Making the Perfect Match Adapting to your buyers’ process

Larry Torri, VP Sales, AssureSign

About the Presenter Larry Torri

• 15 years of sales leadership at large multinational companies Siemens, Fujitsu, Aspect and Nortel

• 15 years of sales and marketing leadership at start-ups NetSpeak, Daleen Technologies and Proxima Systems

• Today, at AssureSign, a start-up SaaS provider of electronic signatures, he uses new and innovative sales and marketing techniques in this fast-paced and ever-evolving technology and customer landscape

2

Agenda Webinar objectives

• A quick look at the traditional process … it may be yours

• A look at the evolving process for the buyer

• A view of some recent sales process trends

• Adapting your existing sales process by using new strategies and techniques

• Poll Question 1—Does your organization have a sales ‘playbook’?

3

The Basics are Unchanged The premise of the sales process is no different than when John Dewey introduced us to:

• Problem/need recognition

• Information search

• Evaluation of alternatives

• Purchase decision

• Post purchase behavior

All businesses need a direction and method

We all built our sales process with what we know

4

The Traditional Sales Playbook Lead/demand generation

• Lists, events, advertising, cold calling, referrals …

Qualify—typically some form of BANT • Budget, authority, need and timeline

Manage • Discovery, players, competition, meetings/demo,

relationship, propose, close, post-sale

Traditional models have sales rep doing most

5

The Traditional Sales Resources Marketing

• Market awareness, demand/lead-gen

Sales team • Inside rep/lead follow-up and qualify

• Account executive—sometimes does it all

• Sales manager/exec, technical resource

Tools • Collateral, competitive briefs, case studies, CRM

6

What is Changing? Information … it’s everywhere now

• Websites, LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs and more

A Corporate Executive Board (CEB) study shows that buyers are nearly 60% through the purchase process before they engage sales

• The purchaser is way ahead in the process

• The sales rep could be considered unnecessary or even an annoyance

7

So What Do We Do? On the front-end—put information everywhere

• Website—provide information, guidance and resources, all combined with a call to action

• Web impressions … blogs (your own, partners and industry), YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook

• Automate lead nurturing with marketing automation from Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, ExactTarget and more

• Crowdsourcing—Yelp!, TrustRadius, IT Central Station, G2 Crowd, FindTheBest and many more

Once engaged with sales—a whole new model

8

Sales Development Sales Development is being split from the traditional all-in-one sales person

• Focused on nurturing until qualified—then handed off

• Specific sales development reps (SDRs) with new hiring criteria and tenure expectations

Nurturing and marketing automation • Traditional content at regular cadence

• Ad hoc content based on news or customer action

• Increased insight on customer behavior

• Our story on this …

9

Sales Development—Qualify BANT/solution selling needs a makeover

• With buyers well on their way, we see new qualifying concepts and strategies emerging

▶ Objective—What does the prospect want to accomplish? ▶ Plans—What does the prospect expect to be doing? ▶ Timeline—When does the prospect want to get this done? ▶ Obstacles—What is in your way? ▶ Budget—What do you expect to pay, save, ROI? ▶ Authority—Who is actually making the decision?

Stricter qualification criteria is in order—don’t be afraid to throw some back

10

A New Adaptive Sales Process Different, more- or less-educated buyers mean you may need to change it up

• Focus on qualifying with specific SDR-like roles

• Get to different people—change agents/disrupters who are looking to make a difference and take risk

• Coach the change agents on how to buy

• Disrupt the sales process, don’t be traditional

A different approach—it works • Salesforce.com’s success is all about ‘disruption’

11

A New Adaptive Sales Process Different, more- or less-educated buyers mean you may need to change it up

• Focus on qualifying with specific SDR-like roles

• Get to different people—change agents/disrupters who are looking to make a difference and take risk

• Coach the change agents on how to buy

• Disrupt the sales process, don’t be traditional

A different approach—it works • Salesforce.com’s success is all about ‘disruption’

• Salesloft—$256K-$4.2M in 11 months

12

What You Can Do … Poll Question—Do you track win/loss?

Take a more serious look at win/loss • There is no better way to understand their process

• Ask deeper questions: Where did you research? Did we educate you during the sales process?

• Be willing to adapt based on what you hear

Reevaluate your qualifying process • Consider tightening it up and letting go

• Do it up-front with specifically trained SDRs

13

What You Can Do … (cont’d.) Don’t be afraid to step out there and be different

• Disruption of the sales process works—you have the power to change or at least adapt

• Experiment with changing your ‘solution selling’ into ‘disruptive coaching’

Leverage technology • Integrated CRM and marketing automation

Push as much information as possible to as many resources as possible with call to action

14

More Information Contacts:

• Rebecca Kalogeris

rkalogeris@pragmaticmarketing.com

@pragmaticmkting

• Larry Torri

larry.torri@assuresign.com

@assuresign

15

Download this webinar and sign up for more at pragmaticmarketing.com/live

Thank you for attending! Next month’s webinar: Are Roadmaps Obsolete?

Product Roadmaps in Highly Iterative Environments