To generate predictable revenue, you have to know how long things take in your funnel.

Measuring and paying attention to the time element of the predictability formula (page 42 of our book) should be part of your focus.

We all know that over time, and as a prospect gets to know us, we establish credibility and trust. How can we slash the amount of time it takes to build credibility and shorten our sales cycle?

According to Dr. Cialdini, author of Influence – Science and Practice, there is a way to build credibility from what used to take 7-8 calls all the way down to 1 call.

This audio file (18:37 minutes long) teaches pharmaceutical reps how to ethically use simple phrases to quickly gain trust. The teachings in this audio file will serve you, no matter what your industry.

URL is: http://www.influenceatwork.com/podcast/cialdini_interview.mp3
or you can click here: Interview

Apply some of these techniques on your next series of e-mails, voice mails and conversations and you will surely start chiseling away at those lengthy sales cycles.

Train hard and expect sales success.

Last month, David Skok, a partner at Matrix Ventures and author of the popular For Entrepreneurs blog (we highly recommend you should follow it) introduced me to the executives at Digium.  Why, you might ask?

David said he’d referred our Predictable Revenue book to his portfolio companies, and that one, Digium, had redesigned their whole sales strategies after reading our book.  I’d never heard of or talked with Digium, so the fact they could get so much value from reading our book made me want to talk with them!

Digium®, Inc., the Asterisk® Company, created, owns and is the innovative force behind Asterisk, the world’s most popular open source telephony project.  Digium’s mission is to transform the way businesses acquire and operate their communications systems through the application of open source software. (<- Picture: Steve Harvey, VP WW Sales, Digium)

I was able to virtually ‘sit down’ with their executive team and talk about how they do what they do… Some points we covered:

• Why you need to reframe your terms in simple english that customers understand (escape the Echo Chamber)
• Why they moved from generalized salespeople doing it all to specialized salespeople (inbound/outbound/closing)
• What Leslie (VP Marketing) did to better handle their big flow of inbound leads
• Their challenges with implementing outbound sales (both 1) making the Cold Calling 2.0 referral process work; and 2) converting pre-qualified leads they buy into customers), plus my coaching for them
• Their best, fewest key metrics they track in sales & marketing
• How long it took them to make the switch from “Sales 1.0″ to “Sales 2.0″ (and how it’s an ongoing process)
• Danny Windham (CEO): “This is not a game of high-level metrics…must drill into incredible attention to detail, to make the machine run”
• Steve: The importance of ensuring feet-on-the-street managers coach more.
• David (Sales & Marketing Ops): The importance of planning changes
• Leslie: Why tracking lead source is so important
• About their great Switchvox telephony product (sounds awesome)

For more about Digium, check out:

• www.Digium.com

As always… would love to see your comments below!

Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Dave Kurlan, a best selling author, top rated speaker and sales thought leader.  He is the founder and CEO of the Objective Management Group, Inc., the leading developer of sales force evaluations and sales candidate assessments, headquartered in Westboro, Massachusetts.

He possesses more than 30 years of experience in all facets of sales, sales leadership, sales strategy, sales training, coaching and consulting.

Simply put, Dave is a Sales Rockstar!

He is internationally known for his groundbreaking work in evaluating sales people and he is the co-developer of Salesmind, software that helps salespeople overcome their weaknesses and much much more!

Dave’s best-selling book is titled “Baseline Selling: How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know About the Game of Baseball.”

I met Dave through a client of mine, who said he thought I’d like his work.  I talked with Dave and not only did I like his sales work, but I also thought he was a super interesting and genuine guy! I caught up with Dave and in our interview, we covered topics like:

• Dave’s passions for sales, fatherhood, music & baseball
• The #1 problem he’s asked for help with (which turns out to be the same top problem as 30 years ago)
• His “Inoffensive Close” (three simple questions)
• How he got started in sales and sales management by selling Cutco knives at age 18
• Dave’s decision about business travel when his son turned 5

Listen to or Download the Interview (listening time: 44:44 minutes)

To listen:

To Download:
Download The Interview

Want to read more about Dave?  Check out the links below:

1. DaveKurlan.com
2. Baseline Selling on amazon
3. Check out his blog series “Salespeople are like Children”

There was an interesting discussion going on in a LinkedIn group recently, on the question of: “90% of professional salespeople do not consistently prospect. Fact of fiction?”

Don’t sales managers complain all the time that their people don’t prospect enough?  Hmm; if everyone seems to have the same challenge, maybe it’s not the salespeople that are the problem…perhaps there are other hidden forces at work

Look, what people don’t understand is that there are GREAT REASONS WHY professional salespeople don’t prospect!

• They are afraid of rejection (a form of fear)
• They aren’t any good at prospecting, and don’t see a return on it.
• They don’t like to do it.
• They are under more demands than ever with the other parts of their ‘day jobs’ (more handholding in deals, servicing current customers, higher quotas, filling out CRM systems, more reporting, etc)
• VP Sales/CEOs have unrealistic expectations about how much they “should” prospect, the results they “should” generate.
• Their company doesn’t train them on how to prospect effectively, give them helpful tools or reasonable goals. Usually the guidance is along the lines of “make more calls!”  Wow, that’s helpful.

5 Things You MUST Do To Build An Outbound Sales Machine

From lessons learned at Salesforce.com (I built their outbound sales process and team, and recently published a book about it called “Predictable Revenue”) and in coaching/speaking with many other companies who have succeeded and failed at building outbound sales teams and predictable revenue…

1. You MUST specialize your salespeople, and have, at a minimum, at least one (better is two) outbound reps focused 100% on prospecting – and that means NO CLOSING or inbound lead qualification. If you can’t specialize today, make a plan on how and when you can. You don’t need to be big to begin to specialize; all you need is two people in sales.
2. You must use a referral/researching approach rather than cold calling people directly. You can generate quality referrals from cold contacts who have never heard of you via short and sweet email templates.
3. You must focus on QUALITY, not quantity, of actions, calls and leads (fewer, bigger, better).  This includes having a well-defined activity funnel, and measuring results-based activities (such as “Number of Scoping Calls Completed Per Week”) and never measuring dials.
4. You must train your outbound salespeople to be “businesspeople who can sell”, rather than salespeople. Not only do they need to have a multi-step outbound sales process that works, they also must be able to have an intelligent conversation with high-level executives, whether via email or phone. You can train young people (even out of college) to do this.
5. You must SIMPLIFY what you track in your CRM/SFA system (such as a Salesforce.com), focusing on your few, best metrics (like new $ pipeline created per month, qualified leads per month, etc.) You have to get rid of all your extra junk tracking fields that clutter everything, and simplify your dashboards.

Unfortunately, too many companies won’t take the single most important step to make prospecting work – dedicating an inside sales team or role 100% to prospecting and generating opportunities to pass on to the Account Executives/closers.  This is always priority #1!

For More…

• Grab the best-selling Predictable Revenue book
• On Hubspot: 5 Reasons Not To Give Inbound Leads To An Outbound Sales Team

The phenomenal growth of HubSpot is a direct result of the people, product and processes in place at the company.

Mark Roberge is responsible for the entire sales function at HubSpot, increasing revenue over 6,000% and expanding the sales team from 1 to 100 employees in four short years. His goal at the start of his journey was to create a predictable, scalable revenue channel for HubSpot.

Results from Mark and his teams’ efforts firmly places HubSpot #33 on the 2011 INC 500 Fastest Growing Companies list.

Aaron Ross, creator of our Predictable Revenue framework, caught up with Mark at the Sales 2.0 conference in Santa Monica.  Hear what Mark has to say about our newly released book – Predictable Revenue:  Turn Your Business into a Sales Machine.  In this brief (1:47 minute) video Mark talks about his reaction to the book and how he credits much of his success in building the sales machine talent at HubSpot to the material we present in the book:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The book is available on Amazon.

Hi – Aaron Ross here!  At a Sales 2.0 conference in Santa Monica, I caught up with Mark Roberge and asked him a couple of questions.  He had just finished a great talk about creating predictable revenue.  He shares here how many reps in what functions he has, and how many times they need to call inbound leads before they are supposed to give up…

Click here to view the embedded video.

PS – Thanks Mark & Peter Caputa for our guest post over there at Hubspot.com: 5 Reasons Not to Give Inbound Leads to an Outbound Sales Team

PPS – Mark also did a video testimonial for our Predictable Revenue book.

R.A.K.E.

Ruminate, Advance, Keep, Esteem

As a Californian living in Iowa, I am embracing all things seasonal, but with my stubborn eco-friendly ways, this is causing quite a bit of manual labor – mine. Refusing to even think about a leaf-blower for my now expansive lawn (which used to be some smartly placed rocks in my front yard on Marina Blvd in San Francisco), I set out last week to tackle the leaves. According to Iowa legend, leaves make the grass yucky if you fail to eradicate them before the snow comes.

Ruminate

The first time my son and husband raked the lawn, they raked leaves in a pile, put them in a small compost bag, carried them to the ravine on our property and turned the bag upside down coating the floor of the ravine with nice compost for next season’s growth. It took them 2 1/2 hours to do the front lawn this way.

I volunteered to do leaves last Monday morning. Unfortunately, I only had 1 1/2 hours to do the work, and there was just me.

I started using my husband’s process, but realized the effort to get raked leaves over to the ravine.

Teaching Point #1: Focus on one key problem, skill or area in your  OB Lead Generation process at a time

Advance

I was convinced there was a better way to get the leaves over to the ravine in bulk rather than one bag at a time. After pondering for a few minutes, I saw a plastic tarp covering wood and asked if I could borrow it for an hour or so.  Now, instead of:

• rake leaves into a pile,
• place rake down,
• bend down, scoop up leaves with hands,
• put them neatly into a bag

I laid the tarp on the grass and raked 10 times as many leaves onto the tarp. No bending, no scooping. Rake never left my hands.

Teaching Point #2: Improve significantly in that area

Keep

Now all I had to do was drag the plastic tarp (think pulling a sled) over to the ravine, flip it over and watch the leaves slide down the ravine. Instead of carrying 30 bags over to the ravine, I made 5 trips – tops.

Teaching Point #3: Sustain the improvement through repetition and practice. Measure and monitor.

Esteem

Not only did I accomplish the same task in a little more than half the time it took my boys, but the next day I was rewarded with no back pain! And, the additional calories burned meant I could treat myself to a steamy mocha on the way to my appointment.

Teaching Point #4: Honor your achievements. Review. Focus on a new area of improvement.

It snowed two days later.

If you’re like many of our clients, you’ve spent a lot of time and effort creating inbound leads for your sales team.  But, is your team truly optimized to handle them? Or are you dealing with:

• low lead qualification rates,
• dropped leads,
• small average order sizes, and
• salespeople who aren’t proactive in developing “small” leads into “big” ones?

(For example, when a marketing manager registers at your site, then goes silent, does anyone in sales reach out to the VP of marketing or CEO of that same company?)

It’s time to specialize your team by segmenting them into different sales roles so you have sales reps:

• qualifying inbound leads,
• separate from the ones doing outbound prospecting,
• separate from the ones who are closing.

So, should you give inbound leads to your outbound sales team? “No!” One of the biggest productivity killers in sales is giving a sales rep more than one core sales responsibility — such as inbound lead qualification, outbound prospecting, closing, or account management. If you have sales reps that are doing both inbound lead qualification and outbound prospecting, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

Building a highly productive, modern sales organization requires increasing specialization of roles — and frankly, it’s a big reason companies like Salesforce.com have such an amazingly phenomenal sales organization.

Let’s look at some of the problems of having salespeople juggle two or more hats of inbound lead response, prospecting, closing, and account management:

Inefficiencies of Generalized Salespeople

1. Expensive: Why would you have your highest-cost people (account executives/closers), doing lower-cost work of prospecting or inbound lead qualification?
2. Impossible to Be Experts: Salespeople juggle too many responsibilities already, reducing their ability to get things done or to focus. Let closers close, prospectors prospect, etc. Focus your salespeople to allow them to become experts in their area — at inbound qualification, closing, prospecting, or farming.
3. Harder to Develop Talent: When you only have one or two sales roles, it’s more challenging to bring in raw talent and develop them. There’s no progressive, step-by-step career path. This is unfortunate, because homegrown talent usually ends up being your best.
4. Unclear Metrics: It’s harder to break out and keep track of key metrics (inbound leads, qualification and conversion rates, customer success rates…) if all the functions are lumped into single areas. Different roles = easier to break out different steps in your processes = better metrics.
5. Less Visibility Into Problems: When things aren’t working, lumped responsibilities obscure what’s happening and make it more difficult to isolate and fix issues with accountable follow-through.

The 4 Core Sales Roles

Here are four basic sales roles you must begin dividing your team into:

1. “Inbound” Lead Qualification: commonly called “market response reps,” they qualify marketing leads coming inbound through the website or 800-number. The sources of these leads are marketing programs, search engine marketing, or organic word-of-mouth.
2. “Outbound” Prospecting: Commonly called “sales development reps,” this function prospects into lists of target accounts to develop new sales opportunities from cold or inactive accounts. This is a team 100% dedicated to proactive new business development. These reps create and qualify new sales opportunities from cold accounts and then pass them to account executives to close. They do not respond to inbound website leads or close deals. My book, Predictable Revenue especially goes into a lot of detail on how this role and the “Cold Calling 2.0” process works.
3. Closers: Commonly called “account executives,” these are quota-carrying reps who close deals. They can be either inside or in the field. While they stay in contact with new customers after signing them, they are not responsible for deployment; they hand customers off to a services group or account management for that.
4. Account Management/Customer Success: This includes client deployment, services, account management, and renewals. In today’s world of “frictionless karma,” someone needs to be dedicated to making customers successful and happy — and that is NOT the salesperson!

If you aren’t specializing your team and segmenting them into these kinds of roles, this is the very first place to begin!

When to Specialize?

We frequently hear, “We’re too small to specialize. We don’t have enough salespeople.” The best time to specialize is always sooner than you think, even if you just have a handful of account executives. To begin specializing, all you need is two people. For example, if your inbound lead flow is light and you need to build pipeline fast, the second person you hire after a salesperson who can close, should be a sales rep who is dedicated just to generating leads for your closer.

We use the 80/20 rule of thumb. When a group of reps are spending more than 20% of their time, on average, on a secondary function, break out that function into a new role. For example, if your closers are still qualifying their own inbound leads, and they’re spending 20% or more of their time doing that, you should hire a dedicated rep who takes over all the inbound lead qualification.

And if your closers are, on average, spending more than 20% of their time prospecting for new client business from cold accounts, then create a dedicated prospecting role so the closers can focus on closing and generating new business from referral partners, current clients, or other relationship-based activities.

By having a role dedicated 100% to qualifying your inbound leads, separate from your prospectors and closers, you’ll improve your conversion rates, lead hand-off process and follow-up, and talent development. And for goodness’ sake, don’t send your precious inbound leads to your outbound sales team!

There has been a lot of chatter surrounding the start of 4th quarter; for most of you the last hurrah to finish off the year. As you ponder your planning for the quarter, I want you to consider this statement:

“Anything worth having requires a commitment to yourself and a conscientious effort”.

Let’s break down the first part of the sentence – “..a commitment to yourself”.

How do you define this in terms of improving your outbound workflow?

• Master your e-mail messaging?
• Offload repetitive tasks to a more automated process?
• Build a summarized dashboard so you can see where bottlenecks lie?
• Build a stronger follow-through process?
• Create an editorial calendar for your nurture queues?

While this is certainly not an exhaustive list of process chunks that will move you towards predictable revenue, are you willing to pick one (or come up with one of your own) and commit to accomplishing the chunk before the end of 2011?

Next, let’s look at the second part of the sentence – “…conscientious effort”

Most of us (me included), know what we are supposed to do, or need to do in order to achieve our goals, but are we on auto-pilot or sleep-walking through some of our days? What can we do to conscientiously keep the drive going?

There is a funny quote from Zig about drive and motivation. “People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.” ~Zig Ziglar

Ready to move your business over the hot coals towards more predictability?

• Take a pen & paper (or do it electronically)
• Write down one goal you’d like to accomplish between now and the end of the year
• Send that goal to 20 friends (send it to me too)
• Ask them to hold your feet to the fire until you accomplish the goal
• Report back on how you did

Here’s to a profitable, fun, and goal-driven 4th quarter!

PS: Oh Yeah — my goal: 14% body fat + volunteering at a local Des Moines animal shelter. HOLD ME TO IT!!!

Bam! This hit me right between the eyes today.

If you know Aaron, and me, you know that we teach the concept of Ideal Customer Profile (if you want to know our philosophy about this in more depth, you can download our book [Kindle version] from Amazon).

In a nutshell, creating an Ideal Customer Profile, or, for you acronym folks out there, ICP, is similar to creating a persona. You blend together everything you know about your customer, or your wanna-be-customer and create a profile. You’ve got to do this for every product or service you sell because you may have different customers loving a different set of your stuff.  Personas are typically used for marketing purposes (writing content), and the ICP is used as you build your list for prospecting.

Well, we had the good fortune of spending time yesterday with one of our expert clients. I call them expert because this particular client really understands the Predictable Revenue process. They have been practicing this method for over a year now and have seen phenomenal results (results are higher than norm for their industry).

In the course of our discussions, we started talking about the ICP.  ”Funny thing about the ICP”, the CEO said.  ”Meaning?” we said.  ”Well, we discovered after all this time that our sweet spot is an entirely different profile.  We discovered if we sell to this type of prospect, they spend 10-times more with us per month”.

Wow wow wow!  Great way to make your numbers, yes?

Teaching Tip:  Take out your ICP and review it against data you’ve been tracking for:

• current opportunities
• current clients (higher revenue producing)
• sales cycle timeline (fastest closing)
• decision process
• decision makers (titles, pain points)
• regulatory/compliance changes
• competitor changes
• outliers

Make adjustments to your ICP and create an A/B test for your next campaign to test your new profile. If you’re like our client, you’ll be so happy you went through this exercise.

Have fun selling.