Brian Giese's Blog

8 (ok 9) Top Sales Operations Ideas

I found out a long time ago that sales pipeline and your ability to hit revenue targets all start with good lead management. The trouble is that leads can come in many ways, shapes and forms and most companies have loose or no structure in place to manage leads (sound familiar?). Here are a few ideas to help create a "sales infrastructure" to leverage and nuture good leads.

1. Decide what a lead is (and is not) and stick with it. One of the biggest disconnects between sales and the rest of the company is the definition of a lead. When does a prospect become a lead that a salesperson will actually work on? It's estimated that 90 percent of the leads that are sent to sales staff are never acted on. For better sales effectiveness, your sales and marketing should agree when a prospect becomes an actual lead that should be forwarded to sales.

2. Use a CRM. Nobody likes thier CRM so how do you get sales guys to use it. No time to be shy, the stick is the only thing that works.

3. Preload your database with the right prospects. Prospects are not leads.Your customers are the first step in prospecting sales leads. Profile of your best customers to better define and acquire new prospects.

4. Track the source. If you don't capture the source, you have no way of figuring out what's working.

5. Distribute leads quickly. Think about your own experiences. How many times have you tried to contact a company to request information and they never get back to you? I rest my case.

6. Nurture your leads. Dvelop campaigns that allow you to touch your prospects multiple times so you can move them through the sales cycle until they're ready to think about actually purchasing from you.

7. Measure everything. But in order to measure your results, you need to decide what you want to measure and why.

8. Hold regular sales meetings with marketing.   Meet with marketing on a regular basis to review lead quality, win/loss records, and tracking CRM systems so you can continue to improve your sales effectiveness.

Bonus Tip: Get operations reporting directly to sales management and have marketing report their as well.

How to Get Sales and Marketing to Work

Last week I was interviewed by Joe and Mike at SalesRoundup on the topic of Marketing vs.Sales: Can't we all just get along? Some of you know that this is a topic I've been blogging lately and is near and dear to me. These guys are really funny, in-the-trenches IT sales guys (Joe works for Informatica and Mike for IBI) who have taken up their labor-of-love to bring us really good content on day-to-day sales topics.

Click here and insert into your favorite content reader (I use iTunes and Bloglines) or cut-and-paste this link http://www.salesroundup.com/podcast.xml 

   Click here to download and listen on your PC.

Marketing vs. Sales

I believe that there is one real purpose for marketing - to generate sales. It seems that top-line growth is back at the top of the corporate agenda and where growth is a priority, marketing is too.

Revenue growth using direct marketing is the rage in business-to-business marketing these days. And with good reason. The last time we had a market ascension in technology it was about the brand, now it's about top-line sales growth with a healthy respect for the bottom-line numbers, so marketing is being measured (like sales) to drive revenues. Here are 4 tips on how marketing can prove their value and work together with sales to accelerate the sales cycle and positively impact the top and bottom lines.

1. Work with sales to figure out what a lead is. Marketers have a serious credibility issue with Sellers that stems from a long history of finger pointing on this topic. So first things first. What is a lead? Sales and marketing rarely agree on this and it’s worth marketing’s time to work with sales and figure it out. If they do, everybody wins.

2. Marketing should treat sales like a customer. Marketing views sales as “arrogant” and sales view marketing as “worthless”. Get the picture? Marketing’s job is to support sales as if they were a customer and treat them like gold.

3. Agree on credible metrics to define success. Marketing should be evaluated by metrics for which it can be held accountable, such as number of qualified leads delivered to sales and the ratio of leads to close. The higher that ratio, the better marketing is nurturing and qualifying the lead before it is handed over to sales.

4. Focus on the things that matter. Most marketers have a list of priorities a mile long. In this environment, the key isn't how much you do, it's how much you help your organization achieve in top-line revenue. It's a good idea to drive some quick wins along with longer-term strategies such as strengthening the sales pipeline. Campaigns that target existing customers for up-sells and cross-sells are a great place to start.

Hope this helps.

6 Tips on Selling Consulting Services

I think the most serious challenge facing consultants is believability. Unfortunately, recent consulting scandals reinforce the notion that that very few clients are satisfied with their consultants and this bad press makes clients even more skeptical. It seems that part the problem is that most consultants are experts in their subjects, but less familiar with the consultative selling process. So here are six tips that help in the process of selling technology consulting services to mainstream companies;

Be a complete expert on the subject. Be upfront with your client and don't "sell" yourself in areas you don't know.

Qualify each project to determine your ability to win the work and earn a profit. These two don't always go hand-in-hand.

Bring your network of skilled consultants with you on the project. You can't know everything so rely on you network of great contacts for support.

Scope projects properly to eliminate "scope creep" and produce predictable results. Your profit can evaporate if you have an ambiguous statement of the project scope.

Find an agreeable pricing model that protects both you and our client. Pricing services is as much an art as a science, and there are at least fifteen different pricing strategies you can use.

Deliver on-time and under budget.

Do those six things well, and you'll have more work than you can handle.

Does CRM Really Work?

I was just reading a blog entry by Jim Dickie from CSO Insights on the effectiveness of CRM. The headline reads "What Does CRM Really Do For Salespeople?". In it Jim says, "We asked participating sales executives to assess the impact that technology was having on their sales performance. A consolidated review of their responses found that 71.9 percent stated that CRM was improving their performance, 18.2 percent said it was having no effect, and 9.9 percent didn't know."

I have to agree that CRM is "improving perfomance" but still has a long, long, long way to go. A few months ago I led a rountable discussion at the Direct Focus Conference in Salt Lake City on the effectiveness of CRM. Of the 12 VP Sales and CMO's present only one (that's 1) said it's CRM was viewed as effective by it's salesforce. And you guessed it, the VP was from Seibel... I mean, Oracle. ;)

Sales Management

How do you create strong sales management?

Look for an integrated approach, created specifically for sales and marketing managers, that helps them develop and manage all of the customer management disciplines critical to profitable revenue growth. Look for a system that provides managers with the blueprint to plan and execute short-term and long-term financial objectives for sales management.