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How are you leveraging Sales 2.0 in your sales strategy?

The concept of Sales 2.0 represents an enormous change in the way many companies sell and market. Some of us will be attending The Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on March 4th and 5th to see best practices in action. So it begs the questions: What is Sales 2.0, is it right for your organization and why does it matter to your sale effort?

A BRIEF BACKGROUND ON SALES 2.0

1. Sales 2.0 is an approach to sales and marketing that evolved from increasingly sophisticated CRM applications and growth in adoption rates of sales force automation, the Internet giving us pervasive access to information, and the emergence of rich media and social networking (or Web 2.0 which is the link to Sales 2.0).

2. According to Selling Power Magazine, “Sales 2.0 brings together customer-focused methodologies and productivity-enhancing technologies that transform selling from an art to a science.”

3. There is no Sales 2.0 standard, but applications that claim to be part of this group typically share the following: the collaboration between the customer, sales and marketing organizations, integration of processes, systems-based and repeatable. The best ones are simple, easy to use and compliment existing normal interaction between your company and the its customers.

SO WHY DO YOU CARE?

1. Keep pace with the way customers are buying – with unlimited access to data and best of breed suppliers, customer purchasing behavior has changed. Prospects don’t want to be sold, they increasingly want to buy on their own schedule.

2. More Sales – If you connect with your customer in more meaningful ways, provide more personalized services, create conditions under which they are incented to buy and let them buy on their own schedule, they will purchase more often.

3. Less Effort – pushing hard to close sales is futile and costly, in contrast to the benefits of programs and systems which enable customers to come to you when they are ready to buy.

4. More Predictable Results – with more visibility into customer behavior and better insight into the buying lifecycle, you are in a better position to predict future demand, revenue and growth

5. Accountability – following above, your team is armed with more useful information enabling you to hold them more accountable for contributing to successful outcomes

6. Better Alignment with Marketing – meaningful customer, prospect, market and buying data is shared across your organization to ensure that all functions are working together to better capitalize on opportunities and drive growth.

7. More Professional Service – beyond the benefits of customization, your team projects a far more professional image when it is armed with relevant information insights and in keeping with modern events. There are many more elements to this emerging trend and we are excited to see it coming to fruition.

IS IT RIGHT FOR OUR ORGANIZATION?

Adopting Sales 2.0 requires the right people and the right processes in place. Just like introducing CRM. you can’t throw process and systems on top of a team or culture that is not process oriented and systematic – it won’t work. You need to be ready. You will need to train your people. You will need to be committed.

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Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

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Habits of Highly Effective Sales Leaders

Successful Sales Leader Habits

Habits, the process in which the brain “converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine” (Duhigg, 2012), help define the rational behind our personal and professional actions. At the core of every habit exists a loop consisting of a cue, routine, and reward that can be altered, removed, or added (Smith and Bolam, 1990). The consequences of introducing a new habit or making a change to an existing one can be significant and powerful enough to cause a chain reactions with intended and unintended consequences.

Across the sales organization, habits play a crucial role. They help determine, for example, how an account executive prepares to overcome the obstacles that arise when attempting to penetrate a large account. Habits dictate how he or she will respond to a prospects objections over price or limited budget. Habits dictate how a manager will schedule their day, including what prospects they visit, and how much time they spend coaching reps. In sum, habits can dictate selling success.

The strength of a sales organization’s leadership, particularly the Sales VP and regional managers, impacts the production of the sales force. It’s a simple concept that influences the most vital aspect of any business – revenue generation and profit. Knowing that habits directly influence selling behavior and managerial style, we asked the most successful VP Sales how they spend their time and what they focus on to ensure they are meeting or exceeding the company’s sales plan.

Here are the habits of successful sales leaders:

1. Focusing on this Quarter’s Number
– developing strategic deals, supporting the team and holding them accountable, monitoring the funnel, watching key metrics and making adjustments on the fly that secure the quarter. This consumes somewhere between 70-80% of the top VP’s time.

2. Team Communications
– speaking with all the reps, managers and support staff, on a regular basis to ensure expectations, goals and priorities are clearly understood, everyone is aware of relevant company initiatives and market trends, and the team is highly motivated and working together to achieve the targets.

3. Organizational Development
– looking at the forecast for the next Q and the current FY, assessing customer, market and competitive trends, planning what needs to happen to ensure future achievement, assessing the performance of the force and individual team members, identifying new programs for improving the overall performance, and executing the hiring plan.

4. Accountable
– holding themselves accountable for the performance of their teams, as well as holding individual team members accountable. Providing praise and acknowledgment to those reps and mangers who not only hit their sales targets but exceed them, accepting responsibility when strategic accounts are lost, targets missed, or poor hires are made.

5.  Eliminating Obstacles
– continually identifying, focusing on, and providing solutions to obstacles that impede selling success while embracing those solutions that arise organically. Altering team structure, incentives, and selling strategies as the market evolves.

Sources:
The Power of Habit – Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, Charles Duhigg, 2012
The Neural Network of the Basal Ganglia as Revealed by the Study of Synaptic Connections of Identified Neurones, A. David Smith & J. Paul Bolam, 1990

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Connect:

Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.

Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

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Checklist for Hitting the Sales Target this Q

How are your numbers looking one month into the quarter? We polled our network of VP Sales to see what is at the top of their dashboard for evaluating the health of the sales effort running towards quarter end. Here are the top responses:

1.    Pipeline – is it above or below the target multiple (typically 3-4x) and is it leading or trailing?

2.    Activity volumes – are calls, meetings, proposals, etc. in line with ratios required to hit targets?

3.    Forecast to Actual – is week to week accuracy improving or deteriorating?

4.    Slide –  what percentage of forecasted deals are sliding into the next month?

5.    Top customers – how many generated revenue / were contacted?

While each VP’s list might be slightly different one thing is for sure, everyone is tracking things very closely – these are not forgiving times.

To win, your sales force has to be operating at full steam ahead.

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Connect:

Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.

Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

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Are Your Sales Candidates Producers or Posers?

Right now with a lagging economy, there are more sales reps on the street or looking for work. Many companies with
open sales positions have a deluge of applicants, desperate to secure a job.

Successfully screening sales applicants is one of the toughest jobs at the best of times, but when there is intense
competition for a limited number of open positions, candidates are more inclined than ever to “dress themselves up”
in the role and tell you what you want to hear.

Here are some of the techniques we use to determine who is for real and who is posing:

1.    Match experience and abilities to the role – not all sales roles are the same. While there is a long line-up of
people who want your job, desire alone will not allow them to be successful. You need specific proof from their past
that they can effectively sell in a selling situation similar to yours, rather than theory on how they might sell
for you.

2.    Be clear on reasons for leaving (RFL’s) – why did they leave their previous employment? There was a
“restructuring and most people were let go” or “we decided to part ways” often means they were under-performing.
Make sure you know whether they resigned or were terminated.

3.    Get real references – the most critical references are previous supervisors, who can speak to work habits and
results, but we are increasingly seeing people present phony references. Make sure the references you call are
actually who they say they are and did actually supervise the candidate in the past.

4.    Ask for proof of income – candidates who say they hit quota have documentation to back it up. Ask for this
during the screening process as another way to ensure accurate information (note – each country has different
privacy laws so make sure you respect the laws in your country about what information you are allowed to ask for).

5.    Beware of “excuses-itis” – there are always obstacles and the best reps find a way to overcome challenges and
sell under any conditions. If you hear things like “the company didn’t support the sales org”, “the downturn killed
our business” or “the product didn’t work”, proceed with caution. While these are sometimes actually true, it
usually doesn’t impact the top performer’s results.

Tried and true methods such as benchmarking, candidate profiling and third party reviews also work well. Whatever
your mix, the number of new reps at target within the first year, will give you an indication of whether your
methods are working (see also our earlier post on Bottom Line Hiring the Jack Welch Way).

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Connect:

Eliot
Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and
leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams.
He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also
Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.

Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton
University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales
Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales
team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.


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Why It’s Easy to Have a Poor Sales Hiring Record

A colleague pointed me to a great Seth Godin post this morning on hiring (thanks G):

“It only takes 10% as much effort to hire someone in the bottom 90% of the class. And it takes the other 90% to find and cajole and retain the top 10%.”

Many companies are lackadaisical about hiring, so it is no wonder that such a high number of reps across the industry are missing targets and the average sales force lives with high turnover rates. Economies like ours will only make things worse.

His full article is here…The 90/10 rule of marketing a job.

To your success!

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Connect:

Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.

Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

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Where to invest your money when times get tough: Sales vs. Marketing

Spending on marketing vs. spending on sales in B2B companies? The debate over which path yields higher results will continue into perpetuity.

In a recent SoftwareCEO.com article, author Maureen Blandford asks some good questions about how marketing investments actually benefit B2B sales:

  • “what happens if you stop producing marcom material, for a year? And most CEOs I ask tell me, ‘That won’t really impact our revenue generation.’”“We don’t want the sales force going in and doing features, functions, and benefits. We want them going in and asking great questions.”
  • Do you really need a new expensive logo redesign? “…what we really need to be driven by is, who is our target? How are we going to reach them today? And how can we support the sales force in doing that?
  • “If you’re a CEO of a software company, when some media is covering a big idea in your space, are they calling you for quotes? Do you have anyone on your team who’s considered a guru?
  • fuel to the fire…“any Fortune 1000 firm can easily cut their marcom budget by one-third to one-half, and no one would ever know. That’s not risky, that’s just common sense.”

Read  her comments in the April issue of SoftwareCEO.com.
While on the topic of marketing and sales, there is a great article by Seth Godin – Nine things marketing shoudl know about sales

The first and last ones made me laugh….

1. Selling is hard. Harder than you may ever realize. So, if I seem stressed, cut me some slack.

9. I know you’d like to get rid of me and just take orders on the web. But that’s always going to be the low-hanging fruit. The game-changing sales, at least for now, come from real people interacting with real people.

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Connect:

Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.

Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

Connect:

Weak Onboarding = Weak Results

Successful companies are very rigorous about sales force structure, process, management, incentives, hiring and development. All important. In today’s market and economy, fierce competition and tightening pockets, dictate every penny spent on the sales force produces results. The most successful companies also know that you can’t simply hire sales reps, throw them into the trenches and expect them to produce.

Good article on this topic in Selling Power, entitled OnBoarding: The Most Overlooked Part of Hiring. A couple of excerpts…

The most successful companies know that onboarding new recruits is absolutely critical to making them productive. Standard company on-boarding does not suffice. In order to achieve accelerated success, the most successful companies have in place rigorous processes to ensure new sales reps are indoctrinated in the products, selling methods, systems, tools and, more importantly culture of the sales force. Success is further guaranteed by monitoring the development of new hires very closely and providing coaching as required. The convenient byproduct of a successful rep is increased loyalty, which in turn reduces turnover, and hiring and retention costs.

“A 2007 CSO Insights report cites that to achieve sales performance optimization, one must truly understand the levers of sales performance and effectiveness. There are ‘levers’ inside the hiring and on-boarding process that must be defined as well.”

“IDC [a global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets] estimates that more than 25 percent of salespeople in companies will be new to their position this year and the ‘typical’ sales rep will only stay in that position for less than two years. If it takes 9-12 months on average to get them up-to-speed, you only get one year of productivity out of that person an expensive proposition. For example, if an annual quota for a sales rep is one million dollars, and in the first year he or she can only attain 40-60 percent of that quota, the lost revenue represents overwhelming costs that are often not factored in.”

See full article….  Selling Power: On-Boarding: The Most Overlooked Part of Hiring.

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Connect:

Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.

Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

Connect:

Do Recruiters Avoid Sales Assessments?

Great short post about how many recruiters fear sales assessments –> (Many Recruiters Fear Sales Assessments, by the Objective Management Group, a sales assessment company so it’s a bit of an advertorial). He is right that most recruiters, are not inclined to use assessments – and it should be no surprise, whether they are internal or external to the company, as they are typically incented/compensated to fill seats so the focus is on “first best” and “selling” candidates to the hiring manager rather than properly assessing candidate abilities. The sales manager, on the other hand, is measured by sales outputs resulting from the hire, so they care about abilities.

I would take it a step further, and add that most recruiters don’t know what a sales assessment is let alone fear them. When we do sales force audits, hiring projects, or provide guidance to our clients, we support the use of several different types of assessments for different types of positions (management vs. rep), for measuring different types of attributes (skills vs. temperamen/DNA) at various stages in hiring or management (screening vs. in-depth analysis). We also recommend the assessments be customized to a particular selling environment+role and that they are benchmarked to top performers in that role in the hiring company.

Assessments aren’t 100% reliable for predicting top performers in a certain sales environment, but when combined with other methods of assessment such as interviews, role plays, background checks, etc., skill tests and temperament assessments, provide useful objective insight and are an important component of accurately evaluating sales staff or potential hires.

Attract Great Sales Reps

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Connect:

Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

Connect:

Loss Analysis – Make it Part of Your Discipline

We all know how hard it is to get the sales force to review losses. When big deals are lost, it is typical for the reps to feel increased urgency to close the next deal – the targets aren`t sympathetic. But managers can gain valuable insight from analyzing losses across the force. Good post by Brian Berlin – Getting to “No”: How to Vet Your Sales Process to Avoid Lost Deals – in which he talks the most common negative responses from customers (“we are going with a competitor” , “we are not making a decision right now” , and “no thanks” ) and how to improve overall success by putting in place process changes to ensure opportunities are properly prioritized, qualified and developed.

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Connect:

Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.

Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

Connect:

The Top 10 Challenges in Hiring Tech Sales Pros

Hiring Tech Sales People

Talk to any sales manager and they will tell you that hiring reliable sales people is one of the most difficult things to do. Even the ones who say they have a good hiring track record will typically admit that too few of their reps are at target.

Why is that? What makes hiring great tech sales representatives so hard?

With thousands of sales recruiting projects under our belt, here are the top 10 challenges small and large companies alike face when trying to hire great technology sales people.

  1. Salespeople, those in the tech space and beyond, are used to putting the best spin on their accomplishments. Fix: Implement in-depth screening and cross-referencing to separate truth from fiction.)
  2. DNA or personality traits are the most critical factor in sales success, especially in the technology industry where consultative selling is the norm. Unfortunately for the untrained interviewer, assessing sales DNA is far more difficult than assessing for experience or even skills. This often leads hiring managers to rely on their gut when selecting a candidate to hire. Fix: Use behavioral assessments and interviews performed by trained interviewers.
  3. The hiring manager may not have benchmarked the profile of the top performers currently on the team, and can’t properly characterize what they are looking for. Fix: Define the experience, skills and personality traits that are critical for the hire to be successful, and then have the discipline to stick with it.
  4. A high percentage of active job seekers have poor sales records which conditions the hiring manager to lower the benchmark for hiring. Fix: The hiring manager needs discipline to not settle.
  5. The best candidates are gainfully employed and are not likely to respond to your job ad. If you are lucky enough to get to them, they may not be inclined to let you make a full objective assessment. Fix: You need to perform the same interview process on every single candidate so you can compare apples to apples when selecting the candidate to be hired.
  6. Many sales managers are extroverts and are naturally attracted to other outgoing people regardless of qualifications. Fix: Focus on how the candidate’s skills, experiences, and DNA align with your ideal candidate profile. Conducting interviews over the phone before in-person, can mitigate the ‘halo-effect‘.
  7. Performing reference checks on someone who is employed is challenging due to confidentiality. Fix: There are always managerial contacts that can be approached. HR is a strategic partner that can be relied upon during this phase to provide guidance.
  8. Verifying income is easy, but verifying performance is tricky. Fix: Rigorous interviewing and background checks are critical.
  9. Sales managers are trained to be sales managers, not interviewers. Fix: Anyone hiring for this critical position needs to get trained or — shameless promo — to engage experts to assist in the identification and selection of the best and right hires.
  10. The pressure of the clock counting down on a quarterly target forces the sales manager to settle on the best candidate available rather than the right candidate. Fix: Wait until you find the right candidate. Hiring the wrong sales person is way more costly than making the investment in time to hire a great sales person.

The bottom line: When making a hire this important, invest in a proven process, and have the discipline to stick to it.

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Connect:

Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.

Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

Connect: