social crm

Turning Relationships into Revenue with Christine Zmuda, Microsoft

In this episode, I talked with Christine Zmuda about Turning Relationships Into Revenue. Great topic and in fact, in my recent interview with Debbie Dunnam, we talked about how buyers – more than ever before – don’t want to be sold. They want to work with salespeople who they can trust and trust is developed when you make a point to focus on building relationships and doing for others first. Here I’ve summarized some of the nuggets of gold from the interview. Listen to it in full on iTunes or here on the blog.

Christine is a Sr. Sales Director in the Emerging Solutions Group at Microsoft. She got started in sales because she was looking for more options in her career. She started in marketing at Microsoft and eventually advanced into a sales role. The common thread for Christine was in taking on positions that were new businesses giving her the opportunity start something from scratch and build it from there.

In Christine’s current role in the emerging solutions group and their charter is to land new business acquisitions or launch first-party solutions from Microsoft. They test solutions to see what works, focus on how to scale and the team stays close to the customer experience.

Right now, Christine is almost exclusively focused on the Dynamics/LinkedIn partnership. In the first-year post-acquisition, performance is quite strong. Customer acquisition, renewal and customer experience has done well.

We talked about the importance of relationships in selling and Microsoft’s Relationship Sales solution that provides an integrated experience with LinkedIn, Office and CRM. The problems that LinkedIn and Microsoft wanted to solve for customers with this offering is to help sellers surface new connections, engage and nurture relationships with business insights and scale their sales outreach in a more personalized way. The other problem they wanted to help solve for sellers is to more easily broaden their reach inside an organization. The strategy of only calling “high” are less effective given the various stakeholders typically involved in buying decisions these days. One executive typically isn’t making the buying decision.

How do you know if you are hitting the mark on relationship sales? Listen to the interview to hear about some best practices that Christine shared.

And finally, we closed out the interview with Christine sharing her career advice for Women in Sales listeners.

Enjoy! Apple Podcasts – Please subscribe so that you never miss an episode! Write a review for the podcast if you like the interviews.

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About Christine

Christine’s passion and professional satisfaction come from identifying market opportunities before they are mainstream. Her most rewarding roles and accomplishments have centered around developing sales and market strategy for emerging businesses and scaling new acquisitions. She is always open to learning more about technology and happy to share her own experiences of leading sales, marketing, and channel teams if it’s helpful.

On a personal note, she enjoys golf, tennis, spending time with my family and embracing new experiences. Her new found love is abstract painting, the bigger the canvas the better.

Connect with Christine on Twitter and LinkedIn

Thanks to our Sponsors

We’d like to thank our Elite Sponsor, Microsoft. In particular, we thank Gavriella Schuster, Corporate Vice President and Channel Chief at Microsoft, for her dedication to supporting women in technology, and making this podcast possible. Gavriella and Microsoft are committed to giving “young women better role models and a stronger voice to all women.” You can hear more from Gavriella and other Microsoft leaders, on the Microsoft Partner Network podcast. Visit the Microsoft Partner Network.

Thanks to our Media Sponsor. Women Sales Pros has a vision for more women in B2B sales and sales leadership roles where there are currently male-majority sales teams. We help educate companies on how to do this, and we champion women on what a professional sales career can be. We also showcase the very top women sales experts who are speakers, authors, consultants, trainers, and coaches. People can sign up to get updates HERE and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @WomenSalesPros

How Nimble is Your Network?

By Barbara Giamanco 3 Comments

When I first began my professional career in sales, my first sales network was captured in a Rolodex. For those salespeople too young to know what a Rolodex is – basically it is cards on a wheel. Believe it or not, those little gems are still sold.

How did we schedule our sales call follow up? Uh, a Day-Timer, a Franklin Planner or my favorite, a Covey 7-Habits of Highly Successful People binder and planner. In those days, we actually wrote down our schedule by hand. What?

Tracking sales opportunities? Well, until a sales tool called GoldMine came along, we tracked activities manually. Goldmine is a platform that pioneered relationship management before Outlook and Salesforce and before sales force automation and CRM. Goldmine essentially gave birth to CRM and marketing automation. Who knew that years later, I would meet and become friends with the co-founder of GoldMine, Jon Ferrara.

As I’m going to talk about in a minute, Jon is reinventing the sales industry once again with a platform that takes the hard work out of prospecting and makes it fun to network and nurture relationships into hard-core revenue.

And here we are in 2014…

Social selling is the rage, but most salespeople aren’t following an organized process, nor do they have a system for unifying communication across multiple online channels.

CRM systems have evolved; we have social networks like LinkedIn and other tools to help us connect, better get to know and engage with customers and prospects. But to date, it has still been clunky. A salesperson’s day often consists of jumping in and out of their CRM system to research, engage on social channels and share content.

Enter Nimble

Nimble is different because the platform is a portal for all your sales conversations and public information pulled together in an all-inclusive work space. It integrates your contacts, to do items, notes, email, your CRM, sales deals and your social media connections into a single application. A godsend for anyone in sales, but nirvana for smaller businesses who don’t need complicated CRM systems.

By the way, even those sellers using Microsoft Dynamics or Salesforce can benefit from the power that Nimble gives them. More to come on that in a subsequent post.

Says Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara, “Let’s face it, most peoples CRM is their Inbox and they are overwhelmed with contacts and communications. Nimble brings intelligence and collaborative workflow to the inbox and our users are turning Nimble into a verb as they use our Smart Contacts widget to prepare them for more authentic, relevant and effective engagement.”

Today, Nimble announced the newest release of its Nimble Everywhere strategy– Version 2.0 of the Nimble Contacts Widget for Gmail and Outlook. The company also debuted the ability to add Nimble’s Smart Contact profiles anywhere you work within Chrome web browsers. With the simple right click of your mouse, you can use Smart Contact profiles to help you pull data and create new contact records on the fly. I updated Office 365 with the Nimble app and wowser – news I can use right from within my email inbox too. Get the Chrome App here.

When you think about Smart Contact profiles, consider this example of how it can work for you. Let’s say you keep tabs on Who’s Viewed Your Profile in LinkedIn. You know people looked at your profile, but you don’t know why. You have no context. Nothing to help you start a meaningful conversation.

With Nimble’s new release, a simple right click on the person’s name lets you instantly create a record and let Nimble go to work sourcing the web and social networks for real-time information about that individual. Nimble builds out their profile with their interests, the content they share or the people they talk about. Think of it as your personalized treasure map giving you some serious clues about the right way to engage.

Though I’ve been using Nimble for some months now, I was not completely leveraging the power of the platform’s full capabilities. Today, I am blown away by this latest Nimble release. You have to experience the simplicity and power to believe it, and I encourage you to watch the video walkthrough. http://vimeo.com/90066404

Forget that outdated rolodex. Using Nimble, today’s social seller is a force to be reckoned with. Hats off to you, Jon and the entire Nimble team!

How to Fix 6 Dysfunctional Social Sales Behaviors

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

Utilizing the appropriate social media to tools to improve sales performance represents an investment of time, and depending on the types of tools that you are using, money.

A common myth is that social media doesn’t actually work; in terms of driving the sales process forward. It does, IF, you have an open mind, you know what you are doing while participating online and you are very clear about the results you want to achieve.

That’s the rub. Too many sales people get started with LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Plaxo or any other social tool because someone else invited them or suggested that they should. Maybe that happened to you. Or, one of your bosses heard social media was cool, so they told you to get going. So, you dutifully went and signed up. You probably then said to yourself, “OK, I’m here. Now what?”

To make the most of your investment in the social sales space, here are 6 behaviors to avoid if you want to achieve sales success.

Failure to begin with a social sales strategy. Yes, I know, planning is sometimes about the last thing you want to sit down to think about, but it’s critical if you expect to see an ROI. Failing to plan how you will use social tools is a recipe for failing altogether. If you don’t have a plan, how can you measure success? Would you really hit the highways expecting to get from Atlanta to Los Angeles without a map? Sure, you would probably end up there eventually (well, maybe not), but doesn’t it make a lot more sense to first determine where you are headed? Of course it does. Same thing with social media.
- Solution: Sales executives should schedule a social media planning session with their teams. Make sure that everyone on the team has the same understanding of what and why you are participating online. Discuss how you will measure and track results. Following that initial planning, discuss progress, lessons learned and share best practices during regular team meetings. This will help to keep everyone on track.
Lack of buy-in from top management. Many sales executives (and their bosses) are, unfortunately, still living in yesterday’s business world. They either see social media as a passing fad or a threat to their view of how the sales process works. Fear of what they do not understand keeps them rooted in outdated approaches to acquiring new customers and serving the ones that they already have.
- Solution: Education. And, I don’t mean a Twitter training class. Bring in outside help to properly educate your management teams on the business value and benefits to using social media. Recently, Dell announced that they’d sold an estimated $6.5 million in products and services using Twitter. LinkedIn has 70 million+ users with 66% of them listed as “key decision makers”. Are your sales people in front of them?
Lack of adequate training. Sales managers often assume that understanding and learning how to use social media tools is easy as learning email. Not so. Most of the tools themselves are fairly easy to figure out, but do your sales people understand how to create dashboards to “link” their various social sites, instead of having to visit them individually? Your sales team members probably understand how to invite colleagues to join them on LinkedIn, but do they know how to create dynamic lead generation lists that they can use for their prospecting efforts? Inadequate training is guaranteed to deliver lackluster results. Make the investment. It’s worth it.
- Solution: Provide the team with webinar training, classroom sessions, accountability telecalls and team coaching. The tendency is to go cheap, but the investment in proper usage training on the front end will give you a huge leg up in achieving your objectives. You may need to bring in outside help, and it would be a good idea to hire someone who has extensive sales and technology background. Anyone can teach your sales people to click on buttons, but I’m pretty sure you need them to understand more than that.
Expecting immediate results. This, very unrealistic, expectation will bite your sales people in the backside fast. Using social networking to further your sales efforts takes time. By the way, this isn’t all that different from traditional offline selling. The likelihood that one of your sales people meets that next million dollar customer at the one networking meeting they just attended is pretty slim. Not to mention that sales people often attend meetings that probably will NEVER produce a sales result.
- Solution: Keep your focus on the bigger picture. More than ever, a sale is about building a relationship with someone that advances the sale forward. The more expensive your product or service, the longer the sales cycle is. You already know this, so why insist that if you use social media it must deliver a result today? Here’s the good news though. Using social sales tools effectively will SHRINK the sales cycle, because your sales people will be reaching the right decision makers faster without driving all over town. Isn’t that what every sales organization wants…to close sales faster?
Sales people are supposed to sell not hang out on Facebook.
- Solution: Change your ‘tude. If your attitude is that your sales people are just “hanging out” then you either never helped them create their plan for being there, or you believe that this social media stuff is just dribble. Here’s the thing. If your ideal customer isn’t likely to be on Facebook then, of course, your sales people shouldn’t be spending time there. But, what if your perfect client does participate on Facebook? Shouldn’t your sales people be engaged where their buyer is likely to be? The answer is easy – yes! It is time to accept that integrating social tools into your sales process not only makes sense, but is critical.
No time. This is a common complaint. The reason that people get hung up on the time thing is that they consider the use of social media an “add-on” to an already packed day. The reality is that there is wasted time on the calendar of every sales person in your organization. Meetings with non-decision makers. Networking events that fall flat. Chasing down leads that are poorly qualified.
- Solution: Put all your sales people through a time tracking exercise. Have them track every activity on a daily basis for one week. Each activity should note the length of time it took to complete. At the end of one week, I think you will be surprised by the results. If, at that point, your sales people haven’t found at least 30 minutes a day of wasted time that they can instead use for online networking – it would be a first. But, just in case it ends up being true for your sales team, please drop me a note. I’ll need to award you a prize to celebrateJ.

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