Archive for August, 2009

Putting e-mail to work for sales team

Bob Ullery from Exact Target lists ten ways to leverage email as part of a revenue enhancement and management system.  They are:

  1. Send-to-a-Friend
  2. Dynamic Couponing (is that a word now?)
  3. Shipping Alerts
  4. Product In-Stock Notifications
  5. Subscription Renewal Reminders
  6. Payment Confirmation Email
  7. Couponing / Live Offers
  8. CRM Integration
  9. Follow Up Email Drip Campaigns
  10. Abandoned Shopping Cart

Not everyone’s going to leverage all of them, but seems like most everyone can add a few here.  We love the CRM Integration features, which are optimized for Salesforce.com and MS CRM 4.0.

A cool pic of some of this dynamic stuff in action:

Check more of it on here.

- Bob Neeser

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 17th, 2009 at 10:41 am and is filed under crm, Marketing, Sales Strategy, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

How to Increase Sales Productivity in a Tough Economy


The moment the economy softened, an end was made to several years of a long “rising tide floating all boats” period. I’m pretty sure your current strategy includes:

* getting closer to your customers
* focusing on your most profitable segments
* curtailing non-performing or not yet performing pieces of your business
* delaying or canceling new programs
* holding on to cash wherever and whenever possible

What I’d like to talk about is adding “increased productiveness” to your list of strategic elements.

We speak with customers every day who are looking for ways to increase productivity at the individual contributor level. Customers appear to fall into two groups in this regard. One group is looking for fast and proven ways to help them and their people do more than they had been doing before. The other is looking for ways to do more than before, but with less expense and resources. Both are seeking quick productivity results.

CRM Needs BPM

Sure, there are customized workflows that can be added to a CRM to help increase productivity; however, if it’s not native to the application it can be somewhat complex. I’ve used, marketed and sold CRM-related technology for a considerable number of years, so I know all about throwing technology at a problem to see what sticks and what it can hopefully fix. Having a CRM that doesn’t incorporate the ability to solve your real business problems with Business Process Management (BPM) will make you less effective with your technology.

We can all agree that employing technology alone without applying proven best practice methods will limit any long-term productivity improvements. The value isn’t in the technology alone, but how you use it to improve your business processes.

SaaS Delivered Enterprise 2.0 CRM

This business principle, if you will, became clearer to me earlier this year when I first heard the phrase “Technology with Methodology” used by a colleague to describe a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) delivered Enterprise 2.0 CRM solution that helps every single person in small to mid-sized organizations be more productive. Not just the sales department.

The term is now a common reference to PlanPlus™ Online, which touts an xRM™ (Dynamic Relationship Management) technology foundation and FranklinCovey’s world-renown productivity methodology. We know FranklinCovey as the global training organization of Fortune 500 companies for the past 20 years.

Here’s the point, you will always be asked to do more. No matter what position you hold. You will be asked to improve, to increase and to generate more; whether it is to increase quotas, brand better, generate more leads faster, or improve collections. It’s just part of doing business in any economy, it’s just more important than ever right now! So, the challenge is to quickly become far more effective in your personal life or business, and therefore become as productive as possible.

We Need Technology with Methodology

I know for certain, a proven methodology approach with robust technology can increase your productivity with daily, weekly and long-term processes.

FranklinCovey’s “Focus” and “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” methodology is central to managing time and priorities and can be applied to managing contacts, campaigns, and to streamline processes. The way the FranklinCovey methodology is combined with technology in PlanPlus Online makes for a potent combination that you need to thrive and not just survive in a tough economy and beyond.

Technology with Methodology℠ is PlanPlus Online. Check it out. It was conceived, designed and built with an increased focus on productivity, generating results at its core. How have you improved productivity in the past? To survive, you must increase productivity in today’s tough economy…you need to do it now more than ever.

- Bob

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 14th, 2009 at 5:02 pm and is filed under crm, Sales Strategy, Technology, Web 2.0 Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

At the local Starbucks again…and there I meet Miller-Heiman

I was at the Starbucks again this AM…how many millions of days start out that way for people?  Anyway, as a total offshoot of normal business, I ran across a person who was doing training at process work in the AZ area for Miller Heiman.  Now that us a name I have not come across in a few years.  He told me that the MH process has stayed constant for 30 years, because it worked, and that MH still lead the industry in complex sales process work.  Now that’s what I remember most about MH, is that the process pulled together all parts of a sales team to enable it to handle complex account efforts.  I pulled this from their site just to refresh my memory of how these guys do their thing.

Winning Complex Deals

Miller Heiman has helped thousands of companies and individuals win high-value, complex deals.

This includes not only professional salespeople, but also professionals such as engineers, accountants, consultants and bankers who need to sell to rise to the top of their careers. Our alumni tell us we’ve helped them transform their careers and their lives by bringing order to the selling process and removing their fear of selling.

When an organization makes a significant purchase, the decision-making process can be extremely complicated. Several players with different objectives, motives and degrees of influence are involved; emotions and politics further complicate matters. This dynamic creates major challenges for sellers, who must often:

  • form a team of their own experts;
  • identify the buy-side players and their degree of influence;
  • understand their individual concerns; and
  • develop strategies to win their support.

Many deals are lost or delayed at the last minute because a key buying influence or even the budget owner has been overlooked.

I still think pretty highly of these folks, although they are all about get a new process, not the 3 day seminar that fixes all your ills.  Check them out in more detail here.

- Michael Grollman

August 2009

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 13th, 2009 at 3:21 pm and is filed under crm, Marketing, Sales Strategy, Technology, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Successful SMB SaaS Sales

I’ve learned that sales processes for SMB SaaS customers have different requirements than do CapEx, on premises, software sales.

  • Create compelling offering (value)
  • Position that to high quality prospective customers-campaigns, channels, Social Media.
  • A+B= web traffic

Once to the site-the give and get look like this (inform, educate, trial) in exchange for add’l information from prospect. Immediacy is key for SaaS. Not old school immediate like call back within 4 hours. Four hours may as well be four days. Live Chat & Call Me Now are key elements for immediacy as well as powerful tools allowing sales to learn when a customer is logging in- first time and how many times during a trial.

Score carding is a minimum sales requirement. Old school is driven by FIFO metrics and, as such,  pretty worthless for SMB SaaS. Scorecarding is a product of assigning values to profile driven answers to questions provided by prospects when they decide to try or to learn more about the offering. Those values are the numerator while their actual behaviors (# education sessions attended, completed, reviewed and logins to the site) are the denominator.  Start with a stake in the ground and as business closes analyze the scores for those closed new customers and adjust the scorecard to reflect reality (tuning the scorecard).

Successful SMB SaaS Sales people are:

  • Digital Natives- immediately “get it” on the technology side
  • Spend 4-5  hours each day on the phone and equal amount Chatting and emailing.
  • Generate significant leads from their own SocNWs.
  • Blog relentlessly
  • Highly motivated- this never changes
  • Intensely led

I’d like to entertain your thoughts, please do share.

- Bob Neeser

August 2009

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 13th, 2009 at 3:01 pm and is filed under crm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.