Matt on Marketing

You know what they say about the best-laid plans. Even if you had a great strategy, clear objectives and commonly-accepted sales goals on January 1, a thousand things can go wrong to push you off track.

Here are 10 specific reasons I find most often as culprits of sales goals that are behind schedule.

1. You didn’t have a plan to begin with
Setting a sales goal is not a plan. Telling your sales team and/or your leadership team (or board) what sales number you’re going to hit this year (and in each month/quarter) isn’t a plan either. Do you know how you’re going to get there? Have you quantified and planned the leading indicators to closed business? Does your sales management team, your front-line reps, your marketing team and other supporting groups know exactly what their role is to drive achievement of your number?

It’s never too late to create that plan, but without it you’re just a rudderless ship hoping to eventually find the horizon.

2. You didn’t commit the resources required to sell
Can your existing sales team hit the goals you’ve set out to achieve? Is the marketing team committed to deliver the leads, sales support tools and other prospect acceleration requirements you’ll need to increase interest and sales pipeline throughput?

Key to effective planning and execution is not only creating the plan, but ensuring the resources you need are in place and committed to execute moving forward. That goes for the size, quality and make-up of your sales team, the tools they use to manage their day and pipeline, budget for the right compensation and incentive plans, marketing and sales operations, and so forth.

3. You’re not doing the daily work to actively manage your pipeline
Talk to the best salespeople in the world and they’ll tell you the same thing. Achieving spectacular sales results means getting up early, putting your hard hat on, and doing the hard work all day, every single day. It means spending the majority of your day working with prospects – new prospects, nurtured prospects, qualified leads, channel partners, friends of prospects, whatever it takes.

I don’t believe that dials and talk time are adequate metrics to measure inside sales success, but make no mistake – inside sales reps will increase their chances of success and higher commissions by picking up the phone more often, taking far more at bats every day, and playing whatever numbers and conversion game exists in their business to their advantage.

This also includes incorporating CRM best practices so that you’re actively managing and tracking your entire pipeline, and spending as little time as possible every day doing it.

4. You’re letting under-performing reps drag you down
Start the year with a proactive sales rep management program in place. Know the early indicators of success or failure well before the month or quarter closes. How healthy is the sales rep’s pipeline? Are they doing the daily activities required to be successful? Do they have enough qualified opportunities, early in the month or quarter, to close a percentage of them and exceed their quota?

The easy answer here is to move out of the organization reps who don’t hit their number. But at the point they fail to meet quota, they’re already dragging you down. Identify problem areas early, coach your reps to be better, and be more proactive at correcting or eliminating that behavior early on.

5. You’re only focusing on today’s deals without managing and nurturing long-term opportunities
In most B2B sales environments, only 10-15 percent of inbound leads will be both qualified and ready to buy. Of the remaining leads, 60-65 percent will be qualified and not ready to buy. That’s business for a future month or quarter that most sales organizations either disqualify or ignore.

In terms of current month or quarter sales, that’s a good thing. But if you fail to triage and manage long-term opportunities, you’re not only decreasing your chances of ever doing business with that prospect. You’re already increasing the cost and difficulty of hitting your number in future sales periods.

Those not-ready-to-buy prospects will eventually transact. Have the strategy and systems in place to manage them without disrupting your sales team’s ability to focus on current-period pipelines.

6. Your conversion expectations are overly optimistic
The vast majority of your leads aren’t going to buy. Even the majority of qualified opportunities probably won’t close. If you expect this up front, and build those expectations into your sales model and plans, you’re more likely to have the resources and execution required to accept those conversion realities and still hit your number.

In many B2B selling environments, for example, if I don’t have access to historical pipeline conversion data, I’ll start with an assumption that 5 percent of leads will turn into a near-term qualified opportunity, and 25 percent of opportunities will close into a sale. That’s a 1.5 percent conversion rate from lead to close in a given month or quarter. Tiny, but reality. If you assume higher without historical back-up, you’re putting your results at risk by expecting too much of what you have.

7. Your leads suck (and you either don’t know it or aren’t doing anything about it)
Working with your marketing team, you should have a pre-existing definition for a good lead and qualified lead (they might be different). Based on that, you need to have an expectation for overall lead-to-opportunity conversion as well as more detailed conversion expectations by marketing channel. And as time goes on, you should be able to measure lead-to-close conversion to ensure that your marketing cost per sale is at or below expectations.

In too many organizations, the focus isn’t on lead quality but lead volume. Marketing dumps a ton of “leads” on the sales team, and either is satisfied with an up-and-to-the-right delivery number month after month, or fails to subsequently measure whether those leads are converting into closed business.

Start with a common definition of a good lead, between sales and marketing. Then track lead performance through the pipeline to ensure your overall modeling on lead-opportunity-close is correct, but also to adjust resources and lead channel investments based on where the best conversions and lowest marketing cost per sale exists.

8. You’re selling the same way to everybody
This is worse than assuming a health care company needs your product or service in the same way as an engineering company or government organization. Worse than assuming that the CTO prospect needs to hear the same message as the CFO. If you’re selling the same way to everybody, you’re also not listening and responding to unique customer needs and priorities.

What you deliver to new customers, the product or service itself, may be largely the same for everybody. But every prospect approaches their unique problem or opportunity differently. The way they use your product or service, and/or the benefits and outcomes they need from it, will differ as well. Take advantage of and embrace those differences in the way you sell. You’ll find far more prospects interested and engaged at the top of the sales process.

9. Google has nothing good to say about you
Your collateral isn’t that important anymore. Your case studies are great, but new prospects will assume they’re heavily biased. What prospects do trust up front, right or wrong, is Google. What does the rest of the Web say about you? What are other customers, press, analysts and industry influencers saying about you?

A top priority of marketing teams working with sales organizations should be proactively managing the Google experience for early prospects. This is much harder said than done, as most of what happens on that first page of Google when someone searches your name is beyond your direct control. It’s not a quick fix either. But it’s worth it not only to increase current lead conversion and interest, but to accelerate new inbound lead volume as well.

10. You’re losing deals to apathy (because you’ve failed to build enough value)
Most sales get lose not to a competitor, but to nothing. Most prospects simply fail to make a decision and drop the opportunity altogether. If they indeed had a problem to solve, this means you as the seller have failed to adequately qualify your ability to solve the problem.

Worse, it could be an indication that you’ve failed to help the prospect with the value translation of a problem they may or may not know they have, and differentiate between the negative future they’re headed towards and the positive future you can help enable for them. You will still lose deals to apathy (you can lead a prospect to water, but you can’t make them all drink), but losing deals because the prospect is confused or uneducated is completely fixable.

Would love to hear other symptoms of under-performing sales you’ve seen or are experiencing in organizations you work in or manage. What else is this list missing?

Every business has partners, including a large number that are either current or prospective channels of new business.  But not every partner is created equal.

Some are extremely important to your business, others aren’t as much but are nonetheless proactive referral sources. And there are multiple shades of grey in between.

Most businesses we work with struggle to organize those partners in the first place, let alone determine and operationalize campaigns to keep those partners active and productive.

To help (or at least to start), consider the partner matrix highlighted below. It allows you to effectively “score” current and prospective partners along two primary factors: Importance and Productivity. I use a four-point scale for each factor, with the following general definitions:

Importance (quality of network/introductions)
1. Elite channel to target prospects
2. Good/average channel to target prospects
3. Occasional match with target prospects
4. Minimal match with target prospects

Productivity (quantity/regularity of network/introductions)
1. Proactive, proven regular communication and introductions
2. Reactive, responds when asked, handful of introductions
3. Minimal production and/or minimally successful lead conversion
4. Dark

The combination of both scores then dictates the depth and frequency with which you might want to communicate with that partner. And these activities can be grouped together with partners that garner the same score.

How you decide to execute and act with each partner type in the matrix is up to you, and likely dependent on your business, industry and how you like to operate. But I bet scoring and organizing your partners in the first place will be a big first step, and likely help drive natural direction on what to do next.

It’s the day after the Super Bowl.  Many of us probably regret the extra beer, or the extra plate of nachos. It was a good idea at the time, of course, but hindsight and perspective brings a different perception.

But a few extra calories are nothing compared to a $3.5 million dollar ad spend.

It’s the day after the Super Bowl. How many of yesterday’s advertisers are still excited about their purchase? How many do you think got caught up in the excitement of being part of advertising’s biggest stage, and this morning are upset about public opinion of their brand, their creative, their direction (perceived, real or imagined)?

There’s a second set of advertisers that are probably thrilled this morning. Their ad was a hit, and it’s still lighting up the social networks today. It’s the darling of advertising critics, and in line for some of Madison Avenue’s most coveted awards.

But $3.5 million dollars (not to mention the cost of creative and other associated hard and soft costs) is a lot of money. Tweet volume, positive reviews and even YouTube impressions don’t pay the bills. Three to six months from now, will those positively-perceived ads make a difference at the cash register?

Measuring ROI on a Super Bowl ad doesn’t happen on Monday. That kind of investment, and the strategy that typically goes behind it, takes much longer to play out and demonstrate positive return. But tens of millions of people saw your cards, and are already chiming in.

Advertising experts by the hundreds are already declaring winners and losers from yesterday’s broadcast. But the real answer, of course, is far more complicated than the context and creative of the campaign on day one.

Technology, in many cases, makes us lazy. It can automate previously manual, repetitive or time-consuming processes that certainly make our lives and jobs easier. But it can also let us slip into lazy practices that compromise the integrity and quality of our work.

So let’s talk about networking. Building a quality professional network is still really hard work. It takes significant investment and time. The work required to initiate, develop and foster an active, quality network is completely different and separate from the tools & processes we now have at our disposal to manage that network.

These are two very different things. A large list of connections on LinkedIn is not a network. A huge list of Outlook Contacts is not a network, any more than the phone book is your network. A list of contacts means nothing, not matter how neatly they’re organized or how much information you can sort through about them.

A quality network is what’s behind that data and behind that technology. Who do you know, how do you know them, what’s the context and depth and value of the relationship you have. Some relationships will be far deeper than others, granted. But building that depth (no matter how narrow or wide you choose to pursue it) takes a lot of hard work. Every day.

LinkedIn and Outlook and Gist and any number of really fantastic contact management tools make the operations of networking easy. They speed up the organization and management functions. But the networking itself is still hard work. And that’s where your time is still very well spent.

The biggest advertising day of the year is upon us, and few Super Bowl advertisers are waiting until Sunday to launch.  Most have been preparing for months, and many launched their pre-event campaigns days or weeks ago.  But despite the fact that the vast majority of this weekend’s big ad spenders are marketing directly to consumers, there’s a lot B2B marketers can learn from their strategies and tactics.  Here are a few:

Use the whole event (before, during and after)
It’s not just about your 30-second ad or pre-game show sponsorship. The best Super Bowl campaigns use the game as a centering point for a wide variety of related events, campaigns and more for weeks before and after Sunday. This year alone, advertisers such as Honda and Volkswagen have generated tens of millions of impressions (not to mention invaluable PR and social buzz) for their Super Bowl ad teasers. And for many other brands, the Super Bowl is the kick-off of a new, ongoing campaign using the ad’s concept or theme as a starting point. The smartest Super Bowl advertisers have rallied marketing groups in their organization well beyond the advertising unit to take full advantage of the opportunity. This isn’t always easy, but the results are well worth it.

Don’t forget the tease
For many viewers, the ads are as important if not more important than the game itself. The anticipation of who will advertise, what they’ll show, what surprises are in store – all create buzz well before the game. And every year, advertisers get smarter and smarter at building that pre-event anticipation to drive awareness. Ten million people viewing a YouTube-hosted video teaser, a week before the actual game? When these brands do the math on whether the 30-second ad is worth it, you can guarantee they’re counting these out-of-game impressions as well. As you prepare for the big event (your product launch, trade show, whatever), don’t forget to take advantage of the tease.

Speak to the consumer, not just the business
Most Super Bowl ads, of course, are selling products to consumers. But many B2B marketers forget that they’re selling to consumers as well. The company may write the check, but the individual decision-maker signs the contract. Appeal to them directly, specifically, and you may unlock the opportunity to sell to the business. It’s subtle, but important.

Old-school tactics still work
Humor, sex, celebrities. They will always be a part of Super Bowl advertising. I guarantee there will be blog posts and commentaries after the game criticizing Bud Light ads, GoDaddy’s innuendos, and so forth. But they work. Know your brand, and what it can and cannot get away with. But following the time-tested rules can still generate predictable results.

Get your customers directly engaged
User-generated content isn’t just for Doritos ads. Why can’t B2B companies ask their customers, partners, employees and prospects to contribute creative ideas and other content to the cause? Some of the best B2B blogs I read publish a majority of their content from best practices among their customer community. Long gone are the days when marketers did all the marketing. Your entire organization, not to mention your entire user base, is now your marketing organization. Put them to work. They often work cheap!

Use the event, but don’t pay the tax
Of course, your other option is to draft off of the main event, but not pay to be a part of it directly. Plenty of brands this week are leveraging “The Big Game” (they’re not allowed to call it the Super Bowl unless they’re an approved advertiser or partner) to do their own game-day promotions. It’s not exactly the same, and it can sometimes reflect poorly on your brand and/or make you look a little cheap, but it can deliver results at a much lower cost. May B2B companies do this actively and successfully at trade shows, when their competitors have their own big launches, and so forth.

Let me start by saying I have incredible respect for not only countless business professionals with MBA degrees, but also many of the programs themselves. And if I could go back in time, I probably would have been more serious about pursuing an MBA for myself.

That said, I think they’re wildly overrated.

If you want to work for a Top Five consulting firm or immediately make middle six-figures on Wall Street or get hired into the standard career path at Procter & Gamble, then you probably need an MBA.

But if you want to start a business, if you want a long and successful career in sales or marketing, or if you want any of the majority of business opportunities for yourself in your early or late-stage career – save your time and money.

Twenty years ago, an MBA was the gateway. It was your ticket. It was table stakes to a wide variety of jobs, opportunities and career paths.

Not anymore. Lots of things have changed. Hiring managers, venture capitalists and more are looking as much if not more for street smarts than book smarts. They know some of the smartest and most successful business leaders today and over the past 50 years don’t have Ivy League college degrees, let alone elite MBAs under their belt.

This isn’t a ticket to skip your college degree. But it’s a recognition that the pedigree of successful business leaders isn’t defined by that degree.

I wasn’t at Microsoft terribly long. But some of the smartest people I had the opportunity to work with and learn from were Ecology majors from public universities. A current client, a world-renown enterprise CRM expert and founder of several successful businesses, studied pharmacy for her undergrad. She does have a Masters degree – in teaching (reading specifically). She’s now one of the most recognized Oracle experts on the planet.

When the iPhone 2 first came out, and it had those awful antennae problems, Steve Jobs brought his son with him to China for a series of intense meetings to identify the problem and determine the right solution. He told his son at the time that the following 7-10 days would be worth far more than two years in an MBA program.

All that said, no matter what your instincts or natural business and “street” smarts you have, replacing the foundation and discipline of a traditional MBA requires a lot of hard work.

Show me a successful business leader without an MBA, and I’ll show you someone who is a lifelong student, devours reading on a regular basis, peppers others with questions to learn what they already know.

Those who succeed (with or without an MBA) make a daily habit of learning, a regular discipline of testing and validating their ideas. They still read case studies, then they go create them.

Succeeding without an MBA might actually be more work, harder work. But my point is that it’s more than possible.

Many marketers pride themselves with how quickly the move, how chaotic their days are, how many fire drills they tackle in a given workday. Speed, agility, the ability and capacity to move quickly with the market – those are all valued attributes of a successful marketer.

But so is planning. Long-term planning. Knowing today what you should be doing six months from now. Thinking well in advance of a product launch, a seasonal opportunity, a big industry trade show or more. This is also a valued attribute of successful marketers.

Agility, speed of thinking and execution, and long-term thinking aren’t mutually exclusive skills. They don’t conflict. In fact, with the world’s most successful marketers, they work together.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer deftly addressed this in a recent Business Week profile, using an athletic metaphor:

“They talk about fast twitch and slow twitch muscles, and I forget, long-distance runners have one and sprinters have the other. Well, on some senses all product teams kind of need a bit of fast twitch and a bit of slow twitch, because there are bigger innovations the take longer and there are other things that your an do in shorter periods of time.”

In sports, you can be a sprinter or a distance runner. In business, you need to be both.

No matter what your current role or future aspirations, networking is a critical skill and should be a top priority. And as with many things in business, there are no shortcuts. Building a strong, effective network takes daily activities and discipline.

You can make it complicated, follow a longer “daily do” list (not a bad idea), or make it easy on yourself and do just five things every day. I bet you can do them in 15 minutes or less once you make them a priority and get the hang of them.

Just five things, every business day:

Five Thank You’s via email or voicemail
Four Catch Up’s with those you haven’t seen or spoken with in awhile (via email or phone)
Three Recommendations (via email or LinkedIn)
Two Referrals (via email, phone, in person or other appropriate channel)
One Hand-Written Note (a thank you, congrats, etc.)

If this sounds like a lot, do less. Eliminate a step, or cut down on the volume. But these are the foundational, daily activities that – over time – build powerful networks.

I hate to pick on the United States Postal Service, but they made themselves an easy target earlier this week.

In my mailbox was quite possibly the worst direct mail letter I’ve received in a long time. I scanned and posted it here (click on the image to see it in all it’s glory).

I can count at least nine problems:

1. The envelope was plain white, and addressed to “Postal Customer”. No personalization, no stamp, not even a USPS logo in the corner.

2. Even the top of the letter itself was addressed to “POSTAL BUSINESS CUSTOMER”, in all caps no less in an apparent attempt to make me feel even more like an anonymous prospect.

3. Although I like the bulleted list of benefits, the subsequent payoff is ambiguous. Provide POSTAL products and services to my customers? Why is POSTAL in all caps again? And do they want me to sell my customers stamps?

4. The next line tells me they’ll give me signage, counters, equipment and training. They know I’m a marketing agency, right? Or do they assume that every business that gets mail is a retail location?

5. A lot of actual prospects who receive this might be interested in the “keep a percentage of the sales” part, but it’s hidden at the end of the first paragraph. Even if I cared (or were still reading), this benefit gets lost.

6. The first call to action is to attend one of their upcoming seminars. No mention of where, when, link to a calendar of option. Nothing.

7. Oh, wait. I can call the two people listed. No email addresses. No social media options. This doesn’t surprise me, but I’m willing to bet Wendy and Liz have email addresses. Why not list them?

8. The letter ends by hoping I become a POSTAL partner. I’m still not entirely sure what that means. I guess I could attend the seminar, but I have no idea when or where that is. And I don’t have time to call Wendy or Liz.

9. The letter, of course, is signed by SEATTLE DISTRICT RETAIL. Seriously, it couldn’t have at least been Wendy or Liz?

I’m sure I’ve missed other issues, but there’s clearly lessons here for all of us on what NOT to do – in direct mail, email, Web copy and more.

Every sales organization has meetings. But are most of them worth the time? Too many sales meetings happen on a regular rhythm but without a purpose, without an objective, without an explicit need or outcome in mind.

Regular sales meetings are fine, but they should follow a strategy. Here’s a three-meeting rhythm that works for many sales organizations.

Daily huddles
Typically 10 minutes long, 15 at the most. First-thing in the morning so it sets the tone for the day. Everybody stands up. Rapid-fire updates from the previous day – highlights from the floor, quick sales promotion updates, sharing of any industry news or competitive moves. Review your key metrics, the previous day’s performance, month (or quarter) to date, and today’s goal. High energy, in and out.

Bi-weekly trainings
Every other week, take an hour (90 minutes at the most) to train the team. Have a calendar prepared in advance of topics for future meetings, so the team knows what to expect and so that presenters have plenty of time to make the training worth everyone’s while. Training will focus on product updates, competitive reviews, consultative selling best practices, role-playing, the occasional book review, etc.

Monthly huddles
Once a month (towards the beginning of the month), do an hour-long huddle. Detail the month (or quarter) just past – what was good, not good, needs improvement. Celebrate the wins, as a group and individually. Launch the new sales promotion and explain how it’ll work. Get a business update from the CEO.

You can use a sales meeting system like this with two per-requisites.

One, you have an effective, non-email communication tool to disseminate information more regularly without interrupting everyone’s time, at the same time, with meetings. This can mean Yammer, Salesforce.com’s Chatter or similar internal collaboration tools.

Two, if you’re a larger sales team, you need an effective system of front-line sales managers to help distribute information and answer questions on a daily basis.