Marketing Interactions

B2B Prospects in Funnels more than Pipelines

It should come as no surprise that your B2B marketing content and nurturing programs are being tapped to provide value farther across the buying process. In fact, many of you are now tasked with moving prospects to that nirvana called sales readiness—before salespeople ever see them.

Because B2B buyers can now push sales activities to whenever they're ready, your funnel may be longer than your pipeline. This reality layers additional responsibility on the marketing team, but it also leaves salespeople somewhat at odds.

You see, when company's had a hold on critical information their buyers needed to learn how to solve their problems, a salesperson gained entry to the relationship a lot earlier. They got to know their prospects and helped them navigate the tricky waters of considered purchase decisions. The salesperson with the best relationship usually won the deal.

The difference is that now salespeople are coming on board at the end. They no longer have those relationships built over the long haul. Any trust or credibility that holds sway with prospects was created by someone else (e.g., marketing messaging and communications, brand knowledge, customer success stories and, likely, peer referrals).

When your pipeline is tilted to slide salespeople to the end stages of the buying process, the rules of engagement change.

Salespeople now have to be:

• prepared to step into the conversation in mid-stride.
• focused on delivering game-changing business value from the start.
• able to apply company expertise to differentiate their offerings.

There's no easing into this with a 60-slide presentation about your company and products. Your buyers likely know as much about your company and products as they need to. They expect your salespeople to come through the door prepared to add value, not have to educate them about their businesses.

What they care about is the value of the information salespeople can provide that tops whatever they've already learned, and how easily they can use it to make the best decision.

Since marketing is telling the longest story, they are positioned to better enable sales to meet and exceed the expectations of sales-ready prospects. When marketers can effectively move prospects farther through the buying process, they're in the perfect position to help salespeople keep up that momentum at the handoff.

To do this, marketers must provide end-stage content, messaging and conversational briefs to help salespeople get a running start. This does not mean recycling marketing content. It does mean fresh insights and intelligence that enables salespeople to bring something new and valuable to the conversation. Otherwise that prospect's momentum will come to a screeching halt.

The marketing-to-sales process is a team sport. I'm often stumped about why this is treated as two distinct efforts, instead of a fluid process. I'll bet your buyers are wondering about that, too.

I read somewhere (if anyone knows, tell me and I'll give credit) that—in the eyes of buyers—40% of the sale is dependent upon their interactions with salespeople. That's a pretty hefty weighting. And yet another reason that marketing needs to put more emphasis on enabling sales to get the job done.

A few sales enablement tips for marketers:

• Create content for buying stages—all of them.
• Prepare end-stage content in usable formats for salespeople.
• Provide access to activity histories and overviews of content the prospect found useful.
• Build presentations from a value—not company—perspective.
• Work with sales every step of the way to ensure you're giving them what they need.

This is not a once-and-done thing, it's a process that will need to be revisited and refined over time as you learn what works best for both your buyers and your sales team. Monitor what salespeople use and dump or fix anything that's not working. Stay involved and learn how salespeople are using what you give them to close deals. I can pretty much guarantee you they'll put things together in ways you haven't thought of doing.

Salespeople think differently than marketers. Embrace this as a source of insight from the people who have the most face-time with buyers. What you learn can also be used across your marketing programs to make them more human. Your prospects will notice.

Tech Buyers Use Collateral for Purchase Decisions

Eccolo Media conducted a study to learn which collateral tech buyers use to make purchase decisions. Their premise was to prove that content development is more than a cost sink or requirement for doing business. The survey report, Eccolo Media 2008 B2B Technology Collateral Survey, definitely provides validation for their premise.

The survey results will also be helpful to B2B marketers who're planning for nurturing content development. It also validates the need for content that provides information buyers need, not just what you want to tell them.

Eccolo Media set out to learn:

"We asked them about their preferred collateral types, how they used content, if they shared it, and just how influential it was on their final technology purchase."

Worth noting, 67% of participants were decision makers, 33% influencers - all from U.S. companies. They were asked if "the collateral was viewed, listened to or read in the six months prior to a technology purchase."

5 types of content were included in the survey:

1. white papers
2. case studies / success stories
3. podcasts / audio files
4. video
5. product brochures / data sheets

Here are some of the survey findings:

• white papers were thought extremely or very influential by 44%
• brochures were the least influential at 33%
• 48% responded that case studies were very or extremely influential
• videos only hit 39%, but it's interesting to note that studio quality was considered important by 93% - casting doubt on that do-it-yourself idea being touted by social media folks. Well, at least for tech purchases.

Some interesting things to note:

Although product brochures weren't considered all that influential, they had high consumption rates, which makes sense at some point in the buying cycle, so you still need them. You just need to pay attention to when they're needed.

The younger the respondent, the more likely that they've listened to a podcast or viewed a video, so knowing who your buyers and influencers are can dictate content formats to some extent. And, even though many decision makers are older, the shift to the digital generation will happen.

Over 70% of white papers, case studies and product brochures were viewed on the computer screen, not downloaded. This means it's critical to think about format and design your content for consumption on computer screens. For example, do you really think people like to scroll up and down to read content in columns laid out in portrait format?

Pass along is alive and well. Over 60% shared collateral with other decision makers and influencers within their organization. So, think about how you can be even more helpful by offering versions that answer the specific needs of the decision makers and various influencers on the buying committee for your customers.

And, it's important to note that they don't just forward content to one person. Forty-four percent pass along white papers to 4 or more people.

For those of you only targeting decision makers with your content, consider this:

"White papers are very viral for influencers. While 66% of decision makers said that they share white papers with others, influencers shared them more often by a wide margin (83%). This may relate to respondents’ role in the purchase, with influencers passing on relevant information and decision makers considering the content more often than sharing it."

Your buyers want information focused on objective discussions of technology, not products. Gee, go figure! The length decision makers prefer is 4-6 pages, while influencers will go for 8 pages. Consider that influencers need to formulate discussions and learn how to speak to the issues to sway decision makers' perspectives. So, keep that in mind when targeting your white papers and help them out. Yet another validation for content designed for specific audiences.

This report is chock full of useful information that can help you not only prove the value content can provide during the buying process, but also to position it for higher consumption.

You can download the report with a fairly painless registration.

Address B2B Buyers' Gut Instinct

When B2B marketers set out to develop marketing content, they often focus on the benefits or results their customers can achieve by using their solution. Hopefully more than they focus on the product, itself. With longer, complex buying cycles you need lots of different content to answer the wide variety of informational needs for both decision makers and influencers.

One type of content often overlooked is content focused on past experiences that have become "anchors" that color your buyers assumptions about solving their problem. Those "anchors" of past experience are often subconscious for the buyer and related to gut instinct.

Past experiences internalized to the extent of gut instinct are usually the bad ones. You know, the ones where you make deals with the devil if the project will just work out. In exchange, you promise to NEVER, EVER make that same choice again. Those are the kinds of things that stick with you.

What gets internalized as the "anchor" for a specific gut instinct can be either emotional or rational. In order to address past experience with your content you need to look to potential points of failure almost experienced by your customers.

Think about this as the flip side of customer success stories for just a minute and stick with me.

Complex sales have a variety of obstacles to overcome. Some of them include:

• Complexity (got you on that one, I know)
• Risk - both professionally and personally
• Change - usually pretty major

The result of these can stall the buying process in its tracks. And you can say over, and over, again how successful you are in implementing your solutions or tout your customers' successes until the cows come home, but these buyers' gut instincts will win.

To get beyond that gut instinct, you need to address it head on. In order to do this you'll need to do some research and learn about all the potential points of failure your customers were worried they'd experience during their projects.

• Start by looking closely at the objections your salespeople are hearing. Try to deduce what's behind them—emotional or rational concerns.


• Talk to your project/account managers and find out what kinds of fires they've had to put out during implementations.


• Ask your customers what concerns they had during their projects.


• Don't forget to include your customer service reps. They likely deal with problem resolution more than anyone else in your company.

Once you've gathered all your potential points-of-failure intelligence, take a good hard look at your buyer personas and create stories that address their concerns as personally as possible. Make sure you do this thoughtfully.

Pay appropriate attention to the concern and be humble about addressing how you help your customers' avoid it. But also let your expertise shine through. This can also serve to increase the buyers' perception of the value add choosing your company can bring.

The purpose of addressing your buyers' gut instinct is to restore their confidence in their ability to choose wisely. [Obviously with your company as that choice.]

Purchasing a complex product is risky. Despite best intentions, implementations can be time intensive and messy. Companies have high expectations about the outcomes they'll be able to achieve with that large capital outlay. Your buyer has to make sure their choice lives up to those expectations. If they've been burned before, making sure you quell their gut instinct  is critical to getting them to take the next step in the buying process.

This type of content is best used later in the buying process. Depending on your buyers, it could be best employed by salespeople in one-on-one situations. Work closely with your sales team to discover where in the buying process gut instinct content will help pull the buyer forward.

And do not overlook that the person with the gut instinct that can hold up a purchase decision could be an influencer. This is why it's important to know and engage as many members of the buying committee as possible.

By taking the time to address issues that could be anchors for your buyers' gut instincts, you have a better shot at enticing your buyer to move beyond them. And you'll garner a lot more respect than competitors who only present the rose-colored glasses view of solving the problem.

E-Book: Sales Management 2.0 by CSO Insights

CSO Insights has graciously allowed me to offer their new E-Book, Sales Management 2.0, to all of you.

Sales Management 2.0 is an eBook that grew out of the answers sales executives gave when asked about their top 3 objectives for the next 12 months. What's interesting is that you'll see a lot of dependencies in their answers.

For example:

#1 is increase revenues - but that can also mean increasing market share, improving margins, shortening sales cycles, improving channel sales and decreasing discounts.

#2 is increase sales effectiveness - which can also mean optimize lead generation, improve customer loyalty/retention, improve team selling and decrease the cost of sales.

To me, #2 is a clear indication of where marketers need to step up to help sales achieve their objectives. Just think what might happen if marketers aligned their objectives with these...

Instead of leaving us with statistics and a chart, CSO Insights wondered,

"...what exactly does “better” look like? What changes do our field sales;telesales; sales support; sales operations; and sales management teams need to make in order to optimize their performance to help achieve key objectives? And what help should they be looking for from the rest of the enterprise?"

So they asked 6 seasoned sales executives' and visionaries to share their insights.

Here's an overview of what you'll find in this meaty 71 page eBook:

• How to use what you have in new ways to create "net new" value and tangible results for their clients.


• How to manage and leverage the sales intelligence that lives inside your companies—usually as unwritten tribal knowledge.


• The differences made by optimizing incentive management with a sales analytics system—instead of manual spreadsheets.


• Ideas about how to shift your sales process to the way customers buy.


• Getting the most out of supporting sales with web collaboration and virtual sales meetings.


• Some ideas straight from Harvard about how we're managing our major accounts and the future of pricing. [goes to internal status quo]

I have to tell you that this E-Book really made me stop and think. If you're a marketer wondering how you can proactively take action to better align marketing with sales, there's great information in here.

If you want to know how seasoned sales executives think and learn more about how they approach the challenges they're facing, you'll find that here, as well.

And, maybe some of you are actually grappling with the issues discussed in the eBook.

Well, now's your chance to learn more from some excellent, real world, insights.

Download the Sales Management 2.0 E-Book (right here - no registration)

Please come back and leave a comment for CSO Insights about what you found valuable and even what topics would really resonate for you in future eBooks they produce.

Get Back to Work Faster

My great friend, Jill Konrath, has created a new project to help people Get Back to Work Faster. She saw the impact this economy was having on friends, family and colleagues and took a big step up to the plate to develop a job creation book. But she didn't stop there. She's created a free expert webinar series this summer to help you get even savvier about your job creation efforts.

This is one of the best books I've read that's all about helping people differentiate themselves from the sea of resumes and traditional job search tactics that just don't work anymore. And, heck, she's a specialist at seeing things differently to get knock-out results. Perhaps a reason her book, Selling to Big Companies, has been a best seller for about 3 years running.

A few things you should know about Get Back to Work Faster:

• She enrolled Jeff Ogden to put her ideas into practice and shares his story in the book. So this isn't just advice, it's a book jammed full of ideas that really work.


• Digital tools and resources are used creatively to help you build a personal brand.


• Get over the idea of finding a job and start thinking about creating the job you want.


• If you've never thought about your personal value proposition, you will now. In fact, I'd say that's worthwhile for all of us—working or not.


• Worried about all the competition for the few jobs out there? Get Back to Work Faster shows you how to eliminate competition by being the most valuable person on the planet your target employer could ever choose to hire.


• Tons of resources and tools are included at the back so you can put all these terrific ideas into practice. Jill doesn't leave you thinking, "Yeah, sounds great, but I have no idea how to make it happen."

Do yourself a favor and go download Get Back to Work Faster while it's free.Then use the Tell a Friend feature to share it with others. They'll thank you!

**The book is only being offered for free until the published version comes hot off the presses. Jill knew people couldn't wait on the publishing time line to find a job, so she's graciously provided the book as a download for a very minor registration.

And one last thing. Even if you have a job, this book can be an invaluable resource for developing and expanding your personal brand. In this day and age, if you don't have one, you should.

Marketo Sales Insights - A 6th-Sense Advantage for Sales Effectiveness

Those of you who read my blog know that I'm passionate about marketing automation. Last week, I was privileged to see a preview of Marketo's 2nd product, Sales Insight, released today. I liked what I saw and think this extension to Marketo Lead Management software can help marketing and sales begin closing that alignment gap.

Why? Well, because Sales Insights eliminates a lot of the guesswork about lead value. And, it's a native Salesforce.com application they've really tried to make intuitive to remove the barrier to adoption companies would have if they threw yet another tool at the sales team.

But the reason I really like it is because it enables sales to work more collaboratively with marketing in a natural and real-time manner.

Here are a few examples:

Interesting Moments: Marketing and Sales can work together to define interesting moments that help sales stay focused on lead behavior that indicates higher levels of interest. Let's face it, not all lead activity merits sales intervention.

With interesting moments, escalating amounts of data are distilled down to key factors that makes a difference by helping sales know just when to reach out and who to reach out to. They won't be wasting their time on leads who aren't displaying buying intentions.

I think this is a key to sales effectiveness. The better companies can distill the interesting moments into actionable intelligence, the more on-target their sales team will be. This will take effort over time as patterns are noted and the importance of those "moments" meanings defined. Nuance will be the factor of the future that helps us better serve our buyers and customers.

Best Bets: Best Bets are those "owned" by a sales rep. The stars indicate lead score and the flames indicate the rate of change of that score. The whole point is that we're now able to gather so much information that it can be overwhelming.

The flames and stars work together to help salespeople focus on what's important. And, they helped you create your lead scoring process, right? Best Bets helps them use that outcome more effectively without requiring them to dig through reams of data.

Actions: Salespeople now have the ability to take actions in regards to leads to work in concert with marketing to generate timely pipeline progression. They can assign a lead to a specific nurturing campaign, view it from the marketing side, add it to their watch list (leads they're interested in following but aren't yet assigned to them) and send them a trackable Marketo email, perhaps to invite a lead to attend a webinar on a subject they've shown interest in. 

And all of this is instantly updated for both the marketing and sales sides. Sales can also suspend marketing for a couple of weeks to eliminate cross messaging while they determine the lead's buying horizon.

The other tool that I think can become extremely beneficial for both sales and marketing is the Anonymous Web Activity tracker. Considering that the leads companies know about, who've opted in, are only a fraction of your website's visitors, this can be killer. Now you can see which companies are visiting your website and how many pages they've viewed. But what makes this helpful is the integration with Jigsaw, DemandBase and LinkedIn. Click any of those buttons to learn more about the contacts within that company you may be able to engage.

What's fascinating to me as a marketer is the potential for uncovering new market opportunities that might not be on a company's radar, as well as expanding lead generation efforts toward companies who've at least shown some interest in what you've got to offer already.

Marketo Sales Insights is sold on a per-seat basis as an extension to Marketo Lead Management software. I'd say it's definitely worth checking out. There's quite a bit more than what I've covered here.

Why B2B Salespeople Say they Win Software Sales

Take a look at the chart below, graciously provided by CSO Insights. If you're a B2B software marketer, this may not be inspiring. However, what's interesting to note is what  sales execs determine are the leading competitive reasons why their reps win deals.

Looking at this from the other end of the funnel and comparing the views of companies who win more than 60% of the deals they're after (blue) vs. those who don't shows some interesting differences.

I'd love to know if their customers agree with how these stack up, but that's another story.

Here are a few things I find deserving of attention for those of us looking at this process from the top end of the funnel:

Marketing Messaging is last on the list for those who win the most. Is this because marketing messaging is so bad or because it's not integrated across the sales process, so sales reps lack visibility into what's driving opportunities to them?

Existing Relationships and References hold the 2nd and 3rd spots for those who win more. This is a critical point and plays into how hard your company works to build relationships after customer acquisition, as well as nurture your customers along by providing new ideas and insights over the full course of the relationship. 

I also think it relates to your company's credibility and reputation in the marketplace.

What role is marketing playing here? Or is this a direct reflection of the relationships the sales reps have built. Shouldn't be heavily reliant on one or the other, but a shared responsibility of both sales and marketing.

Sales process is rated much higher by those who win more.

Contrast this to service and support which are rated higher by those who win less.

Interesting dichotomy, don't you think?

Finally, I find it good to know that both sides agree ROI is equally important from either view. What I fail to understand is why it's so far down the list for those who win more deals.

If ROI wasn't a factor, would your product be superior?

Would your customers still have relationships with you or provide references if they received a limited return on their investment with you? If there was no ROI, would it matter how good your sales process is?

If you, as a marketer, had to rate these factors for why your company wins deals, how would your choices differ from sales?

What other things do you see in this chart worth thinking about?

How much revenue is sitting idle in your pipeline?

In times like these, there's just no excuse for letting revenue opportunities idle in your pipeline. This is a huge reason why marketing needs visibility across the buying process—from start to finish.

Once leads are handed off to sales, they need follow-up and continued engagement to encourage that final burst of momentum that convinces them to become your customers. For some reason there's an irritating hard stop at the point when marketing hands leads off to sales.

This is probably because:

• Marketing thinks their job is done.
• Sales doesn't want marketing stepping on their toes.

This results in marketing ceasing to nurture leads passed to sales.

But, if sales doesn't take action—and research shows sales only works about 30% of the leads marketing gives them—then your leads go cold. That's a big waste of investment already sunk into generating and nurturing those leads.

So what do you do?

Here are several ideas about how to increase the revenue flow from your pipeline:

1. Develop a reciprocal SLA between sales and marketing.
   
   • Get agreement on requirements for a qualified lead.
   • Establish and agree to a timeline for sales to formally accept them.
   • Have sales agree to contact accepted leads within a specific time period.
   • If sales passes on a lead, make sure they can hand them back to marketing with an explanation for the rejection. That way marketing knows what needs to happen to get the lead accepted in the future.
2. Create a Sales Enablement Handoff Brief
   
   • Help salespeople get up to speed fast and take action in line with the lead's expectations.
   • Provide the lead's activity history during nurturing.
   • Include an overview of the related nurturing program.
   • Given the lead's last interaction, provide conversational snippets, messaging and collateral suggestions to help sales initiate a conversation.
3. Integrate extended Nurturing into the Sales Process
   
   • Marketing can create nurturing touches on behalf of the assigned sales rep and execute for them until the salesperson indicates it's no longer necessary.
   • Make sure the sales rep knows what marketing is doing.
   • Shift the messaging for late-stage buyers.
4. Facilitate the Introduction of the Sales Rep to the Lead
   
   • Humanize the process. When you want to introduce one person to another, you don't just hand off their contact info and walk away. You introduce them. Why shouldn't the same respect be paid to people you hope to do business with? It really is about the relationship. People buy from people.

The whole point is that marketing and sales need to work together to keep the momentum going. The more personal you can make the lead's transition to sales, the more credibility the relationship will have.

By putting processes in place to ensure lead progression continues at the transition, you've got much better odds that your leads will actually become customers. Arming salespeople to step seamlessly into the relationship is something marketing can help accomplish.

And, it doesn't have to be difficult. Marketing automation systems can give you a lot of this information on request. When you do your research and content development, create those last two pieces of the sales enablement handoff brief. Likewise, design your introduction email message.

By integrating these bridging activities into your marketing strategy they easily flow from the other work you're already doing to build your nurturing programs. And, by increasing marketing's visibility into the sales side, they can take action when sales reps are too busy closing other deals to pay attention to each new lead that comes their way.

Without that insight, a lot of your leads may be just sitting in your pipeline. But, while they may look idle to you, your competitors are out there catching their attention. And, don't you just hate it when that happens?

Does your B2B website cut sales costs?

According to a recent survey done by Forrester Research with Marketing Profs, "94% of respondents consider corporate Web sites a key element in the marketing toolbox and 84% of buyers say Web sites matter in purchase decision making."

That said, Laura Ramos also points out that most B2B corporate websites "lack the basic building blocks to build customer relationships."

It's time for B2B companies to regard their corporate websites with a more flexible mindset. This is no time for turf battles, ego or company posturing. If your corporate website isn't playing a key role in generating qualified prospects and enhancing customer relationships, it's not doing its job.

You know that buyers are waiting longer to involve sales in their buying process. Longer sales cycles mean escalating sales costs. By enabling your website to deliver better information in formats your buyers find valuable, marketers can transform their website visitors from tire kickers into interested, active prospects.

Here's a little test for you to evaluate your corporate website for engagement:

1. Choose a problem your customers solve using your products.
2. Go to your website as if an unfamiliar website and see how many clicks it takes you to get to relevant information. (you don't know your product names, either)
3. What information exists to help your buyers in different stages of their buying process?
4. Is there a natural flow to how they access this information or does every piece of it have to be found separately? You know - white papers in the white paper section, case studies in the case study section, etc.
5. Now look at navigational paths in your website analytics and see how your website visitors are moving through your website.
   
   Can you tell when they find something of value?
   Where are you losing them?

Corporate websites are often arranged based on separate categories. Almost all of them have solutions, industries, products, company on their navigation. Is that how your buyers want their information?

Start thinking about the words you use and how you present that information.

• Can you orient it around problems and priorities on your buyers' minds?
• Can you combine content to tell a threaded story instead of asking your website visitors to spend their time searching unfamiliar territory?
• What types of interactions could you add to help?
  
  For example, Genius customers are getting great results by chatting with prospective customers in real time about the subject matter displayed on the page the prospect is on.
  
  Do you have newsletter subscriptions available for specific interests?
  
  Can they sign up for webinars on the subject?
  
  How about videos and podcasts with a way to share them with others on the buying committee?

The more information you can provide to buyers across the stages of their buying process, the higher impact you'll see in lowering sales costs. Salespeople will be focused on the most interested opportunities, the ones who raise their hands. Self-identification will happen when your website serves buyers well because they'll have learned what they need to know to build their confidence that your company is the right partner to choose.

B2B websites can be very powerful sales tools if companies start designing them as an integral part of a customer-focused buying process and not as a digital version of their corporate brochure.

Periodic Table of Inside Sales

Trish Bertuzzi and The Bridge Group have been doing some great research on what makes inside sales tick. But they've taken it a step farther and produced a really useful tool for comparing your company's metrics against benchmark metrics.

Because this is such a cool tool, I asked Trish to share a few insights salespeople can extract from the information in the table and apply to their company's inside sales efforts.

Ardath: Can you tell us the basis for the Periodic Table of Inside Sales?

Trish: The Periodic table is a summary sheet based on the data we collected from our Inside Sales and LeadGen Metrics and Compensation reports.  They are the result of surveys with 125 technology companies in North America.  The reports are 30 some odd pages long and executives often prefer the short version and that is what this is – a cheat sheet so to speak.

[You'll find both the reports available for download on the same page as the table.]

Ardath: There's a lot of meaty information in this table. Can you highlight what you see as the top 5 challenges facing inside sales teams today?

Trish: Here's where I see companies struggling in today's selling environment.

1. Productivity – Companies are being forced to do more with less. Reps are caught in the trap of trying to be everything to everyone.  Farmers are forced to hunt and hunters are forced to prospect more than they ever have before. 
   
   We no longer have the luxury of specialized sales teams and are forced to have our teams become “jack of all trades”.  This is impacting productivity dramatically as the reps fumble to acquire skills they either don’t have or have not used in a while.


2. Performance – 64% of all inside sales teams and 72% of all leadgen teams achieve quota.  Doesn’t sound bad BUT you have to remember…these are averages and there are quite a number of reps that perform below acceptable rates. 
   
   The real question is why and there are two possible explanations – either the goal was wrong to begin with or the reps are not being provided with the tools and training they need to adapt in this selling climate.  Each company has to figure out which it is and make changes and investments accordingly.


3. Motivation – Selling is not for sissy’s – now more than ever.  How do you keep your team motivated when they not only suffer massive rejection every day but also lose deals because of layoffs and budget cuts?  It is not an easy task especially with limited funds for traditional spifs and contests. 
   
   What you can do is get creative.  All reps want to learn – invest time in mentoring and coaching.  You have the skills to share so take the time to do so and it will pay off in spades.


4. Training – What is the one thing that gets cut when times are tough – training.  What is the one thing that shouldn’t get cut when times are tough – training.  Need I say more?


5. Systems – Implementing your CRM used to be a daunting task but with the advent of SAAS, it has become a non-issue, well almost anyway.  But what has emerged as a problem is integrating your CRM with all the great Sales 2.0 technologies that are out there. 
   
   The tools that are meant to increase productivity are starting to impact productivity because of lack of integration.  On a daily basis, our team uses: salesforce.com, InsideView, Zoominfo, Jjigsaw and LinkedIn just for pre-call planning! 
   
   Each and every one of these tools is amazing, but how do you seamlessly link them and develop a process so that your reps are efficiently selling and not spending too much time in research mode? That is the challenge.  Add to it all the back office systems that need to be integrated and you can see the problem.

Ardath: I can see how each of these challenges plays off another. If you had to choose, what would you say are the top metrics that inside sales should start focusing on to improve their outcomes?

Trish: I'd suggest starting with these three metrics to increase productivity:

1. Make sure your reps are using live conversations with your prospects to drive the sales process.  Email is not a substitute and does not allow for effective qualification or closing to take place. 


2. It takes multiple touches to move a suspect to a prospect and a prospect to a win.  Not all of these have to be “human” touches so make sure sales and marketing have developed an integrated strategy for getting it done.


3. Pay attention to your conversion ratios.  If you don’t have a grasp on the numbers detailed in the Periodic Table then you can’t control your results.

Ardath: That's some great information for us to use in conjunction with your Periodic Table for Inside Sales. Any final words for my readers?

Trish: Inside Sales is not magic...it’s not art…it is science.  You need to create the formula that works for your organization and then execute flawlessly!

***
Go get your copy of the Periodic Table for Inside Sales. And, while you're there, get copies of the research reports that go with the tool.

After you review it, let me know your thoughts.
Did you find metrics that surprised you?
Are there any your company is beating?
Which ones do you find the most challenging to address?

Thanks to Trish for the great information!