B2B Sales Pipeline

One of my colleagues recently got an email from a vendor who sent over a “report” of all the anonymous visitors to his corporate website.  Looks impressive - It includes some very big name companies who are searching for his company name, flagship product, and his product type. 

So here’s the rant - It is IMPOSSIBLE to track the visitors to someone elses’ website because it requires some sort of tracking code to be placed on each page that is tracked.

So how can they justify sending over this nonsense to prospects?  2 reasons:

1.  Because it triggers the “Greed” gene in the sales people it targets.  “IBM is looking at our website????”  Nevermind that it would be nearly impossible to determine which of IBM’s 40,000 US employees visited.

2.  Because people are generally optimists, in spite of the fact that the prospect generall know that what they are being sold a bill of goods.

So what’s a good method to sell ethically, and restore prospects faith in the Sales process:

1.  Post your Pricing - although it cuts counter to your desire to keep your pricing a secret, it allows customers to go an look at the price at their leisure.

2.  Stand By Your Pricing- Once you’ve listed them, you need to stand by them.  Nothing screams “Used Car Salesman” like Making a Deal for your prospect.  If you’ll cut the prices to get the deal, why wouldn’t your eventual customer feel like they should jockey with you for a Better Deal?

At the end of the day, just be ethical in your dealings, because I hate dealing with customers that you’ve offended and are now jaded that I’m going to do them wrong…like some of you already have.

It’s been said that the lottery is a “tax on stupid people”, however I’ve been guilty of throwing a couple of bucks into the 6-digit retirement plan…but only when it’s at a staggering number – something like $200M…because I don’t want to sacrifice my current standard of living for something small like $50M.

For organizations who don’t have a method of lead prioritization, your Sales People are playing the lottery. Guessing…hoping, that this prospect will be the lead that materializes into a sale. Organizations which have no lead scoring methodology overwhelm their representatives with a deafening amount of:

NOISE !!!!!!!!!!!

“What is Noise?” you ask, however I’m deaf from years in sales and can no longer hear you.

Noise is the overwhelming amount of information coming at sales people, particularly in the form of inbound leads. A conversion page on a website gathers the same amount of information for everyone (e.g., Name, Title, E-mail, Yada, Yada, Yada), so giving a days worth of conversion information to your sales reps is frustrating at best because you ask the rep to subjectively sort through 50 names and prioritize them based. Generally, your faithful sales person utilizes a methodology that is roughly as objective as calling them in Alphabetical order…because we all know people whose last names start with “Y” are generally tire kickers.

Why not add Objectivity to the otherwise Subjective sales process by ranking, scoring / grading / prioritizing / segmenting your leads. A couple of basic options include:

1. By Target Organization – Give higher priority to organizations who meet your “Target Organization” profile, such as selling to a particular company size or vertical.

2. By Ideal Customer – If you’ve found the VP of Sales to be more receptive to your value proposition than the COO, utilize this information to rank them accordingly.

3. By Lead Source – Treat Internet leads from Pay-Per-Click initiatives (where you can quickly identify what message resonated with the prospect) with a higher priority than someone who responded from a trade show.

4. By Customer History – Has this prospect shown interest before, or is a current customer who has up-sell potential? Data gleaned from systems such as CRM or accounting systems can raise a prospect’s score.

5. By BANTS – Everyone knows BANT, but where does the “S” come in? Brian Carroll, an expert in B2B Lead Generation says that the “S” stands for “Sales Ready” meaning the customer is open to an imminent meeting with a sales person.

Don’t forget that there are a growing number of technology providers who provide Web Marketing Automation tools that allow prospects to be graded / segmented based upon explicit factors (title, geography) to determine quality, and scored to identify implicit factors (number of pages viewed, visits to your site, downloading of content). This then allows a sales representative to focus on all the “A” or “Tier I” prospects, and then identify all the ones whose behaviors have shown more intent.

Don’t ask your sales people to gamble…give them solid information which will help them be successful.