Learn why an asset package is such a crucial tool for outbound lead generation team training, especially for getting your reps prepared for selling into a new market.

Earlier this year I wrote a couple of blog posts explaining the importance of training your outbound lead generation team, and what should be included in a new hire onboarding program. However, outbound lead generation team training shouldn’t stop after onboarding.

I was recently reminded of this when we helped one of our portfolio companies develop an asset package to help them market their new product into the CPG and major retail market segments. Whenever your company is moving into new market segments or selling new products training the team on the details of the market can make a big difference in how they sound on the phone, and how successful they are on that campaign.

Developing an Asset Package for Your Sales Team

An “asset package” is the name that we at OpenView Labs have given to the set of assets provided to the sales and outbound lead generation team when our expansion stage portfolio companies test and explore new market segments. The materials in the asset package are specific to the buyers that your outbound lead generation reps are going after.

The goal of an asset package is to turn your reps into mini-experts on a particular target market in a few days. The more narrowly focused your target is, the easier this will be to achieve.

An asset package should include the following information and resources:

• Buyer profile guides for your target buyers
• Conversation guide(s)
• Email series
• Customer examples and use cases
• Objections and FAQs
• Key competitors in the target market segment
• Industry blogs/publications/LinkedIn groups

However, in many cases it may make sense to add additional materials to an asset package to help outbound lead generation reps better familiarize themselves with the market segment. A few other items we have tried include a glossary of segment lingo, an org chart illustration to show how departments are structured in complex organizations, and an outreach process that shows what is the best way to get in and penetrate an account.

What materials do you provide your sales team with to prepare them for selling new products or into new market segments?

photo: 401(K) 2013

A few months ago Anneke Seley wrote a great article on the OpenView Labs site with some tips on designing lead generation compensation plans. In the article she gives some great high-level advice and offers five tips that are really fundamental to building a good compensation plan for lead generation reps:

1. Strike the Right Balance Between Base Salary and Lead Generation Bonuses
2. Attribute Reps’ Bonuses to the Right Metrics
3. Avoid Tying Compensation to Things Reps Can’t Control
4. Pay Commissions & Bonuses as Often as Possible
5. Get Creative!

If you haven’t already, you should read that article before continuing on. Since I focus mostly on outbound lead generation I wanted to add my own thoughts on the topic, and highlight three key concepts that Seley touched upon in her article that I felt are particularly important for managers to understand when designing compensation plans for outbound lead generation teams.

1. The Cap
2. The Cliff
3. Incremental Pay Out

The Cap

Sometimes called the ceiling, the cap refers to capping the amount of incremental money a rep can make by overachieving on their goals.

Setting a cap on compensation might save you a little bit of money if your reps are really killing it, but overall it hurts your business more than it helps. If you cap your reps’ income they will not have any additional incentive to keep working hard after they’ve hit their goals, and it actually gives them an incentive to sandbag appointments slowing down the sales process.

In the chart below, the red line with triangles represents a capped compensation plan at which reps stop making money when they reach 20 appointments, while the green line represents an uncapped compensation plan. Placing a cap will punish your top performers, and worse, it can instill a culture of complacency on your team. On the other hand, keeping your outbound lead generation compensation plan uncapped will help create a sense of urgency and a drive to overachieve by putting your reps in control of their own destiny.

Concepts for outbound lead generation compensation plans.

The Cliff

Sometimes called the wall, the cliff refers to setting a target at a point short of the goal below which reps will earn no incentive compensation. This incentivizes reps not to dilly dally at the beginning of the month, and ensures that they meet at least the minimum expectations to make it over the cliff, or they won’t get their bonus.

The cliff is typically set around 50-60% of plan, so that it’s not too overwhelming, and so reps can still make some money even if they go on vacation for a week or take need to take a sick day. In the example above, reps don’t make any money until they hit their 13^th appointment.

Incremental Pay Out

This is just another way of saying how much you are going to pay your reps per unit that they deliver. For instance, in the chart above reps will make $1,000 for delivering 20 appointments. That means that the reps will make $50 per appointment above the cliff.

This is nothing fancy, but often managers and reps talk about compensation in percentage terms — i.e. if you get 75% of your target, you get 75% of your bonus. This is fine, but getting your reps to think about setting appointments in terms of cash can be a powerful motivator. That way instead of just being another appointment, every appointment they get is a new pair of shoes, a night out on the town, or extra money towards their down payment on a new house. So do the simple calculation and share it with your reps!

What approaches are you taking with your own lead generation compensation plan? Which approach is the best?

That is the question that I’m posing to any sales leaders reading this post.

Over the past several months I have been studying sales performance benchmarking with two goals:

1. To better understand if and how OpenView’s portfolio companies can benefit from sales benchmarking.
2. To identify the benchmarks for what I think are the key metrics for measuring sales and outbound lead generation performance and capacity:
   1. Outbound Lead Generation Metrics
      1. Number of Calls per Day per Rep
      2. Call to Conversation %
      3. Conversation to Appointment %
      4. Appointment to Opportunity %
      5. Lead to Opportunity %
   2. Sales Metrics
      1. Number of Open Opportunities per Rep
      2. Pipeline to Goal % (Coverage)
      3. Opportunity Win Rate % (New Customer Deals)
      4. Pipeline Slippage % (New Customer Deals that Push)
      5. Number of New Customer Deals Won per Rep per Month

I like data, so going into this I didn’t have any doubt that OpenView’s portfolio companies would be able to benefit from sales performance benchmarking. Over the last few years I have found myself in so many situations where someone asks me, or I ask myself “isn’t there a benchmark for that?”

Questions Sales Performance Benchmarks Can Help You Answer

Here are just a handful of the questions that benchmarks can help answer about your sales and outbound lead generation team:

• How many calls should my outbound lead generation reps be making?
• How many outbound lead generation reps should I hire?
• How many opportunities should my sales reps be able to carry at any given point?
• What is a good call to conversation conversion rate?
• When should I hire an additional sales rep?
• What is a good opportunity win rate?

These are questions that as a sales and lead generation consultant I am faced with on a regular basis. The truth of the matter is that the correct answer to all of those questions is: it depends. It depends on variety of factors such as the product market maturity, buyer profile, market segment, average deal size, and the list goes on. Good for one company could be bad for another.

However, a number of those factors can be controlled for given a complete enough sample, and there are a number of interesting reports published every year that share sales and lead generation benchmarking data from a number of different industries that get a lot of buzz and many of the sales leaders that I spoke with in my research find valuable and compelling.

At the same time, I spoke to number of experienced sales leaders who were skeptical of the value of sales performance and competitive benchmarking for expansion-stage companies. This surprised me.

What the Skeptics Say about Sales Performance Benchmarking

Sales benchmarking is different from the more commonly used financial benchmarking, which uses standard guidelines like generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) to define the metrics they are benchmarking.

With sales benchmarking, there aren’t standard definitions.

Every company has its own definition of a qualified lead, and even something like “Closed Lost Opportunity” needs to be defined in order to get an apples-to-apples comparison for the Win Rate. One company might define a “No Decision” as “Closed Lost,” while another company leaves “No Decision” as an open opportunity.

Furthermore, you can’t compare one company’s metrics to another. The skeptics don’t care what the top performing company benchmarks are because they believe their business is probably different, so the numbers might be completely arbitrary.

Why I Find Sales Performance Benchmarks Helpful & Valuable

Personally, I love having hard data to refer to when I’m trying to answer some of these questions. No matter what, when I’m working with a portfolio I always start with their historical data, and build a model to see what performance levels they have had historically — the goal is to always improve.

However, many of the companies we work with do not have historical data on which we can base any assumptions for those metrics. In those situations, having sales benchmarks can be incredibly helpful.

Having sales benchmarks can also be helpful if sales teams think they are doing well, but have no idea if other companies are having more success. Outbound lead generation and sales benchmarks gives me and our portfolio companies a general idea, or an acceptable range, of what performance levels other companies have been able to achieve for similar metrics. I find this helpful and valuable. At the very least, it’s a good sanity check.

I want to ask readers: Do you use lead generation or sales performance benchmarks? Do you find these types of benchmarks valuable? If you had benchmarks for the metrics laid out above would that be valuable to you?

Please leave your answers in the comments below.

This is the fifth and final post in a 5-part series on how managing inter-team collaboration can improve results for outbound lead generation teams.

In my previous post, I covered a few tips that outbound lead generation team leaders can use to collaborate with marketing to generate better lists for the team. In this post, I will cover a topic that most companies aren’t really good at until they have the fundamentals of marketing and outbound lead generation nailed: Creating multi-channel relationship marketing programs.

A Fast Track to Stronger Relationships with Your Prospects & Customers

The goal of any relationship marketing program is to drive awareness, interest, and purchase for all prospects that enter a buying process. Doing this extremely well (which most companies do not) requires the ability to pick up on buying signals, and deliver:

• the right content
• to the right prospect
• at the right time
• over the right channel

The outbound lead generation team is really just one of those channels.

Some marketing teams go down the road of building sophisticated marketing programs, (sometimes called lead nurturing programs), but they are not always integrated with outbound lead generation team calling efforts, or other channels for that matter.

A truly integrated multi-channel relationship marketing program touches a prospect/customer through multiple channels (email, direct mail, events, phone, social, etc.) to develop the relationship, and tracks the touch points to provide intelligence to the organization on the status of the relationship. A human touch point from an outbound lead generation rep early on in the process can help accelerate that relationship. When done well, this is a fast track to building a relationship with your prospects and customers, but is extremely difficult to scale without having the right elements in place.

Mapping Content and Touch Points to Your Buyer’s Journey

A great way to get started is by building a content grid to map out your buyer personas, their respective buying process stages, and finally content that aligns with each stage for each persona. Then consider what channels can best be used to deliver that content or message to your prospects/customers at the right time. Explaining this in further detail would require a lot more than a single blog post, but here are some great resources available to help you get started:

• How to Develop a Content Matrix: A Step-By-Step Guide
• The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing
• Content Marketing in a Blink: The Content Grid v2

While these resources are a great way to get started none of them go into great detail about how to integrate outbound lead generation as a channel in a relationship marketing program. Ultimately, the outbound lead generation team can collaborate with marketing by providing feedback into the program, and by making sure it is aligned with the team’s process. When an outbound lead generation rep updates a lead in the CRM system that update should impact what content is triggered to be sent to the prospect, and vice-versa.

An excellent resource that includes more specific guidance on integrating outbound lead generation into relationship marketing efforts is the book Lead Generation for the Complex Sales, by Brian Carroll of MECLABs. This book does an excellent job of walking through the entire process step by step.

If you have any experience integrating outbound lead generation teams into multi-channel marketing efforts it would great to hear about your experience. Please feel free to leave comments below.

by Ori Yankelev

This is the fourth post in a 5-part series on how managing inter-team collaboration can improve results for outbound lead generation teams.

In my previous post I covered how collaboration on events can yield more appointments for the outbound lead generation team and better results for the marketing team, as long as there some structure to the collaboration. In this post I will cover one of the areas where outbound lead generation teams tend to lean on marketing the most: list generation.

Why Collaboration is Crucial to Effective Lead List Generation

In many companies, marketing is responsible for delivering a list of suspects within the target market segment to the outbound lead generation team. When there isn’t good collaboration between the outbound lead generation team and marketing in this area, the team can easily wind up calling a list of potential prospects that are not in the right segment and/or do not fit the appropriate buyer persona, resulting in wasted efforts from both teams. The last thing you want is to find out that your enterprise outbound lead generation team has coffee shops and pet stores in the list of leads they are calling (it happens more often than you might think).

3 Ways to Build Better Lead Lists

However, there are a number of things that the outbound lead generation team manager and the marketing team can do to optimize this relationship through collaboration and improve the list acquisition process.

1) Set the right expectations with both teams

With outbound lead generation, the marketing team’s job is not to deliver warm leads that are lay-ups, but rather to deliver cold leads within the target customer segment (especially when the product is new to market). A cold lead within the target customer segment can be defined as a person, a company, or a subsidiary/business unit within a parent company. Generally, the more information that comes with lead the better; provided it’s accurate.

2) Control the flow of leads

There is no need to give an outbound lead generation rep more leads than he or she can work with in a given period of time. Leads should be provisioned on a weekly or monthly basis, in the quantity that a rep can handle. Depending on the complexity of the sale and the difficulty of getting the right people on the phone, reps should be able to handle 50 to 200 companies per month.

It is also important to control the number of contacts per company that are provided to the reps. The top three to five contacts that fit the key buyer profiles at each company is plenty. As reps call through their lists and set follow-up tasks according to your outbound process, the number of leads they will require per week or month will level off to a steady number. This way, marketing can be very clear on how many leads they will need to deliver and when. Controlling lead flow also helps prevent cherry-picking and helps the reps follow a consistent outbound process for each lead.

3) Provide regular constructive feedback

Whether the lists are generated by the marketing team, the lead generation team manager, or even the lead generation reps, holding a regular meeting to review feedback on the lead lists and list sources is very important. Outbound lead generation reps should note recurring issues that they find with their lists and share them at the meeting. Some key areas to provide feedback include:

• Which lists/sources worked well and why?
• What additional lists/sources could potentially be targeted for scraping?
• What data was missing from the leads provided that would be helpful?
• Where/how can the data be captured?
• Can that data be captured in a scalable way, or are qualifying calls the best method?
• Where else can we find good leads that fit the target and will allow you to hit your goals?

If you manage an outbound lead generation team then you already know that any help you can get from other teams on the list generation process is great. After all, the less time your reps spend sourcing lists, the more time they can spend on the phone with prospects. At the same time, getting a list of crappy leads doesn’t help anyone. Implementing the steps above can help you improve the list generation process, and can help you get better results from your outbound lead generation team.

In my next and final post in the series on how managing inter-team collaboration can improve results for outbound lead generation teams I’ll cover how the best companies completely integrate outbound lead generation teams into multi-channel, multi-touch, integrated marketing programs.

What tips can you add to this list to help teams generate the best lead lists possible?

This is the third post in a 5-part series on how managing inter-team collaboration can improve results for outbound lead generation teams.

In my last post I covered how companies and teams can benefit from creating a marketing feedback loop to give marketing real time insights from the market. This can be especially valuable at expansion-stage companies that are exploring new markets to sell into. In this post I will cover another way that marketing can collaborate with outbound lead generation teams: events.

Determining the True Value of Events: Cost per Lead (CPL)

Events such as trade shows and webinars can be a great opportunity for the outbound lead generation team to collaborate with marketing. From marketing’s perspective, the costs of trade shows and events are fixed costs. What isn’t fixed, however, is the cost per lead (CPL) generated by those trade shows and events. The more leads that marketing walks away from an event with, the lower the CPL for that event.

From that perspective, it makes sense for marketing to do as much as they can to get as many leads as possible out of every event. That said, many early and expansion-stage companies with limited sales and marketing resources allow events to coast by with very little pre-work, and/or follow up.

An outbound lead generation team can help maximize the impact of an event by driving prospects to register for an event, calling registrants to drive people to meetings at your booth, or setting appointments with target prospects following up after the event. This can add a tremendous amount of value to just about any marketing team.

Be Careful Not to Go Overboard with Your Helping Hand

While an outbound lead generation team can help in this way, outbound lead generation team leaders must exercise caution with this approach, and must be very clear on what the outbound lead generation team’s purpose is.

Your outbound lead generation team should be focused on a list of companies in a narrowly defined target market segment. By asking your outbound lead generation team to also lend a hand driving traffic to an event or following up with attendees, you risk distracting them from their target list of companies. This may not seem problematic, but here is an example of where it could be:

An Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) company focused on the mid-sized healthcare and pharmaceuticals markets sponsors an event like VMworld (VMware’s annual cloud computing and virtualization conference). However, the attendees at VMWorld come from companies of a wide range of sizes and industries, and attendees from the healthcare and pharmaceuticals market segments only make up a small portion of the attendees. If this company’s outbound lead generation team is tasked with following up with all of the attendees, or even all of the booth visitors, they will be wasting their time with companies that aren’t on their target lists, and probably are a lot less likely to buy from them.

Best Uses of Marketing & Sales Team Collaboration Around Events

Outbound lead generation teams should be leveraging marketing events on calls with their prospects. Interesting industry events are great talking points for a call or to mention in an e-mail to keep the content relevant and fresh. However, by collaborating with marketing teams more closely both the marketing team and the outbound lead generation team will be able to achieve better results without creating a distraction for the outbound lead generation team from their targeted list efforts.

Here are three ways in which marketing and outbound lead generation teams can collaborate better on events:

1. Marketing should provide the outbound lead generation team with a mini asset package for each specific event including: messaging for the event, related talking points, one or two sample e-mails that can be sent to prospects, expected attendee profiles, and specific instructions for how to setup meetings at the booth/register attendees/etc.
2. Marketing should include the outbound lead generation team on promotional emails for the event that are being sent out to prospects so that they see what messaging and touch points are being made in parallel to their efforts.
3. The lead generation team should identify companies on their target accounts lists that would be interested in attending the event/webinar and personally invite them rather than just calling everyone on an event list.

In my next post I’ll discuss how list generation can be a key area for collaboration between marketing and the outbound lead generation team.

photo: TheWanderingAmerican

This is the second post in a 5 part series on how managing inter-team collaboration will improve results for outbound lead generation teams. In my last post I covered the four mistakes that will sabotage the relationship between the sales team and the outbound lead generation team. In this post I’ll cover one way you can foster sales and marketing collaboration by establishing a feedback loop between your outbound lead generation teams and marketing.

Outbound lead generation reps will typically make anywhere from 50 – 200 calls per day. Even at the low end, they will wind up speaking with a lot of prospects in your company’s target market segment. With a fully trained and staffed outbound lead generation team, it is almost like holding a microphone out to the market. That is, as long as the feedback is getting back to the marketing team.

Why Lead Generation Reps are Marketers’ Best Friends

Marketing teams will invest resources and effort into developing content, messaging, and events they think will resonate with prospects. While quantitative metrics like downloads and click-through rates provide some measure of performance, an outbound lead generation team will gather more qualitative feedback on the messaging and content directly from the target audience. That’s because part of generating leads is having intelligent conversations in which prospects reveal hints towards market trends, competitors, objections, and challenge that they might be facing. Most great outbound lead generation reps gather this feedback instinctively, but it’s up to management to create a venue — or a formal process — for them to share that feedback with the rest of the organization.

If there is a collaborative feedback loop between the outbound lead generation team and the marketing team, that qualitative feedback can be used to drive the creation of new content, events, and messaging that should perform even better.

Creating a Feedback Loop Between Sales and Marketing

One way to implement this feedback loop is to track key messaging data using fields in your CRM system, and create a messaging dashboard. You can create one or two messaging fields to capture information such as objections that came up during the call and the key pain points that the prospect was experiencing. Marketing can then leverage the data in those reports to develop additional content to address impediments and pain points that seem to be consistently coming up.

Here’s what it might look like on a dashboard:

Outbound Lead Generation Team Messaging Dashboard

Another way to improve the feedback loop is to hold a periodic meeting between sales and marketing to collect the feedback verbally in a discussion forum. Reviewing the messaging data from the CRM system prior to and during that meeting will help you make the best use of the time to drill into some of the interesting points in the data.

This meeting is also a good time to review perceptions and trends in the market to get ideas for improved messaging and content. Rather than holding a separate meeting for this purpose, you may want to have a few people from the marketing department attend one of the outbound lead generation team’s standing team meetings once per month.

In my next post I’ll discuss how outbound lead generation teams can collaborate with marketing on events.

This is the first post in a five-part series on how outbound lead generation teams can collaborate with other teams to improve lead generation results. This post covers why it’s so important to foster collaboration between your outbound lead generation team and your sales team — and highlights four big mistakes that will ensure that doesn’t happen.

Collaboration with the sales team is the foremost critical inter-team relationship that requires management attention. Sales reps are critical stakeholders in the outbound lead generation process, and having their buy-in on the mission and role of the outbound lead generation team is critical to the success of your outbound lead generation initiative.

When the sales team cooperates, and actively participates in the outbound lead generation process, they will bring a tremendous amount of value to the team, which will in turn provide a boost to their own efforts and the entire company, in general.

There are a number of common failure points at which this relationship tends to break down, but if you proactively monitor and manage the relationship, you will significantly increase your odds of success.

1) Treat Your Outbound Lead Generation Reps Like Sales Rep Administrative Assistants

Let’s be clear — outbound lead generation reps have their own goals and objectives that they are expected to meet, and that doesn’t include being a sales rep’s personal assistant.

Outbound lead generation reps who are early on in their career can easily fall into the trap of doing whatever the sales person asks them to do, even if it’s not moving them toward their goals. As a result, they aren’t doing their job, and, ultimately, that will hurt the sales rep’s pipeline just as much as the lead gen rep’s results.

The lead generation team manager must keep an eye out for this type of behavior and can put an end to it by clarifying the roles and responsibilities of everyone involved in the process.

2) Don’t Establish a Clear Lead Hand-Off Process or a Firm Definition of What a Lead Is

Sales reps must buy into the same definitions and processes that the lead generation team is working toward. That means that as long as a qualified lead meets the defined criteria, sales reps must treat it as one.

Sales reps need to know and play their role in the qualified lead hand-off process as defined by the leadership, and they must follow up on all appointments/qualified leads that are passed to them. They must also follow the hand-back process when an appointment/qualified lead does not meet the defined criteria so that the lead generation rep can follow up on it.

The outbound lead generation team manager must follow up on the leads that his or her team passes to sales to make sure that they are meeting the defined criteria and being followed up on by sales.

3) Don’t Schedule Regular Meetings Between the Teams

Besides monitoring the common failure points, outbound lead generation team managers can also take proactive measures to improve collaboration with the sales team.

Encouraging outbound lead generation reps to meet with the sales reps they support weekly or biweekly is a great way to do that. This allows them to build a good working relationship, learn each other’s styles, and collaborate on different ways to penetrate accounts. It also gives the outbound lead generation reps an opportunity to receive more direct and detailed feedback on the opportunities that are going well, and on the leads that get handed back.

4) Don’t Meet with Reps Individually

Finally, outbound lead generation team managers should make it a point to collaborate with sales by meeting with sales reps individually. That will allow them to solicit unfiltered feedback on outbound lead generation reps and the quality of the leads being passed over.

In my next post I’ll discuss how the marketing feedback loop can bring value both to the marketing team, and to the outbound lead generation team.

photo: opensourceway

Although it can be a common pitfall at B2B expansion stage technology companies, sales and marketing should never operate in silos.

A functional outbound lead generation team can be a tremendous asset to an expansion-stage technology company. Having hundreds — and in some cases thousands — of conversations each month, the outbound lead generation team has a direct line to a high volume of prospects in your target market. This makes the function ideal for collecting insights on your company’s messaging and content, as well as perceptions and trends in the market.

Many companies overlook this fact — to the detriment of the outbound lead generation team and to the other departments that don’t view and leverage their insight as a valuable asset.

Many outbound lead generation initiatives fall short because the team doesn’t even collaborate well with the sales team, the primary beneficiary of their efforts.

That’s why managing collaboration between the outbound lead generation team and other teams/departments is so critical. When done well, it’s not just a win for the  lead generation team, but for the whole company. Marketing can leverage the team as an additional channel, sales gets a bigger pipeline, product can get additional insights to drive the product road map, etc.

Creating collaborative relationships with counterparts in other departments can benefit your lead generation team, as well.

Over my next five posts, I’ll write about what I think are the top five ways that an outbound lead generation team can collaborate with other teams to significantly improve outbound lead generation results:

1. Collaboration with Sales
2. Marketing Feedback Loop
3. Collaboration on Events
4. List Generation
5. Designing Multi-Channel Relationship Marketing Programs

If you have any other suggestions or ideas on how outbound lead generation teams can collaborate with other teams in the organization please feel to share them in the comments.

photo: Rob Boudon

There are many different ways to setup a contest for the outbound lead generation team, but the key is to create contests that incentivize the right behaviors. You also need to be careful not to reward the wrong behaviors.

For example, if you run a contest for most calls in a day you will probably get people fudging the stats. There are tons of contest ideas out there that you can find just by searching online. The key is to keep it fun and competitive. Here are few ideas:

• The whole team gets a prize if everyone generates above a certain number of leads
• The rep with the most qualified leads gets a prize
• The rep with the most conversations gets a prize
• The rep with most improved number of appointments/qualified leads (week over week, month over month) gets a prize
• Reps are individually recognized for personal achievement when they reach a personal best for appointments or qualified leads
• Reps are divided into teams and the team with the most qualified leads wins a prize
• Reps are awarded fake money for achievement in conversations, appointments, and qualified leads, and are later allowed to gamble it off for prizes at a “Monte Carlo Night”

Just as important as the contest is the prize, and like contest ideas, there are tons of different ways to reward the winners. It doesn’t always have to be money, and you should keep in mind if you run contest frequently enough the costs can start to add up. It’s a good idea to allocate a portion of your annual budget specifically for spiffs and contest prizes. Here are few suggestions for prizes:

• Cash
• Gift card to a nice restaurant or local coffee shop
• Amex/Visa gift card
• Extra day off to use whenever
• A trophy or plaque
• Paid vacation at a hotel for a long weekend
• Team dinner
• Permission to leave early on Friday

The Biggest Motivator

Never underestimate the power of recognition. Regardless of the contest you run or the prize you give to the winners, make sure that you present the award in public in front of the winner’s peers and superiors so they get the recognition they deserve.

If you have any other good contest ideas that I didn’t mention in this list, please share them in the comments.

Have a great 2013!!!

In my last post I introduced the importance of training your outbound lead generation team. In this post I’ll layout my recommendations for what should be included in the new hire onboarding training.

To get your team up and running it’s important that your new hire training — as well as your ongoing campaign-focused training — includes a number of key elements, especially if your new hires are relatively inexperienced in your product market.

Putting a comprehensive training plan together like the one below is a challenge for anyone, even the most experienced lead generation team managers. That’s why in the second column of the table you will find suggestions for roles that can typically help you prepare or present training on that particular topic.

Of course, at expansion-stage technology companies, many of those roles don’t even exist. In that case, the onus falls squarely on the lead generation team manager to deliver a training program that gets new outbound lead generation reps ramped up as quickly as possible.

In addition to the sessions listed above, I really can’t underscore enough the fact that there’s no better training than practice. That means plenty of role playing, group outbound calling, and calling into old leads. Practice should make up a significant portion of the new hire’s first couple of weeks on the job.

In my next post I’ll cover another training package that can be used in ongoing training specific to new products, markets, and campaigns. At OpenView Labs we call it an asset package.

Training is one of the most important yet overlooked aspects of building an effective outbound lead generation team.

Expansion-stage companies launching this type of team for the first time are often resource-constrained and make the mistake of thinking that trial by fire is an acceptable training program. For instance, they may simply give a new rep a list and have him or her start dialing. Sometimes they even skip the list and just point them to a phone.

Sure, this approach may work out fine, but only in the extremely rare cases where you’ve hired an absolute rock star. The truth is, it’s simply not scalable.

If you decide that consequences be damned, you’re going ahead with this approach, you’re essentially trusting your new hire to figure out a lot on their own. That includes determining the right messaging, scripts, e-mails, outreach process, and lead/opportunity management process, as well as how to log data in the CRM system (for starters).

(For more on this, see Former Stanford Business School professor and entrepreneur Mark Leslie’s article, “The Sales Learning Curve” which explains the difference between “Renaissance Reps” and “Coin Operated Reps,” and OpenView’s Labcast with sales management strategist Lee Salz on Common Mistakes Made When Onboarding Salespeople).

Even if the first few people you hire on your team do manage to figure out most of that on their own and meet their qualified lead expectations, the chances the next three, four, or five people you hire will be able to repeat that feat are slim. Without a training program that at minimum covers the basics of getting up and running, your team will not scale.

New managers are often challenged with figuring out what belongs in a training program for new outbound lead generation reps, and it isn’t exactly obvious. Having a new hire onboard training plan is critical. But even after your team is onboarded you should also provide them with regular training and assets related to the specific market segments, and/or campaigns they’re working on.

In my next two posts I’ll cover what should be included in both your new hire training package and an asset package that can be used as a template for new campaigns.

This is the second post in a two part series on outbound lead generation team sizing. In the first post I explained that there are two approaches that should be used to determine the appropriate size of your outbound lead generation team. The first approach is to size your team based on the capacity required to hit your pipeline and bookings goals using your sales activity funnel.

The second approach will tell you how big of a team you’ll need to effectively cover your market. This approach is especially useful for understanding how you might scale your team as revenues increase, and/or as you raise additional capital to fund growth.

Market Coverage-Based Approach

Before you launch an outbound lead generation team, you should identify your target market segment and have an understanding of the target buyer profiles within that target market segment. If you haven’t done this already, the OpenView Labs customer segmentation eBook is a great resource to help you get started. If you have already done the research and have selected a target market segment you should be able to estimate the number of target buyers in your target market segment.

You should also be able to estimate the number of conversations you expect to have with each target buyer based on your touch point model and/or outreach process. For example, if your outreach process calls for one conversation per quarter per target buyer then you’ll need four conversations per year per target buyer.

As noted by Trish Bertuzzi in the comments of my previous post, a number of variables may impact your touch point model, such as how saturated a particular market is with your competitor’s products, and how much of presence you already have in a particular market.

You can easily determine the total number of touches/conversations that will be required to effectively cover the total market segment by multiplying those three numbers. The table below demonstrates the calculations. Please feel free to leave a note in the comments if you’d like an Excel version of this template.

Outbound Lead Generation Team Sizing – Market Coverage-Based Approach

With the estimate for total number of conversations, you can then plug that number into your sales activity funnel to get to the number of calls divided by outbound lead gen rep capacity (Daily call target/ lead gen rep). That equation will give you the number of reps you’ll need to cover the market.

For example: If there are 1,250 companies in your target market segment, three target buyer profiles at each company, and your outbound process calls for a conversation with each target buyer once per quarter, that means your team will need to have 15,000 conversations per year to cover the entire segment.

If your call to conversation conversion rate is 12% and your reps can make 50 calls per day, then one rep will be able to have roughly 1,440 conversations per year. This means that to cover the entire market you’ll need about 10 lead generation reps, and each of which will effectively be able to manage about 120 accounts at any given time.

What’s important to keep in mind is that the market coverage-based approach and the pipeline-based approach may return different results for the team size. However, the two can be used to inform your decision, and set expectations for what a team of each size should be able to achieve in terms of market coverage and pipeline creation.

Over the past several months I have written a number of articles and blog posts about outbound lead generation team reporting structures, and how to establish the right goals for your outbound lead generation team. I’ve also done some informal research on a topic that I’m asked about frequently — the ratio between outbound lead generation reps and sales reps at software companies. Typically, when sales and lead generation leaders at our portfolio companies ask me about this ratio, they are using it as a method to validate the size of their outbound lead generation team.

However, if you truly understand your sales activity funnel and target market segments, the ratio between outbound lead generation reps and sales reps is practically irrelevant. Instead, there are two much more rational approaches to sizing your outbound lead generation team — the pipeline-based approach, and the market-coverage-based approach.

These two approaches are consistent with the overall goals of any outbound lead generation initiative — to create pipeline and penetrate new markets. Additionally, these two approaches can be used simultaneously to help you make your final decision.

Pipeline-Based Approach

For the pipeline-based approach your mission is to build a team that will have enough capacity to get to your goal of building pipeline. The best way to estimate the required capacity is to use the sales activity funnel to 1) back into the number of calls or activities your team will need to make in order hit the goals, and 2) estimate the number calls and activities that one rep will be able to complete using your own company experience and industry benchmarks. (Feel free to leave a comment if you’d like me to email you a copy of the template to plug your own numbers in.)

If you consider the sample numbers provided in the sales activity funnel blog post, your lead generation team must be able to make 205 calls per day to generate 82 appointments per month, which should result in 35 opportunities. If an average outbound lead generation rep makes about 50 calls per day, then you will need about four reps on your team to reach your goal.

By extrapolating data collected by the BridgeGroup in their 2012 Lead Gen Metrics Report on 41 software and SaaS companies, we found that, on average, lead generation reps make roughly 50 calls per day While 50 calls per day may be a good number to use for estimating should you not have any historical data on hand, this number will vary based on a variety factors including the target market segment, target buyer personas, and average deal size.

There is typically an inverse relationship between a single rep’s capacity and the sophistication of the buyers combined with the complexity of the sales. That is because more complex sales will require a more calculated, personalized and targeted approach compared to a transactional sale.

As long as this math makes sense for your organization and your sales team is properly staffed, then the ratio of outbound lead generation reps to sales reps shouldn’t matter. However, you’ll still want to make sure that your team is staffed to have adequate market coverage.

In my next blog post I’ll dive into the market-coverage-based approach.

Do you agree there’s no ideal ratio between outbound lead gen reps and sales reps?

In my last post, I wrote about how you can determine if the complexity of your sale justifies developing an outbound lead generation team. But complexity of the sale is just one factor that companies must consider when they make the decision to fire up an outbound lead gen initiative. The other, which I’ll cover in this post, is lead generation economics.

Even if your products and services require a complex sales process, an outbound lead generation team still might not be the most appropriate strategy to take. Before you decide to move forward with launching a team, your company’s lead generation economics should also be taken into consideration. In other words, how much does it cost you today to generate a qualified opportunity?

To answer that question, you should consider the following example.

If your marketing team has an annual budget of $1M and it generates 500 opportunities, your cost per marketing generated opportunity is about $2,000. Outbound lead generation reps typically cost $80,000 to $100,000 per year fully loaded. Even if a lead generation rep only finds two opportunities per week, it will cost roughly half as much money to generate almost the same number of opportunities.

Here’s the math to back that up:

[2opps per week] x [48 working weeks/year] x [5 outbound lead gen reps] = 480 opportunities

[5 outbound lead gen reps] x [$90,000 per fully loaded rep] = $450,000

Cost per outbound rep generated opportunity = $937.50

Outbound lead generation vs marketing economics

In this example, if your ASP is $25,000, then your outbound lead generation team should generate $12 million in pipeline. This makes it easy to justify the $450,000 cost of the team with a pipeline multiple of roughly 26X the investment. You can also take it a step further and estimate the team’s ROI if you know your average win rate.

In addition to the two primary factors that I mentioned in this series — sales complexity and lead generation economics — you must also consider the derivative benefits that come from having an outbound lead generation team.

Outbound lead generation isn’t just about opportunity creation. It also allows you to capture value points and objections from potential buyers, and to test new messaging and pitches with immediate, actionable feedback. Ultimately, that intelligence can help you fine tune your sales, marketing, and product development efforts with a much better understanding of the prospects in your target segment.

This inevitably makes every component of your organization more focused. Having a high volume of direct touches and conversations with prospects also helps companies increase brand awareness in their target market and build stronger relationships than an e-mail or advertisement could otherwise create. These intangible benefits can be incredibly valuable for expansion stage companies looking to increase awareness, market share, and their own understanding of their prospects and target markets.

Though deciding whether to build an outbound lead generation team is not an entirely black and white issue, your final decision should be based on a cost benefit analysis that takes into consideration the three things I’ve discussed in my my last few posts — sales complexity, lead generation economics, and the additional benefits that come as a result.

If your product requires a complex sale and the economics make sense, then building an outbound lead generation team should be a no-brainer.]

Learn more lead generation techniques here.

As mentioned in the previous post, average sales cycles (ASC) is one component of sales complexity. In addition to ASC, the complexity of sale can be determined by a number of other components, including the:

• Average sale price (ASP)
• Number of people involved in the decision
• Number of touch points required to close the sale

A complex sale typically requires multiple touch points just to get a call or meeting scheduled with the right decision makers. It also often requires calls with multiple people who each play a role in the buying process, such as the technical evaluator, influencer, user, business decision maker, and/or financial decision maker.

Additionally, a complex sale’s buying process typically takes longer than 30 days, and is most prevalent in situations where the ASP exceeds the amount that the decision maker has the authority to sign-off on without getting additional approvals from his or her superiors. Often times, this type of sale is also referred to as an enterprise sale.

Because procurement processes and approval thresholds can vary so much across companies, products, and markets, it would be difficult to say that there is a universal threshold for ASP and ASC, at which it does or does not make sense to launch an outbound lead generation team. However, in our experience we’ve found that a good rule of thumb is that when the ASC > 30 days, and ASP > $25,000 it is almost always a complex sale.

In a complex sales situation, sales reps can carry a smaller number of opportunities in their pipeline and they must spend more time focusing on those opportunities to increase their chances of winning. This means that they have less time to dedicate to prospecting and building new pipeline.

For example, if your deals require the initial call, technical demo, proof-of-concept, and multiple conversations with several different corporate department heads, then an outbound lead generation team that qualifies and sets up the initial call for the sales team can be hugely beneficial.

A non-complex sale is typically much more transactional and is characterized by shorter sales cycles, lower ASPs, fewer decision makers, and fewer touches required to get the deal done. If the ASC is <30 days, and the ASP is low enough that your buyers can make a decision without getting too many additional approvals, then you likely don’t need to hire a team of individuals to be responsible for outbound prospecting.

For smaller deals with shorter sales cycles, that hand-off process between lead generation and sales can completely overcomplicate things and turn prospects off. In the non-complex selling situation, your sales reps should be able to balance their time between doing their own prospecting, pipeline management, and closing deals.

So, if your ASC is greater than 30 days, ASP is greater than $25,000, and your sales process involves several touch points in the buying process, then there is a good chance that an outbound prospecting team would be a great way to enhance your go-to-market strategy.

In my next post I’ll describe the second factor that you should consider before making the decisions: lead generation economics.

The reason for the frequency of those posts is because we (OpenView Labs, that is) believe that an outbound lead generation initiative, in many cases, is the cheapest and fastest way to build a pipeline and penetrate new market segments.

That being said, outbound lead generation teams are not always the best approach to building a pipeline. In fact, there are some situations (even at expansion-stage software companies) in which this model may not be the best one for your business.

My colleague Devon McDonald recently published a blog post in which she argued that if your Average Sales Cycle (ASC) is less than 30 days and your product can be sold over the phone, then you don’t really need an outbound lead generation team. While I agree with the core idea of her post, I actually think that ASC is only one component of a much larger factor you should consider: the complexity of the sale.

As with any business decision, the economics related to the complexity of the sale need to be taken into consideration. That is, can outbound lead generation actually produce the same number of equally qualified leads for the same or less money as marketing?

So, to decide if an outbound lead generation team really makes sense for your business, there are actually two important factors that you need to consider:

• Complexity of the sale
• Lead generation economics

Ultimately, how these two factors work together will help you determine if outbound lead generation is the right approach for your business. In my next two blog posts, I’ll explain each of these two factors in greater detail.

Relaying leads from marketing to sales might seem like a fairly simple action, and it might not appear to be a subject worthy of its own blog post. Yet, that is the same reason it so frequently overlooked when companies are trying to implement an outbound lead generation team for the first time. While it seems simple and obvious, that lead hand-off consistently comes up as critical point of failure at companies that do not have the hand-off process properly implemented in their sales and marketing teams.

For those who may not be familiar, I will be a bit more specific on what I am referring to with the “hand-off process.” It occurs when an outbound lead generation rep (who is cold calling and e-mailing prospects) qualifies a prospect to the point at which it has met the agreed upon criteria for passing the lead to a sales rep to move the deal along further through the sales cycle.

For the lead generation hand-off process to be effective, we recommend the following steps:

1. Create a formal email introduction between the lead and the sales rep, by the lead generation rep.
2. Encourage engagement by the sales rep with the prospect via response to introduction email
3. Generate an accepted calendar invite for a call/meeting between the lead and the sales rep
4. Update lead status in CRM is to “suspect”

Once the call meeting takes place, two things should happen:

1. If the lead has been verified by sales as meeting the agreed upon definition of a sales qualified lead

• The lead status should be changed to “Sales Qualified”
• The ownership of the lead should be officially transferred over to the sales rep

2. If the lead does not meet the agreed upon definition of a sales qualified lead:

• The sales rep should provide feedback to the lead generation rep as to why it does not meet the criteria
• The ownership should remain with the lead generation rep to continue nurturing the relationship

All of these steps seem so obvious that they shouldn’t need to be explicitly defined and documented included in new hire training. But from our experience in establishing and working with these teams it is shocking how often these steps are not followed beyond a verbal communication of these obvious steps.

This recommended process tends to happen naturally when there is a high degree of collaboration and cooperation between the sales rep and the lead generation rep, and when management drives usage of the CRM system.

However, when lead generation reps and sales reps are not collocated (which is often the case) and management does not drive behavior and reporting through the CRM system, this process almost never happens unless it is explicitly laid out as in the above example. The steps laid out above will help drive the accountability and ownership that is required for success.

Some less effective versions of the handoff process that I’ve seen in the past look more like this:

1. Lead generation rep confirms a time for the meeting on the phone with the prospect
2. Lead generation rep sends out a calendar invite to the lead and to the sales rep, but no formal introduction is made.

OR

1. Lead generation rep updates the status of the record in the CRM system, but there is no meeting invite or formal introduction is sent.
2. The sales rep is expected to follow up on the records in the CRM system that have been reassigned to that status.

In both of these other versions of the hand-off process, potential Sales Qualified Leads have a much higher tendency of slipping through the cracks. Sales reps can easily miss meetings that were scheduled for them, and they can easily forget to follow-up on leads in the system assigned to the designated status.

Unfortunately, more often than not, the result of having a poorly executed hand-off process is that much of the outbound lead generation team’s work is done in vain, and eventually the whole company can lose confidence in the team and the process.

On the other hand, when the hand-off process is executed well, it ensures that no leads fall through the cracks, that everything can be easily tracked, and, perhaps most importantly, that the prospects have an excellent and seamless experience at this early and critical stage in their buying cycle.

Learn more about sales lead generation process here.

Structure 3: In this reporting structure the lead generation team manager reports to the VP of marketing, and the lead generation representatives report directly to the lead generation team manager.

In this reporting structure the lead generation team manager reports to the VP of marketing, and the lead generation representatives report directly to the lead generation team manager.

This reporting structure is very similar to Structure 1, except rather than reporting to sales the lead gen team reports up to marketing. While there is a clear distinction between structure and goals, this organizational structure would make sense for organizations in which marketing is accountable for a larger share of the total pipeline.

This structure is closely aligned with marketing, and is most conducive to collaboration between the lead generation team and the marketing team. As a result, this is a great way to bridge the gap between sales and marketing.

This approach is typically more effective when dealing with a higher volume of lower value opportunities, because those typically require less coordination in the hand-off of qualified leads from marketing to sales.

However, it’s imperative when utilizing this approach that you be absolutely clear on what the role of the team is. It is easy to fall into the trap of using a trained lead gen team as an engine to drive traffic to events and webinars. That’s not a bad thing as long as they are leveraging those events as tools to get into new accounts — and not just driving traffic.

While the image above for Structure 3 does not show dotted-line management to the sales reps, you could add that to this structure in order to improve collaboration between the lead generation team and the sales reps that they are supporting.

To recap, here are the previous posts in the series:

• Introduction: Should Outbound Lead Generation Teams Report to Marketing or Sales?
• Structure #1: The Lead Gen Team Manager Reports to the VP of Sales
• Structure #2: Lead Gen Reps Report Directly to the Sales Manager(s)

Which structure is your organization utilizing? Are there any alternative structures I’ve left out?

Structure 2: Lead generation representatives report directly up to the sales manager, with dotted-line management to the sales representative who they support. There is no lead generation team manager.

The lead generation representatives report directly up to the sales manager with dotted line management to the sales representative that they support. There is no lead generation team manager.

This reporting structure divides accountability for lead generation and loads management of the lead generation team onto each sales manager. This can be a great structure for sales teams that are divided into specialized groups by geography, or vertical. The structure is conducive to intra-team planning and collaboration, which will help each group get even more specialized, increasing organizational knowledge, and yielding better results.

Similar to Structure 1, it also includes dotted line management to the sales representatives that are being supported so that those bonds can form firmly.

However, this approach can be risky if you have less experienced sales managers.

It will add management responsibilities onto their plate, and inexperienced managers may write these off as lower priority. As a result, they may not pay close enough attention to developing the individual lead generation representatives and improving their performance.

This structure is also less conducive to inter-team collaboration among lead generation representatives, so extra efforts will need to be made to disseminate best practices and maintain process consistency across teams. Another disadvantage of this structure is that it tends be the most insulated from the marketing team.

This means that extra efforts will have to be made on the part of marketing as well as sales management in order to make sure feedback from the lead generation team is getting communicated and that lead generation representatives are on message from a corporate and specialized perspective.

In the final post in the series, when we’ll switch things up and investigate what it looks like when the lead generation team reports to marketing.

Structure 1: In this reporting structure, the lead generation team manager reports to the VP of sales. The lead generation reps report directly to the lead generation team manager, but also have dotted-line reporting the sales reps they are supporting.

The lead generation team manager reports to the VP of sales, and the lead generation reps report directly to the lead generation team manager.

This organizational structure obviously aligns the lead generation team more with sales than with marketing. It is also a very supportive structure for the lead generation team because it provides them with a dedicated manager focused solely on managing the team and their development.

The dedicated manager can also act as an effective buffer from external distractions (like sales reps treating them like admin), and can help drive the removal of impediments to the team’s success (like sales reps not following process).

The dotted line management to the sales reps is another benefit of this reporting structure, as it creates more collaboration, learning, and development for the lead generation reps, and for the team as a whole.

Of course, one disadvantage of this organizational structure is the additional cost of the manager, which some companies may not be able to afford.

In the next post in the series we’ll look at a reporting structure that avoids that cost by requiring lead generation reps to report directly to the sales manager.

Do you have experience with this or a similar model? What do you see as the advantages/disadvantages?

A few months ago while attending a Scrum certification course with Jeff Sutherland’s Scrum Inc., I heard something about organizational reporting structures that I found really interesting. Sutherland explained that in his experience working with software development teams, the teams with hierarchical reporting structures wrote hierarchical code, and the teams with flat reporting structures write flatter, more modular code. Not being a developer, I don’t know what the significance of that is in terms of the quality of the software, but what I found interesting was that the product tended to reflect the organizational structure.

This made me think about the reporting structure for outbound lead generation teams, as I have now seen and worked with teams organized in a variety of different ways.

Outbound lead generation teams (sometimes referred to as business development or BDR teams) typically either report to marketing or sales, but whether one is more appropriate or productive than the other is often the subject of debate. In the BridgeGroup’s 2012 Lead Generation Metrics Report, 70% of the companies had their outbound lead generation teams reporting up to the sales department. Of the teams with a heavy focus on outbound prospecting, 81% report to the sales department.

Lead generation teams reporting to marketing or sales via BridgeGroup

However, even when the lead generation team reports up to sales there are a variety of different ways they can be organized, and the result can have a significant impact on the team’s culture and success. When executed well, the outbound lead gen team should serve as a bridge between sales and marketing, regardless of which department the team reports up to.

The reason is that your outbound lead gen team has a direct line to prospects at different stages in the buying cycle. They can test competitive messaging and gather key insight into which messages are resonating with prospects and which ones aren’t. The best outbound lead gen teams will work very closely with sales and marketing to continue refining and adjusting the company’s messaging in a coordinated effort rather than isolating that work in a silo. They will also develop close relationships with the sales reps who they’re supporting (especially in more complex sales environments), and in some cases even help move deals along beyond initial qualification.

There are a number of different ways to organize your team, each of which has its own advantages and disadvantages. Ultimately, you should organize your team in a way that will develop the right culture and relationships with your sales and marketing departments.

Over the course of my next three posts I will dive deeper into three different ways that these teams are commonly organized, and will describe how the way they are organized may influence their alignment, performance, and culture.

Structure 1: The Lead Gen Team Manager Reports to the VP of Sales

Lead generation team manager reports to the VP of sales. Lead generation reps report directly to the lead generation team manager, but have dotted-line reporting to the sales reps who they are supporting.

Structure 2: Lead Gen Reps Report Directly to the Sales Manager(s)

Lead generation representatives report directly up to the sales manager, with dotted-line management to the sales representative who they support. There is no lead generation team manager.

Structure 3: The Lead Gen Team Manager Reports to the VP of Marketing

Lead generation team manager reports directly to the VP of marketing. The lead generation representatives report directly to the lead generation team manager.

While it’s commonly debated whether outbound lead generation teams should report to marketing or sales, I would argue that there is actually a lot more to it than that, and that your company’s culture, stage, product, and target market all factor in. Hopefully, this series will give you some ideas for how you should organize your team.

Please weigh in below: Who should outbound lead generation teams report to — marketing or sales?

In my last post I wrote about understanding the lead generation – sales activity funnel. This is a model that will show you how many calls, conversations, appointments, and opportunities your team needs to generate on an annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily basis in order to hit you goals for pipeline and revenue. That is an extremely powerful concept that every lead gen manager should understand. However, the one thing missing from the model I described is the important dimension of time.

Even after you’ve plugged all of your numbers into the model, after you know how many reps you’ll need to hire and how many leads they’ll need to stay productive, don’t forget that generating qualified opportunities and revenue takes time.

Devon McDonald just wrote a great post on a similar topic in which she points out that sales leaders’ expectations of time-to-revenue from a new lead generation team are often completely unrealistic.

But how much time should it actually take? Here are some lead generation tips to take into consideration:

1. Time to hire: If you’re starting from scratch, you’ll need to take into consideration the amount of time it takes to recruit your team. In my experience it typically takes 5 – 7 weeks to find and hire a good group of two or three lead gen reps.
2. New hire ramp time: Once you hire a new lead gen rep he or she doesn’t start off automatically hitting the daily and weekly goals on Day 1. Since we are trying to figure out a formula for consistent results, you will need to know how long it takes him or her to reach full productivity (consistently hitting goals). Ramp up time can vary greatly company to company depending on the complexity of the product, target market segment, target prospect personas, and of course the amount of resources that you apply towards training your new reps (among other factors). The Bridge Group’s 2012 Lead Gen Metrics report, which surveyed 197 B2B technology companies, found that the average time to full productivity for a new lead gen rep was 3.1 months.
3. Time to opportunity: The average amount of time elapsed from when a lead gen rep first starts calling a contact to when that contact can be marked as a qualified opportunity. I use “time to opportunity” here because that is when the new lead gen rep’s work actually hits the pipeline. However, you can actually break “opportunity” down to any level of granularity depending on your process and definitions. You could alternatively measure time to response, time to appointment set, time to appointment completed, and time to opportunity. Choosing just one or two metrics simplifies the formula.
4. Average sale cycle: The average amount of time from when an opportunity is created to when an opportunity is closed. You should know this already if you have a sales team.

The result looks something like this:

Using the numbers in this table, and assuming your conversion rates hold, it will take 9 months before consistent revenue is being generated by your new lead gen team’s efforts.

To put this in further context, let’s go back to the example I started with in my last post where the goal for the new lead generation team is to generate $20M in pipeline for a new business bookings target of $5M for FY 2013. In order to set yourself up for success in FY 2013, you should have already started recruiting your team in April 2012.

So if you’re concerned that your new lead generation team is not delivering the results you had expected, just plug your numbers into a table like the one above and see if the numbers add up. If you’ve hired good people, invested the appropriate time and resources to train and support them, and they are within the projected time to results based on the table, it’s likely that your expectations are what needs adjusting, not your lead gen team.

Get more lead generation tips here.

Do you really understand the how and the why behind what your outbound lead generation team should be doing on daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis?

Hopefully, the answer is yes, but all too often managers just start driving towards the goal without truly understanding what is going on. At the heart of this question lies what I call the lead gen sales activity funnel, and understanding this funnel and the associated conversion rates is the key not only to setting the right expectations within your organization, but to driving process improvement, as well.

My colleagues and I here at OpenView blog frequently about the importance of monitoring conversion rates throughout the lead generation process. This post from Devon McDonald, “Is Your Sales Team Really Looking at Conversion Rates?” is a great example. I have also written a number of posts on tactics that may help you improve those lead gen conversion rates, such as email prospecting best practices and getting past the gate keeper, but seeing the big picture helps put those things in context.

It should all start with a specific organizational goal that the outbound lead generation team should focus on.

For example, your goal might be to generate 50% of the new business pipeline for next year. The plan for next year is $10 million in new business bookings, and you need to carry a 4X pipeline because you know that your opportunity win rates historically are roughly 25%. That means the new team will have to generate $20 million in pipeline for next year. Once you have your starting point you can work backwards to get to the goals for the rest of your outbound lead generation metrics.

In other words, based on your average deal size and average conversion rates, how many calls, conversations, appointments, and opportunities does your team need to generate on an annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily basis in order to get to that $20 million in pipeline?

This table works backwards from the ultimate goal of generating $5 Million dollars based on the conversion rates and average deal size in the yellow boxes. In this example the average deal size is $47,000 and the average opportunity win rate 25% (this reflects the 4x pipeline target). You will need to understand this model in order to have realistic expectations of what can be done, and you can use it to figure out how many reps you’ll need to hire and what their goals should be. This model indicates that your lead generation team would have to be able to make 205 calls per day in order to generate 82 appointments per month, which should turn into 35 opportunities. Studies show that, on average, outbound lead generation reps make about 50 calls per day, which means that you would need about four reps on your lead gen team to get to that goal. It also means that each rep can generate about $5 million in pipeline per year, which should result in $1.25 million in revenue if the model holds. Not bad considering the average fully loaded cost of one lead generation rep is under $100k.

If you are building a new lead gen team from scratch you may not know the conversion rates that go in the yellow boxes. In that case, use both qualitative and quantitative data from your current sales team to get some sense of what a realistic conversion rate might be for each conversion point. You can also look at industry benchmarks from variety of different sources to get a sense, but keep in mind conversion rates can be drastically different depending on the market you’re calling into, the persona you’re targeting, and a plethora of other variables. As an example, the conversion metrics in the example above were the actual conversion rates for a company that I worked with in the past, which successfully implemented a lead generation team to support their field sales organization.

Regularly test the model:

At the end of each month and quarter, recalculate your average conversion rates by taking the aggregates of all of the activity, not just on a per rep basis (this will give you a more accurate representation). You should also recalculate your average opportunity win rate and average deal size. Then plug those numbers into the model to make sure that it’s holding. This will allow you to immediately see the impact that slide improvements can have on the pipeline and top line.

Another extremely important dimension that needs to be considered when building your model is timing. I’ll dive deeper into that in my next post.

Swayne Hill, SVP at Mintigo, has also published some great content on this topic at his blog.

If you’d like a copy of the spread sheet with all of the calculations feel free to shoot me an email.

In my last post I discussed some of the announcements made at Dreamforce 2012 and the continuation of salesforce.com’s expansion deeper into the social enterprise space and other peripheral markets including marketing automation, performance management, cloud storage, and identity services. My last post ended with the suggestion that while salesforce.com may be spreading themselves thin by expanding into new competitive markets, they are quickly becoming one of the most well-positioned companies in the social enterprise market.

In his keynote speech to kick-off Dreamforce 2012, salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff gave insights into not only the company’s road map, but also salesforce.com’s strategy to compete in the still-developing social enterprise market. What salesforce.com is doing with social enterprise isn’t new, but it does appear to be a smart approach to competing in the social business market against the other major players.

In an article in Business2Community, SAP VP of Social Media Audience Marketing, Ted Sapountzis laid out his view of the “Social Enterprise Software Stack”. Below is a slightly modified version of the original image in which I have highlighted salesforce.com’s presence in each of the sub-sectors (noted by a red circle), and adjusted the position of Radian6 because I believe its core functionalities span across both the Engagement and Monitoring/Analytics subsectors as defined in the details in Sapountzis’s follow-up post.

What the modified image below points out is that so far, salesforce.com has built or acquired their way into six of the eight sub-sectors laid out in this depiction of the “Social Enterprise Software Stack”.

Original image from Ted Sapountzis posted on Business2Community

Another depiction of the social business ecosystem is in “IDC’s Social Business Taxonomy,” in which they map-out the business processes, technologies, and technology sub-markets that have formed as these businesses begin to leverage social technology. Again, I have slightly modified their original image here to demonstrate salesforce.com’s presence in each of the social business markets and sub-markets. What you’ll also notice in this model (that aren’t included in the one above) are three of salesforce.com’s most recent acquisitions, ChoicePass, GoInstant, and ThinkFuse. Each of these companies has some technology that fits very nicely into this model of the ecosystem.

Original image from IDC Social Business Taxonomy 2011

Another difference between the IDC image and Ted Sapountzis’s image is the presence of Enterprise Resource (ERM) and Digital Commerce as part of the social business market. I believe that the ERM sub-market is an important distinction, and one that is key to salesforce.com’s strategy in the social business market. In both depictions of the social business market the technologies and associated business processes are primarily “front office”. With the exception of HCM (Human Capital Management) and PPM (Project Portfolio Management), the rest of the sub markets are “front office” tools, which is where salesforce.com’s core bread and butter has always been.

Business is social, and now the way business gets done is becoming more social thanks to some of the great technologies in this market. And like salesforce.com, huge technology companies such as Oracle, Microsoft, and Google (among many others) are acquiring those technologies to make their own applications more social. Eventually, all business will be done with social-media-style applications, feeds, “like” buttons, profile walls, groups, and sharing, and we won’t be talking about the Social Enterprise market anymore because the term will become irrelevant. Today, however, there is still a very relevant race to become the company that can provide a social answer to all of our traditional business applications, including the back office.

From this reality comes the billion dollar question for companies in this race: what is the key leverage point? Which process or application will give them the most leverage and allow them to capture the most market share for their social applications before companies go to someone else’s? If the answer to that question is CRM, then salesforce.com may already have a leg up. But the answer could also be community/collaboration platforms such as Yammer, Jive, SAP Streamwork, and Salesforce Chatter. It could also be none of these.

Salesforce.com was not one of the first companies to enter the social enterprise market, and according to this IDC report their market share is tiny compared to their competitors. However, the company has managed to acquire most of the key pieces needed to build the current enterprise stack, and has begun integrating them into the business. It has also acquired several new technologies that gives it access to the social ERM space, a beachhead to a future social “back office”. Another thing it has going for it is broad access to the SaaS business market. According to Gartner, an estimated 35% of the CRM market is using a SaaS CRM, and with an estimated 16.7% of the total global market, salesforce.com surely has an even larger share of the SaaS market. This could indicate that salesforce.com customers are more likely to adopt new social technologies faster than others, much the same way they adopted SaaS and the “cloud”.

Watching the social enterprise market develop over the next five to ten years will certainly be exciting. With the market still taking shape, it is too early for any one vendor to claim dominance. What can be said however, is that the major software companies are all gearing up for the race, and I believe that salesforce.com has the potential to become one of the top social business vendors within the next five years.

Since the launch of Chatter, salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has been painting his picture of a truly social enterprise: A company in which employees communicate both internally and with their customers via social media, creating a social media community for customers, employees, and products to all engage and collaborate together. With companies like IBM, Lithium, Jive, and Yammer working towards this vision since as early as 2001 this was a test for salesforce.com entering into a new market beyond their core business, one they believed was the future of business, like the “Cloud” was 10 years ago.

In the opening keynote at DreamForce 2012, Marc Benioff began his speech by siting an IBM study of 1709 CEOs, General Managers, and Global Business Leaders. Two of the key takeaways from the study were:

1. “CEOs believe that social has become one of the top to ways to engage customers mainly at the expense of traditional approaches.”

2. “For some time, businesses have been refining and optimizing their networks of suppliers and partners… But something just as revolutionary has been happening – the sudden convergence of the cloud, social, and mobile spheres – connecting customers, employees, and partners in new ways…”

The latter of the two is closely aligned with the vision of the social enterprise that Benioff has been describing for the last few years.

During the keynote, Benioff highlighted and demonstrated the new features that enable a truly social enterprise through some amazing case studies of salesforce.com clients who have already begun implementing this vision. These examples show just how effectively and quickly salesforce.com was able to gain ground on the incumbents in the social enterprise market. In 2011 we also began to see salesforce.com appearing as a leader on Gartner’s Magic quadrant for social enterprise providers, just a few short years after Chatter launched.

In addition to the enhancements to their core products — Sales Cloud and Service Cloud — the new offerings announced during the keynote at this year’s DreamForce once again expand salesforce.com’s influence far beyond their core business of CRM and SFA; deeper into the social enterprise space, but also disrupting a slew of more unexpected and competitive markets. These markets include marketing automation, performance management, cloud storage, and identity services. In each of these new markets salesforce.com will be competing with existing incumbents, some of which are salesforce.com partners.

A natural question to ask as a reaction to these new products is, are they spreading themselves too thin? After all, they had already made acquisitions and investments in the content management space competing against WordPress and Drupal with Siteforce, which never really got off the ground. Salesforce.com has also changed course a number of times with their knowledge, customer support portal, and ideas products. Are these new products destined for the same fate, or will their adoption be as seamless and obvious as Marc Benioff and his clients made it sound in the key note?

While some of these products may succeed and others may not, salesforce.com is quickly becoming one of the most well-positioned technology companies in the world to help business become social. The reason is that they are quickly building a social enterprise stack suited to go after the front office of the world’s largest companies and establish a beachhead into the back office.

In my next post I’ll explain this in more detail. In the meantime, this series by Ted Sapoutzis is a great primer on the social enterprise market.

Yep. It’s that time of year again, DreamForce season is in full force (no pun intended) and the salesforce.com community is gearing up. This year is said to be the biggest yet with a total of 100,000 attendees, 70,000 on-site, and an additional 30,000 viewing the live streaming online, according to CEO Mark Benioff. I unfortunately will be viewing the streaming online, instead enjoying the action live. However, in response to my last blog post on how to build a data hygiene dashboard I had the benefit of learning about two free data hygiene apps that — if I were going to DreamForce 2012 — I would definitely be checking out.

Two cool, easy, and free data hygiene apps to check out at DreamForce 2012:

FieldTrip, by Candor (recently acquired by RingLead)

Similar to the data hygiene dashboard in my last blog post this app can help you scope, and monitor the overall hygiene of your database. It can also help you quickly identify which fields are and aren’t being used on any object, even on a subset of objects such as large opportunities. In addition to hygiene, this is a great tool for monitoring user adoption and process compliance.

DupeDive, by RingLead

Set to be released at DreamForce 2012, I was given a sneak preview of the app. Using RingLead’s proprietary de-duplication logic, this app answers the very basic questions that nearly every admin is wondering, such as, “How many duplicates do I actually have in my system?” It also spits out a report with some additional general facts about your duplicates, such as where they came from and when they were created. I would definitely swing by the RingLead booth briefly to check out these two free apps, and the rest of the data management suite.

If you are going to be attending DreamForce 2012, please let me know what other apps you plan on checking out and what new apps you discover that you didn’t already know about. And have great time!!

Managing data hygiene is a constant challenge for any Salesforce.com admin, and everyone else in the company who interacts with the data in Salesforce.com.

I also believe that managing data hygiene is an imperative for any organization that invests in a CRM system, whether Salesforce.com, or anything else. As the saying goes – garbage in, garbage out. If you are not managing data hygiene proactively that basically means you are throwing away all of the time and money you are investing into your CRM system, and if you actually do the math, it’s not cheap. With poor data hygiene, basic activities such as territory alignment, lead assignment, or even simply getting in contact with customers become a time-consuming challenge.

On the other hand, companies that manage data hygiene proactively gain tremendous value out of the data in their CRM system. Companies with good data hygiene can make good business decisions based on accurate data, and can actually reach the customers and prospects they already spent good money acquiring in the first place.

There are a wide range of causes of poor data hygiene in any salesforce.com database, and in fact the very term “data hygiene” is somewhat of an umbrella term that covers duplicate data, incorrect data, incorrect format (ex: US vs. USA), and incomplete data. Likewise, the remedies for poor data hygiene can be equally varied and are dependent on the cause.

In order to help diagnose, determine the scope of, and proactively manage your data hygiene problems, I recommend starting off by building a data hygiene dashboard. A data hygiene dashboard is a dashboard specifically designed to help you proactively manage data integrity on key fields that are critical for to key business activities such as the ones I mentioned above.

Here are a couple of examples of what a data hygiene dashboard setup to track completeness on key address and contact info fields might look like:

Data Hygiene Dashboard

I like this version because you can set the maximum value on the gauge to the total number of records on the table, and the gauge will show you the number of records missing the key info, and the percentage of total records. You can also set a data integrity goal using the colored thresholds. I recommend setting Green to at least 90%.

Data Hygiene Dashboard V2

I like this version, because it is a bit cleaner and easier to digest, but it’s the same data. (Tip: you can also set color thresholds for this version as well, but it won’t show you the percentages.)

Running the Reports

Running the reports for these dashboards is pretty simple. You just have to set up the filters to show all records with missing or incorrect data. If you are just looking for missing data the filter would be [Field Name] [equals] “[blank]”. When you run these reports remember to filter out the records whose integrity you aren’t worried about. For example, Junk Leads are filtered out in the example below using the Lead Status [not equal to] “Do not contact”. Here is what most of them will look like:

For reporting on records with no state or zip code, remember to exclude countries outside of the US and Canada:

Once your data hygiene dashboard is set up for your organization, you can schedule a monthly dashboard snap shot. Then make it a goal to improve your data hygiene on a monthly or quarterly basis until you reach an acceptable level by your organization’s standards. You can experiment with different approaches to accomplish your goal such as data append applications, outsourced data cleansing, validation rules, and increased security on users to prevent them from adding new incomplete records.

The final tip in my series on the best email prospecting tactics is to stay persistent. I suppose this particular tip is probably the least tactical, but it’s also perhaps the most important. If you look at email behavior in general as is suggested in Jill Konrath’s Ultimate Guide to Email Prospecting, the majority of people typically scan through their inboxes extremely quickly, often merely glancing at the subject line, sender, and pre header before making the decision of whether to read, delete, or save each message for later.

The fact is, even if you follow the advice in this blog series, to a tee, or any other tips found elsewhere, the odds are still against you. If someone tells you otherwise they are either lying or confused. Yes, statistically, most of the prospecting emails you send will wind up in the latter two categories: “delete” or “save for later” (and we all know how often we actually read the “save for later”s).

That’s why my last tip is about persistence. You need to think of email prospecting the same way a great sales person thinks about cold calling. It requires cadence, thick skin, and you need to remember it’s not about making the sale, it’s about getting a chance to make the sale, or setup the meeting, or even simply land a response to find out whether it’s actually worth your time to continue pursuing.

Just because you don’t get a response to your first, second, or third email doesn’t mean you should stop or give up. In fact, in my experience managing and observing outbound prospecting teams in the portfolio, prospects almost always appreciate persistence, and it is only in rare cases that prospects ask you to stop trying to contact them. At one company at which I built and managed the outbound prospecting team, every time I would go to a trade show at least two or three prospects would approach me and say, “I’ve been getting all of the calls and emails from your guys, and I just haven’t had a chance to respond. I appreciate the persistence. Thanks.”

Furthermore, while I am generally a very strong proponent of picking up the phone for prospecting, in some market segments, I have actually seen emails be more effective for outbound prospecting than dials. At another portfolio company we did an analysis of their customer acquisition process and actually found a number of opportunities thanks to a very persistent sales rep who consistently emailed and called the same few accounts for about nine months before actually getting a meeting scheduled. When it did finally happen it was in response to an email, and the deal finally came in about 30 days later.

All that said, you may be wondering, how can you stay persistent with your prospecting emails without annoying your prospects? Here are a few tips:

1) Never send more than two emails to the same person in the same week.

Instead, have a set cadence that you follow that includes calls, emails, and voicemails spread out over time. There are two primary cadences that I have used.

• This will last two business weeks and includes numerous unlisted calls with no voicemail in between each touch point:
  • Day 1 – Call VM, Email
  • Day 3 – Call VM, Email
  • Day 7 – Call VM, Email
  • Day 10 – Call VM, Email

• Here is another one that I borrowed from a Marketing Sherpa case study that they saw great results with:
  • Email #1 – on day 1
  • Call #1 – after the email, same day
  • Call #2 – two business days later
  • Call #3 – three business days later
  • Email #2 – four business days later
  • Call #4 – two business days later
  • Call #5 – three business days later
  • Call #6 – four business days later

2) Keep the content fresh.

If you keep sending the same email over and over again it tells your prospects that they are just another email address on your list. If you change it up every time, however, it tells them that you are at least putting in an extra bit of effort. Use the tips in my previous posts on leveraging the prospects content and being specific to craft unique and effective emails.

3) Never send too much info in one email.

If your product address three specific pain points, and prospects always bite on at least one of them, you don’t have include all three in the any one email that you send. If you send them all in the first email you won’t have anything else to email about next time. Remember that the odds are against you, and that prospects scan their emails quickly, so try focusing on one specific pain point in each email, and send three emails to increase your odds of getting a bite.

This post concludes my series on the best email prospecting tactics. I hope you find these tips useful, and I hope they bring you great results. If you have any stories about these tips, or others that have worked for you, I would love to hear about them in the comments.

In the coming months OpenView will be hosting a few events and releasing some more content on email prospecting and lead nurturing practices, so please check out our newsletter for updates.

The fourth tip in my series on the best email prospecting tactics is to optimize email for mobile. By now, it’s no secret that a significant and increasing portion of the emails you send are being read on a smart phone. A number of studies conducted in the last two years have suggested this trend towards mobile email consumption. One such study conducted by MailChimp suggested that about 41% of mobile users in the U.S. read email on their mobile devices.

The two most important rules to follow to optimize email for mobile:

1. Keep it short: Your prospect should be able to read the whole email within two finger swipes on a smart phone. Test your email before you send it. It’s pretty easy to send yourself an email and see what it looks like on your smart phone. Make sure that it’s an email that you would open, and that it’s easy to read.
2. Send text, not HTML emails: Images, fancy templates, and links usually don’t come out looking very nice on a smart phone. For prospecting emails use text or plain HTML with no special formatting, and make sure that your email signature does not contain too many images and hyperlinks.

Generally speaking, if you follow these two rules your emails should be reasonably optimized for prospects reading emails on a mobile device. However, there is a lot of insightful data out there that suggests trying a few other tactics will also help increase your open rates.

1) Consider the timing

Studies show that if you send email late in the day it is more likely to be opened on a mobile device. A study done by Knotice on email behavior also suggests email open rates on mobile devices peak in the early morning and late in the evening, and decrease over the course of working hours. This also aligns with the MailChimp study in which 72% mobile email users said that they check their email in bed. So, with the odds up that your email will opened and viewed on a mobile device, make sure that when sending emails late in the day or early in the morning that they’ve been optimized for mobile using the tips in this post.

2) Shorten the subject line

In my first post in this series on email prospecting tactics I made a number of recommendations on how to write a compelling subject line. However, on mobile devices your subject line gets truncated. To optimize for mobile try reducing the length of the subject line. A study by Informz showed that subject lines with less than 10 characters had a significantly higher open rate than other lengths.

3) Consider your preheader

The preheader is the short summary text that appears on the message in the inbox below the subject line. When sending text or HTML emails with no special formatting or templates this will always come from the first few lines of text in the email. Though I haven’t found any research showing that the preheader has as much of an impact on open rates as the subject line, the same logic should apply. That line of text is one of the first things your prospects see when they look at your email in their inbox, so make it count. If you aren’t sending plain text emails, try sending a test to your smart phone to see what this looks like.

4) Font Size

Set your email application’s default font size to 12 point font.  When optimizing for mobile it’s important to remember that phones can be small and text on them can often difficult to read. Some mobile email applications will automatically re-size fonts to 12 point font. Any bigger or smaller than that and you are taking the risk that your message will not look the way it looks when you send it.

5) Consider the sender name

Make sure that the email is coming from you. After the subject line, the sender name and preheader are the next two most prominent features of the email when it’s sitting in a mobile inbox, so make it personal. In some cases, the sender name is even more prominent than the subject line (as seen in the iPhone example above). Often, what appears in the sender name is determined by the reader’s email application. However, if you send emails out of MS Outlook you can customize the name that people see in their inbox, so that they see “Bob Smith” instead of “Robert A. Smith <rasmith@abc.com>”. Just follow these simple instructions. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHXd0heX2zE

For more info on how to optimize email for mobile, here are a couple of other posts that I liked and found helpful:

•  http://www.bluefountainmedia.com/blog/how-to-optimize-email-for-mobile-devices/
• http://masstransmit.com/uncategorized/5-tactics-for-successful-mobile-email-marketing/

Sales forecasting is a major challenge that almost every expansion-stage company will face.

It is most certainly an area that many of our portfolio companies have struggled with. What we have found, however, is that the companies that struggle the most with their sales forecasts are struggling because they lack the basic fundamentals of forecasting — having effective, consistent forecast review meetings, asking the right questions, reviewing the right opportunities, leveraging technology, and supplementing the entire process with periodic pipeline review meetings.

To address this important gap that many early and expansion-stage companies face we pooled our internal knowledge and experience, tapped sales leaders within the portfolio companies, and reached out to topical experts such as Jeff Hoffman, President at M.J. Hoffman and Associates, and Swayne Hill, Co-Founder & SVP at Cloud9 Analytics to create our latest eBook, Sales Forecasts: A Questions of Method, Not Magic.

This eBook is a comprehensive guide to sales forecasting that is perfect for CEOs and VPs of Sales at expansion-stage software companies who need to learn the fundamentals of building a scalable forecasting process. The eBook includes a range of topics and tips that cover everything from why sales forecasting is critical to how to run an effective forecast review meeting, to how to leverage technology effectively to manage the forecasting process.

Finally, the end of the eBook contains a great list of additional resources for developing your sales process, developing sales forecasts, and analyst reports on sales forecasting.

I hope you have a chance to read it, and would really welcome any comments or feedback on the eBook in the comments thread on my blog. You can download it here: Sales Forecasts: A Questions of Method, Not Magic.

In the coming weeks I’ll be working with a number of the contributors to the eBook to publish some follow-up posts that cover some more advanced forecasting and pipeline management techniques. The first is from Swayne Hill and it’s titled Advanced Sales Forecasting Methods: Getting More from Your Sales Forecasts and Improving the Quality of Your Pipeline.

The next tip on outbound prospecting emails in my series on the best email prospecting tactics is be specific.

One of the biggest mistakes that sales reps and BDRs make when sending emails to prospects is sending information without explaining the purpose of the email and what they are looking for in response. A good tactic the sales reps and BDRs can implement immediately is to be specific with a) why they are reaching out, and b) what they are looking in response in every email they send to a prospect.

As laid out in this great presentation by MECLABS’ Marketing Experiments, there are at least three key conversion points that you need to consider:

1. First, the prospect must decide to open the email;
2. Once opened, the prospect must decide whether or not to read the email;
3. Finally, the prospect must decide whether or not to take action as a result of reading the email

My earlier posts in this email prospecting series on crafting engaging subject lines, and leveraging the prospect’s content focused on the first two conversion points listed above. This post is focused on the third point: getting the prospect to take action, whatever that action might be.

Keep in mind prospects are not mind readers — even though it may seem obvious to you that you want to set up a meeting to qualify them and pitch them your product that may rarely be the first thing that comes to mind for the prospect. The point is that if you don’t specifically ask for a response, you are much less likely to get a response. While this point may seem obvious, the truth is we see emails every day being sent by sales people that do not contain any explanation as to why they are emailing the prospect, and how the prospect should respond.

The simplest way to implement this tactic is to make sure that every email sent contains at least one sentence that either includes what you would like the prospect to do next or asks a specific question that the prospect can quickly answer with a brief email. If you are looking for a referral to the right contact, then ask for a referral, and if you are hoping to get 5 minutes of there time to find out what their current xyz strategy is, ask for 5 minutes of their time; but in any case be specific so that it isn’t left to interpretation.

Here are a few examples:

• Are you available sometime next week to discuss? I am available on Monday between 10:00am and 2:30pm, and Wednesday between 1:30pm and 4:00pm.
• Who is the best person to speak with at your organization about our solutions?
• What day would be best for a 15 min call to discuss?
• Could you please respond to this email to let me know if I should stop trying to contact you?

I’ve seen from experience that ending an email with these types of very direct and very specific questions will yield more responses than not; especially if your emails look anything like the ones in these examples:

Don’t Send Prospecting Emails Like This

How to Write a Prospecting Email

Check back in next week, when my series on the best email prospecting tactics continues.

Most sales and marketing professionals know that people like hearing about themselves. It is also common knowledge that most people like having their egos stroked a little. The question then becomes how do you use this fact in an email without coming off disingenuous or annoying? In fact, the best way to do this is to reference your prospect’s content in the email, and to tie it back to the reason you are reaching out. Not all prospects have their own blog, so a quote from their website, an article about them, an article that they are featured in, or an article that they have shared could be equally compelling.

This requires a bit of research prior to writing your email, but you will definitely get better email prospecting results using this tactic. Here’s what to do:

1 ) Find a relevant piece of content related to your prospect that you can mention.

1. See if the prospect has a blog.
2. Google the prospect to see if his or her name comes up in any recent news or publications.
3. Search for the prospect on Twitter to see if there are any relevant recent tweets.
4. Search for the prospect on LinkedIn to see whether they’ve shared anything recently.
5. If you do all that and don’t find anything interesting, do the same for the company.
6. If all else fails, go the corporate website and find a quote about the company that is compelling and relevant to what you are selling.

2) Use an actual quote from the article/blog post/ website, and literally paste it into the body of your email.

The quote should not be more than a sentence or two at the most. The first part of your email should explain that the quote grabbed your attention, how you’re interested in what they are accomplishing, or how you can empathize with their challenge/goal.

Here is an example:

Subject: Your blog post: The Best Email Prospecting Tactics

Hi Ori,

I came across your recent blog post on the best email prospecting tactics where you mentioned that “email prospecting can be an extremely powerful tool when done right.” I really enjoyed the post and actually shared it with a few of my clients.

I currently work with a number of venture capital firms to help them and their portfolio companies such as… to help them optimize their email marketing and lead qualification.

Do you have few minutes later this week to briefly discuss a partnership?

Thanks,

-Amanda

Here is another example from a blog highlighting this tactic of leveraging a prospect’s content in a slightly different way.

Remember, the goal of email prospecting is to get a response. Using the prospect’s content in your email subject lines and bodies is a tactic that will immediately help you increase your response rate.

The first email prospecting tactic on the list:

Crafting Engaging Subject Lines

The subject line of an email is one of the most important pieces of the email. It is the first part that people see when they receive your email, and it is the only part they see sorting through their inbox trying to decide what to open and what to delete.

I recently watched an excellent web clinic that was done by the MECLAB Marketing Experiments research group on optimizing email subject lines. In the clinic they explain that the role of the subject line is not only to grab people’s attention, but to convert that attention into interest in order to get them to keep reading. They continue to explain that a truly engaging subject line is inherently connected to the value proposition, and that by using research about our prospects we can maximize the force of the subject line and value proposition. They also outlined the four criteria of a successful subject line:

1. Clarity
2. Appeal
3. Exclusivity
4. Credibility

While the science behind their findings is truly impressive, when it comes to sales prospecting, as opposed to mass email marketing, I believe that there is a lot more art involved. If you are reading this as a sales person or outbound prospector, then your goal is slightly different than that of an email marketer. You are trying to setup a call, not get someone to click on a call to action. You may also already have rapport with many of the people who you are emailing. You know how they will react to certain things, what their tone was like on the last call, and what their attitude is toward you and your company. These are things that are not captured in a database, but that you can leverage to increase your success.

Consider these tips for crafting engaging subject lines:

• Use all lower case letters: Think about a casual email from a friend that you would open — what does the subject line look like? It’s usually all lower-case letters.
• Be brief and to the point: “Do you have 5 minutes?”  is a subject line that I have seen work successfully in a number of different companies and selling environments for getting a call back.
• Include their content in the subject line: If your prospect has a blog use the title of one of their recent posts in the subject line. Most people who write blogs don’t have that many readers, and they get really excited when one of them actually reaches out to them directly about their post.
• The subject line should start with the word “Your”: As in “Your recent blog post…”, or “Your product…”. Research from Kensei Partners, a sales training firm shows that subject lines that begin with the word “Your” perform significantly better that not.

Understanding the concepts laid out in the Marketing Experiments web clinic, and combining them with some of these other tips will help you craft engaging subject lines that will have more people reading and responding to your emails.

Stay tuned for more examples of best email prospecting tactics in my upcoming posts.

In my experience working with expansion-stage software and internet companies there are a few important concepts that are key to helping the outbound prospecting manager drive performance from the outbound prospecting team. Understanding these concepts will help you implement the right fields in your CRM system so that you can manage you team effectively.

1) Activity

Keeping track of the number of calls, conversations, and emails that your team sends on a regular basis is probably the first and most basic indicator of productivity. Having a base line for those three metrics will help you understand what it takes for each rep to hit their targets, especially as the team scales. Pure activity will almost always be a leading indicator to performance. In order to track this effectively it works best if you have your email and phone system integrated with the CRM system, but this is not always practical or cost effective. If you don’t have those two systems integrated make sure your reps are logging their activities manually. While it does require a bit of additional admin work on their part it is the only way you and they will be able to keep track of what activity has gone into each lead that they are calling.

Tips:

1. Make sure that you have customized the “Type” field to include at least these three basic pick list values: Calls, Conversations, and Email
2. Make “Due Date” and “Type” required fields
3. Provide standard guidelines for subject lines so it’s easier to read reports

Productivity

For the purpose of this post, I am defining productivity as the results driven from the activity. At the end of the day, the purpose of outbound prospecting is to deliver some clearly defined metric. Whether that is a qualified lead, appointment, opportunity, or demo, this is something that can and should be tracked in salesforce.com. In addition, it is important to track what results are generated from those metrics. Depending on what your team is delivering there are a number of different ways the desired output can be tracked. For tracking appointments, demos, or discovery calls, using “Tasks” or “Events” is probably the best way to do it. However, for tracking opportunities or sales-ready leads using the opportunity record or a status, check box, and date on the lead is probably a the best way to do it.

Tips:

1. To track sales-ready leads set up a workflow that updates a custom “Sales Ready” check box and “Sales Ready Date” when the lead is changed to “Sales Ready” or “Qualified” depending on what lingo is used at your organization.
2. If you take the Qualified Lead/ Sales Ready Lead status approach make sure those fields also exist on the Contact records in case a lead already exists as a contact in your database.
3. If your outbound prospectors are going to be creating opportunities make sure that your qualification criteria is a bit further along in the sales process so that you aren’t just filling the pipeline with very early prospects. This can have a negative impact your win rate and actually slow things down.

Process Flow

Process flow allows you to track how many leads are going through your team’s outbound prospecting process at any given point in time. This is the top of funnel equivalent of the sales pipeline. What leads are in which status for which reps. Of the three concepts mentioned here this is typically the most difficult to track in salesfore.com and varies depending on maturity of the marketing team. In my experience, I have seen two primary approaches to tracking the lead management process:

1) For outbound prospecting teams that have little or no support from marketing, use a very simple process that lets you track which new leads have not been hit yet, and which leads are in the outbound prospecting funnel. This is an old-school approach, but it works well, and it’s great for getting started at building out your house list.

1. Open
2. In Progress
3. Contacted
4. Qualified
5. Unqualified
6. Nurture

2) For outbound prospecting teams that have a more mature marketing team that provides support with list and content generation you will need to use a more mature process that allows you to not only manage the current list you are going after, but also helps you manage existing leads and contacts that may be popping up from marketing activity. This type of process is typically more sophisticated and calls for a lot of cooperation with marketing. This slide share presentation made by Jep Castelein of the LeadSloth is a great example of what this type of process should look like. This type of process is more holistic to the entire marketing process, and hence requires a more mature marketing team.

1. Inquiries
2. MQLs
3. Sales Accepted Leads
4. Sales Qualified Leads (Opportunity)

If you are missing one of these concepts, then there is a good chance you are missing out on some key data that can tell you a lot about your outbound prospecting team’s performance.

As I’ve mentioned in my previous blog post on grouping leads on accounts in Salesforce, many users in B2B sales environments struggle with the concept of distinguishing accounts, leads and contacts in salesforce.com. The distinction is important to understand for sales and marketing managers as well as salesforce.com admins, and any disconnect or lack of understanding between the common CRM objects can result in a number of issues, including:

• Proliferation of duplicate data
• Inadvertently calling customers thinking that they are prospects
• Inadvertently calling prospects who are already involved with an active opportunity

I have seen these issues occur in almost all of the companies I have worked with, and they are often caused by a misunderstanding of the purpose and difference between leads and contacts. It doesn’t help that mixed in with those to terms is a cornucopia of other terms that describe leads going through a sales process — terms such as suspect, prospect, MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead), SQL (Sales Qualified Lead), and many more. So, let me do my best to explain the distinction as I see it for a B2B sales environment.

Leads                                            

Leads contain both company-level information and personal information on a single record. This is in contrast to contacts which contain only person-level information, but are associated with an Account that should contain all of company-level data. Leads should be used to separate people and companies that you are not even sure would be a fit for your product — and with whom you have not yet established contact — from the rest of the database. This would include inbound inquiries and any leads imported in bulk to the database for the purpose of outbound prospecting efforts. Using leads requires an extra manual step of converting the lead to an account and contact so that a person is literally responsible for confirming that the lead meets the minimum requirements of the company.

Contacts

Contacts contain only person-level information, but are associated with an account that should contain all of company-level data. That is in contrast with leads which contain both company-level information and personal information on a single record. Contacts and accounts should be used to separate customers and prospective customers with whom you currently have or have had an active sales cycle based on your definition of an opportunity. Using contacts and accounts has a number of benefits including grouping multiple contacts together into a single account, and reporting on the number of companies in the database (as opposed to leads). On the other hand, it also has a greater administrative burden because reps are required to update both the contact records and company records.

The main reason you would want to keep these two groups separate from the database is that with any list you buy, and with any inbound channel into your company, you are bound to get a whole lot of junk. Keeping this junk separate helps you maintain a cleaner database of customers, qualified prospects, and the people and companies you really want to keep in touch with.

The Grey Area

The explanations I gave above are somewhat simplistic. When deciding between junk leads and qualified prospects the decision is pretty is easy. The challenge comes when dealing with prospects that you aren’t sure about. Either they didn’t give you a straight answer, or they never responded to your outreach efforts, but you are sure they are real, and could be good prospects to boot. I will discuss these in greater depth in my next post.

Tip #1: Leads offer many benefits for inbound inquiries. If your website is a prominent source of leads for your sales/marketing team, you should use leads in salesforce.com

• Web-to-Lead, Lead Assignment Rules, and Lead Conversion are all out-of-the-box features that make lead management much easier.
  • Web-to-Lead: a really simple web form creator the generates the code for your website to route leads directly from the web into salesforce.com
  • Leads Assignment Rules: allows you to automatically assign inbound leads to the right people based on geography, email suffix, or any other data point that you capture on your web forms
  • Lead Conversion: this feature allows you to convert Leads to Accounts Contacts, and Opportunities – this is a key conversion point that is important for any company to measure

Tip #2: Leads are not easy to group into one company. If your team is only focused a smaller set of targeted accounts and you want to be able to track your penetration in to those accounts then leads may not be right for you.

• Many contacts can be grouped on to a single account. This will allow your team to easily keep track of all of the contacts at a given company and see when they were last contacted right out of the box.
• Accounts will also aggregate all of the activity that gets logged on any of its child object relationships.

Tip #3: Contacts and Account separate company info and person info onto separate records. If you need to easily be able to keep track of how many companies you are targeting as opposed people or opportunities you can only do that with Accounts and Contacts.

Here are a few links to some other threads on the topic:

http://boards.developerforce.com/t5/Nonprofits/Leads-vs-Contacts/td-p/39663

http://success.salesforce.com/questionDetail?qId=a1X30000000ItBqEAK

https://sites.secure.force.com/success/questionDetail?qid=a1X30000000HZbLEAW&sort=newest_oldest

Most sales people and business development reps are way too quick to write off a holiday week as a wash. However, in my experience I have found that those weeks can actually be extremely productive, and in certain markets quite fruitful, as well.

Regardless of what market you are selling into, the tips Mark Hunter’s post provides are things that you can accomplish in a slow week when many of your prospects may not be in the office. However, in some markets you may actually be more productive on the phones during a holiday week such as Thanksgiving or Christmas. I have learned this from experience in my last role leading the business development team at one of our portfolio companies. We were selling into small and medium sized managed IT service providers.

During Thanksgiving week we were expecting a slow week in terms of connecting with prospects and setting up appointments. What we found was that while the call-to-connect rate was a bit lower, the people who answered the phone were happy to speak with us and our connect-to-appointment rate was much higher. The reason was that the people running those companies are small business owners who are typically managing helpdesk tickets, putting out fires, and dealing with clients. On those vacation weeks their clients typically take time off, and that winds up being the only free time they have time to conduct research on new technologies and vendors proactively.

So before you decide to write-off the whole week next time there is a holiday, make sure you really understand your prospects. It may end up being a lot more productive that you think.

1. The end user: When implementing a new process, field, reports, dashboards, etc. always keep the end user in mind. As a salesforce.com admin, one of your primary goals is user adoption and ease of use. Try to think like a product manager about how people actually interface with the system. If your processes and page layouts are so complicated that nobody can figure out how to use them, you will not be successful in capturing the data you are looking for. 
2. Data integrity: In a data-driven organization the integrity of the data should always be a priority, but it’s your job to make it happen. Only a few people in the organization should be allowed to mass import data: the salesforce.com admin and potentially people in operations roles such as sales ops and marketing ops. Set guidelines for data import, de-dupe as much as possible, and use limits and validation rules to prevent bad data and incomplete data. Also, data integrity and compliance comes from the top-down. Line managers have to play a huge role in this, and should be committed to enforcing the proper input and usage of any fields or process they have asked you to implement in the system. Before implementing anything new get commitment on enforcing the usage, and try to create a culture of, “If it’s not in salesforce.com it doesn’t exist”.
3. What’s already in the system: While this might seem obvious, in my experience, of these three things it is the most frequently overlooked. Every time the sales and/or marketing management turns-over at a company, the new leadership brings with them the applications, processes, fields, reports, and dashboards that they like to use. However, all of the applications, processes, fields, reports, and dashboards that the old leadership put in do not just get ripped out. Instead, they lie dormant in the system collecting virtual dust like ruins of previous regimes. As a result, the system becomes crowded and filled with junk that makes doing anything quite cumbersome. The nature of most end-users is to ask for something first and then look, rather than look to see if what they need is in the system before asking after they have confirmed that it doesn’t exist. It is the admins job to keep the system as clean as possible. Delete fields that are not used or contain irrelevant data. Uninstall apps and installed packages that are not in use. Limit who can create public reports dashboards. Finally, do not fulfill any requests without first checking to see whether they already exist.

Keeping these three things in mind will result in better user adoption, better data integrity, and ultimately less work for the salesforce.com admin.

For salesforce.com admins, working at an extremely data-driven organization is a blessing. It means that the leaders in the organization actually care about collecting data, the quality of the data that is collected, and all of those fancy charts and reports that make the data come to life so they can make good decisions.

However, that doesn’t mean that managing all of the custom objects, fields, workflow rules, validation rules, views, apps, reports, and dashboards — not to mention any custom development that might have been created to automate, capture, and report the data — can be very difficult. As mentioned, I do consider working for a data driven executive team as a blessing, and have witnessed smart decision making as result of accurate and comprehensive data time and time again. But is there such a thing as too much data? When does it stop being helpful, and what can a salesforce.com admin or business analyst do to help his or her executive team avoid data overload in salesforce.com and focus on the right data?

Companies that discover the full potential of salesforce.com, or any CRM system for that matter, will gain the ability to track and report on just about any aspect of their business. That said, it’s your job as the salesforce.com admin to implement the system in a way that will make it an asset to the company and help your executive team make informed decisions.

Here are a few tips that can help you on your mission:

• Always keep the key metrics in mind: When asked to implement a process in salesforce.com, make you sure that you, the line-of-business leader, and the executive sponsor are very clear on what the key metrics are that you are trying to affect. If they haven’t given you this already don’t wait for them to tell you, be proactive and get into their head. Ask yourself questions like, what would tell me whether my process is failing or succeeding? Think about what you would want to track and see daily/weekly/monthly. Then bring that to the line-of-business leader and get their buy-in. Do not implement anything until you have their full buy-in. Otherwise, you are setting yourself up for failure.
• Do not be afraid to question the value of a report: Especially if you get a request for a reporting need that will most likely be extremely time consuming to implement. Ask if the report is an important metric that will drive smart decision making. If the answer is no or maybe make your reservations known to the person making the request. It doesn’t have to be a confrontation, simply make them aware that the request is complicated and ask them if this is a necessity or potentially just a nice to have. Most executives don’t know the work that goes into creating a report or creating the mechanisms that will allow you to report on something. It’s your job to let them know when something will be complicated and time consuming, so that they can better manage your time. Although no business leader likes being told no, they are also mindful of resources and don’t want their analysts spending all day on a report that they will look at once instead of a much easier set of reports that they will review daily.
• When preparing and presenting a dashboard make sure to keep two questions in mind:

1. What question do we want this report/chart to answer?
2. Is the report/chart meeting this need?

When you ask these questions over time you will see that although one dashboard may contain many reports and may look very impressive, only some of the charts are actually answering valuable questions. Only those will drive any type of decision making and the rest are probably just nice to haves. In addition, knowing the answers to these questions will make your presentation more valuable and effective for the executive team.

While accounts are at the very center of the sales object data model, and are associated to contacts, opportunities, partners, cases, contracts, and most of the other standard sales objects, leads are off to the side on their own table not connected to rest of the data model.

The two biggest problems caused by the practical implications of this data model are:

1. If you are working on an account with contacts in Salesforce.com you may not see any or all of the leads that are from the same account. As a result, you may or may not notice that someone else in your company has been corresponding with leads associated to that account.
2. Unlike with contacts with accounts, this data model does not provide a simple way to group associated leads from the same company onto a single record. If you are calling into a lead you do not have simple view on the record of the other leads that may already exist, and that someone else may already be speaking with the lead.

The Salesforce.com purists reading this post are probably saying that this is actually a process problem and not a system problem, and to some extent they would be correct. If you check for duplicates on every single lead and convert new leads over to contacts and attach them to the account you would avoid this problem, altogether. In an ideal world, this happens automatically through a marketing automation tool such as Eloqua, Marketo or the like. Or, you have you territory assignment rules setup correctly so that all leads and contacts in a territory get assigned to the same person.

However, 4 out 5 companies that I deal with struggle with this exact problem, because it isn’t entirely intuitive, immediately obvious, and many companies do not have territories or a marketing automation tool. Furthermore, some actually intentionally keep new leads as leads even if the account already exists in the database because of the way they have their team or process structured.

If you are struggling with this problem, there is one fairly simple solution that you can implement. It certainly isn’t perfect, but it allows you to associate leads to accounts, which means that you can group them and get a single view of all leads and contacts on a single account. For a few of the companies that I have worked with this has made a world of difference.

1. Create a custom lead field called “account”

   1. Data Type: Lookup
   2. Related Object: Account
   3. Related List Label: Leads (account)
   4. Child Relationship Name: Leads

2. Add the new “account” field to the lead page layout below the standard company field

3. Add the new “leads (account)” related list to the accounts page layout

4. Enjoy

Once you’ve done that you can populate the account field on leads from the same company, and they will appear in the leads (account) related list on the account record.

Please feel free to leave questions and comments.

With the overwhelming amount of content and resources available from each of these companies it is easy to get distracted and wind up wasting time learning about features and functions that aren’t really important to you and your users. Even worse, you can easily overlook a feature that may be of particular importance to you and your users, and not realize it until after your buying decision has been made. Going into an evaluation of marketing automation software with a planned approach can help keep you on schedule and focused on the features that matter most to your decision.

I used the following methodology in my evaluation:

1. Internal Discovery: Conduct internal discovery to gather requirements from the key stakeholders internally regarding process, goals, budget, timeframe, technical requirements, marketing channels, and expectations of a new solution.
2. External Discovery: Conduct research through available online content from 3^rd party resources such as blogs and forums, as well as from the vendors’ websites, both of which are loaded with content. The goal at this stage is to identify additional features/requirements that may not have been identified during the internal discovery. I also reach out to a couple of marketing automation consultants — current customers of each solution from my network — and began gathering data points for my evaluation.
3. Internal Alignment:  Once I complete both internal and external discovery I put together a list of key factors that each of the solutions will be rated on, and share it with the team internally to get buy-in on the assessment (see Key Factors below).
4. Evaluate: set up calls with sales people at each company and begin the evaluation. During the evaluation the goal was to understand how exactly we would execute our requirements using the solution, and what the capabilities were as related to each requirement. In most cases if you are clear on what you are looking for and they are good sales people they will help you get the information you are looking. I had conducted a series of calls with internal stakeholders on my end, and people at each company who were knowledgeable about different aspects of the solution that were important to my team and I. We did not conduct a trial for this evaluation because they require serious resources commitments, and are not completely free from either vendor.
5. Negotiate: Of course, price should be a factor in any product evaluation. At the time this post was being written, we have not yet reached this stage, but general pricing has been provide by the sales reps that I am working with.

Key Evaluation Factors:

1. Ease of Use/Ongoing Administration: the majority of our portfolio companies have between 1 and 5 people on their marketing teams, not to mention limited budgets.
2. Integration: Most of our portfolio companies use Salesforce.com.
3. Social: Social continues to emerge as an increasingly important area for marketers.
4. Lead Nurturing Campaign Management: Ability to automate a series of touch points for a specific audience is critical to building a relationship marketing program.
5. Newsletter: An important component in most content marketing strategies, including ours.
6. Dynamic Content: Delivering the right content to the right people is critical to building a relationship marketing program.
7. Segmentation: The ability to segment your audience across an array of social, demographic, firmographic, and behavioral parameters is critical to building a relationship marketing program.
8. Onboarding Resources: The sooner you can get up and running, the faster you will get a return on your investment.

This post outlines a pretty simple methodology for conducting a marketing automation software evaluation, but there are a lot of other great resources out there. Many marketing automation consultants will publish their own blogs with thoughts on this topic. One that I enjoyed reading was “Marketo vs. Eloqua,” a post by Sam Boush, the owner at Lead Lizard.

David Raab at the Raab Associates also offers a regularly updated Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool called VEST for a fee.

In my next post I will share a summary of my evaluation.

The topic of sales prospecting emails is widely discussed in the sales and marketing blogosphere, and I agree with most of the other contributors that email prospecting can be an extremely powerful tool when done right. So if you aren’t doing it already, you should start, because it can significantly improve your prospecting effectiveness. If you are already doing it, like me, you are probably looking for ways to improve.

With all of the people out there commenting on the topic, I thought I would share some of my own experience, favorite posts, and top tips in a series of posts over the coming weeks.

In brief, these are the 5 tips I will cover in more detail over my next five posts on “The Best Tactics for Email Prospecting”:

1. Craft an engaging subject line
2. Leverage the prospects content everywhere
3. Be specific (both as to why you are emailing the prospect and what you are asking for in return)
4. Optimize for mobile
5. Stay persistent

If you’re interested in reading some additional resources and tips on the topic of email prospecting right now, here is a list of helpful posts and resources to get you started:

• http://www.slideshare.net/landmarkrecruiting/the-ultimate-guide-to-email-prospecting
• http://freelanceswitch.com/money/writing-email-copy-that-turns-into-sales/
• http://www.salesgravy.com/sales-articles/prospecting/5-secrets-to-effective-email.html
• http://www.drewsmarketingminute.com/2011/06/five-elements-to-writing-an-effective-sales-letter.html
• http://www.agsalesworks.com/Blog-Sales-Prospecting-Perspectives/bid/12690/2-Rules-to-Email-By-for-Successful-Sales-Prospecting
• http://www.eyesonsales.com/content/article/8_tips_for_increasing_your_email_prospecting_response_rate/
• http://thesaleshunter.com/4-things-not-to-do-on-a-cold-call-email/
• http://thesaleshunter.com/email-as-a-sales-prospecting-letter/
• http://fearless-selling.ca/you-lost-me-after-hello/

I hope this is helpful and invite any comments.

Instead, the most successful sales professionals think of creative ways to get around the gatekeeper and sometimes even leverage the gatekeeper as a resource to help with the sale.

Over the years I have gathered tactics for working with gatekeepers from many of the sales professionals I have worked with. Here are the top 10:

1. Don’t sound like a sales person when you ask for the contact:

• This is the first mistake that most people make. If you sound like you know the person you are trying to reach, you are a lot more likely to get through without any questions.
  • Instead of: “Hi this is Bob for Acme Inc., I’m looking for Michael Ka…Kaplansky? Is he available?”
  • Try asking with confidence: “Hi, is Mike there please?”
• The second approach will work much better, but you have to be confident, quick on your toes, and prepared to answer follow up questions like, “Mike who?” and “Who is this?”

2. Build a rapport with the gatekeeper:

• Make sure to get his or her name every time, and make a note of it for the next time you call – people like hearing their name, and it creates an instant bond. “Thanks Rebecca,” sounds a lot better than “Thanks, bye.” She will remember that touch the next time you call.
• Match tonality and empathize with the gatekeeper. If he sounds like he is having a bad day, show empathy by adjusting your tone: “Gee, it sounds like you might be having a bad day, would it be better if I called back another time?”
• Ask, “How is your day going?” Most sales people don’t do that. It will set you apart.
• Use humor.

3. Be friendly, brutally honest, and ask for help:

• “Ms. Gatekeeper, I have been trying everything to get in touch with Mr. Decision Maker over the last few weeks. I could really use your help. What would you suggest would be the best way to get in touch with Mr. Decision Maker?”
• Make the gatekeeper your ally, and she will want to help you.

4. Treat the gatekeeper like a concierge, not a bouncer:

• A concierge is someone whose job is to provide people with the information they are looking for or accomplish a task. Use the gatekeeper to get other relevant info that can help you with the sale, such as:
  • Company info
  • Contact info for other contacts
  • Best time/way to reach the decision maker
  • Other people who might be involved in the decision-making process
• Many gatekeepers will have access to their boss’s calendar – ask to get 15 minutes on the calendar.

5. Use flattery:

• “Gee Elise, I really like that name. It’s actually my daughter’s name” This typically works better when the gatekeeper is of the opposite gender.
• For really important deals, sending flowers, a bottle of wine or bourbon, or some nice cigars addressed to the gatekeeper with a note will almost always get you a meeting.

6. Leverage social media:

• Try connecting with the contact on LinkedIn or send an InMail to circumvent the gatekeeper
• Try sending a message via twitter.

7. Ask to speak with accounts receivables:

• If the company you are calling has an accounts receivables department, it may be your best way in. Usually when people call into AR it’s to pay a bill, so gatekeepers will not usually filter those calls. Furthermore, most of the AR professionals I have met are extremely friendly, and would welcome any phone call in which they don’t have to negotiate with an angry client who doesn’t pay on time. Once you get them on the phone just explain why you are calling and ask for their help. You may be surprised by what you find.

8. Ask a technical question:

• GK: “What is this call regarding?”
• You: “Well, I am putting together a proposal for Mrs. Decision Maker, and there were just a couple of other details that I needed from her to get this together. Do you know what the average daily site traffic and conversion rate is?

9. Send a calendar invite:

• Send a calendar invite to the decision maker the day before you call. Often, people will simply accept the calendar invite, so when you call the next day you can simply say, “I’m looking for Mike. He should be expecting my call. I sent over a meeting invite yesterday.”

10. Use an email return receipt:

• Send your prospect an email with return receipt turned on, so that you get a notification when they open it. When you get the notification you know that they are either at their desk or by their phone. That is a perfect time to call and get a hold of them.

There are plenty of great tactics out there. Please feel free to share some that have worked well for you in the comments.

For more great tips on improving your sales strategy and growing your business sign up for the OpenView newsletter.

Image provided by: tochis

While working on a recent project with one of our expansion-stage portfolio companies in the life sciences space, I found myself floating in a sea of acronyms. One sales call that I sat in on sounded as if it were being conducted in a completely different language. It seemed like every other word that came out of the prospect’s mouth was a three or four-letter acronym. For sales and marketing professionals in any industry, understanding the language of the buyer is critical to their success. In order to get myself up to speed fast, and to help the company at the same time, I put together this acronym guide.

I was amazed at how many acronyms I was able to think of off the top of my head, after just having worked with the company for a few weeks. With a bit of additional research I put together this list of the acronyms I felt were most relevant to the company and their buyers in life sciences:

As I was doing this I thought about some of our other portfolio companies and the acronyms that would be relevant to them. For sales people working for technology companies there are a few “core” acronyms that are used in conjunction with other acronyms across a wide range of industries, products, and services. Understanding these can help sales and marketing professionals get up to speed faster in any industry:

Do you know of any additional acronyms that are used in the fields of technology or life sciences that are helpful to know? Please feel free to contribute in the comments section below. This is obviously not a comprehensive list, and new ones pop up all the time.

What acronyms are important to your buyers?

However, that type of loosely structured data is difficult to keep consistent and nearly impossible to report on, which is one of the primary points of capturing that information in the first place.

Though most sales organizations at this stage do not track sales by product, that information can be extremely insightful and help sales leaders improve focus, training, and incentive plans around specific products. As your sales team scales, this level of information will be critical to your success. If you haven’t already, you should invest in a resource to help you implement sales tracking at the product level.

If you are already using Salesforce.com as your CRM/SFA system these tips will help you implement products effectively.

Before you start implementing anything, review some of the overview documentation that salesforce.com provides to get a better understanding of how this module is designed to work and intended to be used. As a rule of thumb I always try to use as much out-of-the-box functionality as possible.

• Products, Pricebooks and Schedules Overview
• Admin Tip Sheet

Also, when implementing product tracking in your organization, there are a several relationships between objects that are important to understand. Before you start implementing make sure that you understand:

• The difference between the Products object, and the Opportunity Products  (opportunity line item) object, and the role each one plays
• The difference between the Price Book object, and the Price Book Entry object, and the role each one plays

The Products, Price Book, and Schedules Data Model provides a great graphical representation to help clarify the relationships.

Once you’ve completed the initial setup you may be interested in implementing some of these additional tools and features which are not obviously documented and available. Here a few examples that I have found useful, and some documentation to help guide you through implementation.

• Tracking annuity based products
• Mass Uploading Products and Price Books
• Requiring Products on Opportunities:
• First make sure that you have enabled the Enable Prompt for Products feature in:

Setup -> Customize -> Settings -> Prompt users to add products

This will not effect leads that have been converted. Also, some organizations only require products once an opportunity has reached a certain stage.

• If you want to take your implementation a step further you can implement one of these validation rules: (credit to Katherine Chilcote in the salesforce.com administrators Group on Linkedin)

When the stage reaches X, Y, or Z, sales reps are required to enter products and schedules. Before these stages, products and schedules are not required on opportunities.

AND( 

TEXT(StageName) = “ABC”, 

NOT(  OR(  ISNEW(),  HasOpportunityLineItem))) 

For Multiple stages, the rule is this: 

AND( 

CASE(StageName,  “Perception Analysis”,1,  “Proposal/Price Quote”, 1,  “Negotiation/Review”, 1,  “Closed Won”, 1,  0)  = 1,  NOT(  OR(  ISNEW(),  HasOpportunityLineItem))

• Tracking amount to goal by product if you want to incentivize sales of a certain product

If you have any other good tips for implementing salesforce.com please share.

image provided by: TheBusyBrain

The goal of the forecast review meeting is to go through and understand the deals that make up the current period’s forecast. In a pipeline review, the goal is to monitor the health of the overall pipeline, not just the deals in the current forecast. Everything in the pipeline is fair game. A pipeline review meeting will give you a much more realistic sense of how much pipeline you really have, so that when your SFA tells you that there is $5 million in the pipeline for Q2 you’ll know what that actually means. It is also your chance to perform some necessary clean-up and make sure that your reps are working on the right opportunities that will help them build a healthy pipeline.

Of course, the pipeline and forecast reviews don’t necessarily have to be two separate meetings, and you may find it beneficial to include elements of the pipeline review into your forecast review meetings. However, in many expansion stage SaaS companies, there are simply too many deals in the pipeline to discuss every single one. So in order to incorporate a pipeline review into your next forecast review meeting pick 5 to 10 deals randomly for each rep and ask the same questions that you would ask in a forecast review meeting. But instead of asking “How do we get it to close?” you should ask, “How do we get it to the next stage in the sales process?”

If you aren’t incorporating some aspect of pipeline review into your meetings with your sales team, you should start today.

Regardless of the length of your sales cycle, you should hold a forecast review meeting with every sales rep at least once per week . Quite simply, if you aren’t reviewing the business that is closing on a weekly basis, you don’t know your business. That’s a good philosophy for VPs of Sales to live by at expansion stage companies.

If you have a shorter sales cycle with a low ASP, you will probably be focusing on the many deals that are closing within the next week. If your sales cycle is longer with a high ASP, there may only be a few forecasted deals to close. But even so, that doesn’t mean you should have fewer or less frequent forecast review meetings. Rather, that makes it even more important to stay on top of those deals.

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While the goal of any sales professional is to exceed quota and make money, it’s important to keep in mind in that the goal of the forecasting process is accuracy. That is why in a sales forecast review meeting, not only what you say, but how you say it, matters. The forecast review meeting is an opportunity to hold sales reps accountable and to dig into their deals. But you do not want to put them in a situation where they’re simply telling you what you want to hear for fear of how you might react if they tell you the truth. I am NOT saying that you should baby your reps, or sugar coat anything at all, but you do need pay attention to how you come off, especially when it’s crunch time at the end of a quarter and everybody is on edge.

An important expectation to establish up front is that the ultimate purpose of the forecast meeting is accuracy. If a sales rep misses their quota but hits their forecast dead on, that’s a more optimal end result (even thought it never seems that way) than if the forecast was botched altogether. After all, that situation allows you to deliver a more accurate forecast to management, making you look better, and improving their ability to make measured decisions.

At the end of the day, your success is dependent upon the success of your reps. When you dig into their deals, it’s with their – and your – best interests in mind. You’re keeping them on track with each deal, and helping them get better at their jobs. So, while it’s important to ask tough questions, how you ask those questions is just as important. You must ask them in the way that makes the reps feel like you’re trying to be helpful by encouraging honest answers and accurate forecasts. That will help you and your reps plan better so that they will get to quota consistently.

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As sales teams at early stage companies grow, they have a tendency to carry with them some of the older habits that made sense when they were smaller and less focused. One of these habits is the forecast review meeting with not only the whole sales team, but often times the CEO and other people form the organization. As companies grow into expansion, that is one habit that just doesn’t scale.

The forecast review meeting should be a one-on-one meeting between the rep and the manager, but it may be appropriate to invite other people in some cases. In more technical sales, for example, you might invite a sales engineer into the forecast meeting to provide feedback on the technical aspects of the deal, and to confirm the technical win. Often times, as your sales team grows, a very well-trained and trusted resource such as a Sales Engineer can offer valuable insight from the front lines. For instance, they may have additional insight into the deals that they’ve been involved with, or information about new technologies and competitors that you or your reps may be competing with on deals.

However, be cautious not to let any other meeting participants undermine a rep’s forecast. Each rep should own their own forecast, and if they start to feel like you or someone else is setting it for them, you risk losing their trust.

If your organization is already at the size where you have a layer of management between you and your sales reps, such as a sales manager or sales director, you will want them to run their own forecast meetings with their reps. Depending on how many reps each director has, there may be too many deals in the forecast to go through every opportunity. A good approach in that case is to go rep-by-rep, picking on specific deals, especially those in the commit forecast, and the deals that are key to hitting the number. Another good approach if you’re dealing with a high volume of deals is to group similar sized deals together and apply a probability to each group in your adjustments based on feedback from your managers, and historical data.

It’s important to note that even though you want your managers running their own forecast review meetings, you will always have questions that you want unfiltered answers to. As a best practice, it’s good to sit in on at least a handful of forecast review meetings with the manager and the rep every week. This will give you the opportunity to acquire unfiltered feedback from the reps, while also allowing you to see how your managers run their forecast review meetings.

Again, as a general rule of thumb, forecast review meeting participants should be limited. But always keep in mind other resources and people that could help get a deal done. At the end of meetings, you may want to help or advise a sales rep to engage with other members of the organization and ask for their assistance. That’s especially true at early and expansion stage companies, when some prospects may want to speak with a member of the executive team before committing to a deal.