With this kind of ‘above the funnel’ lead generation process now in place (what we call Lead Ready), expanding the sales force in a controlled fashion now makes sense and can produce the revenue ROI your company needs.   Now, part 5 of this series looks at the effective hiring practices to find, attract and close on the top talent you need.  Sales hiring is a science, not an art, and it’s more important than ever.  Remember, the cost of a bad hire is far more than wasted salary and fringe benefits.  Depending on customer contract values total out of pocket cost could easily be millions of dollars.  According to Topgrading author Brad Smart, a bad hire could cost 24X (or more) salary paid in terms of opportunities lost, damaged relationships, and wasted internal resources.

5 Steps to Effective Sales Hiring

The ultimate goal of the hiring process is to increase the number of “A” players on your team.  An effective hiring process has 5 primary steps.

• Planning your search
• Attracting great candidates
• Interviewing
• Successfully negotiating with the chosen candidate
• Assimilating the new hire into your organization

1. Good search planning preparation is critical to attracting the talent you need.  This planning is more than just defining the duties and responsibilities and reporting structure of the position.   Give some extra thought to the background of the ideal candidate.  Make sure your expectations are realistic or you will have a very small pool of talent to recruit from.  Also, make sure you build a compelling company story.  Your ability to truthfully sell your company and its capabilities is an important part of the process.

2. Step two of the process is attracting great candidates.  The traditional path of using recruiters and job site postings is quickly being replaced by social media, groups, and associations.  That’s not to say that executive search firms don’t provide an important function; if you are in a unique industry or have concerns over directly recruiting from a competitor then executive search firms path may be the best for you.  The explosion of social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook can speed up the search for qualified candidates. These platforms allow you to quickly identify, qualify, and in most cases provide for personal introduction or referrals from trusted colleagues.  The most common mistakes in the recruiting process are not evaluating enough candidates and not developing a compelling company story.

3. The interviewing process is the most relied upon candidate selection process and is likely the least reliable method.  Many sales leaders lack the needed skills to interview properly and many make hire/no hire decisions within the first 10 minutes of the interview.  Make sure you understand your criteria for candidate selection.  Separate the “must have’s” from the “nice to have”.  Most of the candidates you interview won’t have the perfect background you seek; you need to make sure that you find the right balance when making your selection.  As past behavior is the best predictor of future results look for a verifiable track record of goal attainment and accomplishments.  The interview is also the right time asses the cultural fit between the candidate and your organization.  For example, if your organization is dynamic and constantly changing and the applicant prefers a stable status quo environment there will be cultural misalignment.  Ensure that the candidate understands that you will check and recheck references, trust but verify!

4. Now that you have the right person how do you successfully close the candidate. Continue to focus the candidate on the compelling story of your company, keep reminding the candidate why they would want to work for your firm but make sure they are valid reasons.  Hopefully you started the compensation discussion early in the process, the first or second conversation would be ideal. There is nothing worse than going through the long selection process only to find you are miles apart on compensation. Allow yourself a little wiggle room on compensation but don’t fall into the trap of playing games.  Make allowances for the right person but don’t make commitments that could cause conflict with the existing sales team, it’s hard to keep compensation confidential in any organization.

5. The applicant accepted, now what? Assimilating the new hire into the team is an urgent matter. I can think of several occurrences during my career where I lost a good person because I thought my job was finished when the acceptance letter was signed. If you don’t have a formal orientation program develop one.  Making sure that the new hire has a thorough understanding of the company and its processes will help get a new person comfortable quickly. Send a note to the spouse of the new hire welcoming them to the corporate family. Our jobs are always easier when we have the support and backing of the home team. I have also found that providing an internal mentor/confidant will help the new person navigate the political landscape more quickly and also gives them an additional go to point if their sales leader is not available.  Effective hiring requires a significant investment of time and effort, assembling a team of “A” players should be the number one priority of your time.

Sales 2.0 explores the emerging Sales 2.0 phenomenon, how it is characterized, why it is imperative for a company’s long-term success, and how anyone can get started with this new approach to generating revenue.

Driven by an explosion of online products and changing customer buying preferences, Sales 2.0 is the marriage of Web 2.0 technologies with innovative sales processes. The book shows readers how to redeploy their sales teams for greater bottom-line results, and reveals all the differences between Sales 2.0 and traditional selling.

Through real world case studies, readers will learn how industry leaders achieved phenomenal results and a competitive advantage. Applicable to sales teams in any industry, Sales 2.0 presents the future of sales today.

Under pressure to keep costs down, customers may only look at price and not listen to your sales pitch.
Help them understand – and believe in – the superior value of your offerings.

An organization accomplishes sales benchmarking through a rigorous analysis of its sales function, comparing its performance across leading (not lagging) indicators and comparing that to external, empirical data from a relevant peer group. Sales benchmarking helps organizations understand how to use data to uncover the root cause of individual sales problems, drilling down to the real issues preventing success and connecting the return to a quantifiable improvement in shareholder appreciation.

Creating Client Value, Outsourcing Sales Process, Phases of the Selling Process, Key Take Aways

• Marketing executives often find themselves buried under an avalanche of performance data and analysis
• Much of the success or failure of the function’s contribution to the organization can be boiled down to a handful of demand creation-related metrics
• This brief identifies and defines those metrics that should be reported to senior management with regularity

The primary sales benefit of integrated lead management is tracking and reporting on the digital behavior of prospects to determine when they have entered a research state or are ready to buy. Knowing when a prospect goes from unqualified to qualified ensures higher quantity of leads at the lowest cost, since expensive sales resource is not being wasted tracking unqualified prospects.   There are now several feature rich tools available to automate the lead management process.  In fact, some tools have so many features that it is possible to build in too much complexity.  A best practice is to implement a basic process first then add features and capabilities as you become proficient at managing the activities.

When you are ready begin evaluating the following lead management systems consider these features and capabilities (just remember know your markets, targets and messages before you try to automate anything!).

The ability to launch and track emails and newsletters

This function is critical to effective nurturing and drip campaigns. Having knowledge of who opens your email and the ability to track when they click through to your website will allow you to understand their specific area of interest and will also help to establish a lead scoring methodology. The tool can also be used to automate the drip marketing function. If a prospect shows interest in a specific area, workflow rules in more advanced products can automatically email a white paper or other relevant information to the prospect either immediately or on predetermined schedules, an excellent way to stay top of mind with your prospects.

Lead Scoring and Prioritization

The ability to track who specifically is reading your outbound messaging, who visits your website, what they look at, and how long they look are important components of lead scoring. Large amounts of activity by senior executives would rate a higher score than lower activity by less senior people.  The benefit is this process keeps sales focused on leads that achieve high scores, meaning their activity has shown they are in research or buy mode.   Advance thought needs to be given to establishing your scoring methodology to ensure you know when a prospect moves from unqualified to qualified.  Having the capability to include category tags or fields in your lead database is important for more refined scoring approaches.   This feature is also available in more advanced products.

CRM Integration

By integrating your lead management system with your CRM system it is possible to track prospects real time. The minute a prospect hits your qualified stage it can be automatically moved into your CRM system and assigned to the right rep for immediate action.  If the sales organization determines it is not yet qualified they can move the prospect back into the lead management system for additional tracking and nurturing. This ensures no prospects leak from your funnel.

Analytics and Campaign Measurement

This key capability is what ties together the all the push, campaign and content delivery elements of the more advanced lead management systems.  This feature allows you to track visitors to your website and determine who is actively researching or interested in your products and services.  It tells how they originally reached your website, and what features of your offerings they’re most interested in learning about based on the pages they visit and the downloads they complete.  Visitor analytics information also helps you to refine and fine tune your scoring process.  It’s hard to achieve this level of integrated dashboard with disparate tools – so to really make this work seamlessly consider only the more advanced lead management offerings.

Now that you have the right targets, the right messages, the right tools, how do you build and motivate a high performance team?  We will finish this series with Part 5; Now, Hire That Rep!

Responding to the new buying process by applying the modern education model to content nurturing strategies.

How social networking technology is changing the competitive landscape during the economic storm.

How to Set Up, Run and Manage a Social Media Campaign

1. Social Media overview
2. Case studies
3. How NOT to run a Social Media campaign
4. The big idea in Social Media
5. 60 Second Marketer Social Media Management Principle
6. 10 things to measure in Social Media
7. Social Media measurement tools
8. 10-step action plan to get started on your next Social Media campaign
9. Social Media data plus “The 10 Worst Mistakes on Twitter.”

“This report explores how Best-in-Class organizations holistically approach lead management and demand generation. The study highlights best practices from 223 organizations around the concept of Lead Lifecycle Management (LLM). This study is designed to help identify best practices in LLM by exploring the processes and practices Best-in-Class organizations leverage to extract more revenue from sales and marketing efforts.”

The Aberdeen Group

“Sales organizations are looking for a proven sales approach that combines the effective engagement of a “high touch” selling experience with the economical aspect of “low touch” selling utilization rates.  If possible, such a ‘best-of-both-worlds’ combination would generate the highest level of sales productivity with the shortest sales cycle at the lowest cost.

Is this even possible?   The answer is simply – yes.   Let us share how we arrived at this determination.”

- Sales Benchmark Index

By developing consistent repeatable processes and investing carefully in automation, Forrester found that these companies achieved stronger, more qualified sales pipelines, greater visibility into the impact of marketing on sales, more control over marketing program execution, and better accountability for marketing spend against business results.

Their reasons for delay were the same objections many others have when considering these new tools and new model for selling.  Those being: time to learn both what to do and how to do it; concern they won’t have enough value-added content to make it work and the lack of internal resources to launch and manage the new operation.

What I’m afraid may not have sunk in during our talk is that not participating in this new customer engagement and acquisition model is conceding to a guaranteed demise.   That some industries and segments are not as far along as others is the only thing saving some of these companies who fail to recognize or admit to what’s happening in the marketing and sales world.

Bottom line: the time is fast coming when you won’t be able to hire enough reps, make enough cold calls or push enough brochure-ware to keep your revenues above the breaking point.   As more and more buyers (business, consumer, small, large, etc.) move to ‘Buying Process 2.0’ every industry will eventually reach the stage where those suppliers not active, participating and engaged in the new marketplace will become irrelevant.

*****

For more on what’s changing and the impact it’s having, here are a couple excellent blog posts by some other leaders in this movement that we follow.

Could Sales 2.0 Turn Your Company Into a Victim of Change?

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing No Longer Apply

Dan Hudson, president, will be presenting for 3forward, a leader in lead creation and sales acceleration programs for companies worldwide.  3forward’s session will illustrate a path and a process to make sense of sales 2.0 technologies – while keeping the focus on company revenue goals.  Topics include setting 2.0 strategy and priorities; Selecting applications and vendors; Demand generation; Lead optimization, nurturing and management; Prospect and competitor research; and Social networking for lead development.

3forward’s Presentation

More than 1,500 contact center professionals and thought leaders world-wide are expected to attend this year’s conference.  The theme of the conference is “2010 and the New Global Services Economy”.   It is an opportunity for business leaders to learn first-hand from the experiences and best-practices of companies that are leveraging global resources for their strategic Call Center, IT and Business Process Outsourcing needs.

Organizers & Co-Chairs

The IMT is Mexico’s leading Contact & Call Center / Customer Contact institution.   Founded in 1991, it offers a wide range of services to the industry, from training to consulting to certification and is recognized as the preeminent authority for Contact Center professionals in the country and throughout Latin America.  The Global ContactForum is Co-Chaired by Keith Fiveson, CEO of ITESA and Anupam Govil, CEO of Global Equations.

Download our presentation

Presenting for 3forward are co-founders Dan Hudson and Matt Smith.  Their presentation covers 3forward’s methodology for sales revenue planning, reveals the forecasting traps many companies fall into and illustrates their formulas and models for successful multi-year revenue planning.   Participants will learn The Five Most Important Numbers for Revenue Planning, Takeaways for Growing Pipelines and Increasing Wins, Essentials for Prospect Profiling and Targeting, Best practices in Lead Creation and Development.  Participants also receive 3forward’s 2010 Revenue Planner for measuring, evaluating and projecting sales revenues.

The Alternative Board brings together owners of privately held businesses to overcome challenges and seize new opportunities with a combination of peer advice and business coaching.   The Dallas / Ft. Worth chapter of TAB has over 100 members who meet monthly in a facilitated board session to learn from one another’s successes and lessons learned.  Each board has up to 10 sitting members with over 200 years of combined business experience. Confidential, frank discussions at TAB meetings opens eyes to new alternatives and opportunities brought from different vantage points; and helps members determine what they need to change, and how to confidently make the needed change.

Generating leads and managing those leads through their lifecycle requires a disciplined approach to yield the greatest value. A combination of inbound and outbound elements allows your firm to be top of mind with both immediate and future prospects. This process allows your sales team to focus the bulk of their sales activity on those “qualified” prospects that have an identified need and are showing the right indications of making a buying decision in the near term.  For those targeted prospects that are not yet qualified you need a process that allows you to “stay in touch” with them and to identify when they become sales ready.

We believe that the keystone of any lead generation process is the ability to manage, nurture and score all these leads (1) over time and (2) in an automated system.  Fortunately, there are several strong software solutions which provide this dual functionality.  The very compelling ROI from these products comes from better targeting of sales ready leads and the reduction of sales time your team will expend following non-qualified / non-sales ready leads.

Looking at outbound lead generation, both cold calling and email marketing are typical examples most companies deploy.  Each has pros and cons but both require the need to deliver a clear message in order to capture the attention of the prospect and get them to take the action you want.  The action may be a return phone call, signing up for a webinar, or responding to an email.  Investing time on script and message development will significantly improve lead generation response.   A word of caution, do not use either of these push methods to “sell” a prospect.  What they can be when applied correctly are excellent ways to drive in-bound traffic to your website, create lead traction and begin moving leads into your sales process.  For content that works well, consider providing unique insight or information, a tool or template or some other form of relevant content that will engage prospect and lead them to viewing you as a resource point.

Your outbound program should dovetail with your inbound lead generation program.  Email marketing and webinar invites should attract traffic to your website. The use of social media products such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, if aimed at the correct audience, can also generate traffic and help establish you or your firm as a credible, go-to source for information and insight.  The key to effective social media participation is both the discipline to provide meaningful content and the time commitment to participate on a regular basis.  It’s usually a good idea to separate your personal and professional social media participation; prospects aren’t really interested in seeing your vacation pictures or reliving your college memories with you.

Our next post will focus on the required features of the tools and solutions that automate the lead management and nurturing process.