Speaking Engagement Trascript
If you think about your sales reps they all have territories and I make the analogy here to its almost like a galaxy or a university, in which you live, and each of your sales reps have to know how am I going to tackle that in the first place. That’s very basic, everyone is talking about big ideas. If you go to your reps and say, “How are you tackling your territory?” If they don’t have a good answer, that’s step number one: create some kind of business plan for your territory.
Now that we figured that out, how do we identify who are the right people to target within those accounts that we think we have a high probability of doing business with, based on characteristics of other accounts. So how do we find the folks? How do we find out where they fit in the org chart? I have heard a couple of different folks talk about this, this is critically important because what ends up happening is you probably get a lot of marketing leads dumped on you. Who feels like they have a lot of marketing leads dumped on them? Okay. Who wishes they had a lot of marketing leads dumped on them? You’re just cold callers, right? What ends up happening is, technically speaking, the people who do that marketing activity are not going to be your buyers. It is going to be someone else in the organizational structure. But what happens there is an SLA between marketing and sales that says okay inside sales, you guys have to call my leads or you have to call my leads this often. So they go okay great, I call up, I say, “Hey Larry,” I leave a voicemail, “its Steve, here at Vorsight, I see that you downloaded XYZ whitepaper, thanks a lot, take care.” Hang up, task myself off 30 days in my CRM tool and now all the sudden I think that thing kind of disappears, where I finally get Larry on the phone, and to use one of those terms from yesterday, “No hope,” it’s one of those no hope folks. So we have to look at the org chart. We have to figure out who reports to who and get to the right person.
This is how you use your tools to do this sort of thing, if you were in my session yesterday you would know this, direct lines. There are four big reasons why: number one is caller ID. So if someone calls you inbound, and you look at your caller ID, if they call you through the switchboard, it looks different and in the day and age of all the calls going on, are you going to pick that up? Or are you going to let that go to voicemail? So the direct line is so critically important. There are three other reasons, I am not going to waste your time.
We did a little research at our company at Vorsight, because we also have a lead generation team, about 20 people who are doing outsource appointment setting. We said, “Let’s look at a cross section of reps, let’s look at 6 of our reps” And we always said imperially or qualitatively, we are like you know, direct lines are important, we really didn’t know how important they were, and then we did this [screen shot of direct lines and meetings scheduled correlation.] One of my colleagues, Eric Young did this, and literally counted all of the people they were trying to contact, what percentage of those folks had a direct line versus having a switchboard number. The numbers blew us away. Absolutely blew us away. There is a direct correlation, clearly, I am no statistician, and I did not collaborate with MIT on this. The insidesales.com guys and David, let’s get a real study on this. It was pretty dramatic, at least to us.
So basic information: you have to know who you’re calling, you have to figure out where they sit in the org chart you have to have their direct line, you have to figure out where they are located. I will leave a name nameless, but I was doing a sales call with a software company the other day, that was trying to sell me their services, and they are actually here today. When I got on the call, it was probably the fourth or fifth call, and it was their quote on quote “Closing call,” they thought they were going to close me down. And the manager gets on the phone and goes “Steve where are you located?” And this is after probably a month and a half of talking to them in the sales process. You could almost see the reps that were engaging in me, on the other end of the phone, go “ohhh.” They know better, or at least they know about it now.
Prospecting and getting all this information, whether you are hunting, whether you are farming, if you are trying to go broader and deeper in an organization, is like assembling a puzzle, and I wish I could sit here and say that there is a beautiful pixie dust that I can sprinkle across all of you and that’s going to solve all of your problems, but there is not. And it depends on your organization and who you are trying to sell to, ultimately, for most of the client work that we are doing, we find the inside view is getting about half of the way there, at least for us. So you are getting these puzzle pieces, but then you are combining those puzzle pieces with actually making calls into the organization, to the switchboard operators, the administrative assistants, and all that, to gather the intelligence about what’s going on within that company.
Advanced info, tons of vendor noise and vendor static out there in the market place. We know that there are so many people who are going out on these folks. And it’s like the TV of late night goes shhhhh. Or at least, it used to. Now they just run infomercials on loops, or something. How do you figure out what you are going to look at? Most messaging like that, email or voicemail messaging, sucks, sorry to say. If any of you have had any of your reps leave you voicemails, or send you emails as if you are a prospect, you will see. There is not a whole heck of a lot of customization going on. And it looks and sounds like snow. And I get solicitations all the time, from all over the place, because I am a business owner, right? People are trying to sell me, but it looks and sounds like this… We got to get outside the box, I love the outside the box comment there a minute ago, that was fantastic because the box doesn’t exist for the best reps.
Gather some financial information. It’s not hard to get. You can just read an analyst report on a company, there is your sales pitch. Because the analysts are paid to poke holes in what the CFO says. And they’re your risk factors. And companies are thinking about risks. So what are the financials? What’s the new, latest, greatest, hottest, things that are going on, that we can capitalize on? What’s hot in the organization for them, that we are going to be thinking about? What are our trigger events? What’s our key information? You know who your customers are so what you are doing is trying to find customers that look like them, and then profile them. Once you have them profiled, you have a much higher probability of selling them. It ends up being like a sniper shot.
I am going to use the example from Angie (because we did work together), there is a story about how they sell to mergers and acquisitions executives that are about to be closing a deal. And for people who have to go through a bunch of documents and review them, she saw there was a trigger event that there was an acquisition happening that one company was acquiring another, so next thing she does is goes to LinkedIn, she identifies who the correct mergers and acquisitions executives and she goes into the voicemail system we talked about this yesterday to figure out how to get the direct line by the codes and voicemail system that you use to get the direct line, now that she’s got the direct line, she is getting a bit further, she starts stalking this person. There is not a long window in the sales cycle, where you can buy her product, email, voicemail, email, voicemail, finally, she gets a call back from somebody else saying, “We are not interested.” When the person called back saying “We are not interested,” direct line shows up on the caller ID. So she says, I am not done because no box exists for me. There is no box. She calls them back and says, “Look, you are in the middle of this, exactly like this other customer that I was talking to before, and it’s an approacher called PT Barn approacher, you say “you have to see it to get it and that’s all I am asking you, take a look at it.” And they say “alright, fine I’ll take a look at it.” That turned into a $150,000 piece of business for her in two weeks. So all of this information when used effectively goes places. All of this information if your reps don’t know how to use it, it’s not worth anything.
<< Back to Video Library
