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CRM Pro Tips: Thinking about Linking

Dear CRM user: This is arguably the most important 5 minutes of CRM training you’ll ever need, if you want a CRM that is well-tuned, delivers on its promises, and gives you unbeatable competitive advantage. ~Ed

Human intelligence is often described as sophisticated pattern-matching or linking concepts together. Example: you learn early in life not to touch that hot stove a second time. (“Thanks, brain!”)

Everything we do is linked to something else, somehow. Our “cause and effect” knowledgebase can be expressed as “If / Then”: If X happens, Y follows. We learn and improve by linking new ideas, events, data and relationships.

CRM, similarly, unlocks tremendous potential advantage, helping you to link activities, people and resources with deals, customers, relationships, and reliable dashboard reporting. Done well, it helps you discover unique and repetitive link patterns and accelerate improvement in sales, service, revenue and innovation. You can then detect patterns in buyer behavior, purchase process, dealflow and more, which in turn can improve your forecasting accuracy and your business intelligence advantage.

The reverse is also true: done poorly, your CRM database becomes a useless mess of disjointed data, and your team coordination, customer satisfaction and data intelligence can suffer.

This 15 page playbook illustrates in just 5 minutes how CRM products are ready-built to help you leverage links and relationships among people, data, sales, products and more. It all comes down to “thinking about linking”.

CRM: Thinking about Linking from Fan Foundry

Have at it! I welcome your reactions, comments and edits. Help keep this crowdsourced tutorial fresh and improved. Of course, I’ll credit you with any changes that are kept. More CRM Pro Tip playbooks to come. Subscribe! It’s all free.

Cheers,

sales 2.0, sales forecasting, sales training, Strategy

How Sales and Marketing Leaders Plan

The Chief Revenue Officer is constantly stretched in multiple directions. How do we keep it all straight?

Sales leaders wrangle with team leadership, forecasting, partnerships, customer care, implementation strategy, etc. Marketing leaders need to manage Brand, research, communications, media, communities, etc. Both roles require technology and processes to support measurement, reporting, analysis and tactical adjustments to keep progress on track.

Complicating matters further, the Sales and Marketing roles have numerous touchpoints and overlapping responsibility which, managed well, provide a real “power couple” opportunity. How do you map that and keep it productive?

After some years in the role, I came upon a planning tool a few years ago, shared it with a few colleagues, and we evolved it to its present state. It continues to evolve based on input from users.

Here is a screen shot of the planning guide’s clickable map cover (sorry, click-map only works in downloaded .pdf and .ppt versions). Visit our Resources page to freely download the complete Sales & Marketing Development Plan for the CRO.

Item #6 at our Resources page - free — Item #6 at our Resources page – free

The tool is three “layers” deep and 33 slides long, with each detail slide covering a major strategic or operational topic. You can freely preview it ( item #5) at this site’s Resources page . There is also a download link where you can request a copy of the native file for your own adaptation and use. See below for details and user tips.

Topics Covered

Sales Strategy – covers distribution models, pricing, direct and partner channel management, pipeline management and sales management.

Strategic Marketing – covers mission and branding, market segmentation, customer profiling, competitive analysis and value proposition development.

Integrated Marketing – covers lead generation, CRM, content marketing, audience / community management, web properties, media and PR.

Customer Engagement deals with product / service satisfaction, account development, customer asset management, etc.

User Tips

For best results, use the Resources page’s “get the file” link to request the MS PowerPoint slide deck. Of course you can click the Preview link and view it immediately as a Google doc online, but you’ll only get the linear version – slide by slide, front to back. It is best viewed in Slide Show mode as a clickable map, with all links activated, so you can jump quickly to any topic you desire. Alas, those links are de-activated in the Googledocs version.

Another benefit of having the .ppt file is that you can then modify it to suit your individual needs, inserting sub-pages under each topic where you can detail your own planning progress.

As with all Resources page downloads, I welcome your feedback and suggestions.

Enjoy!

~Ed

When Sales and Marketing Align, Good Things Happen (FanFoundry article)
Building the Sales and Marketing Machine of the Future #salesmktg [INFOGRAPHIC] (blogs.salesforce.com)
Social Media: Somewhere Between Sales and Marketing (roundpeg.biz)

The Sales and Marketing Alignment Conversation

The path to sustained sales and marketing alignment can be a simple one – simple to do, simple to repeat, simple to remember. All you need is a map. In that spirit, I attempt here to boil down some alignment opportunities for Sales and Marketing leaders, into a single graphic.

The chart below shows the three main focus areas each for Sales and Marketing which, if approached collaboratively, can improve business results and transform the relationship. Below the chart is a set of definitions, followed by a few examples of how to apply it to your own situation.

Sales and Marketing Alignment topics chart — Sales and Marketing Alignment topics

3 Sales goals – Value, Volume, Velocity

Value. Since it is almost as costly to close a small sale as it is to close a large sale, Sales professionals would be wise to focus on increasing the potential Value of each sale. In larger organizations, differently skilled teams manage different sized deals.

Volume. The more dealflow you can create, the better your chances of growing your customer base, learning from their needs to improve your offering, and improving the company’s financial ability to innovate and fulfill those evolving customer needs.

Velocity. Increasing the speed of deal flow can also increase your capacity to sell, grow the customer community, and learn from them to help you innovate and improve. It becomes a flywheel.

3 Marketing goals – Content, Community, Conversion

Content. The more compelling and relevant your content, the more you will attract the audience most likely to benefit from your offerings.

Community. The more your content resonates within and among audiences, the greater your capacity to build a community and engage in dialogue to improve sales, products, services, and support.

Conversion. The more effectively you convert sales, the more you can learn from customer experience about how to improve your engagement, conversion and product improvement processes.

Conversations Worth Starting

Using the 3×3 chart above, look at the 9 intersecting boxes and ask the questions implied by the two nouns whose paths cross in each box.

Example 1: Value + Content. In the upper left intersecting box, where Value and Content intersect, Marketing might ask: How can we improve our Content to increase the Value of each sale? Sales might ask: How can the improved Value of each sale guide us in improving Content? It’s the same question, asked from different perspectives, that aligns your response.

Example 2: Conversion + Velocity. In the bottom right box, where Conversion and Velocity intersect, Marketing might be asking: How can we improve the Conversion process to accelerate the Velocity of Sales? Sales might ask: What sales accelerators (velocity) can we use as input for improving the Conversion process?

See how it works? You may come up with better questions to suit your organization’s culture and challenges. Now, formulate your own questions using the relevant nouns for each intersecting box, turn those questions loose in your organization, and watch what happens.

Measuring results with analytics, sales CRM and marketing automation solutions can help you measure and manage your improvement. If you need assistance here, contact us.

How’s it working for you? What questions would you ask your colleagues to help you get better aligned? Drop us a comment here; we’d love to hear your feedback! Visit our Resources page for more free strategy tool downloads.

Sales Pipeline Best Practice (reference chart) (fanfoundry)
5 Reasons Marketing and Sales Should Get Married (hubspot.com)
Does your Marketing Automation have a Human Problem? (SAVO Group blog)
The use of Hansei in Lean Sales and Marketing (customerthink.com)
Does your Website copy suck the life out of your conversions? (seocopywriting.com)
SaaS CEOs: Measure Customer Engagement (ForEntrepreneurs)

Sales Pipeline Best Practice (reference chart)

Having led goal-beating sales and marketing teams (details: see my LinkedIn profile), I have found that cross-functional synergy to be an essential ingredient in business success. ~Ed

To help keep sales teams focused on essential steps and processes, try using this simple, downloadable Sales Pipeline Best Practice reference chart. Assess any single prospect using this plain-English chart, and you will instantly understand their deal value relative to their place in the pipeline, and pinpoint the next steps you can take to increase that value – or devalue it as appropriate.

Topics include:

Sales Stage Summary – helps you assess whether your prospect is Qualified, Scoped, Evaluated, post-mortem evaluated, etc.
Key activities – chores and self-test questions for validating and moving prospects up or down the Pipeline;
Milestones – Decision points and signposts for verifying your assessments;
Control documents and tools – essential elements for effective assessment and communication;
CRM tasks – recordkeeping duties which help your CRM system update the forecast and schedule/prompt you on next steps;
Probability – relative value of each prospect at each stage of the Pipeline;
Partner Forecast – analogous information for assessing your resellers and partners

Hope is Not a Strategy. Groom better sales pros using the Best Practice chart

What makes the top 15% of sales pros into stars, another 50% solid contributors, and the remainder only occasionally brilliant? I believe that you can have more top sales pros on your team if they could make this single page Sales Pipeline Best Practice chart into a habit.

No matter how great a relationship builder your top sales pros may be, they don’t stay at the top without attending to a customer’s pain. It requires methodical, relentless focus that can seem intuitive but can definitely be learned. Such learned, relentless focus keeps the client so comfortable that they can’t even imagine alternatives, relying on your top sales pro (“TSP”) for all their resource needs. Your TSP knows how to make him/herself an indispensable, irreplaceable, joined-at-the-hip resource for life, turning the client into a raving fan.

Of course, even TSPs don’t always win, for a variety of other reasons, some of which are covered in previous articles, like:

“Buyer Bias: How Deep is Your Dive?”

“Your Three Constant Competitors and How to Beat Them”

“Accurate Sales Forecasting: The ‘Aim High’ approach”

Over to You

Can you groom more top sales pros? Yes, if they are willing. Are you a good enough coach? It requires a few essentials, like instilling in your team the ability to accurately forecast. I have seen accurate forecasting offset even the limpest personal skills. Customers respect the diligence and focus of an accurate forecaster who gets to the heart of the matter and focuses on the critical path to their satisfaction. A limp but accurate forecaster may receive fewer golf invitations, but they keep the customer and your organization effectively engaged.

Making it Work for You

The Sales Pipeline Best Practice reference chart has been jokingly referred to by colleagues as the “eye chart”. If you can read this chart, you know how to accurately forecast, and you always know what to do next. You can avoid overblown optimism and unrealistic assumptions. You can detect bottlenecks, derailment and other disruptive patterns. You can reduce financial miscalculation. The result is improved situation awareness and a more consistently productive sales and marketing team. Every aspect of this Pipeline Best Practice chart is also rooted in, and links back to, fanfoundry best practice. Diligently applied, it will help your Sales and Marketing team sing from the same piece of sheet music. You will share a common language, a shared mission, and a common set of criteria that maps to CRM, performance management and other processes.

If you are student of your profession, you will likely recognize that some terminology on this reference chart has been borrowed from widely popular sales training programs. This is done deliberately to mesh with your sales organization’s frame of reference, to facilitate understanding and immediate application. I have many colleagues to thank for helping to shape and tweak this chart over time. Your input is welcome.

Enjoy, and if you have a question, call or write.

Selling is Not about Relationships (Harvard Business Review survey)
The Vanity of an Enlarged Pipeline (customerthink.com)
The Difference Between a Sales Funnel and a Sales Pipeline (paceaustralia.wordpress.com)
Where is Your Sales Funnel Leaking? (customerthink.com)
Are Top Salespeople Born or Made? (Harvard Business Review)
Your Three Constant Competitors, and How to Beat Them (fanfoundry article)
When Sales and Marketing Align, Good Things Happen in Threes (fanfoundry article)

Accurate Sales Forecasting: the AIM HIGH approach

Sales and Marketing really are a power couple, and need to know one another’s business intimately to succeed together. I know what it’s like to lead a quota-busting sales and marketing team, and have had to work hard at achieving sales and marketing alignment, so I thought I’d share some playbook pages from the Sales side of the aisle. If you read between the lines, you’ll find it contains implications for the marketing mission every step of the way.

I chose to talk about forecasting because I humbly believe it is the most vital skill any sales professional can possess. Without it, your revenue projections are a fairy tale, and your organization can’t reasonably plan its financial and operational future.

With that said, read this admittedly cutesy formula, and think about what types of questions you’d ask your prospects and customers to determine if you have accurate information to satisfy these 7 facets of converting a Lead to a Qualified Opportunity and plotting its trajectory in your sales pipeline.

The AIM HIGH Approach to Accurate Sales Forecasting

1. Align with appropriate internal and external partners. Partners could include members of the customer’s organization (or their partners) who contribute necessary skills and knowledge, or other third parties you can identify who could help you comprise a complete solution.

2. Ingrain pain and urgency. Find out how broadly and deeply the pain is felt — is there an executive champion? A critical event causing urgent attention? A persistent motivating force? Use the customer’s language to express this, and refer back to it occasionally to re-validate it.

3. Measure how your product/service can solve the prospect’s need. Paint a hard, statistical, monetary picture of how your proposed solution can solve a need, and take action to make that vision a reality. Get agreement with your customer on how success will be measured and verified.

4. Harden the decision criteria and processes. Gain clarity into the necessary steps and individuals involved in getting to final approval and sign-off.

5. Identify all buyers – economic/financial, technical, executive, etc. Discuss all possible players, even those your prospect might dismiss as irrelevant, if you think their support matters down the road. Extreme example: suppose you are selling a cloud computing solution. You and your prospect might ordinarily think the I.T. organization is not relevant. Actually, I.T. plays a vital role in validating cloud computing solutions for security of information and access, and increasingly are the experts in building account access solutions, so their standards and expertise are often critical.

6. Gain trust through internal champions with strong political capital. Ask your key prospect contacts about how they see your solution impacting the organization, and listen for clues to organizational strategy, institutional patterns of practice and key buyers’ alliances and affiliations. Include social networking sites like LinkedIn and Twitter in your research to determine how closely your key prospect contacts are aligned.

7. Hoist your solution over the competition. Give your customer the information they need to convince themselves that your solution is the right fit. Consider external competitors (know what & how they sell!) as well as internal ones – – apathy, inertia (stay the course, status quo). Note: the “right fit” can be based on price, feasibility, etc. – not necessarily superior technology. Often the best solution just lays on their template nicely, requiring less effort to implement, or perhaps matching their own complement of people and processes.

How do you spell forecasting success? Holla back!

Category: sales training

CRM Pro Tips: Thinking about Linking

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