Don’t let the ‘cold calling is dead’ crew drag you down: Madlibs with @srichardv

I say it time and time again: The best people to pick up prospecting tips from are the appointment setting guys. Steve Richard from Vorsight is one of those guys. I personally learn a lot from the tips and tactics they are willing to share. If you are in the business, you should too. Here are his Madlibs:

  1. The b2b buyer is overwhelmed and, as a result, more unaware of their needs than ever.  How do you help someone realize they have a need that they didn’t know they had five minutes ago?
  1. The biggest innovation in sales is a deeper understanding of the buyer’s journey and how to align selling activities to it. [Read more...]

Social Prospecting and Don Draper: A story about getting that hard-to-reach client

I have a very simple rule for prospecting: If you want to know tactics and best practices for getting to hard-to-reach prospects, then listen to the guys who run appointment setting organizations or outbound call centers. They do this for a living at scale.

I was putting together a preso for Sirius Decisions with Mike Damphousse from GreenLeads. He is the master at prospecting. He explained to me how they have changed their approach and then provided an A-MAZING example.

The game is changing, even for the outbound masters

Buyers just don’t pick up their phones very much anymore.   I talked about this problem in one of my earlier posts on cold calling. If you walked into an outbound call center two years ago, you would see reps staring at a list of people to call and making hundreds of dials.  They would hang up on voicemails and wouldn’t dare spend the time to write emails. [Read more...]

Price v business value, delete buttons, Sunday emails and calling before 9AM – This week on Twitter Part II

I had too many tweets this week to do one post. Had to do another one.

Lets get into it:

A lot of my consulting gigs are to help design or optimize Inside Sales teams. One thing I have noticed is that companies are throwing young folks on the phone to sell their cloud solutions. In their mind you can be successful by getting some young-twenty-something folks on the phone, give them some technology, and teach them how to give a demo. The problem is the core foundation of sales fundamentals is not being established. I have had so many bad sales calls recently as I take calls for solutions for my clients. The phone-based sales reps I encountered focused on two things: the demo and the product. We have to train our reps to develop real business value. (PS I think I was taught that 15 years ago when my career started). [Read more...]

“This Week in Sales”– Video interview with Kevin Gaither

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8hG4-fATfw&w=560&h=315]

This is my interview with Kevin Gaither on This Week in Sales. It was awhile back but I haven’t had a blog in awhile. I had fun in the interview and I am just getting back into getting the Funnelholic up and running.

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter

Don’t Miss Focus B2B Marketing Week, July 11-15

From Monday, July 11, through Friday, July 15, Focus.com is presenting Focus B2B Marketing Week, rolling out a bunch of webinars and roundtable panels that will bring together the top experts in their fields to discuss the state of B2B marketing today.

Couple things to note:

  • Wednesday at 10 am PT is a webinar with Ardath Albee and me. Everything else is a roundtable.
  • You can catch all the action by clicking here.
  • Ask questions before, during and after the event in the event interfaces.

For speaker details and to attend, click the event links below.

Monday July 11

1 pm PT/4 pm ET: How to Set Up an Effective Marketing Organization

Tuesday July 12

11 am PT/2 pm ET: B2B Marketing Tactics That Work (And the Ones That Don’t)

1 pm PT/4 pm ET: Modern B2B Marketing Strategies

Wednesday July 13

10 am PT/1 pm ET: The Four Types of Prospect Attention and How They Affect Demand Generation

1 pm PT/4 pm ET: B2B Lead Generation: How To Use the Phone to Drive High Quality Leads

Thursday July 14

9 am PT/12 pm ET: The Key to Sales and Marketing Alignment

1 pm PT/4 pm ET: Expert Best Practices in Content Marketing

Friday July 15

11 am PT/2 pm ET: B2B Marketing 3.0: What’s Next for B2B Marketers?

1 pm PT/4 pm ET: Tips on Generating Leads for Yourself

Sign up to attend now — it should be awesome.

54 Things to Do when Building a Lead Qualification Team

I hesitated to write this post, because Marketo’s Jon Miller has already written quite possibly the best, as-close-to-definitive guide to lead qualification.

OK, now that I have led you off my site, let’s get back to business. I decided to write this because I continue to believe in my heart of hearts that one of the single biggest levers a revenue-focused organization can pull is to have a dedicated phone qualification team. Also, I was cleaning out old paperwork and found some of my old notes from my days at SalesRamp.

First, some clarifications: I’m talking about a multichannel process that includes dedicated phone-based resources and automation designed to determine whether or not a lead fits the agreed-upon qualified lead definition and is deemed ready to speak with sales. Or CliffsNotes-style: There are people on the phones who qualify leads or inquiries before handing them to sales.

There are a number of different names for this: inside sales, sales development, lead development, telebusiness, lead qualification, and so forth. No matter what you call it, there’s a buttload of things to do when building an LQT (lead qualification team). I can think of at least 54:

  1. Establish a business plan.
  2. Create definitions; in particular, your qualified lead definition (more on this later).
  3. Determine your “value-chain,” starting from revenue the organization needs to generate then go in order from there: a) Opportunities: How many opportunities do we need to hit the revenue number?; b) Qualified leads: How many qualified leads do we need to hit our number?; c) Leads or marketing-qualified leads (MQLs): How many leads do we need to hit our qualified leads number?
  4. Draw the value chain from top of the funnel to the bottom.
  5. Create metrics for each step in the value chain.
  6. Determine your leads’ needs (demographics and so forth).
  7. Determine lead/inquiry generation flow (what are the sources, etc.).
  8. Figure out how leads will be entered into the system.
  9. Establish the merged/purged database process.
  10. Develop a list of prospects/customers not to call.
  11. Develop a definition of a qualified lead. I know I mentioned this earlier, but it is the most critical definition — what criteria must you uncover in order to pass this lead to sales?
  12. Sales has to agree to the definition, or nothing on this list will work.
  13. Get a commitment from sales to follow up on the qualified lead. Some might call it an SLA (besides Dan Waldschmidt).
  14. What is the deliverable to sales? Is it an appointment? Demo? What is the information provided?
  15. What’s the closed-loop process? Sales needs to provide feedback on the qualified leads; try to do it using your CRM.
  16. Create lead stages just like sales stages, but make them mimic the phone qualification process.
  17. Develop the quota of qualified leads (as my old boss Stu Silverman called it, “The ‘keep-your-job’ quota”).
  18. Develop a commission plan for the LQ reps. It should be a qualified lead number with a bonus for revenue generated.
  19. Develop a commission plan for the manager.
  20. Determine how to track calling statistics. Yes, sir (or madam), you need to do this. (P.S. You may or may not be able to do this in the CRM.)
  21. Tie your qualified lead flow with the overall sales forecasting process.
  22. Establish the territories for the lead qualification reps.
  23. Develop “hang-on-the-wall” materials: value propositions, call guide including voice mail, qualified lead definition, competitive comparison guide, list of customers and partners, diagram of the field organization, buyer personas.
  24. Set content-delivery strategy – what should be sent when.
  25. Create scoring (this is if you don’t have marketing doing scoring). You should score on lead source, demographic info that hits your sweet spot (title, for example), and so forth.
  26. Score will determine level of effort and time spent.
  27. Create a “connect-strategy” that includes phone and email — a series of calls and emails over time.
  28. Determine the number of voicemails you will leave (if any; some people don’t).
  29. Create a web-researching strategy. Allot a certain amount of time to research each account. Provide an application to do research such as Inside View.
  30. Create a process for inbound calls including call routing. (P.S. Here is to hoping you get inbound calls!)
  31. Get senior executive staff to buy into the LQT.
  32. Write all of this down in a strategy document. Not just to look cool, but for your own good.
  33. Develop automation strategy, customizations, reports.
  34. Choose a CRM system if there isn’t one. Figure out how to support your process if there is one.
  35. Ensure you set up CRM to make lead qualification reps’ lives easier. They need to live in it.
  36. Write an automation cheat sheet. Lead qualification reps should hang it on their walls.
  37. Establish a process for tracking qualified leads.
  38. Develop a lead source report — goodness of sources and goodness of follow-up.
  39. Make sure leads are seamlessly entered into the system. Make sure lead qualification reps are alerted when they enter the CRM system.
  40. Train, train and train: industry, buying personas, market, technology, product, company, your new lead qualification process, the automation, the message, objections.
  41. Sit with the lead qualification reps; it’s the best way to help them.
  42. Determine headcount.
  43. Create job descriptions. Copy other job descriptions of like jobs to make sure you are thorough.
  44. Advertise on craigslist, it works for this position. And send out word to your network. After you get one or two, pay for referrals. The average age will be young for this position, and the young’uns like working with their friends.
  45. Manage the group toward hitting its goals.
  46. Monitor calling. Use a splitter. It sounds invasive, but it works great.
  47. Continually communicate goals and results to management. They don’t always get it.
  48. On second thought, continually communicate to the entire company.
  49. Have a closed-loop meeting with sales. It should be weekly. Accept feedback and do something about it.
  50. Have a closed-loop meeting with marketing. It should be weekly too.
  51. Have marketing listen to calls of their leads so they can see what is working/not working live.
  52. Constantly optimize.
  53. Expect a year to 14 months of maximum output from lead qualification reps.
  54. Wake up do it again (think Groundhog Day).

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter

Focus Funnel Expert: Ardath Albee of Marketing Interactions

Today, we’re delving deeper into the Focus Experts’ Guide: Sales and Marketing Pipeline and Funnel Models, so I’d like to introduce another of the industry thought-leaders who contributed to the Focus Experts’ Guide.

Meet Ardath Albee, CEO and B2B Marketing Strategist at Marketing Interactions. Ardath brings over 20 years of business management and marketing experience to help B2B companies with complex sales create e-marketing strategies, using contagious content to turn prospects into buyers. She shares her insights on the Marketing Interactions blog, and is the author of the book eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale.

The Funnelholic: Explain your approach to the funnel.

Ardath: I approached the funnel from how the buyer might experience it. If organizations are truly going to achieve customer-centric orientation, they need to start thinking from the buyers’ perspective, not their company’s.

The labeling of a buyer as a contact, lead, prospect, marketing qualified lead, sales accepted lead, etc., is a company construct that emphasizes our interests in selling to them, not theirs in buying from us. What might make an interesting experiment is to overlay the buyer perspective funnel on top of a company perspective funnel and take a look at how the stages line up. We might learn something.

The Funnelholic: Besides your own, were there any other funnels that resonated with you?

Ardath: Several. I really enjoyed Mike Damphousse’s take on the demand-gen cloud as a funnel. There’s definitely a lot more going on these days than there used to be, and “harnessing the chaos” is definitely now within marketing’s purview. That said, I think “managing the demand-gen cloud” is a tall order. We need to embrace it, learn from it and proactively work to engage in all the channels that our prospects spend time in, as Mike discusses, but control is firmly in the hands of buyers.

The statement that the funnel “is a living object that changes as business conditions evolve,” made by Christopher Doran also resonated with me. We would all be well served to pay attention to how fast our marketplaces are changing to make sure we change in parallel. Barbra Gago’s funnel focused on community to the point of involving all customer-facing departments within the organization; that got me thinking about some new opportunities. I also liked the fact that she went beyond purchase, as did Matt Heinz and Matt West, to loyalty, lifetime value and evangelism. I actually found something unique to consider in all the funnels. Each of them had points I found well worth considering.

The Funnelholic: What did you learn from the exercise?

Ardath: That designing a funnel is challenging. Especially — as a practicing marketer — to separate the strategic from the tactical in order to draw the funnel to support a specific perspective. And, not being a graphic designer, it was frustrating trying to determine just how to depict my funnel so that what I visualized in my head would get my point across to the audience.

I think I created and discarded five or six funnels before I landed on my final version. It made me think about the process from different angles and also challenged me to look for a new way of presenting a funnel that might help others look at the concept of a funnel differently.

The Funnelholic: If everyone needs to create a funnel to model their business, what are best practices for creating it?

Ardath: That’s a tough question. Here are a few insights from my experience that may be helpful. I’m just not sure they should be called “best practices.”

Play. Allow yourself to toss out a number of ideas that are not traditional for your company.

Start from a blank page. Trying to change the funnel you already have by working within that construct will limit your ability to envision things differently.

Make sure each section of your funnel makes a logical transition. If you see gaps, insert another stage to fill them.

Describe your funnel in 100 words or less. You made us do that, and it caused me to really think about what I needed to say to get my point across. If you can’t describe your funnel so that people understand it in 100 words or less, go back to the drawing table.

Invite people with various perspectives to participate. I drew my funnel by myself. After seeing other Focus Experts’ funnels, I realized there were a few things that I hadn’t considered that I’ll now incorporate into my funnel.

Consider your funnel’s application. Once you have your funnel, take a look at your processes and determine how they might be modified to smooth the transitions from one stage to the next — or better connect them. If you’ve flipped your funnel on its head, this could be a really enlightening exercise.

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter

The world’s most incomplete list of inside sales experts

This blog post contains a list of experts in the Inside Sales space. This list is incomplete, is missing people, and in general is not ready for prime-time, this I admit.  Please play along:  My goal is to create a fairly complete list of experts in the inside sales space. My hope is that if I post the “World’s Most Incomplete List of Inside Sales Experts”, readers of this blog will recommend experts to complete my list. I actually tweeted out this request and didn’t get anything, so I feel like I am doing a service to the world. There you have it.

Here is how I am thinking about this list:

1.  Inside Sales is defined as people who make their living using the phone as their primarily vehicle for selling.  This can mean lead qualification or closing revenue over the phone.
2.  An expert for the sake of this exercise fits the following criteria:

a.  Tweets and Followers (sorry, welcome to 2010)
b.  Blogging (once every two weeks is all I was looking for here)
c.   Inside Sales as expertise…there is a lot of REALLY good sales bloggers out there that I read regularly that I purposely left off the list.  The key here is that these people actually care about inside sales, the profession.
d.   There is one guy I have to leave on even though he continues to ignore letters a and b above and that is Stu Silverman who was my mentor and gets a pass.

3. Who I missed is as important as who i have….either send me people I missed in the comments (keep the rules above in your head), tweet it to me, or email me at craig AT funnelholic DOT com.

Experts:

1. Mike Damphousse
2. Trish Bertuzzi
3. Josiane Feigon
4. Stu Silverman
5. Anneke Seley
6. Matt Bertuzzi
7. Ken Krogue
8. Karla Blalock
9. Aaron Ross
10. Chris Snell
11. Steve Richard
12. Geoff Alexander
13. Art Sobczak

New Additions:

14.  Matt Heinz
15.  Michael Pedone
16.  Mark Roberge
17. Simon Carruthers
18.  Larry Reeves
19.  Bob Perkins
20.  Mike Brooks
21.   Kevin Gaither
22.  Dan McDade
23.  Laurie Page

More New Additions (9/9/10)

24.  Sharon Little
25.  Tom Scontras

Remember, I want more…send, tweet, whatever, but hurry, I want to get this list to 30 in a week.

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter

Don’t Tug on Superman’s Cape: 5 Tips to Help Marketing Deal with Sales

Last week, I went to Silverpop’s B2B Marketing University.  As I have blogged before, I don’t write about conferences unless I can write about something interesting. This event was awesome — the content was great (not your typical BS), 180 people were in the audience, and the questions were engaging. I was having writer’s block going into the event, and I left with three posts (coming soon). Props to Silverpop.

OK, so during Malcolm Friedberg’s presentation, someone in the audience asked for advice on how to handles sales. (The actual question is not important, but it had something to do with convincing sales to let marketing nurture instead of passing the leads to them directly.) Anyway, I was sitting there thinking that, here we have Malcolm on stage talking about marketing automation processes, etc., and one of the questions that comes up is the age-old issue of the sales-marketing divide. Boom. Funnelholic blog post.

One thing I have noticed as Marketing 2.0 continues to gather steam is that all of us in the marketing blogosphere can act like dealing with sales is easy because we are all in marketing-dominated companies. But in the real world, sales is the powerful and dangerous entity. That’s not an insult. That’s reality. Sales is on the front line — they are type-A, aggressive, unforgiving folks. It’s rare to find a place where marketing is in the catbird’s seat.

If you don’t have sales on board, however, you will have NO ROI. So act, don’t complain.

So, here is how you know you have a problem with sales:

  • Sales tells you that you suck — Do I need to explain?
  • Sales ignores you completely — Sales is a “you are either helping me or in the way” type of crew, so if they view you as being in the way (fairly or not), prepare to be ignored.
  • Sales tells everyone you suck, but not to your face — It’s amazing how many sales leaders are passive-aggressive, but I see it all the time. Which leads to …
  • Sales is really nice to you: Beware of smiling sales management.

Here is how you tell you have a good relationship:

  • When leads don’t convert, they look into what they can do about it. Good.
  • They ask for more of your leads. Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner!

Here are 5 things you should do to foster a healthy sales-marketing relationship:

1. Have a meeting: I know this sounds obvious, but here is my point. If things are bad, then have a meeting. If you are starting the relationship, have a meeting. In the meeting, tell sales the following:

  • MARKETING will create an infrastructure (nurturing, phone) to pass qualified leads to the sales team. (Again, stop passing raw inquiries to sales.)
  • MARKETING AND SALES will AGREE on a unified lead definition to live by.
  • SALES will sign an SLA that, if MARKETING hits the unified lead definition, they will follow up an agreed amount of times.
  • MARKETING AND SALES will meet at least biweekly to optimize the program.
  • MARKETING AND SALES WILL get along.

2. Create a unified lead definition: I give Brian Carroll the credit for this term, but gurus like Stu Silverman have been making the lead definition the key to sales and marketing success for years. Here is the essence: sit down with sales and AGREE on the definition of a lead — what marketing passes to the sales team. Look, sales will forget — particularly when one an account executives complains — but you can always refer back to it. When sales comes back and says, “none of your leads are closing,” offer to revisit the lead definition. Keep in mind that the lead definition dictates volume, and when you discuss definitions, you have to make sure sales understands the volume implications.
3. The sales SLA: When you agree to a unified lead definition, you also need to agree on sales’ activities after you pass them a qualified lead. Do this. It’s only fair.
4. Have weekly sync-up meetings: You can do this biweekly, if necessary. Just don’t let it slip. Don’t just talk about the numbers, talk anecdotally. Remind everyone that the meeting must be honest but not accusatory, because the wheels can fall off these meetings very easily if you are not careful. On the other hand, they can’t be a meaningless rubber stamp either. Optimization is a two-way street.
5. Just try to get along: I hate to say it, but if you are the marketer, you have to lead this charge. Sales is always moving, so have a plan and instigate peace. Both sides will win as a result.

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter

26 Reasons Your Leads Aren’t Converting into Opportunities

I got the band back together: Tom Scearce (aka @TLOTL) and Chris Jablonski (aka @cjablonski). These are my partners in crime when creating long(er) list posts, and they certainly helped me here. We have put together a list of 26 reasons your leads are converting, and, as usual, we had some fun with it.

Before you read on, I want to make one point. There is typically one major issue to overall lead conversion: lack of lead management, also known as passing raw leads/MQLs directly to sales reps. I have yet to find an organization with legit lead management processes that can’t convert leads. They can convert co-reg, content syndication, you name it — because they have built an always-on lead management process to convert leads or inquiries into qualified leads.

One other point, this assumes you are producing at least reasonable leads/inquiries/MQLs.

With that in mind, here are the 25 reasons your leads aren’t converting:

  1. You’re passing them directly to the sales team without an intermediate step or two (i.e., lead development or lead nurturing).
  2. You don’t have dedicated resources (i.e., lead development or an inside sales team) connecting with and qualifying leads.
  3. You haven’t tried to optimize what the lead development team is doing to convert your leads.
  4. You aren’t leveraging scoring.
  5. You aren’t leveraging nurturing.
  6. You haven’t created a unified lead definition with the sales team (the term “unified lead definition” was coined by Brian Carroll @brianjcarroll).
  7. You don’t have an SLA with your sales reps for what they guarantee they will do when you pass them a qualified lead.
  8. Sales doesn’t care about you anymore and won’t follow up on anything you send.
  9. You’re considering the wrong metrics when looking for optimization.
  10. You don’t look at metrics at all.
  11. You look at too many metrics.
  12. You think your job is to get the most leads and the lowest CPL (cost per lead).  Right answer: your job is to create the highest conversion at the most efficient CPO (cost per opportunity).
  13. You don’t have “conversations”— optimization sessions with your lead vendors.
  14. You don’t have “conversations” — optimization sessions with the sales team.
  15. You dump leads from different sources into an identical lead development path (@cjablonski).
  16. Your shotgun marketing approach gives you a lot of quantity at the expense of quality (@cjablonski).
  17. Sales disqualifies leads because they deem the leads too early in the sales cycle (@cjablonski).
  18. Your value proposition is diluted, unreinforced, or at worst, forgotten as the prospect moves from inquiry through nurturing to sales follow-up (@cjablonski).
  19. Marketing has no process for filtering raw inquiries and disqualifying those that don’t fit (at least closely) the ideal customer profile (@cjablonski).
  20. Your sales team already has so many good leads on its plate, and sales reps would rather close those leads than sift through your mixed bag of suspects and prospects (@tlotl).
  21. Your leads are going to inbound contact-center sales reps, and answering the ringing phone is always more important than calling out on your Web-captured “handraiser” leads (@tlotl).
  22. Your leads were captured at a trade show two months ago and haven’t been nurtured or called since (@tlotl).
  23. The first 100 leads tagged with campaign code “XYZ” were unreachable, unqualified or not ready to talk to a sales rep, and now any lead tagged with that campaign code is effectively blacklisted in the sales team (@tlotl).
  24. You haven’t educated your leads with vendor-agnostic, third-party-sourced content that validates your solution in the marketplace (@tlotl).
  25. You’ve purchased a targeted list of contacts or names, didn’t market to them and delivered them to sales — under the (false) pretense that they are actually leads (@tlotl).
  26. Your leads are great leads, but they’re best suited for a product that your sales team is not properly trained, compensated or experienced enough to qualify. For example, your sales team is world class at selling a point solution, but you’ve delivered them (expensive) leads for a bundled offering (@tlotl).

Are there more?  We’d love to hear yours.

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter