Is in person & telephone the only way to truly launch the sales process?

Carlos, I was on the panel and I am afraid you misheard the statement and I should know since I made it. Is misheard a word btw?

The statement was not "the only way" to engage with buyers is to pick up the phone. The statement was that the only way to launch the sales process is to have a CONVERSATION and that requires communicating mano y mano.

By way of clarification, and now that you have provided the opportunity, we believe you can use the keyboard to generate interest, arouse curiousity, share information... all wonderful things. But what you really can't use it for is handling objections, competitive positioning, or developing a deep understanding of your buyer's business and challenges. Those things require conversation.

The response was to the question "What was one of the mistakes Inside Sales people made in 2010?". It most assuredly was putting down the phone and picking up their keyboards. When you think about a sales process you have to segment interest development from moving a prospct through to closure. Different jobs that require different tools. Lots of reps lost that understanding and revenue suffered because of it

The discussion is online at focus.com and yes...we were fascinating so feel free to give it a listen!

BTW John Coisineau....great answer!

At the risk of sounding trite, people buy things from people. They buy for company reasons (related to and driven by their current situation), and they buy for personal reasons (that include compensation, recognition and in rare cases self-actualization). The higher up in the organization you go the more the requirement for a "mano y mano" (like that Trish) approach.

I am glad that at least in this conversation no one has said "70% of the buyers journey is completed before a sales rep is invited into the process". I had a meeting with a marketing automation company yesterday and even they don't believe that... Sorry... I digress.

Thanks for the great conversation,

Dan McDade
PointClear
@dandade

All the social media and Sales 2.0 apps help create the illusion of connection, rather than authentic connection (and thus trust, likability, credibility...), between reps and prospects.

Social media, email and keyboards are fantastic at helping make initial connections, and then reps need to use the phone and in-person meetings to turn them into authentic relationships.

Too many reps become dependent on email and overuse it because it makes them feel like they are "doing more", like there's more activity than if they make calls.

Managers aren't helping, because, from what I've seen, they always reward quantity "how many emails sent, how many dials made?" over quality "how many real conversations did you have today that helped further qualify/disqualify a prospect?".

Great conversation, enjoyed reading it a lot. Lots of ideas and cross conversation taking place here, but good stuff. Sometimes I think certain organizations have lost their way a little, with regards to this kind of social media/sales 2.0 tool set.

I recently saw some art being raffled off for charity via only Twitter, nothing else, in the end, via Twitter that art was "sold." Do I think that my team can sell their next $2M contract via Twitter because someone sold a painting that way, heck no, as in really...no. There are tools for each job, and social media/sales 2.0 tools are designed to expand our reach, multiply our connections, and allow us a way to engage markets/customers/prospects in an online conversation, a more dynamic form. They are a bridge into realms we could not reach before as an individual, they are a beginning.

Let's be very clear here, if a rep works for me and they try to tell me they are not going to hold face-to-face meetings or use the phone to launch sales, well, frankly, they are unlikely to be around long. Why, because they would not perform, simple. Those techniques would not work in the kind of investment bracket we deal with. The other issue is after the sale - do you expect to keep customers for years through nothing but social media connections? I doubt that will be successful, highly doubtful, because as soon as your competition takes your customer golfing, or to dinner, lunch, coffee, they have risen above you, they have made the connection part of your customers' real life, not virtual life.

I like to see my marketing team building brand, determining messaging, growing awareness, and working with sales management to translate that into selling tools. I then like to see my lead gen team work to use those tools and lead process to put the field guys to work. I like to see the field guys using the marketing tools to drive to the next stage of the sales process, and work to close the deals trough a defined, scalable process they have been taught.

We cannot use inside sales to manage the sales cycle end-to-end, for our business, I know others can. The reason we cannot use inside sales reps for this is because our customers would never sell to us if they did not meet us, hear us, smell us, and engage with us in real conversation - to see the whites of our eyes, to know us.

I am really long-winded now, but major B2B sales will never take place through social media, they will take place after marketing has built compelling tools, the social media tools may have opened a door or made a connection, or grown awareness, the phone has been used to connect voices, and the reality of people in a room together talking has brought the sale to a close.

Sales is the art and science of people managing people, of people knowing each other at a core professional (and often personal) level, it is a form of facilitation, of connecting, and of trust. it is about understanding your prospect and customers, of knowing their needs, how they make money, where they make money, their goals and plans, both corporate and personal etc. Those are not activities that social media will ever, in a million years, be a good medium for. Live human interaction is the core of significant sales activity, it is the sitting down to dinner, what comes before is, at best, merely setting the table.

This discussion came up again on this past Friday's roundtable. And it's not a new one. I used to sign my posts "don't forget, selling doesn't start until you're having a conversation with a prospects". It was intended to stifle the hype of inbound marketing, marketing automation and terrible outbound marketing techniques and remind everyone that although those techniques are all must haves in the marketing mix, they are also over relied upon.

Studies have shown that humans are X times more likely to process information when presented with it verbally (wish I could remember the X). This is due to the way our brains consume information. We analyze differently -- analyzing data, comparing apples to oranges -- but we build the original understanding of the issues through a conversation. As soon as your lead research, lead qualification, outbound lead generation, or whatever technique it may be, gives you the opportunity to have a conversation...have it.

Don't sell either, or at least don't "try". Have a conversation. There is a nuance there. Tell a story. Reach the emotional nerves of the person you are talking to, and trigger a positive result for the goal of that one conversation. Examples:

- First conversation - tell a story that allows the prospect to want to have a second conversation. Goal of first meeting, to get a second meeting.

- Initial presentation - have a conversation that embeds your story and the issues you want the prospect to think about in the front of their thinking.

- Conversation where you need to ask for an action item - work the conversation to the point where the prospect asks YOU for that action item. Make the story work them to the point where they think it is their idea.

These ideas reach deep into how we work with each other, and they encompass techniques that can rarely be implemented in an email or by reading a script. As Trish Bertuzzi says, or something similar..."I want to get them as a customer, I don't want to be pen pals with them!"

Good Conversations...Good Selling!

Mike Damphousse
Green Leads
http://www.greenleads.com/b2b-blog/

Thanks for the clarification on the statement and appreciate the input. My apologies for mis-stating and I will edit the question.

The key is to have ACTIVE dialogue, regardless if it's person-to-person. With all the new technologies, there are many ways to keep active dialogue moving forward. However, most sales, especially enterprise sales, will need to have a live conversation take place, and a personal visit if the investment for your product is large.

Think about when you bought your home or if you bought an enterprise product for your organization. Most executives won't fork-over $250,000 unless they've spoken and met face to face with the seller. Executives want to meet, look the seller in the eye, read his body language and determine if the seller appears to be trustworthy or not. Body language and reading another person's body language is a language in its own.

Carlos,

People may argue that it is the BEST way, but it certainly isn't the only way. I guess it really begs the question of engagement. Are you engaging potential purchasers through branding, education, informing, promoting? These are all things that can be done effectively through the keyboard.

This primes the pump for more personal engagement as your prospect moves into or further along in the sales cycle. Prospects are more knowledgeable today than at any other time, largely due to social media and web access to a wealth of information. As a vendor, you need to be a part of that conversation or you risk getting shut out all together.

Allowing prospects, customers (past and present) to openly engage with your business online provides the level of transparency that the market now expects. At some point, there's no doubt that you need to get in front of real people with real business problems in order to determine the best fit. The bigger the sale, the more personal interaction required, but there's real value to be gained by building a foundation for the relationship at a distance.

Trish: thxs for your feedback. Mine on yours: intrigued by your point that in 2010 one of the bigger mistakes sales reps made was putting down the phone and picking up their keyboards. Inclined to agree that there's a problem with how we're collectively encouraging Reps to spend their time.

I'm less concerned with whether or not reps are using a phone, a keyboard, or an abacas ... I'm more concerned with how much of their time is creating enough visible buyer value to seed subsequent conversations. IMO, reps are spending far too much of their time learning how to press buttons + follow rules inside applications and far too little time learning how to discern + create buyer value.

Trust this adds some further value. - John

Great conversation so to keep it going...

Ah... John but that is the question isn't it? Should we expect sales reps to have to learn how to discern and create buyer value? Isn't that a part of the formula that should have been figured out by marketing/sales management and delivered as part of a repeatable/scalable process?

Is part of the reason that only 50% of all sales teams make quota partially due to the fact that they have to do it all? Are we forcing our sales teams to wear too many hats? Hasn't the chant always been, and continues to be, let sales do what they do best and close deals?

What is the tipping point between figuring out when branding/awareness, content development and market validation/buyer messaging stops and selling starts?

And, if sales owns the whole enchilada... do we need a new way to compensate them that encourages that type of thinking that goes beyond achievement of a revenue goal?

Would love to hear from some VP Sales and Marketing. We know you are out there - so what do you think?

I don't think it is a case of having sales do it all. The best reps in any industry have always been the ones that can LISTEN, have a conversation, and provide value by introducing a solution. Artificial sales methodologies are designed to give more "control" to the sales team by following a consistent pattern. But in today's selling environment, it is not about control, it is about enablement and facilitation. Regardless of the channel used, a sales rep will be successful consistently if they work on solving problems and not trying to control the cycle.

Trish: great questions + I hear you. With a nod of agreement to Jeff's + Edwin's points, I'm reluctant to sound like there's a 'one size fits all' or 'silver bullet' solution to the issues you raise. Obviously varies by the type of productt/service being sold, sales cycles, etc.

My general point is that, IMO, there's just way too much conjecture on what Reps should do to most productively invest their efforts, and way too little proof of what effort, when invested, is most productive. Therefore firms 'script' what they believe will work best and then hope for the best. Success is hardly predictable.

With a sharper read on what Reps are ACHIEVING from what they're DOING, Reps will LEARN that: what they do matters; unless there's a buyer impact from sales efforts, they're dead; buyer impacts occur when Reps create a high Return-on-Effort FOR BUYERS.

If we're looking for predictable success in B2B sales, IMO, we need less scripted execution and more learning from execution. From which can come the precisely correct answer to Carlos's original question.

Would rather be having this conversation over a coffee than a keyboard. In the meantime, trust this adds some value. - John

Aaron, I have been a fan for quite some time... you just solidified that relationship!

Aaron: brilliantly put. To your point on "how many real conversations did you have today that helped further qualify/disqualify a prospect?" I'd add ... and how many of them did the buyer find so valuable that THEY took an invited action? Agreed to a(nother) scheduled appointment or read info you subsequently sent them? Conversations are the key to cash. Good conversations, proven by buyer actions, are golden. They let buyers open the door to another conversation. They let sellers gauge their own success in doing so, spot their failures to do so, and learn from their mistakes.

I use two forms of communciation to begin client relationships/sales processes. The first is in person. People buy you first and I ask permission to initiate contact to increase first appointment percentages. The second is email campaign. Note the word campaign. My campaign is about acquisition and education.
Acquiring as much information about the prospect is key. From the exchange of LinkedIn/Social Media/Web accounts to how their lack of using my product is impacting their revenue. Educating vs. selling is a very important aspect in obtaining trust. This can be done inperson, through newsletters, blogs and speaking engagements.

Make today a success!

Trish’s question: "What is the tipping point between figuring out when branding/awareness, content development and market validation/buyer messaging stops and selling starts?" brings up the heart of the matter.

We are talking here in terms of “Sales Process” but let’s not confuse that with the buyer’s process. We invented a sales process so we could forecast, not for the benefit of the buyer. They have their own agenda.

The underlying question here is: “When and how should a rep engage?”

Dan made a good point about Marketing Automation, but it's not MA's responsibility to sell, it's MA's job to help provide visibility and/or clues about where in the buying cycle a buyer may be, and to help meet those particular needs with timely content. It’s Sales’ job to interpret those clues and act.

Whether a buyer is 70% of the way through the buying process or not, the rep is still at 0% of the sales process until they engage the prospect and have a conversation. It's management's responsibility to determine when and how sales will start their own dialogue.

We certainly don't want sales reps owning the whole enchilada, that's far too expensive, but Marketing should also have revenue accountability, not just a "lead" number.