Sales is still a numbers game and the phone is a great way to get those numbers

Posted on February 18, 2012 by Ira Michael Blonder

Talk to enough people and you will find someone with an interest in what you’ve got to sell. This adage has been true for ages and is still true today. Telemarketing provides a terrific method of reaching enough people to achieve sales objectives. When properly orchestrated and staffed with experienced practitioners, the telemarketing method is methodical, akin to a contact-friendly variant on carpet bombing. The turf upturned as the result of conversation upon conversation will ultimately prove fertile enough to feed even innovative emerging technology businesses with precious revenue.

It all comes down to a question of timing. Given enough time (together with an ongoing analysis of documented conversations and a complete dedication to changing whatever may turn up as needing change) presentations can be refined and focused to deliver objectives. We’ve written extensively in this blog about the present-day phenomenon of a broken down purchasing system for some types of technology, largely with regards to larger businesses (often referred to here as global businesses) and/or larger public sector groups. No matter. Focus telemarketing efforts on information gathering rather than persuading or pushing a market that is obstinately unwilling to be pushed to get positive, progressively healthier results.

A two pronged approach that combines persistent, flexible direct marketing over the telephone with interactive marketing that exploits online search portals and social media can produce very effective results with comparatively few personnel and leaner facilities. For products sufficiently branded as commodities in a marketplace inbound leads are generally more promising. Look to interactive marketing techniques to stimulate such inbound lead activity. At the same time, a constant rumble from telemarketing can and does motivate less mature aspects of markets to move forward, over time, to generally bigger deals that usually incorporate a combination of products and services.

Coordinating both efforts is a mandatory requirement. By no means does it make sense to entirely focus on simply one approach. We have recent experience with such efforts and can say, conclusively, that clients would have done much better had they availed of interactive and direct simultaneously. There is absolutely no reason that we can find why one approach necessarily precludes the other. Further, we have more recent evidence of the success of just this type of combination.

We have excellent recent experience working extensively with interactive and direct marketing media for software technology innovators committed to global business markets. We welcome opportunities to elaborate on our experience. Please call Ira Michael Blonder, IMB Enterprises, Inc at +1 631-673-2929 to discuss your product and your near term market plans.

Producing Valuable Leads for IT Sales to Global Business Is Challenging but ROI is Very High

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Ira Michael Blonder

The process of selling IT products and services to global businesses and other large organizations, with overwhelming frequency, devolves at an alarming rate into highly competitive situations where factors are clearly at the disadvantage of IT marketers. These factors include:

Important roles within opportunities to engage with prospects change. Prospects assume a dominant position, changing direction as they see fit. IT marketers may be left high and dry at will
Telling signs of commodity purchasing scenarios rear their heads. For example, prospects cut back on engagement opportunities with IT marketers. Pricing discussions proliferate. The task of researching needs as well as methods of satisfying these needs becomes entirely relegated to prospects. IT marketers have little to no opportunity to speak up.

It is imperative for IT marketers, even those with products and services offerings entirely relegated to specific product platforms that lie out of their control (I include in this category offerings from Microsoft Managed Partners, Oracle Partners, SAP Partners, etc) to build fine tuned lead generation programs to ensure as completely as possible that precious scant face time and ear time be spent with the right prospects. IT marketers must be sufficiently capitalized to ensure that these opportunities to engage include no unnatural imperative for prospects to move forward, prematurely, at all. Better to take two years with the right prospect to land a lucrative order than to utilize artificial means to hasten the purchasing process. In fact, it may be necessary to authentically partner with decision-makers within prospect businesses who have a useful view of realities while incorrect decisions, already on the table for purchasing discussions, are dismantled.

Broadly speaking, in order to produce useful, promising sales leads for complex IT products and services to global business prospects, it is imperative that methods emphasize telephone contact to ensure that a meaningful set of potential advocates, information-gathering resources, decision-makers, etc within prospect businesses can be gathered in an efficient manner over manageable time frames. It is quite simply not possible to “touch” enough contacts within prospect businesses, neither via opportunities for face to face meetings, nor from conference attendee lists, or even email marketing outreach programs. Further, the mode of this telephone contact method must be firmly limited to teleprospecting activities, at least at the outset of campaigns, prior to identification of useful decision-makers, etc.

IMB Enterprises, Inc. has considerable recent experience implementing lead generation programs for complex sales of IT products and services to global business. Please telephone us at +1 631-673-2929 to discuss your products and needs. We are particularly interested in technology products–software or hardware–as most of our experience has been garnered from working with software and computer hardware manufacturers.

Look to Teleprospecting for a Superior Business to Business Lead Generation Program

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Ira Michael Blonder

Useful Sales leads are food for any business, nutrient rich supplements that promise to enrich cash flow and sales staff alike.

But what constitutes “useful” with regard to leads?

Leads are useful when they include information that can be used to forge successful sales campaigns with appropriate prospects. There is no better way that I know of to accumulate this type of information for innovative technology providers targeting global business and other large organizations than teleprospecting, meaning an outbound telemarketing effort that eschews hard selling for information gathering. Business to business lead generation requires a “hands off” attitude on the part of the teleprospector. Further, top teleprospecting talent will communicate a genuine interest to contacts in the subject of discussion, thereby encouraging a free exchange of information that typically leads to collection of useful sales information.

I do not believe in the value of buying contact lists. The task of identifying companies that constitute realistic targets for products and services is very useful endeavor that will help train a teleprospecting team to qualify contacts; therefore, why hand the team a set of businesses from a purchased contact list? If sales has participated in the business from inception (as I have advocated elsewhere in this blog) then there ought to be plenty of time to canvas the marketplace slowly and carefully to identify businesses that ought to be contacted once selling efforts begin. With regard to contacts within the prospect businesses that pre sales efforts identify, once again, researching contacts online, through address books, etc. and, generally, through sales team collaboration is superior route. Once again, the process of working to identify these contacts helps sales to refine the qualification process that will have to be in place to land the business. It is safe to say that the process of qualifying leads cannot be too precise an activity. The finer the grain the better as far as leads are concerned.

Once a lead list has been assembled, then a teleprospecting program can be successfully implemented to deliver very high quality selling opportunities. There is no error in combining this type of direct marketing effort with online product promotion. With recent improvements in online marketing communications opportunities, as well as with a tendency of today’s prospects to research just about everything they need to know about a product or service by themselves, with little to no hand holding from sales, online promotion can be successfully crafted to support the sale of complex products to global business.

I am wholly engaged with clients who are implementing teleprospecting programs with web 2.0 online marketing. I welcome opportunities to discuss specific needs that may be at hand for your business or your business plans. Please call me at +1 631-673-2929 to further a discussion.

A Teleprospector Carries an Audible Sandwich Board Directly to the Ears of Prime Prospects

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Ira Michael Blonder

I learned early on within my experience with teleprospecting that the opening message to prospects, delivered through this powerful telemarketing technique, was much like an audible sandwich board, comprised of front and back key phrases delivered directly to one set of hand picked ears to stimulate a conversation that would deliver lots of useful information. The teleprospector is merely responsible for delivering the message. The real payload lies in the phrases themselves, which must be carefully chosen to catch the interest of the listener on the other end of the telephone call.

A client grudgingly noted that the phrases, which must be delivered early in the conversation and in an interval comprised of no more than five seconds of the complete telephone call, should place his product at the very top of commodities in his market. He would have rather had the call occasioned by survey taking, or on the premise of a prospect interview on a topic germaine to his product, but he correctly surmised that framing the conversation that far away from an actual sales call would leave the prospect with a less than sanguine opinion of the client’s business should subsequent conversations follow where the true nature of the call (as a door opener for a sale somewhere in the future) be made known to all parties. I present this recollection to illustrate the very subtle positioning required of the teleprospecting call, which must be carefully, but comfortably, placed between a sales call and a research study to deliver the most productive effect.

The most productive effect will be to unearth a substantial amount of information, at once credible and descriptive of a prospect’s role with regard to a product or service within a business. Once this information is digested, categorized and stored within the sales effort a foundation of understanding will be in place, upon which additional information can be layered and positioned, as appropriate, to determine interest, decision makers, etc.

Teleprospecting should be included as a tactic within any sales plan for a product or service targeted to enterprise customers. There is no other sales tool that will produce information of comparable quality. As well, no other sales tool makes so little a mark on the market with so little notoriety. Curious to think that these audible sandwich boards could produce so elegant a result. No wonder that effective teleprospecting skills are so hard to come by.

Unique Dynamics of “Cold Call” Prospecting Telephone Sales Calls

Posted on October 26, 2011 by Ira Michael Blonder

Most sales people have a pavlovian reaction to “cold call” telephone sales — quick glances from left to right (anywhere but straight eye to eye contact) and a determined effort to vacate the premises. The fact is that “cold call” telemarketing tasks are uncomfortable and far removed from the type of ego inflating activity that most sales people require to gin themselves up to the task of hitting their numbers on a month in/month out basis.

But the truth is that “cold call” telephone sales provides a highly targeted, controllable method of expanding market visibility with precision. In fact, if properly managed and executed, cold calls can be utilized to increase market awareness of a product precisely as planned. Therefore, I regard this method of prospecting as the most precise and efficient method available to any type of business marketing any type of product or service. While the number of prospects contacted depends entirely on the number of telemarketers at work (I eschew any mention of “robo dialers”, which dialers I consider to be entirely useless and a waste of precious funds that could be better spent on buying a telemarketers time), the contact, itself, is highly effective.

In contrast, advertising (even inclusive of online, context-sensitive display ads) is inherently a broad market passive technique of juxtaposing text, photos, suggestions, etc (which may all have the very same forward, presumptuous characteristics of a cold call) alongside subject matter that attracts prospect interest but, nonetheless, irrelevant to the ads themselves. The return on investment for advertising, I argue, is far less and certainly not appropriate for tight lipped businesses with leading edge technology that need to operate under the radar.

Usually sales people break out into one of two character types–so-called “farmers” and so-called “hunters”. I like to refer to farmers as the guys with the address books, the nice guys who are well liked by their contacts who have usually bought different products from the same sales person (my nice guy) over several sales “lives”. “Farmers” do not like cold calls. It’s the “hunters” who can be taught to use cold call telemarketing techniques. These sales people are generally in sales not only for the money, but also to satisfy a need for competition and achievement.

“Hunters” may not do a good job of maintaining business friendships, but they certainly can be trained in “cold call” telemarketing for prospecting. With a new technique like cold calling firmly ensconced in their quiver of sales methods, “hunters” can relied upon to not only deliver the orders, but to open the market precisely as planned for a controlled, yet covert, expansion of business.

Don’t pass up on cold call prospecting.

Use Just a Pinch of Commodity Sell to Rev Up Direct Marketing for Products Still Under the Radar

Posted on July 31, 2011 by Ira Michael Blonder

The “commodity sell” is, generally, anathema for the complex sale. Nevertheless, for clients of mine with products that operate “under the radar,” just a bit of “commodity sell” does the trick to drive the performance of direct marketing (essentially a combination of telemarketing, teleprospecting, and webinars) as a driver for the complex sale.

If contacts at enterprise size business prospects know nothing about your product, and little about your niche (regardless of its strategic importance) there is no other option than to include a presentation of what you offer within your early conversations with the prospect. This presentation provides just the “pinch” of commodity sell to spark contact interest in furthering conversations and, thereby, the gathering of information that you must do to qualify just who this contact is and what he/she does relative to important related projects and plans (or the lack thereof) at your enterprise business prospect.

It is absolutely essential that the information that you convey via the presentation be completely consistent with any subsequent information your sales team may communicate to the specific contact as well as any other contacts at the prospect. Understand that your product is still under the radar of the marketplace; therefore, the information constitutes the only branding that you possess. Whenever the information changes, then your brand changes and, therefore, the power of repetition along with the development of subliminal associations is substantially diminished. Keep the presentation consistent, better yet, require that any and all references to features, benefits, value proposition, etc make refernce to the same uniform information.

The importance of this point is doubly critical if your product is an integrated solution. Permitting communication of ambiguous information abvout an integrated solution provides the prospect with an opportunity to break up your solution into components. This opportunity spells doom for the complex sale and lots of revenue will be left on the table. I have worked with clients with this problem who saw projected revenue growth delayed by six months, and longer, as planned complex sales trended into commodity sales of components with dangerously lower pricing to customers.

If you opt for a direct marketing approach to product promotion and lead generation then do consider a hybrid method that includes a highly controlled and consistent presentation to contacts. Review any/all printed and electronic collateral to ensure that information is completely consistent. Revise as required or risk diluting your potential for complex sales, not to mention precious revenue.

Use Teleprospecting to Validate Decision Making Processes for Complex Sales

Posted on July 24, 2011 by admin

I use prospecting over the telephone, or teleprospecting, to perform a key function within the sales planning process for complex sales to enterprise prospects — test and verify all important assumptions about the prospect. Important assumptions include:

Who needs the complex product or solution
Why the need makes sense for the prospect
When will they need to satisfy this need
Who will approve the purchase
Who will use the complex product or solution
What the final integrated solution should look like, and
How they plan to get to the final integrated solution

In my experience, acting on untested assumptions, more often than not, results in wasted time and effort for the sales team. Close ratios can be doubled by simply increasing the number of conversations with contacts at the prospect business and verifying that answers to my Who/Why/When/What/How questions, as listed above, are accurate and, therefore, useful.

Examples of untested assumptions include job titles, published prospect initiatives, and planned capital expenditures. The facts are that job titles are often poor indicators of decision-making authority; published initiatives can, and often do change and, finally, budgeted capital expenditures can be preempted. Better to learn what the real drivers are for the prospect and who is leading the charge.

A team of telemarketers who are dedicated entirely to prospecting and gathering specific pieces of information about prospects can be used successfully to test any and all sales campaign assumptions. Candidates for membership in such a team must be able to demonstrate an ability to engage high level individuals in meaningful dialogue crafted to produce required answers. Further, these candidates must demonstrate a thorough understanding of the complex product or solution and a commensurate understanding of how the complex product or solution interconnects with other complex products or solutions already ensconced within the organization or on the schedule to be added within the same time frame envisioned by the sales campaign.

Once the teleprospecting team has been selected, depending upon the size of prospect businesses, this information gathering activity can be ongoing. Be sure not to start validation efforts until the sales team approves public discussion of contacts, prospect plans, etc. This timing requirement is critically important. Keep in mind that the actual names of contacts, and apparent prospect plans, must be topics of discussion within the teleprospecting calls if they are going to produce any useful information. In reciprocal fashion, steps in the sales campaign should be timed correctly so that important meetings transpire after the information collected by the prospecting work has been discussed and plans modified as required to better align with emerging facts about the prospect.

What a Pair! Elusive Decision Makers and Ambiguous Needs–Welcome to the World of Complex Sales

Posted on July 23, 2011 by Ira Michael Blonder

Sure, it’s very hard to motivate a sales operation without buyers, and even harder when the reasons buyers cannot be found can be attributed to ambiguous needs and ambivalent interest in complex solutions. Nevertheless, sales must be made. Buyers, like birds hidden by shrubs, must be flushed out. Sales people have to shine a light on buyer needs and pique buyer interest. Ultimately, sales must build buyer commitment to purchase complex solutions. Happens every day. But how?

As I’ve written earlier in this blog, telephone prospecting, teleprospecting, provides a very useful foundation for complex sales. For example, prospecting over the telephone provides an excellent method of revealing buyers within enterprise businesses for complex sales. Prospecting over the telephone amounts to engaging with many contacts within a prospect enterprise business in telephone conversations to determine three critical pieces of information:

The level of maturity of the prospect relative to other prospects with regard to the complex product or solution offered for sale
The groups within the prospect business who will use the complex product or solution, who will propose the purchase and, finally, who will approve the purchase
The perceived value of the complex product or solution for the enterprise prospect, and the probable timing of a decision to purchase

A teleprospecting campaign to determine the answers to these three points can take several months or even years to complete, depending upon the product and the size of typical prospects. Nevertheless, if vetted correctly, the quality of information collected from telephone discussions will be high and, therefore, the information will be indispensable to formulating a sales plan for the prospect.

The best approach for soliciting teleprospecting discussions with contacts can be found in an expressed interest in gathering information, much in the manner of a survey. Contacts are much more willing to share an opinion than to entertain a sales presentation. This greater willingness to talk can be used to engage contacts and collect the information required to qualify the enterprise business prospect’s likely interest in purchasing and successfully implementing the product.

Understanding the likelihood that a prospect can successfully implement a complex product or solution should be critically important to correctly determining whether or not a sales campaign makes sense for a prospect. After all, a favorable image of a brand within an enterprise market can only be built on satisfied customers who have successfully implemented a solution and derived the greatest possible value. Embarking on a sales campaign for a prospect that lacks the maturity to successfully implement a complex product or solution is only asking for trouble.

Best Practices: Outbound Teleprospecting for Complex Products Post #2 — Where Time Matters

Posted on May 22, 2011 by Ira Michael Blonder

When time matters (for a company with a complex product for enterprise customers), and capital is limited, the lead generation strategy should be built, at least in part, around outbound teleprospecting, but without an effort to survey prospects. I am not going to treat interactive tactics to augment outbound teleprospecting in this post, but will shortly write a series of posts describing the use of one set of interactive tactics–social media–within a powerful and comprehensive lead generation strategy. Rather, in this post I want to talk about variations on the survey approach to teleprospecting to hasten along the sales cycle.

The most obvious means of hastening a sales cycle is to focus sales efforts only on prospects with clear needs. Selling efforts should only be made on those leads where indisputable, confirmed decision-makers have been identified within companies. Further, these decision-makers must be managing funded projects that are scheduled for completion over the next near term (the actual length of the “near term” will vary depending upon the “typical” sales cycle for the product). For the record, the drawback implicit to this approach is that it eliminates the group of prospects who do not know what they need as well as those who think they need the wrong thing. But a company pressed for time and running on limited means must make some sacrifice in order to achieve sales goals. An additional drawback is that some of the projects identified through this process will be mature and at a level where the prospect is “shopping” a specific solution, meaning a commodity in the market.

Nevertheless, the hook for generating most of these leads will be discussions about well known solutions (effectively the highest quality commodities in a particular market) with interested parties. These discussions are not an optimum basis for a conversation, but at least a workable technique. Determining a reliable ratio between telephone calls and discussions will vary; however, as a rule, each set of 100 calls should result in at least 15 discussions. Further, 2 or more sales calls should result from 15 teleprospecting discussions at some point in the sales cycle. If actual efforts do not deliver results in keeping with these assumptions, then the lead contact list must be evaluated to ensure that the right contacts have been included.

Typically, utilizing this approach, a teleprospecting team will have to plan on at least one additional discussion with a prospect prior to passing along a useful lead to sales than would be the case for a focus on securing surveys with the same prospects. The script for this additional discussion will include questions to determine important information about a prospect and his/her company prior to scheduling a meeting with a subject matter expert. The result will be a considerably enhanced, and substantially narrower selling effort. This combination may provide a CEO with a viable solution to limited time and budget. Of course, the dialogue with the prospect may, over time, reveal opportunities to widen the lens and chase more lucrative opportunities based on what a prospect doesn’t know.

Best Practices: Outbound Teleprospecting for Complex Products for Enterprise Business

Posted on May 21, 2011 by Ira Michael Blonder

As I have written earlier in this blog, a teleprospecting campaign can yield substantial results for sales of complex products targeted at enterprise business prospects. These substantial results can amount to high quality sales leads, depending on how successfully the campaign is managed. The key to quality, of course, is the level to which leads are correctly qualified for the specific product offering and the targeted market. But how to run such a campaign?

The best method of running a teleprospecting campaign as an outbound lead generator for complex products targeted to the enterprise business market is in some variation of a survey. Taking a survey is rarely perceived by participants as a sales effort. But if the survey questionnaire is crafted correctly, the information gathered can be very useful as the sales force “fills in the blanks” about the enterprise prospect. Don’t lose sight of the fact that the enterprise prospect is actually a complicated organization with a system for purchasing products and services that includes many individual participants and a set of required procedural milestones that must be properly completed or else there will be no sale.

For the subset of complex products targeted to enterprise business that will require a reorganization of processes across a customer’s business (should a decision to purchase be forthcoming), the need to compile information about important individuals, recent business history, etc is especially important in advance of a sale or even the overture of a sales effort. The fact is that the core purchase process may be broken and dysfunctional. Further, the participants may not play the perceived role and the agenda of priorities may be deceiving.

This latter characteristic of some complex products for enterprise business, that a reorganization of business processes will be required as the product is implemented by the customer, plays a powerful role within the sales effort. Janus-like this aspect of the product, as implemented, can be either a smile or a forlorn frown as the sales effort wends its way to success or failure. The way is especially volatile where the perceived value of the product within the marketplace is ambiguous. Truly intangibles, sometimes these products deliver substantial benefits and sometimes not. Examples of this type of product include solutions for Operational Risk Management, and Enterprise Risk Management. What is most vexing for the market is that such a product, within heavily regulated businesses like Financial Services (including Banks, Asset Managers, Brokers & Dealers, Insurers, etc), is required and mandated by regulators, but the “how to succeed” directions are no where to be found.

In the best of all worlds for the firm offering such a complex product (with unclear perceived value in the enterprise business market), formulating an outbound teleprospecting campaign within the shape of a survey is mandatory. The firms that can follow this script typically have lots of time and, generally, lots of capital to slowly and carefully sell into the market.

But what about other firms with less time and, typically, less capital to build a market? Is there a way to use teleprospecting to advantage in a less than perfect world? I will provide an answer in my next post.

Marketing, Promotion & Sales Consulting for Business

IMB Enterprises, Inc., Huntington, NY 11746 +1 (631) 673-2929, imblonder@imbenterprises.com

Category Archives: Direct Marketing