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
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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’?
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 …
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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
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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’
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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
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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
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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
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More Information Contacts:
• Rebecca Kalogeris
@pragmaticmkting
• Larry Torri
@assuresign
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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
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