David Cummings on Startups

Category: Sales and Marketing

  • Sales Reps Should be Pleasantly Persistent

    Earlier today I was having lunch with a successful entrepreneur in town and the topic of sales reps came up. He used a term to describe the most common attribute for productive inside sales reps that I really liked: pleasantly persistent. Continuing with yesterday’s post that customer service shouldn’t be hard, let’s look at why sales shouldn’t be hard with pleasantly persistent reps:

    • Make a plan of attack that involves multiple phone calls to the appropriate prospects/suspects until contact is made
    • When leaving voicemails, say when the next day/time call will take place
    • Follow-up at the previously announced time and reiterate that you said you were going to follow-up and did it
    • Do what you say you’re going to do and be pleasantly persistent

    Of course, all of this should sound like common sense, because it is so obvious. Sales is not easy but being pleasantly persistent increases the chances of success.

  • Account Sign-up Page Best Practices

    A few weeks ago I was helping an entrepreneur who was getting ready to launch a new site. He took me through the product functionality, the website, launch strategy, etc. When we reached the account sign-up page it was a disaster. An interactive agency had designed it, and it looked aesthetically pleasing, but it wasn’t designed for reducing friction in creating an account.

    Here are some simple best practices for account sign-up pages, which in many ways should be treated like landing pages:

    • Remove all unnecessary links, which are usually 90% of the ones of the page.
    • Minimize the header and text as much as possible. Then, cut it down even further.
    • Reduce the number of fields, especially required fields, to the bare minimum. Once you have someone’s email address you can always market to them later to fill out more fields.
    • Keep all the fields in the form above the fold so that the user doesn’t have to scroll down at all. Test and enforce this on monitors with a 1024×768 resolution.
    • State clearly that you value the person’s privacy and won’t sell or share their information.

    With these best practices in place, conversions typically increase 10%-50% over a normal sign-up page.

    What else? What are some other best practices for designing an account sign-up page?

  • Hiring Your First Sales Person

    An entrepreneur in town recently reached out to me for advice as he’s about to hire his first sales rep. Building a sales team is no easy task, and hiring successful sales people ranks right up there as being one of the most difficult positions to figure out if someone will work out. Why? Sales people are the best at selling themselves, and not always your product. A great sales person is worth their value many times over.

    I’ve written about sales on numerous occasions. Here are some of my posts:

    What else? What other advice would you give to someone about to hire their first sales rep?

  • Customer Video Testimonials

    One of the most compelling uses of web video is for customer testimonials. No, not cheesy infomercial type talking heads but rather actual customers talking about key issues. Topics for the video might include:

    • Why did you choose vendor X?
    • What was your evaluation process?
    • What was your implementation process?
    • What benefits have you found?
    • How likely are you to recommend it to a professional colleague?

    Videographers can typically put a testimonial together for $1,000 or less. As for hosting the video, there are good services out there like Wistia.com and Vzaar.com. My recommendation is to seriously consider customer video testimonials as part of your site. Please see the Pardot customer testimonials for examples.

    What else? What other tips do you have for video testimonials?

  • Buying Lead/Prospect Lists

    One of the more challenging things for sales and marketing teams is to purchase a high quality list of potential leads/prospects at a reasonable price. Now, I’m not a proponent of buying lists for the purpose of sending unsolicated bulk email (SPAM) although targeted one-off emails tailored to the recipient are fine. Lists, when well done, are great for cold calling, which is an under appreciated technique, especially for more modern, web-centric companies.

    Here are some tips for buying lists:

    • Use sites likes Jigsaw.com or NetProspex.com to build your own list based on typical categories (e.g. geography, job title, etc)
    • Contact non-profit associations for one of your customer industries and ask if they sell their member list (some provide it in book form where you then have to use a service like eLance or Mechanical Turk to convert it to digital form manually or through OCR)
    • Reach out to magazines/portals of one of your customer industries and see if they sell their subscriber list

    What else? What are some other ideas for getting potential leads/prospect lists?

  • More Domain Name Searching Tips

    Yesterday I had lunch with a friend and we got into the typical domain name searching discussion. My friend’s friend was starting a new company and having a hard time coming up with a name. In addition to my previous domain name searching tips, I had a few new ones to add:

    • Find a few technology companies that list their customers and take words from the customers’ names and plug them into BustAName.com.
    • Add colors or numbers to go with a word (remember to not have more than two words for a total length of 10 letters or less). As an example, the domain jetblack.com would be cool, but the asking price on sedo.com is $450,000. Only 20x overpriced, but I digress.
    • Use sedo.com to search the domain name marketplace and include the following in your search: only .com extension, exclude hyphens, numerals, and IDN, and finally sort by bids (important!).

    What else? What are some other tips for finding a good domain name?

  • #1 Paid Search Marketing Tip

    Continuing the sales and marketing theme from yesterday, I was recently reminded of the number one paid search marketing tip for B2B companies. Are you ready? Good. Here it is:

    Use your competitors’ names as keywords in pay per click (PPC) campaigns.

    There, that wasn’t too tough. It’s true. The best thing you can do is buy the names of your competitors and create PPC campaigns specific to each competitor. Now, please remember that you can’t use your competitors’ names in the actual ad as that would be trademark infringement and Google will take the ad down, but you’re free to buy the trademarked keywords all day long.

    What else? What are some other good paid search marketing tips?

  • Offer Free Tools and Great Content for Lead Gen

    David Skok, a VC with Matrix Partners, has the best blog for B2B technology companies that care about sales and marketing (which ones don’t?). In fact, his Sales Funnel article is a must read for entrepreneurs generating leads online. Here are two great takeaways:

    • Offer free tools with as little friction as possible for people to try. As an example, Pardot offers the free VisitorID product so that you can learn what companies are on your website and what pages they are visiting.
    • Provide great, compelling content in the form of blogs, white papers, and other online content to build credibility and trust with your target audience. Education is the highest form of marketing.

    My recommendation is to read the Sales Funnel blog post and to start building a sales and marketing machine.

  • Track Competitor Displacements

    Earlier today we had a good conversation about the recent trend we’ve seen where new customers were already vended and came over to us from a competitor. Traditionally we haven’t seen too much competitor displacement as our market is small but growing fast. This might be a sign that our market is maturing but I wouldn’t give it too much credit. Rather, enough companies have had a chance to use our competitors and we’ve come in with the right value proposition at the right time.

    New customers, once they’re smiling and satisfied, are a font of information about their previous vendor. Here are a few reasons why it is important to track competitor displacements:

    • Understand if there are any trends e.g. a certain competitor’s customers seem to be switching so you should focus on reaching out to more of that competitor’s customers
    • Learn what the competitor doesn’t do well and exploit it as a weakness
    • Figure out what the competitor does do well and incorporate it into your strategy, if applicable
    • Inquire if there’s anything about the customer experience you provide that was better or worse about their experience with your competitor

    My recommendation is to track competitor displacements and spend time understanding the nuances of the deal as it will provide significant intelligence for your company.

  • 3 Reasons Sales Calls Get Returned

    After yesterday’s post on having prospects itemize their top priorities, I wanted to continue the sales theme today. One area that we spent a good bit of time on Thursday was sales, which makes sense as Jim, the facilitator, owns a professional sales training company. We spent time talking about how to get potential prospects to return our call. Here are the three reasons a potential prospect will call back:

    1. Mentioning someone that referred you, or a relevant company (e.g. partner or competitor)
    2. They need what you’re calling about (less than 1% chance)
    3. They appreciated your persistance and thought you sounded nice

    The average number of times a sales person calls on a potential prospect before giving up is 2.4. That’s not enough. My recommendation is to clearly identify your ideal customer profile and plan on being persistent, and nice, with sales calls.