The Funnelholic

Anneke Seley is our first interview in the series. Anneke Seley was the twelfth employee at Oracle and the designer of the company’s revolutionary inside-sales operation. She is currently the CEO and founder of Phone Works, a consultancy that helps large and small businesses build and restructure sales teams to achieve predictable, measurable, and sustainable sales growth. Her book, “Sales 2.0: Improve Business Results Using Innovative Sales Practices and Technology,” is available at online retailers. For more information, visit www.sales20book.com.

Everywhere you go in Silicon Valley, people know Phone Works. In my eyes they have evolved their messaging to the point that they are directly associated with the Sales 2.0 movement. I am excited to have them involved in the Funnel Thought Leadership Interview series.

1.   What are the three trends you see emerging in 2009?

• Proliferation of Sales 2.0 — the use of innovative sales practices enabled by technology that creates value for both the buyer and seller.
• More focus on measurable, predictable selling and lowering cost of sales.
• Strengthening of customer relationships and alignment with buyer preferences.

2.   What are the biggest challenges for 2009?

• Finding new customers with budget and resources this quarter.
• Keeping sales teams motivated.
• Getting creative and strategic when it’s necessary to do more with less.

3.   What are three metrics that b2b marketers should care about and why?

• The number of qualified leads they are adding to pipeline weekly/monthly/quarterly. Volume is important, but numbers alone won’t help sales make its numbers.
• ROI on marketing investments (best sources of qualified leads) to drive future investments in the most effective programs and avoid spending money on ineffective programs
• Conversion rates from qualified-lead stage to future stages such as opportunity and close. To align marketing goals with sales objectives, leads should be tracked all the way through the sales cycle. Compensating marketing for generating leads that turn into revenue strengthens this alignment.

4.   What are the top oversights marketers are making regarding lead generation?

• Not measuring quality or conversion from lead to close.
• Not communicating with sales on what constitutes a “qualified lead” or “target prospect”
• Under-investing/not understanding volumes of qualified leads needed in the pipeline for sales to make its numbers.

5.   What will you prescribe to marketers to carry out effective lead generation?

• We design sales processes that clearly indicate the volume of qualified leads required for revenue objectives to be met.
• We work with marketing to define target prospects, lead-rating criteria and lead-qualification processes and establish sales development functions to track demand-generation program effectiveness as well as effectiveness of marketing messages, positioning, pricing, lists and offers.
• We recommend marketing automation tools that can accelerate the sales process and test the results of those tools with pilot programs.

6.   What three Web 2.0 applications, cutting-edge technologies or lead-generation sources do marketers HAVE to consider to be successful?

If forced to pick only three, I would pick a well-designed, easy-to-use, expandable CRM as the foundation, a great contact list/data source that is well-maintained and accurate, and sales analytics tools to facilitate sales process measurement. But there are many other effective tools that help engage or qualify customers online, accelerate the process of connecting with them live, shorten the contracts cycle, and so on.

In order to pick the best technology for you, first establish a sales process to track and measure your sales steps consistently to understand where the selling cycle is stalling or sales challenges are occurring. Only then can you determine which tools can have the most impact for your company.

7.   What do you hope for in b2b sales and marketing for the new year?

• Close communication and collaboration — with each other as well as with customers and prospects.
• Changing mindset to embrace Sales 2.0 and the science of predictable selling.
• Staying positive, optimistic and creative!

The Funnelholic will be going on hiatus until January.  Before I go, I just wanted to look back on the Funnelholic in 2008.  Overall,  building the Funnelholic.com blog has been a rewarding experience.   By having to write 2 posts a week, I have done more research than ever in all aspects of the b2b sales and marketing funnel.  I have also learned a ton about social media and traffic building, met new friends and contacts, and actually had people say “Wow, you’re the Funnelholic!”.  I don’t plan for this blog to be a huge Web property, instead a place for me to have some fun talking the business I enjoy.  It’s also a colossal time-sink.

2008 Milestones:

• Redesigned the site: There is probably another rev coming, but the most important thing was to get up and running as quickly as possible.  Bottom line, it is working for me and I haven’t heard too many complaints.
• Two posts a week: I basically decided this was all or nothing.  I didn’t want the Funnelholic to be one of those blogs with 3 to 5 posts on there a year.  Two posts a week is incredibly difficult, but I believe has been integral to the Funnelholic’s success
• “Friends of the Funnel” Linkedin Group: My goal for the year was 500 members, and I hit that number last week. The group is now one of the bigger ones in the demand gen space.  For a guy who came out of nowhere, this has been awesome.
• Twitter: 227 followers and adding 1 or 2 a day. I am not Guy Kawasaki, but I am happy with the progress.  I got a lot of traffic from Twitter and Linkedin.
• Facebook: Total flop, doesn’t work for me. Neither does Plurk.  Thumbs down.
• “The Wikipedia Scandal” series of posts: This post was one of my first big traffic lifts.  For a while, I was getting 15 visitors a day, no comments, and no links.  I wrote this post and I blew up for a week.  The traffic poured in and I finally got some comments.  This post will go down in Funnelholic history as a big traffic boost.
• My mood swings: The blog is meant to be fun, sarcastic, and witty.  When the depths of the recession began to be felt, my writing got dark.  After some personal requests to go back to putting the FUN back in the Funnelholic, I came back to life.  One post that I got a lot of great feedback on was the Making It Work in 2009: 6 Quotes from Martin Scorcese Put Things in Perspective. This article got kudos and traffic, and writing it was fun and cathartic.

So, I am off for a couple weeks, and then we will come back with a vengeance in 2009.  I plan to kick off the year with some thought leadership interviews.  As the year progresses, I hope to use more data we are gathering here at Tippit around buying behavior.

Signing off for 2008.  Happy New Year.

At Sherpa last week, I met one of my readers. She said in essence: “I love your blog, but lately you have been bumming me out.”  She’s probably right. I am trying to make the blog reflect what I feel and am thinking at a given time.  Looking over my posts, you can see I’ve gone from irreverent, cocky, and sometimes funny to gloomy, dark, and fear-inducing in a fairly short span of time.  For me, the most important thing is that, as sales and marketers, we deal with REALITY and be as proactive in our adjustments as we can. If I write about sunshine and roses, how is that going to help us get through this?

Speaking of getting through this, when times get tough you have two choices; Lay down or fight.  I have seen a couple marketing departments “lay down” recently and I am really disappointed.  Yes, the world is going to hell, but guess what, your job is to survive and advance.  I look forward to watching which organizations make the adjustments necessary to come out on top in the next couple years.  I especially like those organizations that view negative times as opportunity.  Organizations see blood on the street, and go for the jugular.

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There is no way to sugarcoat this, world economic markets are screwed. It’s one thing to have fun with The Funnelholic, but I can’t ignore what is happening right now. All of us in the B2B marketing and sales media need to band together and provide tips to one another on how to keep be successful and even keep your job in these hard times. I have already begun — see 3 Changes Marketers Must Make to Survive in This Post-Apocalyptic World.

We will figure out what to do, but we can’t live in fantasyland. We won’t be able to make the necessary adjustments if we don’t swallow the reality. And by the way, we should assume the worst and create a plan that we can execute confidently. My buddy Steve puts it simply: “Mad Max” time.

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