Managing a sales funnel for IT

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you [Music] we need to get them into a CRM system so we absolutely need to kill the silent sales floor this was an image that I put up in a blog post just a couple of weeks ago they've got a huge number of comments from people I've got a cunning plan in what I'm going to talk to you about today and that I want you to do some of the work in a moment not right now but in a moment I'm going to ask you to take off your headphones and I'm going to ask you to find somebody near you who you don't know and you're going to do a little roleplay together maybe it'll even find you a prospect today what I want you to do is to simply ask the other person just say to them I'm a potential prospect what do you do and the reason we're going to do that is I really want to address this question how do we go and create interest in the market today so how do we go and create interest and people tend to fall back into this thing of trying to beat people over the head with their message who managed to get a prospect out of that conversation by any chance anybody actually a whole heap of hands that's great let me tell you what I find really interesting human nature being what it is is that when someone asks is what we do it's actually a trick question have you ever found that in social settings someone says what you do for a living and then you start to explain it to them and you see their eyes glaze over they're just being polite I found this with myself when I go to my wife's social functions she's a schoolteacher and school teachers have very little interest in what I do for a living so I learned to not really treat that as a serious question I just take an interest in them and practice my listening skills but the problem is no one in the world worth getting to worth talking to is lonely and bored and looking for a new friend everybody in business is incredibly stressed they're stressed they're busy and what they're interested in is how can we help them achieve the things that their needs achieve how can we help them achieve a better state how can we help solve their problems so so that's a really important point and the other thing is nobody worth talking to in business or sales is looking for a new friend so they don't want a new friend they don't hear about us in their products they're not lying awake at sleep at night hoping that a salesperson is going to call them and tell them about their their solutions so we need to change our narrative and we need to talk about the real business benefit and having a conversation with us we need to learn to lead with why conversations matter instead of leading with who we are what we do and how we do it and yet sales floor after sales floor that I go and walk on and people that I work with you go watch them in action they say I'm Tony and I'm from this company and we're the global leader in and this is what we do and these are our products and services and this is how we go and take it to market people aren't interested in what we do and how we do it until we've entered why the conversation is important so I actually think that there's three big things that can help us overcome the problem that we have today in sales and I'm going to show you some trends that are really quite worrying the first thing is we need the right narrative we need to learn the art of the conversation and we need to be able to do that in a very pragmatic way with the right combinations that enables us to do a little bit of research and have some context so there's a big fat out there at the moment that says cold calling just doesn't work now the reality is if you don't pick up the phone and use the phone I would argue you're not going to be very successful in business or sales the phone is the most powerful digital selling tool that was ever invented and there needs to be combined with other things so we need to find that the right combinations and we need the right mindset I just want to talk to you about why having the right narrative is really important we could go to the next slide there was research done by corporate executive board where they surveyed 5,000 professional buyers and buying organizations that's a big statistically accurate sample and they said to them what are the factors that caused you to select one particular supplier over another and the first two points they're about 19 percent each was brand and what you're actually selling so the power of your brand and the features and functions or capabilities of what you're offering is less than 40% of why someone will buy no no special prize is forgetting what the 9% is it's a price yet the thing I find when I talk with salespeople if L say that the reason that they lost the deal was based on price and the reason that they won the deal was based on their wonderful relationships that they built yet often the reverse is true in the real world so just as we advanced that you can see that 53% of why people buy from us is the experience that we provide for them one of the things that I think is incredible with what Salesforce is doing is they are helping organizations create incredible customer experience answering multiple channels including talking to a salesperson but the ability to want to work with marketing to go web to lead and marketing and lead nurture with a good content strategy the ability to go and prosecute opportunities with a lower cost inside sales force with sales development reps supports all of that and then obviously getting field sales people that are incredibly expensive to go and work with people is all is all there for them so the first real takeaway of this is that if we create the right narrative if we can provide education and insights for the buyer which was what was on that previous slide in those four points in the top right corner we become the emotional favorite have we all experienced this line before most often I've gone to market to buy things I looked at getting a carport built at our house and the Builder that turned up and explained to me how I could avoid the torture of having to put in a development application with local counsel and just do it as a complying development if I manage my named neighbors in a certain way he became the Builder that I wanted to do business with because he didn't just talk about building a carport and giving me a price he talked about that emotional scar I'd had from previous renovations and even to a simple thing like building a picket fence in my front yard with council so we need to regain the art of the narrative I just want to give you some statistics here which are really quite surprising if you talk to sales people and ask them when you go meet with a buyer do you meet their expectations would you agree that most sales people would say absolutely yes I'm a professional salesperson it's the core thing I'm paid to do yet when they go interview is what they find is that 85% of those engagements fail to meet the expectations of the buyer and and worse than that ninety-five percent of decision-makers expect some insight and 86 percent of sellers fail to differentiate altogether you know in the eyes of most buyers when we go in there we think we're special in what we offer in the eyes of the buyer we all look pretty much the same so it's really important that we regain the art of the narrative that we focus on the client and what they need to achieve the other thing that I'm seeing is people are losing the courage to sell they're asking questions like when is the best time to make a call and when you give them the answer which I'm not going to give you when you give them the answer they use that as an excuse to only call in those tiny windows of the day and then find a way to be busy where they don't do it people are losing their discipline amidst all of the technology the reality is that there's just a white wall of noise and rather than working well with technology people are becoming overwhelmed by it or they're becoming distracted by it and the thing I love about Einstein that we saw earlier today is it's a way of guiding a salesperson it's not a way of running the deal for them but it's doing today what so few sales managers have got the bandwidth to do it'll proactively have a look at a deal and see what is potentially going wrong this is an imagery magazine in the USA a little while ago it was complete satire the thing that amazed me with so many American readers thought it was dead serious so I actually joked about an apocalypse of salespeople but if you have a look at some of the statistics that have been published and gather themselves believe that by 2020 85% of business-to-business transactions will be done without any human intervention so if as a salesperson all we're doing is helping the client navigate our organization and transact we're certainly in trouble the other statistic that's really interesting is that ing to Andy Hall from Forrester where they surveyed the way by is intend to buy what they believe is that in the USA alone a million salespeople business-to-business sales people will be out of work and the reason that's the case is they'll run out of hours in the day to transact the necessary level of transactions to fund their role one of the problems all sellers is that average deal size tends to get smaller the complexity of selling and b2b selling is actually not getting simpler there's more people to typically cover off and there's increased competition is very easy for the buyer to introduce competitors into any conversation that we're seeking to have and what Andy did is when you had a look at that research and went deep II saw what kinds of sales people are actually going to lose their roles and in the book that you've all been given today on your see this quadrant that's about to come up if the guys could move that for me this quadrant that you're seeing is in my book what I've mapped into this quadrant is Andy hordes classifications so in the top right hand corner I've used that term trusted advisor which can you know be mythical for a lot of us but it is possible he uses the term consultant and anybody who adopts a consultative approach to selling there's going to be 10% growth in that roles you can see in those other quadrants if you're just helping people transact if you're just a relationship manager or if you're more of a tactical BDM that's talking about the competition a lot those roles are absolutely in trouble and the reason they're in trouble the first big force that's really hurting sales is that is the force of commoditization and globalization it's happening in professional services lawyers themselves are becoming disrupted by people moving a lot of those functions to AI so lawyers would previously make really good money in doing precedent for clients you know tell me the details of your situation we'll go and research precedents and we'll tell you what the probably the probability is of a win or a loss they're now applying technology to that if you look at a company doing a merger and acquisition they would typically engage a law firm to run a deal room they would do due diligence on all of the contracts and they go and have a look at that they're increasingly sending all of that offshore so between offshoring and technology there's a lot of competitive pressures Gartner themselves said that last year nearly 90 percent of chief marketing officers focused on customer experience has been the way that they going to drive sustainable competitive advantage now it begs the question if everybody's focusing on the same thing how do you differentiate with it but I remember once I when I was a sales rep for a public company my CEO said to me that he believes he could leave the company's business and on the seat of an aeroplane by mistake and have their biggest competitor pick up that that business plan and take it away and it wouldn't matter because they can't execute we can now I don't know whether that was necessarily true but I think we all know its ability to execute that really makes the difference and let me just give you a little case study to bring this into sharp relief who remembers seeing the launch of the Tesla Model 3 online last year did anybody watch this live online now this is the amazing thing you would think the process of buying a car it's very much a business-to-consumer exercise would require a dealership a showroom and a salesperson people want to come in and have a look they want to go for a drive they need to be up sold for the paint package all of the protection things the additional warranties this is a model that's tried to true and tested for selling motorcars and yet here's the reality Elon Musk who's a pretty quirky guy and not a particularly great salesman managed to sell fourteen thousand million dollars fourteen billion dollars worth of motorcars in 72 hours out of a shopping cart on the Internet and the specs he gave were pretty loose what he said to people is this motor vehicle will not ship for probably at least 18 months and here's some high-level specs about range and some features pay us $1000 us deposit in the shopping cart and jump in line and they took deposits that equated to 14 billion dollars worth of sales so the world is dramatically changing is changing for all of us including white-collar professionals we tend to look at blue-collar roles and go they're getting disrupted by technology y.color especially so old dogs can absolutely new learn new tricks but it's not a bad gimmicks and technology this there's a lot of mysteries that have been peddled out there and to me there's three timeless things that we need to apply to a use of technology so the first thing is we to lead with inside remember that research from from a corporate executive board that buyers expect some level of insight from the seller they can source information anywhere but if you can bring them some insight on how they can achieve the better state how they can manage their risks what other organizations that are relevant to them are doing in the way that they innovate if you can bring some kind of insight for them you'll typically become the emotional favorite so we need to have insight in the way that we engage the next timeless truth is we need to create value but the way the way typically wired is we believe that there's value in the thing that we're selling the truth is when you trade value in the conversation the reason a person needs to meet with a salesperson is not because of the value in buying a product it's in the value of the conversation go and help them and do that and if you do you'll achieve this third thing that's a timeless essential in being successful in sales and business and life actually all aspects of life is trust trust takes a lifetime to build and can be destroyed in seconds but we can start the process of building trust online before anybody sees us so just so you don't think that I'm going to say let's get back on and start cold calling again I am a believer in social selling I have my own framework for it I talk to conferences about it I do lots of followers by talking about this I've got five pillars for it I'm not going to go through that framework but but just to say to you that you can jump online and do research about somebody you can look for trigger events you can find context you can find a person that can provide an introduction referrals are still incredibly important in life and you can serve a charge the way that you sell the problem with social when we go and talk to salespeople is the couple of issues typically sales people can't writes very well so if the strategy involves I'm having to write and publish things we're kind of in trouble before we begin that's another topic we could maybe talk about that in the Q&A session but the other problem is they tend to get distracted and what we don't want is people narcissistically gazing into the mirror of their LinkedIn profile right instead of actually engaging with clients I believe that for anybody in business the business selling and for anybody that's in business themselves that LinkedIn and Salesforce is a marriage made in heaven because what LinkedIn can do for people is it can help them solve what most people believe is the number one problem that they've got and even yesterday I was working with a global organization doing a one day so to kick-off workshop for them in Manly and I said then what do you think is your number one one and they they said it was this I said then I'm one problem we've got is I just we just don't have enough pipeline now the reality is is that not having enough pipeline is not a problem at all it's actually a symptom it's a symptom of a deeper issue it's a symptom of them not having the disciplined activity for doing the things that create pipeline it's a symptom of the fact that they don't have the right narrative that they're not using the right combinations of activity I see people today jump into LinkedIn and I've even heard the heresy that LinkedIn is of itself a CRM system LinkedIn absolutely is an awesome platform for establishing and maintaining relationships with people but it doesn't help you forecast it doesn't manage pipeline it doesn't integrate into your marketing system to do lead nurturing and drip marketing it doesn't enable you to effectively collaborate with people inside your own organization like you need to it doesn't enable you to build a closed plan about an opportunity to capture discovery information it doesn't help you can't automate the process of building a quotation to get out to the person so LinkedIn to me is essential for building top of funnel and if you have a look at a LinkedIn the statistics are staggering two people are second join LinkedIn they're approaching half a billion members there's eight and a half million Australians in LinkedIn and although there are some exceptions maybe it's less adopted within government maybe it's less adopted with super senior people but everywhere I go with all when I work with clients we jump into LinkedIn into their sales navigator product and we can find anybody that we need to find in an organization we're targeting we can find a path to go and start a conversation with them so it's an incredibly powerful platform and if you're wondering about do you adopt the combination of LinkedIn with Salesforce because you need both and sales forces integration to sales navigator is best in market it's absolutely brilliant here's why it's so important an organization in the USA called c9 or a research organization work with large corporates and with everyone's permission what they got was the leader or or the leaderboard of all of the people that carried a number inside those organizations highest performer to lowest performer stack ranked as a percentage against quota what lengthens ended is they ran the social selling index score it's an algorithm against the way that you use LinkedIn if you come to the Q&A session I'll explain to everybody how you can get your SSI score even if you don't have sales navigated as a way of doing that but they measured their social selling index scores over time and what they found was this the people that used LinkedIn consistently well worth 500 percent more likely five times more likely to secure a meeting when someone our targeting inside an organization the other statistics that they found was that the people who use LinkedIn world personally built 45% more pipeline so if people are saying my biggest problem is I just don't have enough pipeline you can increase your pipeline bond by almost half again if you start to use social tools well as a way to go and create engagement and in a way where you create a really strong personal brand because by is researcher 75% or made-up statistics of 74 percent so this one isn't made up at 75 but 75 percent of buyers research the seller before they choose to engage when they see that person's LinkedIn profile what is it that they see do they sell Porsche driving quota crushing salesperson no thanks or do they see someone of genuine insight and values that's got a strong Network and a really good credible personal brand so those people build 45% more pipeline and that last stat is their 51 percent more likely it's not like it's probability to actually make their number now I go work with organizations what I find is typically in any business - business selling organization the numbers are better for b2c but in business-to-business somewhere between 40% and almost 70% of the people carrying numbers are missing their number and you look at the cost of the organization you look at the cost of turning over salespeople one of the reasons we need to embrace technology use things like LinkedIn and Salesforce is so that we can take the hit and miss element out so the first combination I really want you to think about as you go back in your own organizations is social and the phone it's both if people jump in social to do research and send out richly they send an end mail maybe they send a connection request there's tool to the don't screen scrape LinkedIn at all but there's ethically sourced data where you can get phone numbers email addresses bio means do that but then you want what you want people to do is to jump on the phone and call and you want people to time block which I'll talk about in a moment it's incredibly important so the first big combo we need to think about is its social and the phone there is a debate raging out there about social or the phone again it's one crazy company in the UK I got to God told about took the phones out of the sales area they went all in on social massive fail giant mistake it has to be both the other combo that's really important is people and technology it amazes me how many salespeople call themselves professional and yet unlike a carpenter who is a professional and can use all of their tools properly sales people say they were professional and they struggle to use the most basic of tools basic social and social analytic tools basic sales intelligence tools getting themselves basically away they're around themselves automation and marketing automation tools inside their organizations incredibly important and then the real combo to me that's just critical is its sales force with sales navigator so you can both fill pipeline then you can manager then you can manage opportunities and lead nurture and score and use things like Einstein to help and then it's dialling software that gives you phone numbers to make that process really efficient we don't to be hitting people that are gatekeepers blockers and switchboards it's using technology and and then it's absolutely things like Einstein and we need to take massive action so those three things I just like you to really take away from today is people need to go back to old school and create the right narrative slap people over the head in your office if you hear them talking about themselves and the company and the product new prospects are not interested in that until you first lead with why they should care and why it's important so create the right narrative then get them using the right combinations get them using social and the phone get them to use LinkedIn well get them to use your CRM system well get them to get people back into your lead your lead nurturing system to use those technologies well and then the last thing they need is the right mindset they must get the right the right mindset what I see out there this is the last point is I see many sales people that are victims they say they have too much on they say it's too hard to get to people the people don't answer the phone that there's too much technology that there's too much competition salespeople need to own their own success they need to treat every lead from marketing every warm lead they get from inside sales with a sales development rep they need to treat them as a bonus and own getting referrals and own building their pipeline thanks for listening today we're going to be doing a QA over in the other part of the auditorium thank you so much [Applause] [Music] you