Business Bedrock

Carpe Diem Consulting hires new Senior Marketing Consultant

Carpe Diem Consulting are excited to announce the addition of Mariel Cunningham to the expanding Sydney-based team of Consultants.  

With the ever growing realisation that B2B organisations must move away from one-off traditional marketing campaigns to taking a more transformational approach, Mariel has joined at a really exciting time for the Company.

Mariel has predominantly worked for full service B2B marketing and advertising agencies, specialising but not limited to the IT & Finance industries. She has run a number of highly successful and award winning campaigns in ANZ & APAC for clients such as Microsoft, Avnet, VMware and Cisco.  Further to marketing strategy, she has an in-depth understanding of the creative brand process having led a number of rebranding projects.

What excites Mariel most about her move to CDC is shifting from ‘sugar-hit’ style campaigns to more of a transformational marketing approach which is aligned with the new buyer journey.  She believes she can bring her knowledge and methodologies around integrated marketing to a more sustainable engine to deliver ongoing leads and increase revenues rather than just on a ‘campaign-by-campaign’ basis.

Bruce Rasmussen, Managing Director of Carpe Diem says:

“It’s great (and rare!) to find another B2B marketer like Mariel, who very much gets it:

• The need to engage early and nurture buyers on their journey
• The need to work hand in glove with sales all along the buyers journey
• The need to research to identify disruptive insights in support of the sales team
• The fact that “sugar hit” lead generation campaigns decreasingly work – and that New Marketing is needed.

With her previous experience, Mariel is perfectly positioned to discuss with customers why some of the more traditional marketing approaches are failing – and her experience in and in-depth understanding of B2B sales ensures critical sales/marketing alignment.

Mariel is set to assist B2B organisations of all shapes and sizes completely transform how they “do marketing”, ensuring they stay ahead of the pack.

We’re excited she’s on-board our rapidly growing Marketing Consulting Services team.”

The year ahead for B2B Sales in 2015

As B2B sales teams move into 2015, we anticipate the continued development of some key recent trends – but also more of the usual challenges.

Ongoing trend development

We predict development in 3 key areas

Increased use of (disruptive) insight selling

B2B buyers want to be educated, and prefer to source information from the web and social sources, rather than approach sales teams.  Depending on whose research you read, buyers get somewhere between 50-90% of the way along their buyer’s journey before they approach sales.

The sales teams that can CAPITALISE on this in 2015 will be big winners.

Carpe Diem clients had good success in 2014 running research programs within their customer base to uncover some “disruptive insights” – measurable ways their customers’ businesses had been improved by using their solution sets.

What’s disruptive about this?  Packaged the right way, these insights can be presented to target prospects, pointing out to them they can improve their businesses – IN WAYS THEY HADN’T THOUGHT OF BEFORE.

The buyer’s thirst for new knowledge has been quenched – and the sales team is engaging early.

Sellers that continue to engage late – ie when approached by a customer ready to buy – will see their success rates continue to drop, as customers merely use them to “make up the quoting numbers”.

The end of social selling

2015 will see the removal of the distinction between “traditional” and “social” selling – sales resources need to recognise that it’s all now just selling, albeit in a social and digital world.

B2B sales resources will be left behind if they’re not able to leverage social techniques of:

• Listening
• Publishing
• Participating in online communities

to routinely achieve (as an absolute minimum) the following outcomes:

• Identifying new prospects
• Identifying new opportunities
• Attracting incoming leads via LinkedIn profiles
• Building connections with new prospects, and nurturing these relationships with content
• Identifying the content to be shared with individual prospects via online search and reporting tools
• Being referred in to meet new prospects
• Effectively researching prior to meeting customers to enable targeted conversations in the full knowledge of each customer’s current issues, KPIs etc
• Monitor the ongoing customer relationship strength via social means

etc.

Courses in “how to use Facebook”, “how to use LinkedIn” will not be enough – B2B sales resources need to be trained in the key workflows associated with the list of outcomes above, using a range on social tools to assist in each instance.

Sales and Marketing are now aligned – now what?

2014 saw growth in the number of consultants offering to “align your Sales & Marketing teams”.

This is absolutely necessary – but it’s not sufficient ie once they’re aligned, what do they do now?

Deeply understanding the new buyer’s journey is key here – as is the recognition that there are specific roles for each of Sales and Marketing at each step of the new buyer’s journey. 

Same old, same old….

Sellers that ride the 3 trends outlined above will be successful – at the other end of the spectrum however we predict a majority of sales resources will continue to fall into the same old traps:

• Talking about their company at the beginning of presentations – rather than the customer’s (everyone’s favourite topic is….)
• Talking about their products and services – not the outcomes that will be created for customers
• Engaging at the seller’s level of comfort – rather than with the Decision Maker
• Engaging with customers where the 1^st point of contact is the customer requiring a quote – rather than generating “fresh” opportunities via insight selling, problem solving etc
• Quoting a price – without outlining the ROI
• Using mass produced brochures – rather than treating prospects as individuals
• Going for every deal where the seller has a good solution – rather than qualifying based on the chance of winning

The list could go on and on – and in this regard 2015 will be just like 2014, which was just like 2013…….

Sellers and selling organisations that recognise that Sales truly is a profession – and that run ongoing customised training and coaching programs – will, as always, have the opportunity to jump way ahead of the majority.

 

One step back and two steps forward

What happened in sales in 2014 and how to move on in 2015

This year we’ve seen a lot of the “same old, same old” practices that many sales resources continue to do wrong.

How many of these sound familiar?

• Waiting for the prospect to call them
• Beginning presentations talking about their own company (a topic of no interest at all to prospects)
• Talking about products, services, features etc. rather than the vision or the outcomes that they can create for the customer
• Blaming marketing for poor leads
• Spending too much time doing anything but selling (e.g. attending meetings, writing tender responses, checking orders in the system)
• Relying on building relationships with prospects – when the prospects just don’t have time, and aren’t interested
• Not realising that how they sell is at least as important as what they sell
• Not liaising with the decision maker and all of the buying influences.

Some key B2B sales facts

In this vein, we were interested to see the following statistics reported out of the Corporate Executive Board’s recent sales & marketing conference (with thanks to Tom Pisello for rounding these up):

1. 94% of prospects discontinue contact with a vendor because they received irrelevant promotions and messages (Blue Research)
2. 71% of business executives get “turned off” a company when content is more like a sales pitch than valuable information – yet 93% of marketers continue to tie their content directly to products and services (The Economist)
3. The average B2B deal now has 5.4 decision makers (CEB)
4. 53% of buyers indicate customer experience in the sales process is more important than brand, product, service and price - “Today brand, product, service and price are table stakes.” (CEB)
5. 58% of buyers disengage because sales reps are not able to help them solve business challenges or articulate the value of proposed solutions (Qvidian)
6. In 2 years time 90% of B2B companies expect to compete almost entirely on the basis of the buying experience, up from 36% 2 years ago (Gartner)

Looking forward to 2015

Despite this grim news, we’ve seen the emergence of some key trends this year and some successful practices including:

• Realising we don’t sell how buyers buy leading us to align our sales and marketing efforts with the new buyers’ journey
• Disruptive insight selling – teaching customers better ways of running their business and shattering their status quo to start them on new buying journeys
• Realising we shouldn’t differentiate “social selling” from “normal selling”, that in fact it’s all selling, albeit in a social world
• Good progress in aligning sales and marketing along the new buyer’s journey
• Increasing realisation of the importance of coaching as the #1 sales management skill. 

Join us over the coming weeks as we discuss the trends we’ve seen, talk about implementation best practices and predict what the “Salesperson of 2015” will look like.

Should salespeople create or pursue opportunities?

How salespeople should spend their time is a fascinating subject!

An interesting place to start is to agree on What is selling? – and indeed how much of their time should be spent selling.

A salesperson is one of the most expensive marketing investments a B2B company can make. (Yes, certainly Marketing is usually a different department to Sales, but personal selling is just one way of promoting a product, hence is a subset of marketing.)

As such, we need to maximise salespeople’s time spent on genuine sales activities.

So what is a genuine sales activity?

Activities often done by salespeople – that aren’t selling

Perhaps we should start by listing what isn’t selling:

• Cold calling
• Booking meetings with prospects
• Building relationships with prospects (if there is no point to it)
• Sending information to prospects
• Writing quotes, proposals and tenders
• Following up customer meetings
• Entering orders into a system
• Checking backorder reports
• Chasing outstanding orders
• Writing content
• Providing forecasts (although it’s a necessary evil – as long as something happens based on the forecast)
• Helping the project manager run the project
• Assisting or dealing with account/project problems

etc etc – you get the picture – but what is left?

So what should salespeople do?

In our world, the key skills of the sales person are to build trust, display empathy, teach, disrupt, influence and persuade with the goal of moving buyers to the next stage of their buyer’s journey, in favour of both the buyer and the sales organisation:

 

Anything that could be done by a lower cost resource (e.g. following up that white paper download) should be done by a lower cost resource.

The studies we have read indicate that best practice for a sales resource is to spend around 80% of their time selling. However, our research with clients generally reveals that sales folk spend less than 40% of their time actually undertaking sales activities!

Why are we getting high cost resources to do what lower cost resources can do?

So when salespeople do sell, what should they focus on?

Ambulance chasing is a popular sport for the majority of salespeople.

Sales people who focus on "building the relationship" service the customer well, get on with all the key influencers - but effectively wait for the customer to figure out what they want to buy, then rely on their relationship to ensure the customer will buy what they want to buy from them.

This works well until another salesperson comes along and points out to the customers that they’re buying the wrong stuff!

Other salespeople only engage when the prospect knows what they want, and in terms of our earlier buyer journey diagram, START ENGAGING PROVIDER.

Research from the folk that wrote The New Solution Selling book insists that only 5-10% of all opportunities involve the customer actually looking. The other 90-95% of opportunities are latent, the prospect doesn’t realise they have a problem they need to act on.

Now, great debate and PR wars between the Solution Selling and Challenger Selling camps about which methodology is dead!

 

 

But at the end of the day, the ability to create rather than pursue opportunities surely has to triumph.

When we pursue opportunities, we’re faced with:

• Multiple competitors
• Lower margins
• Lower win rates.

When we create opportunities where previously they didn’t exist, we have the opportunity to walk with the buyer along their buying journey and shape their thinking.

How we sell is now more important than what we sell.

Sure, the sales cycle will be longer, but the certainty will be much higher.

Corporate Executive Board research reveals that the biggest driver of customer loyalty is the sales experience. If we can solve problems for customers, if we can disrupt their thinking and show them new/better ways of running their business, this has to be how salespeople should spend their time.

Focused sales training can have a big impact on your sales performance. Is solution-based sales right for your organisation or will disruptive customer insight training hit the mark? Complete this Sales Training Effectiveness Assessment and learn more about the effectiveness of your current programs and they can be improved…Find out how or Contact us

 

 

 

Sales tip - how best to follow up when someone downloads your content

It was recently my pleasure to interview via webinar Craig Elias, author of SHiFT!, and renowned guru on all things sales, but in particular the theory of "trigger events".  Trigger events start buyers on new buyer journeys - if we can recognise or even better CAUSE trigger events then we give birth to new sales opportunities, WELL in advance of our competitors knowing about them!

Over the coming weeks, we'll be writing up various components of the interview - expanding on Craig's comments - and giving you links to the various literature he mentions.

To start things off - Craig made some very interesting comments on how best to follow up when a prospect downloads a piece of content - perhaps from your website, or maybe via the landing page associated with your recent email blast.

Via the link at the end of this article you can hear Craig for yourself - but by way of summary he made the following excellent points:

1. When building a form/landing page - the critical questions you need to ask are:
• Name
• Phone
• Email
• How did you hear about this resource
2. Once someone fills in a form and downloads your content, you MUST call them within 5 minutes(!)
• Craig referenced The Lead Response Management Study - carried out by Kellogg/MIT - that informs that the chances of contacting and hence qualifying a lead in 5 minutes is 21 TIMES GREATER than doing it in 30 minutes
3. Craig also referred to Aaron Ross's work around Predictable Revenue
4. So - once someone has downloaded your content - your have 5 minutes to call them.  What do you say?  Craig's advice is:

• State that you're following up on them filling in the form - and you have 3 quick questions, so can you take 2 minutes of their time(?)
• Question 1 - "Did you get the email that has the link to the resource you were looking for?"
• Question 2 - "How did you hear about this resource?" OR "What about this resource caught your attention?"
• Question 3 - "I am curious - what happened recently that made this resource more important/relevant to you?"

What you're listening for as you ask these questions is to determine where on the buyer journey the prospect is ie are they:

• Calm
• Their status quo is shattered ie they're in the "window of dissatisfaction"
• They're searching for solutions/alternatives

 

So - having determined where they are on their journey - what's the CTA (Call To Action)?

Based on information gathered - you may offer to send them a new resource to advance them on their buyer journey - or ultimately you may offer them some sort of "scoping study", wherein you can fully analyse their situation, and make specific recommendations.

So - are you responding to content downloads within 5 minutes?  And are you then asking the 3 key follow up questions?  Click on the link below to hear the relevant part of the interview with Craig.

Craig Elias - Following Up a Form Download