Category: Sales and Marketing

Entrepreneurs are always looking for an edge or a new strategy to assess progress. One area that is important to track for certain startups is brand recognition online. The Internet, unlike most marketing mediums, provides fairly straightforward methods for tracking brand recognition through several avenues like the following:

• Track the number of times monthly that someone searches for your company or product name in a search engine and then clicks the link to go to your site (this is measured via the referring keywords in standard web analytics tools like Google Analytics)
• Measure the number of direct visitors to your site that didn’t come from clicking a link on a site to get to your site as this implies they had your site bookmarked or typed in the URL directly, and thus remembered your brand
• Calculate the number of mentions of your brand on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube using a social media monitoring tool like Looxii

As you probably guessed, the goal is to see the data show growth of the your brand recognition on a monthly basis.

What else? What are other ways to measure your brand recognition online?

Yesterday I was spending time with one of our reseller partners talking through our best practices and strategies for selling our software. Towards the end of the conversation, with it clear that our partners were impressed by some of our techniques, one exclaimed how many of the B2B sales and marketing tools we use didn’t even exist a decade ago.

Here are some of those new tools and techniques:

• LinkedIn to find the appropriate contact based on company and job title
• Jigsaw.com to understand the email naming convention for a company as well as the direct dial number for a potential prospect
• Twitter to monitor your industry name and competitors in order to find potential prospects
• Caller ID for your website to understand which companies have been browsing around
• Drip marketing and other prospect nurturing programs to stay top-of-mind

Of course, no amount of new technology can substitute for good old fashioned hard work, including picking up the phone and talking to people. My recommendation is to experiment with a variety of B2B sales and marketing tools and incorporate the ones that are most beneficial.

What else? What are some other B2B sales and marketing tools that didn’t exist a decade ago?

This week I’ve had the opportunity to talk with three different idea-stage entrepreneurs. Two of them are on the right track talking to prospects in advance of the building the product. Unfortunately, I could tell from their answers to my questions that the picture they painted for their prospects was much too vague for their proposed solutions.

Selling to customers in advance of building a product is critical. Here are some tips:

• Mock up a few screens in a wireframing application
• Ask general questions but make sure they aren’t leading questions (entrepreneurs love leading questions!)
• Explain how the system will work
• Ask for a commitment for them to use the system once it is ready
• Get at least three commitments in advance of development
• Work with the committed parties during the development (it’s much better to make it too simple rather than too complicated)

My recommendation is for entrepreneurs to better clarify their product’s functionality with potential prospects before building the actual system.

What else? What other tips do you have during customer discovery?

Earlier today I sat in on a product demo with one of our top sales reps. By the end of the demo, I was reminded of the old adage: we have two ears and one mouth and we should listen twice as much as we talk. As a sales rep the beginner inclination is to excitedly talk about all the amazing bells and whistles, both to show how great the product is as well as to show off your knowledge. Successful sales reps know that asking the right questions and listening is more important than doing all the talking.

Our successful sales reps did the following today at the second product demo for a prospect:

• Explained his understanding of the top five pain points for the prospect
• Articulated what areas would be covered during the demo
• Gave a two minute background on the company (no slides ever)
• Presented a story of a user performing common actions
• Showed the results of those actions and our system
• Paused and asked if there were any questions at every step in the demo
• Respected the prospect’s time and ended promptly after 25 minutes
• Received an affirmative response at the end signaling the prospect is likely to move forward

Again, two ears and one mouth for a reason. Listening is one of the most important traits for sales reps.

What else? What listening tips do you have?

One of the things I enjoy doing is talking to entrepreneurs about their business. I’ve talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs over the years and 30+ entrepreneurs just last month. My conclusion recently is that nine out of 10 entrepreneurs have a sales challenge. By sales challenge I mean that increasing sales is their number one goal, focus, and priority. Unfortunately, for many of them, they aren’t making the desired progress.

Here are the recurring themes I see:

• Not enough time to devote to sales, but they are the only person selling
• Don’t like to sell and the recently hired sales rep isn’t working out
• Trying to sell over the web (e.g. self-service) with no luck
• Wanting recurring revenue but still doing one-off projects
• Performing sales-like activities with co-founders but deals aren’t materializing

Now, I don’t have a silver bullet solution to these challenges. My recommendation for entrepreneurs is to think through customer acquisition as one of the most core aspects of their business and realize it is going to be the hardest.

One of my favorite questions to ask startups is “How are you going to generate leads?” Inevitably the answer comes back along the lines of SEO, SEM, blogs, social media, etc. The major challenge, naturally, is that’s everyone else’s strategy as well. Oh, and the well financed and/or established companies have significantly more money to spend, especially when it comes to PPC ads.

I get most excited when a company has a proprietary customer acquisition strategy. Here are a few examples:

• Exclusive relationship to co-market their product with a complementary solution that already has great distribution
• Exclusive relationship with one or more lead generation sites that specialize in their industry (one company in town has done a great job with this approach)
• Proprietary method of generating prospect lists based on non-generally available data

Customer acquisition is hard and fiercely competitive. My recommendation is to think through proprietary customer acquisition strategies as a pre-requisite to starting a business.

What else? What are some other example proprietary customer acquisition strategies?

Earlier this week I was having lunch with an entrepreneur that has a successful consulting business. He’s been in business for four years and has 10 full-time consultants. The big challenge for him now is that he’s both selling new deals and coordinating the delivery of work on existing deals — working 80 hours a week in the business. If he doesn’t sell new deals the business goes under, and if he doesn’t sell even more deals than last year, the business doesn’t grow.

The goal right now is figuring out how to train the consultants to sell and make it so that he’s not the only person bringing in new business. We talked for over an hour and this is what I suggested to him:

• Figure out how to get economies of scale with his sales abilities
• Consider having an inside sales person call on target accounts to set up appointments for him as well as offer events like “my CEO is going to be in town on xyz date and would enjoy grabbing breakfast or lunch with you”
• Build regular value-added content to stay top-of-mind with prospects and outsource this work to a markting person
• Look for other ways like lumpy mail and industry speaking events to stay in front of prospects

My biggest recommendation for him was to lean on junior sales and marketing people to help him maximize his reach.

What else? What are some other ways to help sell more as a relationship-oriented consultant?

Sales are the lifeblood of most organizations and sales reps are an integral component of success. I love sales people as they are typically out-going, passionate, and easily carry a conversation. Yes, money is a primary motivator for sales people but it is also important to have non-compensation recognition. Here are a few of the ways we do that:

• Hero of the month award voted on by other team members (any department, not just sales)
• Mentor program for senior reps to help junior reps
• Million dollar club (once a sales reps has sold $1 million in total recurring revenue)
• Priority choice for tradeshows (e.g. shows in San Francisco are more desirable)

My recommendation is to consider ways to recognize sales people beyond financial remuneration.

What else? What are some other good ways to recognize sales people?