June 2010 Archives

With the emergence of all the technology that we have today, we often forget the importance of simplicity in creating an effective PowerPoint presentation.  This is especially true when you want to leave a lasting impression on your audience with compelling data or information. It's even more critical when you're on the road presenting to a potential client or walking through a deck with a potential lead over the phone.

In the business world, some impressions can last a lifetime and others can be forgotten in an instant.  The key is finding that equilibrium of spoken content and text to be memorable - without being memorable for the wrong reasons.  The best way to take control is by going above and beyond in your preparation, and the rest will follow naturally. 

Here are 5 ways to prepare better PowerPoint presentations:
   

Does your target audience include buyers in construction fields? This BuyerZone white paper provides a detailed look at how construction buyers research, plan, and execute major purchases, and what's important to them during the buying process.

Some of the key findings:

• Simply being responsive is one of the best ways to stand out. Even if their budgets are small, these buyers expect that you call them back and follow up as needed.
  
• At least to this audience, social media channels are simply not an important source of purchasing information. (Tough news for bloggers like us... but we'll get over it.)
• Opinions on favorite communication methods are so scattered that only conclusion we can draw is that you'd better figure out each buyer's preferred contact method as quickly as you can -- and be prepared to change that method as you get closer to a sale.
  

You can read the paper below, view the online version, or download the PDF.

Not following up after speaking with a prospect or sending a proposal is a costly mistake. Follow up is critical and you will lose sales if you wait for people to call you back.

If you don't already have one, take a moment and compile a list of prospects that you haven't followed up with yet. These are prospects that are waiting for your phone call so they can take the next step in the purchasing process - fine tune their purchase requirements, receive your quote or estimate, or even sign a contract. If you take a moment and look at your follow up list, how much business does that equate to?

By not following up, you are wasting the valuable marketing dollars and time invested in gathering new leads, not to mention the potential revenue of the lost sales themselves. Here are a few quick tips to get started with effective follow up:

Commit. Whether you need to follow up after an initial conversation or after a prospect receives your proposal, start by asking or telling your prospect that you will follow up on a specific date. Tell them how you will follow up (phone, email or in-person) and record it in your calendar as an appointment so you don't forget.

Be persistent. The business owners and decision makers you are trying to reach are typically very busy. Use a combination of contact methods - email, phone calls and drop in meetings - to reach your prospect. I once heard someone say something along the lines of "follow up until your prospect buys or dies".  It's a catchy phrase but I'm not convinced it's a strategy that will help you win more sales. However, I do think it's important to consistently follow up with your prospects until you know if they want to do business with you.  Finding the balance between too little and too much follow up can be tricky and it depends on your business.

Get organized. One of the most important aspects of following up is being organized. As soon as you commit to follow up, add a reminder to your calendar or day planner. Include the prospect's contact information and a few notes about the prospect and the goal of your follow up so you don't have to waste time going through your notes.

Be consistent. This is a critical time in your relationship with your prospect because he or she is trying to get an idea of what it would be like to work with you. Following through on your commitments will build trust with your prospect and prove you are serious about winning his business. Consistently stay in front of your prospects and follow up after each meeting or call. You will build rapport and ultimately you will make more sales.

Make it a priority. If you're just getting started with follow up and you have a long list of prospects waiting for your call, start by putting aside an hour or two each week that's strictly devoted to follow up. Considering the revenue you could earn by winning a few of these sales, it's time well spent.

Instead of focusing on the number of calls you need to make, consider how many sales you're losing by not following up. You can easily differentiate yourself from your competition by taking the time to follow up with your prospects. Don't wait for their call - be proactive and contact them. Your next sale could be just a call away.

If you want to improve your sales results, you have to stay on top of new trends and constantly refine your skills. But sorting out which sources of information to trust can be a challenge.

Here are 20 informative, detailed, and engaging sales blogs written by professionals in the industry. You don't have to read them all - but you'd better be reading some of them. We've highlighted a sample post from each that's worth a read.

Heavy Hitter Sales Blog

Heavy Hitter Sales is a blog dedicated to helping sales professionals take their sales skills and careers to the next level by learning how to expand readers' influence within their company.

The author, Steve Martin began his career programming computers as a teenager in the late '70s and later became a top sales producer for a billion-dollar company. He is the author of critically acclaimed "Heavy Hitter" series of books about enterprise sales strategies for senior sales people.

Posts vary in length and are updated on a weekly basis. Each post is creative and full of advice, sales tips and techniques, and formatted into lists, interviews or essays.

Sample post: Your Sales Career! Indy 500 Racing? They're the Same!

Follow The Lead

The ZoomInfo B2B Sales and Marketing Blog provides news and information for sales and marketing executives.

Contributors include: Matthew Schwartz, an independent journalist with over 20 years experience working in the media, reporting on marketing, communication, advertising and PR; Chip Terry, VP and GM of Zoom Info's Enterprise Solutions; Matt Llyod, who oversees product, executive and brand communications for ZoomInfo.com.

The blog is updated at least twice a week and each post contains news, analysis, interviews with sales and marketing gurus, and guest posts.

Sample post: When social media 'will be like air'

Contact forms are a great source of new leads. But they can also be a total conversion killer if they're not properly thought through.

If you're trying to get people to register for a webinar or encouraging people to download your latest whitepaper - chances are you're asking people to provide some information that you can pass along to your sales team. And, of course, your website is littered with ways to contact you - including a contact form.

Have you ever taken a moment to step back and assess how good your forms are? If you haven't, you should. And if you have, it never hurts to re-assess.

Make sure to keep these key factors in mind when you do:

Whether you're a small company or a large one, having leads in your sales pipeline isn't enough. You need to track and monitor leads as they move through the sales process to prevent lost opportunities.

Many companies use sophisticated software programs, such as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM), to assist them in tracking sales leads. There are many types of software on the market that can assist in keeping up with sales leads, but many are expensive and provide complicated tools that many companies never use.

What's a small business owner, who doesn't have the time or budget to invest in a CRM, to do?

Track and Monitor
Tracking sales leads is a critical component of a successful business. You should be able to track prospects from the first opportunity through to the sale, including when a lead came in, the source, the sales person you assigned it to and what actions they've taken to move the sale forward.

Tracking begins with you. Keep a record of who each lead is assigned to so you know who to follow up with. Choose the best method for you and your sales team - an Access database, Outlook plug-in, Excel spreadsheet or a combination - and track appointments, calls, emails, contacts on the account, contracts, etc.  Hold each member of your team accountable for keeping this information up-to-date for all of their leads.

Establish a formal sales process
Establish a step-by-step process to ensure that leads don't slip through the cracks. Define your communication strategy for each phase of the sales cycle - what do they get, how often and in what format. Provide standardized scripts that ensure everyone on your team is conveying the same message to customers, along with supporting tools and marketing collateral that are aligned to the steps and activities in each phase.

For example, let's say Phase 1 of your sales process is setting up a meeting. Here is the process:

Action: Call the prospect, leave a voicemail if he doesn't answer, then follow up with an email.
Tools: Voicemail script and email template.

This keeps every member of the sales team on the same page when it comes to taking the steps to close sales leads.

Report
While you may not be able to track everything through a central database, you should create standardized sales report templates to track what's in the pipeline, what sold and what you may have lost to the competition. Your sales team needs to focus on selling, not administrative tasks, so resist asking for complicated data. At a minimum, the reports should include where each of the sales leads stands, next steps, the likelihood of closing the deal and likely closing dates. How often you request updated reports is up to you.

Share information
Keeping information in a central folder or database is critical. Here are a few tips to avoid a situation where when a sales rep is out of the office no one has access to information on his or her accounts:

• Use a central mailbox so everyone on your team can access leads.
• Share weekly or monthly reports with your team so every member is up-to-date with the pipeline.
• Save sales collateral, including presentations and contracts, to a central folder
• Use a common address book or database to manage contacts that everyone on your team is able to access and update.

As your business grows, you may choose to upgrade to lead management software that integrates contacts, accounts and sales opportunities in one place. There are a lot of options in the CRM space - from fully integrated CRM software solutions like Salesforce.com to less costly, less complex software systems such as Highrise or PipelineDeals  This type of solution offers more than Excel reports and Outlook plug ins, but doesn't integrate as much data as a complete CRM. In the meantime, it's important to establish a formal process for tracking and managing leads from start to close to prevent leads from falling through the cracks.

There are loads of sources for information on lead generation and related marketing and sales topics -- it only takes a few searches (or clicks on some the experts in our sidebar) to find bloggers who regularly provide good tips and news.

Sometimes you want more than just an article or blog post, though. BtoB Magazine's 2010 Lead Generation Guide is packed with juicy stories and insights into lead gen best practices.

It covers using search to generate leads, driving leads through webinars, email tips, social media, and more.

It's only going to be free to download for another couple of weeks, so go get it!

Although it's hard for some of us to believe, BuyerZone's been doing online lead generation for more than 15 years now. In some ways, it still seems like just a few months ago we were a startup working out of a dingy converted gym.

On the other hand, we've got experience working with companies of all sizes, across dozens of wildly different industries, and in good and bad economies. So we've learned a thing or two over the years.

Here's a summary: we guest posted some lessons we've learned from 15 years in lead gen over at LeadCritic. For anyone buying or selling leads online, it's a must-read. Go on, check it out!


(Note for the detail-oriented: we were founded in 1992, but it took us a couple of years to get into lead generation.)

Dan Blank provides another voice on the power of social media in B2B marketing. Dan's a thoughtful writer and former colleague -- definitely good reading for marketers of all stripes. This post makes the point that social media is your chance to position yourself as an expert in your industry. (Not that we'd know anything about that...)

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I may be a bit of a video game junkie - I just bought a new computer so I'd be ready when Civilization V comes out this fall. And it's pretty easy to see how games can be a fit for the B2C market: the massively popular Facebook games Farmville and Mafia Wars have made a leap into real life, thanks to a cross-promotion with 7-11 that lets players earn virtual rewards for real-life purchases. But does game playing result in real benefits for the B2B marketer?

It does, according to the Spears Marketing Group. In Can Games Play a Role in B2B Marketing?, they interview an executive at Blockdot, an interactive agency with several B2B game success under its belt. B2B games are becoming more popular for a range of uses, both advertising/marketing related and more specific tasks like keeping partners informed about new offerings.

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This isn't lead gen-related, but a great read for anyone who manages other employees: 12 Things Good Bosses Believe. Here's a little exercise you can do: think back through bosses you've had and consider the first point on the list: "I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me." How do your 'good' and 'bad' bosses compare on that question? It's pretty clear to me that bosses I dreaded working for had no idea that someone wouldn't love working for them. Don't be that boss!

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Finally the always-informative LeadCritic blog has a great guest post from LeadQual's Andrew Coleman: Are You Throwing Away Leads? They actually went "undercover" to submit leads to colleges and see what followup practices are like in the real world. Their results:

Very few schools have rigorous systems and processes in place to be sure to consistently follow-up with their on-line inquiries.  From experience, I can tell you that companies have trouble (a lot of trouble!) following up on leads.  Closing leads takes a more disciplined approach than most people want to believe.

Our experience at BuyerZone says the same thing - one of the first lessons we try to impart to our clients is the importance of following up consistently on every lead.

This is a busy time of year for most businesses with new college graduates coming on board to start their first jobs. Even if your company has a formal sales training program, the sessions are likely spread out over a few months or the first year. You have leads in your CRM right now that need to be followed up on, so informal training needs to start on day 1.

I put together a list of tips for new sales people to help them hit the ground running. While an experienced sales rep already knows most of this, getting back to the basics never hurts.


1.  Focus on value
Your prospect is not interested in the features of your product, service or solution. Tell them about your newest product  not interested, don't need it. Change your focus to the tangible benefits they can get from using your product - they're all ears. Your prospects are interested in solving business issues shortening sales cycle, driving revenue growth, etc.

Instead of selling the features of your solution, tie them to the benefits. Make sure they pass the "So what?" test. For example:

Focused on the product's feature: "Our new software includes an easy to use reporting tool."

So what?

Focused on value: "Using our software will enable your sales team to spend less time creating reports and more time on revenue generating activities like sales calls."

Remember: Buyers buy solutions and results; they do not buy products or services


2.  Ask the right questions
The most effective way to move the sales process forward is to ask quality questions that give you insight into the prospect's issues, purchase requirements and goals. Don't assume you know what matters to your prospects.  

Quality questions are not:

• What will it take to earn your business?
• What is your budget?
• If I gave you a good price would sign a contract today?

A good rule of thumb is to ask questions that begin with "What", "How", or "When", because you'll get more from the prospect than a simple Yes or No. The questions you ask will vary depending on your product/service and your prospect. However, here are a few sample questions to get you started:

• Tell me why this issue is important to you.
• What areas of your business are being affected?
• What is the impact in terms of dollars, market share, employee turnover, etc.?
• What do you think of our product/service?

Remember: Asking the right questions will help you understand the prospect's issues and hot buttons, and what benefits will be most valuable to them.


3.  Actively Listen
Now that you know what kinds of questions to ask, stop talking and start listening. Understanding the prospect's issues and motivation will help you differentiate yourself from the competition and form an effective value proposition.

The ideal talking-listening ratio in sales is a hot debate. Some say the ideal ratio is 80:20 with the prospect talking more, others claim 50:50 is best. I think it's an art, not a science. Your goal is an engaging dialogue where your prospect to shares information and you ask probing questions and offer valuable insight. Being a trusted advisor that can help solve business issues, not a walking and talking product brochure will help you close the sale.

Show your prospect you are serious by actively listening. After the prospect answers your questions, you can confirm that you understand the client's issues by rephrasing what was just said.

For example: "Roger, you mentioned that X, Y, and Z are critical success factors for this initiative. How well does that capture what we need to focus on?"

By using a phrase like the above or "Let me get this straight", you have an opportunity to ensure you completely understand the prospect's position.

Remember: You can ask all the questions in the world, but if you don't listen to what your prospect tells you, you won't be able to present the best solution.


4.  Differentiate yourself and your solution
Most businesses compete against companies with similar offerings, making standing out in a crowded marketplace challenging. Differentiating yourself and your company from your competitors is essential to a successful sale. Focusing on value, asking the right questions and actively listening differentiates you from the competition, but taking it further will glean the best results.

Differentiation is found not just in what you deliver  your product or service  but in how you deliver. Here are some steps you can take to differentiate yourself and your solution:

• Create a customized value proposition based on your prospect's specific needs and priorities.
• Do a competitive analysis so you are familiar with your competitor's product or service, and their strengths and weaknesses.
• Set yourself apart from the competition by building relationships with your prospects, even those that aren't ready to buy yet.
• Be a business advisor, not an order taker. Bring value to the table.
• Present your solutions in person instead of simply faxing or emailing your quote and waiting for a response.

Remember: You want to give your prospects a reason to do business with you instead of a competitor.


5.  One step at a time
Today's business to business buyers have long, complex purchasing cycles and more often than not, the decisions are made by a team rather than an individual. Prospects don't buy when you want them to buy and they don't always move through the sales process linearly. Sometimes you've led them to the close only to find they've revised their purchasing requirements, gone back to their short list for new proposals or changed their budget.

Being able to close a sale is critical; however, there is a difference between strategically moving your sale forward and just rushing your prospect. The more you rush them, the more resistant to moving forward they might become and you risk losing the sale. Slow down and simply advance the sales process one step - one meeting, one call, one email - at a time.

Remember: Get to know your prospect so you can stay in sync with his purchasing process.


Being successful in sales requires persistence, follow up and planning. The best sales people set goals, determine a plan and execute. Once your sales team has a lead, they need to know how to approach the sale. What tips could you give a new sales person that would have the highest impact on success?