Barbara Giamanco

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How Does Your Sales Experience Stack Up?

By Barbara Giamanco 2 Comments

Creating differentiated, personalized customer experiences is a top business initiative for most organizations. Executives know that when exceptional experiences are delivered, they distance themselves from their competitors. The reverse is also true. When things don’t go well, the negative brand impact on your company has greater potential for damage that goes far beyond losing a sale or a current customer.

Every interaction someone has with your company matters. That is especially true when it is your salespeople.

The term “customer experience” is misleading. The use of the word customer suggests that your experience strategy begins once someone becomes a paying customer. But that’s not the case at all. The experience begins with the very first interaction someone has with your company. It could be a marketing interaction, and more often, that first touch starts with someone on the front lines of your sales organization. That touch could be a phone call, email, an in-person meeting at a business event or a LinkedIn connection request.

When companies are designing their experience strategy, that strategy must include the salesforce.

To me, that seems an obvious suggestion; however, I don’t believe that organizations are doing enough analysis to understand how ALL buyer interactions with their salespeople – starting with the first ones – are either helping or hurting pipeline and revenue objectives.

Gartner has defined Customer Experience Management as “the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed customer expectations and, thus, increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.”

I would revise Gartner’s definition slightly to say, “designing and reacting to prospect and customer interactions to meet or exceed their expectations and, thus, increase pipeline, revenue, satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.”

So, let’s talk about “aligning to the buyers’ journey”.

The most common strategy to engage new prospects starts with content. A lot of it. The idea is to deliver the right articles, white papers, case studies, videos or webinars at the right time in the buyers’ decision-making process.

Conventional wisdom says provide educational content that informs during stages when buyers are looking for products to solve their problems. Or, use content to provide insights into problems buyers’ may not know they have yet but are bound too, and they are more likely to book a sales meeting. Unfortunately, that may no longer be the case.

Content overload is creating a backlash to the buying experience.

Analyst reports indicate that buyers are inundated with so much content that the information overload is leading to the exact opposite reaction companies want. Rather than creating an experience that inspires buyers to more quickly engage with sales, they are opting to do nothing!

In a recent report from Gartner about how sellers can help buyers “make sense” of the overwhelming availability of high quality content; albeit, often with conflicting points of view, authors Neha Ahuja and Benjamin Hooker confirm that “when customers encounter too much information — even trustworthy, evidence-based information — they may stop learning. In such a scenario, customers reach a point of information saturation after which they can’t process new information.”

This leads to a point of diminishing return in the perceived value that information has to purchasing decisions. Rather than decisions being based on “quality data”, decision making becomes reminiscent of the days before the internet with buyers’ making decisions based on best guesses and gut feelings as opposed to rational, fact-based choices.

Which brings me back to the sales force. The people paid to sell to your products.

Information overload is causing problems. But so are salespeople with their messaging and approach, whether meaning too or not. Your sales team members are typically the first human exposure that someone has with your company.

What do you know about the experience those interactions are creating?

Unless what you sell requires little more than an order taker to seal the deal, evaluating what’s happening throughout the selling cycle when those interpersonal – people to people – sales interactions are taking place is a must. Often your salespeople are losing out on sales opportunities with the message they convey in the first email they send or phone call they make.

Another day we can debate why sales organizations spend an inordinate amount of time and money constantly chasing new logos. The reality is that they do. Empty pipeline phobia puts more pressure on salespeople to surface new sales opportunities any way that they can often without enough training and coaching to help them succeed.

Leaders own the fault here. When the default command is to do “more activity” to try and meet objectives, quality is bound to suffer and it does.

Banish magical thinking.

As I often do, I recently wrote another LinkedIn article about the need for salespeople and sales leaders to banish magical thinking and stop looking for short-cuts to engaging buyers. Cheap tricks in the form of subject lines, break up emails and other such nonsense simply reinforces that buyers don’t need sellers to help them in their purchasing decisions at all. There is a reason why 90% of the time buyers simply hit delete to rid themselves of constant deluge of sales spam.

Put yourself in the buyers’ shoes. Do you know what it is like to try and buy from you?

Go through every step of the journey as a buyer would. Download white papers or attend a webinar, and then experience what it feels like to be hounded by a salesperson through email, phone calls or LinkedIn connection requests. Evaluate the messaging that salespeople are using to try to book sales meetings. Are the messages focused on the issues relevant to the buyer or simply another attempt to sell with your product pitch? Engage directly with a salesperson and experience what it feels like to have features, benefits and a product demo pushed on you. Record sales calls and listen carefully to how your salespeople are representing your offering.

It is easy to toss around phrases like “improve the customer experience” or map your processes to the “buyers’ journey”, but in truth, the effort to transform existing processes isn’t easy.

But that doesn’t mean the transformation effort shouldn’t be undertaken. In fact, I believe it must be a strategic imperative!

We are about to enter the 4th and final sales quarter for most companies, and I can guarantee that the “do more” mantra will reach a fevered pitch with the end result being largely the same. As it has been for the past decade, roughly half of all sales teams will still not meet quota goals. Same activity = same results. Denial doesn’t change reality!

Filed Under: blog, sales Tagged With: customer experience, experience, Prospecting, quota, sales, sales leadership, sales management

Building the Startup Sales Team with Anna Talerico, Beacon9

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

For the founder, or early employee, who ends up at the helm of the sales function, what do you do when you are tasked with building, scaling and managing a team when you haven’t done it before? That is the big question and the focus of my conversation with Anna Talerico, Co-Founder at Beacon9.

It can be intimating and downright scary to find ourselves challenged with something new that we haven’t done before, and that is exactly how we grow in our careers.

Anna and I started off by talking about the first thing someone should do when they find themselves tasked with building a team and they haven’t done it before.

We discussed sales leadership and what’s the most important element of being the best at leading teams.

As companies grow there are challenges and obstacles to overcome. Anna shared her perspective on handling those possible barriers to growing your team.

We discussed the most common mistake an inexperienced sales leader makes and what to do about it.

Finally, we talked about how to set quotas and determine commission if you are starting from scratch.

Enjoy the interview!

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About Anna:

Anna Talerico an experienced SaaS operator focused on management, company culture and sales. At her former company she led her customer-facing teams which included sales, customer success and product support. When that company was acquired in 2017, she co-founded Beacon9 to help other tech companies chart their successful path forward in these same areas.

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Filed Under: blog, Women In Sales Tagged With: commission, leadership, quota, SaaS, sales, startup, teams

SocialTech Tuesday: Another Kind of Handshake

By Barbara Giamanco 1 Comment

As the co-author of the second book about social selling to hit bookshelves in August 2010, I am delighted to see that a philosophical approach to selling that I began evangelizing as early as 2006 is gathering steam.

At the time that The New Handshake: Sales Meets Social Media was published individual sales contributors were testing the waters on their own. Their managers, however, snubbed their noses at the idea that using social media as part of selling could help to generate revenue. More sales leaders get it today, but we still have far to go.

Part of the social selling process relies on sales people creating a perception of expert credibility and that’s where content comes in. Largely misunderstood, I want you to think about content in the context of helping the buyer make their decision to buy from you and your company and not someone else.

Recently, I sat down with Jason Wesbecher CEO and Co-Founder of Handshakez to talk about content and a unique platform that he and his team have developed to help sales people use content to close deals. Jason is a seasoned sales leader, so I know that you’ll benefit from his perspective as much as I have.

By the way, on Thursday, June 27 at 12N Eastern, I’m hosting a complimentary webinar with Jason that you need to attend. You’ll want to see for yourself what Handshakez can do for your teams sales results!

BG: Jason, why is content such an important part of the sales process?

JW: So much of the sales process unfolds these days outside the presence of an actual salesperson.  Because of this, it has never been more important to produce and share compelling content that can help provoke your customer to ask a question, start a dialogue… to engage with you.

BG: Isn’t interacting with our prospects and sending information back and forth sort of boring and wasting time? How does Handshakez overcome that challenge?

JW: The challenge with information exchange in today’s B2B environment is that it’s done much in the same way it was 15 years ago – via email.  What’s changed, though, is the sheer amount of email customers receive these days – as much as 600 new emails per week.  That is a tremendous amount of noise that sales reps now need to cut through.  Moreover, unlike 15 years ago, there just isn’t the same social obligation associated with responding to emails today.  Customers will easily delete dozens of external emails per week without thinking twice.

BG: Sales people often spend a lot of time chasing opportunities that really aren’t opportunities. How does your platform help sales people with that?

JW: As a former technology salesperson for 17 years, I can tell you with certainty that the next best thing to a “yes” is a “fast no.”  Quickly disqualifying opportunities is a valuable skill, as it reduces the time and cost of chasing conversations that will likely never come to fruition.  Our platform is focused on fostering engaging and transparent conversations between sales teams and buying teams.  When a salesperson using Handshakez starts to see declining engagement levels during a sales cycle – or worse yet, no engagement at all – it can inform next steps, sales stage and forecastability.

BG: Why did you start the company in the first place?

JW: I have been in enterprise software for 68 quarters and flown 2 million miles, selling to some of the toughest clients in the world.  What I learned is that oftentimes it’s a dance between a sales team that has an immature or undifferentiated product and a buyer who has multiple alternatives and very complex requirements.  In other words, selling is really, really hard and only getting harder. 

BG: We all know that the length of time to close deals has only gotten longer because multiple stakeholders are involved and some have more influence than others. What are some of the benefits of using your platform to address this reality?

JW: For today’s sales professionals to be successful, they must navigate the complex politics of committees staffed with informed and frugal buyers. Successful reps in this environment tend to engage customers rather than manage them.  And they differentiate their sales process as much as their products & services.  The best reps may already do this very well, but they only account for 10-20% of your sales force.  What about the rest? 

BG: Jason, you’ve told me that the buying and selling of B2B products is one of the most opaque and adversarial processes in the world.  Does it really have to be that way?

JW: No, it doesn’t.  I started Handshakez to make the B2B sales process incrementally easier and more enjoyable for all involved by humanizing it and taking it out of email.

BG: Humanizing it. I like that a lot, Jason. I rant quite often about how I think that sales people are using technology as a substitute for great selling skills. What are your top 3 pet peeves about the way people are selling today?

JW: As CEO of a company, I am now both a salesperson and a buyer.  We have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars building out our infrastructure, oftentimes with 3rd party tools and services from vendors.  My 3 pet peeves in working with these vendors have been:

  • Long PowerPoint presentations that emphasize the history and values of the vendor rather than my specific business challenge and how they can help address it.
  • Lack of awareness as to who the buyer actually is.  While I may be CEO, I generally outsource all technology decisions to my partner & CTO.  You would be surprised by how many vendors lack an appreciation for the differences between a buyer and an influencer.
  • Providing me with boilerplate vendor slicks as opposed to 3rd party content (HBR blog entries, industry best practices, etc) that can help influence my thinking.

BG: We definitely share the same pet peeves. As you know, I have strong opinions about why I believe sales people need to change their approach to selling. Why do you think it is important?

JW: Research by CSO insights suggests that only 46% of forecasted deals close.

BG: Ouch, only 46%? That’s a lot of lost revenue sitting out there. What’s the problem?

JW: After the countless hours of training and millions of dollars spent on tools, today’s B2B salesperson still has better odds at a Las Vegas craps table.  The definition of insanity is to repeat the same behaviors while expecting different results.  Handshakez helps sales reps redefine their approach, grow closer to the customer, and differentiate themselves.  We help clients close this forecast gap.

BG: Everybody talks about their ability to deliver ROI, but often they really can’t. What kind of ROI can sales leaders expect to see when their teams use your social selling platform?

JW: We help our customers realize a 10% increase in renewal rates and a 10 hour reduction per week in time each sales rep spends doing manual and administrative tasks within CRM.

BG: That’s what I would call ROI. And just think what could happen if each member of the sales team was spending 10 more hours per week on selling.

BG: Jason, I have enjoyed our conversation today, and I’m looking forward to our webinar on Thursday, June 27 at 12N Eastern.

Filed Under: blog Tagged With: content, new handshake, quota, revenue, sales, social media, social selling

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