’s highly educated and has not been engaged until late in the process.

Counter intuitively, a trend that was prolific in the first decade of the century could also be having a detrimental effect on the process - the free evaluation download.

Once thought to be a great lead generator, this vehicle has not been the silver bullet everyone had hoped.

• IT departments of customers often don’t allow downloads
• Large applications take literally hours to download
• Self-guided installation and setup is rife with problems damaging the prospect of a sale
• After the download, the software vendor has zero visibility into how the prospect is using the software or if they’re using it at all
• The use of dummy email addresses and phone numbers with automatic downloads leaves the vendor with no visibility and no lead to follow up on

In the best case scenario, the prospect has downloaded the software, tried it out and formed an opinion before the sales rep even calls on them and engages in a discussion.

The Cloud as an Engagement Platform

By enabling prospects to securely access and use software installed on the cloud in a self-serve fashion the marketing team will have the engagement platform to efficiently perform the enhanced role of inside sales.

Marketing people will have a self-serve environment where newly created content can be placed alongside the latest version of their software.  They will have a single destination to which they can drive prospects as they engage with them on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and blogs.  As prospects take themselves through the education (sales!) process, the newly minted Inside Marketeer/Sales Person will have visibility into how the prospect uses the software, analytics by which to qualify them, and communication tools by which to engage them in realtime.

Key attributes of the cloud platform are:

• No downloads, so IT’s happy and so is your customer
• No installation, so your customer has a good experience crafted by you
• Detailed analytics and automated analysis of activity and software use to automate the inside sales process
• Configurable degrees of screening to ensure every lead is validated against a list of prospects

(Not by coincidence, these are primary features of the Xuropa Software Sales Platform with integrated Intelligent Sales Engine™.)

How have you seen your customer engagement model evolve? How has this impacted your organization and your hiring practices? There’s a lot to consider in this very real trend in the evolution of sales.

Posted under CRM, Sales Automation, Social Media Marketing, cloud, software

Photo (cc) by Flickr user Leo Reynolds.

Lead generation is one of the primary roles of your marketing organization and the greatest demand of your sales force. As markets become more globalized your marketing team needs to make greater use of the web in generating leads for your sales team to follow up on and close.

Here’s a list of 10 key steps to take in generating those leads.

1. Identify Your Prospects

List the key characteristics of your target customers in order to find where they are on the web, what they are interested in, and what is likely to make them take time out of their day to visit your site and provide their contact information. This last point should tie back to your value proposition.

2. Give to Get

While many sales professionals refer to the first stage of the sales process as “Lead Generation” we’re really talking about “Contact Generation”. We want our prospects to visit our website and then provide their contact information in exchange for something of value. So we have to create something that would be interesting or useful to our prospects. Such as a Case Study, Tutorial, Whitepaper, or maybe you have the budget for an iPad giveaway. Whatever you determine to give your prospects make it available on your website with a simple sign-up form.

3. Write a Blog Post

You or someone in your company should already be contributing to a blog, so write a blog post that talks to the subject of your giveaway. The less it is about your product and more about your customers the better. Your blog post helps with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), but also gives you an additional link to be used for subsequent steps.

4. Tweet

Very little about marketing is discussed without “Tweet” or “Twitter” being mentioned. Unless you have a very targeted audience (targeted using hashtags or your carefully nurtured list of followers) this may not be an immediately rewarding channel. However, post a comment with a link to your giveaway or blog post in order to build up that marketing channel at the least.  These links will drive your targeted prospects to your sign-up page.

5. Post to LinkedIn Group

Especially if your business is B2B, you should be using LinkedIn as a way to find and engage your target audience.  Search LinkedIn’s groups, join them (if you haven’t already), and start a discussion or join one.  Then, in a non-spammy way, post a link to your giveaway.

6. Post to Facebook

While the value of Facebook to B2B companies is still patchy, it is an essential channel for B2C businesses.  Search for groups that focus on your customers and post a link to your giveaway here.

7. Join a Conversation

Ideally you should be participating in online discussions important to your customers.  Either way, using tools such as Technorati, BlogPulse, or Google Alerts, find blog posts or articles from publications that serve your community (market).  Engage in the conversation by making posts.  You can add a link with your comments, but again - don’t make it spammy!

8. Answer a Question

Sometimes, within LinkedIn or Quora, your customers are asking explicitly for your help.  The question could be related to your value proposition, the problem you solve, or the field you’re in.  Perform searches on these platforms, answer the question in a meaningful way and include your link as a source of additional information.  But make sure that your giveaway content is indeed related to the question and your answer.

9. Buy Contacts & Engage

You can buy contact information using services such as Jigsaw.  But if you do, a best practice would be to enable your customers to opt-in to your marketing program.  Use an email marketing tool like ConstantContact of Mail Chimp to reach out to your new contacts with a “value rich” email and link to your giveway.  The same could be done with a purchased or rented email list.

Here’s an interesting perspective on evaluating the quality of your list.

10. Advertise

Last but not least, if your budget allows, purchase adwords from Google and include a link to your content and sign-up sheet.  It sounds pretty straight forward, but this alone is an art and a science.

Posted under CRM, Sales Automation, Social Media Marketing

There is no shortage of ways to get a contact at a prospective account.  In the off-line world there are traditional and still powerful techniques such as partner or customer referrals and attendance at trade shows.  On-line we can connect through LinkedIn or Facebook.  We can perform an email marketing campaign.  Alternatively our storefront to the internet, our website, can provide us with contact information to follow up on.

Qualification the Hard Way

Once the contact has been collected you need to judge their propensity to buy your software.  Tracking that contacts behavior on social networks and your website is a definite way to understand their interest.  But the only true way you will know you have someone your sales team should be focused on is when they want to try your software out.

Software Downloads Don’t Work

A download of an evaluation version of your software is fraught with uncertainty.  Was the download successful?  Were they able to easily install your software?  Once they installed your software, did they actually use it?  In fact, an increasing number of your customers ban the ability to download software behind the firewall, and so this is not even an option for some of your customers.

Shipping Sales Engineers with Software is Costly

Sending your software with a sales engineer to install your software on your customers system may appear to be a sure-fire way of gauging interest and ensuring a good user experience, but that’s a very expensive way to do it.  Increasingly your customers are spread out all over the world, so you could be spending thousands on airfares and accommodations.  That may be considered a small price to pay if the ASP of your software is high enough, but what about the opportunity cost involved.  While your valuable sales engine is on the plane, in a hotel or asleep in a different time zone they cannot be serving other potentially higher qualified prospects.  Finally, after the software has been installed on-site at the prospect your sales team is blind.  They don’t know when the software is being used, how often, or if it’s being used at all.
All of this effort and cost can ultimately result in a very expensive “fishing expedition” and the potential loss of other prospects that would have been better served.  This is where Xuropa comes in.

Three Steps to Prospect Self-Qualification

By installing your software on the Xuropa Platform you now have the perfect vehicle to qualify leads from all of the globe 24/7.

Step 1: Invite Your Contacts

Take the contacts that you’ve generated from a trade show or an email campaign and invite them to try out your software on the cloud.  Using Xuropa you simply upload your contacts and send out an email from the platform.  The platform includes a link that takes your prospects directly to your software on the cloud.

Step 2: Your Contacts Self-Qualify

Those prospects that click on your invitation link will start using your software on the cloud with just their browser.  There are no downloads or installations at all.  And the whole process is extremely secure.

As your prospects use your software (or review documentation, presentations, or manuals, etc.) the Xuropa Platform is gathering data.  Everything that your prospect does is analyzed and their propensity to buy calculated.

Step 3: Automated Prioritization and Follow Up

The Enterprise level account of Xuropa provides sales analytics, lead qualification and prioritization tools.  Each prospect is literally plotted on a Sales Funnel and ranked for your marketing team and sales team to follow up appropriately.
Now you can replace the costly and vague processes of software evaluations of the past with a powerful software sales solution.  Xuropa was built from the ground up to enable your customers to qualify themselves while they use your software and provide you with complete control and visibility into your customers and how they use your software.
Check out the Case Study if you’d like to see the results that Cadence Design Systems were able to achieve.

Posted under CRM, Xuropa