Inside Sales (and the Buttered Elephant)

Specialization & Learning

Chris — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 21:44:00 +0000

Given the movement away from field sales and towards a more balanced field & corporate (I’m moving towards this label for Inside Sales after reading Marc Benioff’s “Behind the Cloud”) sales mixture do we expect to see an associated rise in the subject matter expertise of corporate sales teams which are based in the office?

This seems to be the case and is reinforced by a growing perception that buyers are engaging with sellers further and further down the sales cycle – given this state of affairs we can expect corporate sales to become more of a blend between marketing & sales rather (especially with non-commodity products) than a pure numbers based sales machine. In that case they have to be able to speak with prospects at all levels within the organization and at wildly varying times within the sales cycle.*

Given this state of affairs I’d like to point any technology sales people who are looking for more academic knowledge of computer science in general towards the MIT OpenCourseWare site which includes an excellent list of technical courses in the Electrical Engineering & Computer Science section. I’ve only listened to one lecture so far but the content & delivery are first rate (as one would expect of MIT) and its a great resource for those who are looking to expand their subject matter knowledge.

* this raises a related point in that we may need to start thinking about new models for managing leads over a longer cycle and a more complex model for managing accounts. MFA systems such as Marketo & Eloqua provide some functionality around this area but are still predominantly single lead based rather than account based. You can use SFDC to manage some of this but its mostly manual.

Back (but in Palo Alto)

Chris — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 04:01:27 +0000

It’s been an interesting few months. After the new funding round closed and the new management team was appointed the decision was made to relocate the HQ to Palo Alto. So, I’m now living in Palo Alto, CA (weather is generally gorgeous) and am now (to an extent) running sales on an interim basis with two people working in the Inside Sales team.

All good fun (if rather stressful).

Analysis vs Art

Chris — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:41:57 +0000

There’s always been a debate in sales about the use of data (how to capture it, represent it etc), the value it provides (especially as its gathered by people who are not trained data gatherers) and how this lines up with the traditional view of the salesman as some kind of gunslinger going out to tame the dangerous customers.

The New York Times website has a fascinating article on the difference between empiricism and intuition as it relates to health care and specifically a medical center called InterMountain Medical Center. The center has employed a data/process driven approach to cut pneumonia mortality rates by 40%, lower the rate of adverse drug events by 1/2 and reduce the “…death rate for coronary-bypass surgery was to 1.5 percent, from the national average of about 3 percent.”

They do this by rigorously gathering and debating their data, iterating and refining their treatment protocols over time and by then disseminating their results within the center. Since the first study was done and the impact recognized they have done over 50 such trials.

How do we replicate the same approach in inside sales/sales? We’ve seen a move towards this using systems such as SalesForce.com, LeadLander, Eloqua – but how do we take it further and how do we measure the impact on our business in a fair and objective manner? Questions to be answered and debated in another post.

Reframing

Chris — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:44:48 +0000

I had an interesting internal discussion yesterday which was both depressing and exciting. I’m not going into details because its still unresolved but it involves a fixed fee to cover various expenses. After discussing it via e-mail I made a quick phone call and became more voluble than appropriate and before I knew it the fixed fee was being re-negotiated and opened to other discussions about whether it was necessary etc.

Thinking about it last night and this morning I believe that this was mostly my fault (I’m not going to take all the blame, 80% will suffice). Instead of starting with what was positive (I’m glad we agree on the amount, now lets talk about the delivery mechanism) I focused on the negative – with the result of uncertainty as to whether this will happen at all and potentially a damaged relationship.

It always pays to stand back and think for a moment, whether it relates to internal or external discussions in your professional life or personal life. I tend (as a rule of thumb) to make decisions quickly and they’re not always the right ones – as a manager this matters, especially when it involves my staff and the direction of the company. So, time to re-frame the discussion I had, pour some oil on slightly troubled waters and move onward.

Buying Persona’s

Chris — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:18:00 +0000

There’s been a lot of chatter recently on buyer persona’s and how to use them to structure sales calls/questions. I’m going to layout how we segment our buyer persona’s to discuss where we start as a company, how they align with our sales cycles and the questions/collateral that each one generates.

Lets start with the sales cycle (I’m typing this with a one finger bandaged so any typo’s are the band aids fault). What we’ve seen over the last year is a fairly defined sales cycle within our enterprise accounts (and one that happens over and over again in other software companies). The first stage is generally a purchase of some basic workstation licenses by a small user group within the enterprise. Second stage (once people have had a chance to use/discuss the distribution) is either a larger add-on purchase (server/cluster) or a different group(s) within the same company will approach us with requests for both small & intermediate license’. Third stage is normally sponsored by us as a company and involves getting senior management at the company (SVP/CTO/CIO) involved to talk about a site license and the value we can provide through standardization and high performance.

The buyer persona’s can be labelled as follows against each stage:

Stage 1: R users, statisticians (perhaps their direct line manager)
Stage 2: Group managers, purchasing agents
Stage 3: Senior executives with personal budget control

The definitions above are very broad, we’re going to dig down into them as we go. Taking the stage 1 community, we can broadly state that they’re interested in functionality that makes their lives easier and are focused around specific features/benefits and not so much in the overall business impact (for SPIN selling enthusiasts this is a small $ sales which you’d expect to close/lose quickly and which rely’s on features/benefits as opposed to the “IN” of SPIN).

Stage 2 are interesting in that they may not have direct knowledge of use R themselves, yet they are heavily involved (and may be the ultimate decision makers). Do we need to structure the data for them in a different way?

Stage 3 need direct business benefits at a senior level – how does this impact dept’s productivity and the bottom line?

The $ amount gets higher as you progress through the stages from small deals ($1500+), medium ($15K+) and enterprise site licenses ($100K+) – a future blog post will look at the relationship between the stages and how you align different area’s of the sales team/process.

Change is happening

Chris — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:52:21 +0000

It’s been an interesting time at REvolution – we’ve taken more VC funding, have a new CEO (Norman Nie – founder of SPSS) and the HQ is now going to be based in California. There’s been a few personnel changes caused by bad communications (not the best transfer I’ve seen) but on the whole things seem to have shaken out and we’re almost back to business as usual. On a personal note I’m going to be moving to Palo Alto in a couple of months time (post Christmas break) and that’s a fairly exciting step (1) because I haven’t lived on the west coast before and (2) there’s an obvious wealth of technology companies there and a fair few inside sales folks who I’m looking forward to swapping stories with.

It’s exciting for me on a professional level because SPSS did 80% of its business via the inside sales channel (approx $240M prior to being bought by IBM) so I’m going to have the chance to build a kick-ass team in Palo Alto (looking forward to using this recruitment method to see what the results are).

On a slightly sadder note this will mean an end to my relationship with an outsourcing company we have worked with for the last few months, they’ve been a good stopgap whilst we’ve been going through the funding process but the cost/benefit calculation we made is that bringing the resource in-house will give us a competitive advantage and be (assuming a good hiring process) less costly in the long term.

I’ll keep updating as the process and team begin to take shape.

Start at both ends and meet in the middle

Chris — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:54:18 +0000

We’re coming up on an exciting product release (end October). We have a Visual Studio IDE in beta now and scheduled for general release towards the end of October. I’m excited about it because it adds even more to our value conversation around the Windows platform in general and enables us to approach people who may not have been that familiar with R before and show them a way to gently introduce themselves to it via expanded & interactive help menu’s, snippet tagging and debugging facilities.

The key point in all of this is that we’re doing something that has direct impact on the user. Our other features (support, Win64, ParallelR) are more focused on IT (support, Win64 platform so they can upgrade computers) and the business in general (ParallelR – how can we drive more analytics through our quant/stats teams in a shorter time). You can and should argue that parallelR is useful for the users as well but it falls on both sides of that particular fence. The IDE though, is a direct appeal to the individual end-user: “We will give you a more streamlined and – dare we say it – fun user experience in the R language” (depending on your preferences/skill level of course).

This is important to us from a sales perspective because it adds a real drive to the adoption of REvolution R Enterprise at the user level. Previously we could appeal to the business & IT but without any direct end-user benefits. If they’re on the Windows platform the IDE will make their lives significantly easier which should have the knock on effect of drawing more people into R who were previously uncertain about taking that first step. As a company we can now talk to people at the end-user and senior business strategist points and demonstrate significant value across the board.

Hiring Inside Sales Professionals

Chris — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 01:56:36 +0000

There’s a great post on the Inside Sales Experts blog from “The Bridge Group” which looks at an interesting way to recruit staff via CraigsList: something I may try in the not too distant future, if I do I’ll post my results.

A Bold take on Inside Sales Hiring

10 B2B Sales Predictions

Chris — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 01:28:28 +0000

There was an interesting post a little while back on the “SalesMachine” part of bnet which is titled “The Future of B2B: Like it or Not”. Essentially it consists of 10 predictions concerning B2B sales that will take place by the year 2020. In an abbreviated form they read as follows:

1. Entry level sales jobs will be extinct.

2. B2B selling will be specialized.

3. The road warrior will be an endangered species.

4. Sales technology will dominate selling.

5. “Dress for Success” will be irrelevant.

6. All B2B marketing will be measured.

7. All B2B advertising will be qualified.

8. Traditional B2B advertising will wither.

9. Trade magazines will disappear.

10. B2B marketing groups will be downsized.

I may have got them ordered the wrong way around but you get the gist. There are some interesting points in here and also, I believe, some mistakes. For 2,3,4 I whole heartedly agree and would argue that it has been moving that way for a number of years, especially with regard to 2 and 4. Technology is becoming more pervasive and sales it becoming steadily more focused on hard measurements. There will always be a bit of art but I believe it is going to come down to the 10% figure that has been bandied around with the remaining 90% being process focused. Which could well be another blog post – if 90% of sales is process then how do you begin to differentiate when the competition have the same process (e.g. prospect, identify, needs evaluation, match product to needs, understand pain, understand hierarchy/buy cycle, emphasise pain and solution from, close).

With regard to level 1 I’m not sure that this will ever really be the case. You have to get staff from somewhere and the idea that there will only be a cadre of high level inside sales specialists inside ofany one company doesn’t ring true. If you’re speaking about field sales then it is a possibility but I believe this is the case now. No company which is sales focused is going to want to recruit a “green” field sales executive, they want someone with a specialized skill set, knowledge and experience. Inside Sales however should continue to be a means of proividing fresh meat to the sales mill.

Number 5 I don’t really care about. I haven’t worn a suit at my job for 5 years. I would say that in certain situations you should always wear a suit, and if in doubt it’s the safest option (sans tie perhaps to be more informal).

6 – 9 seem a little strange. Is this really news to anyone? B2B marketing should be (and has been) measurable for a long time, the same applies to advertising. We may see this becoming more focused over time but I’ve yet to meet a marketing dept that wasn’t been pressured to demonstrate ROI. B2B advertising has (again) been moving to a more focused model for at least the last 5 years. There are still blanket adverts in some trade magazines but even these are becoming slightly more specialized. I’m not sure that trade magazines will ever really disappear – you could argue that specialism to a high degree may have the effect of killing itself (the recent GQ article on “Politico” is a good example).

10 – on the face of it I wouldn’t agree but when you look at the explanation it makes sense. Geoffrey is drawing a direct line between the death of traditional marketing and the emergence of new forms ofspecialist communication.

Where does this leave the Inside Sales team today? Focus on process, ROI and work with marketing to continually define new channels for information delivery. What blogs do people read, how do they research – getting this data to marketing quickly will lead to more qualified leads on a regular basis. Ensure you understand the technology you’re using to sell, its applications and ways in which it may be “mashed-up” with other tools to add value.

Researching for Inside Sales (and Sales)

Chris — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 20:11:52 +0000

Research is an integral part of sales and with the advent of the internet it has become an order of magnitude more efficient to conduct (e.g. no more going to the local library and reading dry annual reports and SEC filing documents; although these still have their place).

In this post I want to cover the quickest and most efficient ways to begin to develop a list of targets and a greater understanding of an account. Specifically I’m going to detail a list of the sites and techniques I use every day to ensure that (a) I’m talking to the right people and (b) I understand what their motivations and interests are before I begin the call.

As a starting point for any account I always to to Hoovers.com which gives me the corporate office address, switchboard number, the URL for the companies web site , revenue figures, senior officers in the company (occasionally the CIO/CTO are listed which is especially useful for technology sales) and the names of their closest competition. One quick web site visit and I already have a minimum of six pieces of information to work with (this applies across most of the Fortune 1000). Hoovers does offer a paid for subscription model but for the purposes of this post I’m going to focus on free sites which are easily accessible.

Next I’ll go to the companies web site to scan recent (3 – 6 months) press releases to see if any senior appointments have been made in the area’s I’m interested in. New hires can be especially useful if you can prove that you bring them a solution which will quickly offer a substantial pay-off and generate kudo’s for them. Additionally, it’s worth having a look for a list of senior officers in the company; most public companies list their C-suite in varying levels of detail. Whilst it may be difficult (in some cases impossible) to reach these individuals ensuring that they at least have some information from you is important so they have an idea of what you do when their reports call them (they may not read anything you send but it takes a minute to send an e-mail/print a stock letter etc).

After Hoovers I start to research on LinkedIn; most companies will have some kind of web page and its “People” search function is very useful to find potential contacts by entering the company you are researching.

If you have any senior contacts culled from Hoovers, the company website and/or LinkedIn then its worth entering their names and company name into Google. Senior professionals are often invited to speak at conferences and the topics they speak on are a key source of information for their current job focus. In addition, the conference overview will give you broader information about the industry is focused on and the speaker list will give you additional contacts to prospect amongst. If the Google search produces a blog or web site contributions that also provides valuable intelligence.

When I first started working in the technology industry I researched every morning from 7 AM to 9 AM and a method which always resulted in about 10 – 20 new leads each morning was doing searches for conferences aimed at the people I wanted to speak with and something called “wild card” searches as well. This involves entering a potential contact job title (e.g. Head of IT Infrastructure) and the company name into Google (or search engine of your choice) and then scrolling quickly through the results. It does take some time but can produce surprisingly good information.

You may also want to check sources like Spoke (although I find their data to be incomplete or incorrect a lot of the time) or you can start to swap leads on a site like Jigsaw. Just be aware that your competitors may use resources like Jigsaw and you’re potentially giving away your hard work.

Lastly, if you’re going to take the time to do laborious manual research (it is worth it) make sure to be meticulous about documenting each piece of data. I find the best way is to build a spread sheet with headers that correspond to the field legends in your CRM system. That way when you have built a list of 50+ names you can quickly and automatically import the list and begin to campaign against it.

Happy researching.