They know just how rapidly it’s becoming practically a necessity on the job. But who has the time?  And even if you do have the time, do you really understand how to navigate the social web successfully? How to generate meaningful business results from social media? And what content you need to drive your social media efforts?

________________________________________

OneSource and Nowspeed are teaming up to present a series of three webinars on key social media topics:

* 5 Social Media Tools for Your Business

* Content Creation for Social Media

* Social Media Optimization for Your Website

________________________________________

Register for 5 Social Media Tools for Your Business

In the course of one hour, Sham Sao, Dave Reske and Bob Cargill will demonstrate how to leverage some of today’s most popular social media tools. You’ll first learn what’s in it for those businesses who understand how to take advantage of these exciting, new communications channels, platforms and properties. You’ll then learn the steps you need to take to use a blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Delicious to position yourself and others in your organization as knowledge leaders, community builders and people everyone will want to faithfully follow.

Visit the Social Media Webinar Series Microsite for More Information on Each of the Sessions. After each webinar, an on-demand link will be posted, so content will be available at your convenience.

 There are three major problem areas for firms using sales automation software: First, customizing your sales automation software and tailoring it to your company’s specific needs is crucial in order for your sales process to be as clean and efficient as possible. Also, how data and/or sales intelligence is integrated into your CRM is important to keeping the sales process streamlined. Finally, getting your users to adopt a particular process and to accurately record data when using your sales automation software is critical for allowing information to flow freely.

 Tailoring your sales automation software to your company’s unique needs is paramount. In addition to integrating the CRM system into the culture of your firm, the system itself needs to reflect the needs of your company. Defining which metrics are important, integrating the information your company needs, and creating custom reports detailing critical information/metrics are the most important things to customize. Adjusting the interface and making customized dashboards, and even managing phases of the sales cycle and implementing work-flow rules that help increase productivity are also necessary. Effectively designing and implementing these facets of your firms sales automation software will dramatically increase efficiency. The graph below depicts a number of different solutions and the percentage of companies who currently have them in place. Best in class companies represent the top performing companies of those that were surveyed. All of these solutions are customized to fit the company who is employing them.

 Integrating data or sales intelligence into your CRM system not only gives sales reps contextual information and contacts, it also reduces the amount of time reps spend searching for this information. Whether this means the sales reps reaching out to others through email or searching on the internet for this information, without integrated sales intelligence the sales process typically slows to a snails pace.

 Creating a culture in the workplace that revolves around your sales automation software is also vital. Meaning, the sales automation software needs to be the primary way that sales reps record data and share information instead of just an extra book keeping mechanism. Increased visibility, accurate forecasting, and comprehensive reporting are extremely difficult to achieve without sweeping adoption of sales automation software by a companies sales force. Qualifying leads and closing deals becomes a much more streamlined process with widespread usage of sales automation software by your firm’s sales team, mostly due to the lack of availability of information to individual sales reps.

This integration of CRM software into the daily regimen of the sales team’s workday requires leadership, or influence from the executive team. In a survey conducted by Aberdeen research, out of 212 companies surveyed, 72% of best in class firms (best performing in year over year revenue) have executive level support for their CRM system as opposed to only 54% of those firms who are under performing. Executive level support is necessary to instill the mindset that accurate and thorough usage and data recording in your firm’s CRM system is critical to its success. Without Executive level leadership, widespread adoption of sales automation software among sales reps is unlikely.

While sales automation software is an exceptional tool which can dramatically increase sales efficiency and streamline the flow of information, it needs to be used properly. To be effective, your sales automation software needs to be fully adopted by your users, fully customized to your business, and data needs to be seamlessly integrated into the system. If these three things are done, your sales optimization software will yield impressive increases in efficiency and much higher ROI.

As mobile devices become ubiquitous and the sophistication of smart phones increases, mobile marketing will evolve and become a more significant part of the marketing mix.

Since mobile marketing is such a new and evolving field, it will be a challenge for most firms to develop viable marketing programs and to develop organizational best practices. 

The issue will be how companies design and implement campaigns to accommodate all different sorts of mobile devices as well as being able to analyze results.

In a recent study, the Aberdeen Group outlined a few ways in which an average firm might break into mobile marketing successfully:

• Determine performance metrics for measuring mobile marketing effectiveness. These metrics are necessary for tracking success over time. Like many other initiatives, mobile marketing is a continuous improvement process, and without these key metrics it can be difficult or impossible to assess and improve on a campaign.
• Streamline the process for allowing a customer to opt-in or opt-out of these mobile marketing campaigns. Beyond the obvious, this will give the company another set of metrics for determining success.
• Hire resources that have mobile marketing as part of their job description. Mobile marketing specialist agencies can assist with campaign development, implementation, and analysis.

In addition to these three tactics, Aberdeen surveyed top performing firms to assess the strategies they used to produce results via mobile marketing.

The audience for mobile campaigns may be larger than that available through other marketing channels. Although reach is one of the main incentives for exploring mobile marketing, marketers need to realize that volume does not trump the importance of targeting; unqualified responses will not move the needle. Taking this attitude ensures that not only will the firm generate many leads from mobile marketing but that a good portion of these leads will be quality and will close.

The favorable math of email gives direct marketers the chance to focus on the “knowledge” side and optimize frequently overlooked elements, like concepts. Unfortunately, this rarely happens.

Email ads routinely lack the conceptual quality associated with great advertising. Offers are lackluster. And list usage, a make or break factor, is often abysmal.

Anyone with an inbox knows email is a crowded medium. To maximize the odds of success, marketers must ensure that (forgive the cliché) all stars are in alignment.

ClickSoftware makes mobile workforce management software. This email ad is a rare hybrid: an emotional concept tied to today’s economic times, a relevant and captivating offer; strong storytelling; and all elements optimized to ensure maximum delivery. The ad recently deployed, and results in the U.S. are considerably above the norm for this marketer.

Here are five ways to revolutionize your email advertising:
- Work with unusual, captivating, smart creative concepts.
- Think of email as a platform for telling great stories.
- End the monologue and start a true dialogue with readers.
- Move beyond the usual offers. Dare to be different.
- Test audio and video on your email landing page.

Robert Rosenthal is the Founder of Mothers of Invention. Robert’s agency has created dozens of record-breaking campaigns and won more than 50 results-based awards.
____________________________________________________________
View a link to the archived presentation: “Taking Your Email Marketing from Average to Awesome” and to register for the October and November sessions in this webinar series: http://www.onesource.com/micro_sites/US_MOI.aspx
____________________________________________________________

Top companies typically have sales reps with much higher average deal size and larger revenues per rep than the industry norm. It comes as no surprise then that these companies typically invest larger amounts in external training for their sales reps, as evidenced in this recent poll conducted by Aberdeen Group:

 

“Cutting training programs puts your sales force at an extreme disadvantage and will directly effect revenues. A recession may be the worst time to cut these programs,” commented Colleen Honan, SVP of Global Sales at OneSource.

The constantly evolving online world mandates the constant training of sales reps. Without regular training and exposure to new techniques and trends, a sales force will fall behind and the entire firm will have to bear the consequences.

“I view sales training as I would any other form of training.  If you want to get better, you need to challenge yourself and leverage the best techniques available.  As an organization we conduct internal training to continue to reinforce and enhance our team’s sales skills, but we find it very beneficial to bring in outside training consultants when we are looking to have a more impactful session and provide more than a refresher,” said James Cabral, VP of Sales North America at OneSource.

One of the big challenges these days is the increasing difficulty of getting the email into the prospect’s inbox.  According to an Aberdeen group survey if major ISPs, as much as 90% of email sent today consists of SPAM.  As a result, ISPs need to filter out much of this junk before it gets anywhere near an inbox.

As companies use multiple tiers of SPAM filtering, some of these emails may not even be visible to the end user even in their “junk” box because it is filtered out further up in the chain.

Here are 5 key tactics that B2B Marketers can use to increase sales eads by improving email deliverability:

1. Clean Content.  Avoid using spammy words in subject lines or email bodies (words such as “free” may trigger spam filters.  Many email marketing systems have tools to analyze content for potential spam flags.
2. Dedicated IP Address.  Make sure you’re on a dedicated IP address – if you have a shared IP, other companies using the same IP may be polluting it
3. List Hygiene.  Remove hard bounces from your list – continuing to send emails to dead email addresses makes you look like a spammer.
4. DKIM & SPF Records.  Make sure you have Domain Keys and SPF Records set up in your email system (if you don’t know what these are, get help from the provider of your email system). These confirm your identity, and if you have a reputation for sending good email (not SPAM), they will benefit you.
5. Target Your Emails.  Recipients of email are notorious for hitting the “SPAM” button on email if they think it does not apply to them – even if it is not spam.  By making your emails more relevant and targeted, you reduce this from happening and improve your reputation, which ISPs use to determine whether to let your emails through or not.

Let’s talk a bit more about “Targeting,” because this is not just about increasing deliverability, it’s also about increasing the Quality of your Sales Leads and about getting the most ROI out of your email marketing.

Better targeting makes your message more relevant to the recipient, improves open rates, improves your email reputation, and produces higher quality leads – just what every marketer and every sales team wants!

 Are the rumors true? Is the old-school method of telephone lead generation really extinct? Critics say: cold calling is obsolete and a waste of time…that it simply doesn’t work…or does it?

There is a good case to be made for personal contact, and there are some smart strategies that can underpin a successful cold call campaign: 

• Target, Target, Target! 
  The marketing “rule of thumb” says that 40% of results are driven by the list; this holds true for cold calling, as well. Are you calling on the right level contact, in the right industry with the right offer?
• Consider Cold Calling as Part of an Integrated Campaign
  Cold calling is often most effective when complemented by email and direct mail. Have you used integrated campaigns for demand generation?
• The Right Offer Based on the Right Understanding
  Are you calling with an offer that is compelling–one that addresses the major challenges that prospect is likely facing? Researching and knowing who you are calling and understanding their business is critical. Consider tapping into a sales intelligence service in order to boost sales effectiveness and cut down on sales rep time spent researching prospects.

Remeber that cold calling offers additional benefits:

• It saves time. By using the telephone in your sales prospecting strategy, you can contact a large number of prospects in a short amount of time. The telephone also cuts down on the cost and time involved with traveling to meet customers and prospects.
•  You can conduct business research. The telephone is one of the easiest ways to research businesses. With one quick call, your lead generation team can collect the most accurate and up-to-date information on the companies you want to call on.
• You can add a personal touch. Unlike an email, a telephone call allows you to deliver your sales message personally and persuasively. Use your personality to get your point across, and use your patience and empathy to answer questions and concerns.
• Companies can get to know you. Even if your prospect isn’t ready to buy, the telephone offers an excellent opportunity to introduce your company. By promoting brand awareness and leaving a positive image, you can plant the seed for future sales.
• You have a direct line to the decision-maker. The telephone gives you the opportunity to find and speak directly to the decision-maker. Remember, if you’re not speaking to the decision-maker, you’re not making the sale. That leads to the question: How to get past the gatekeepers?

Getting past the gatekeepers

There are two types of gatekeepers – individuals who are “chartered” to block or prohibit access to the buyer, and those who are self-designated gatekeepers.

Personally, I love the former and stay far away from the latter.

I use different techniques depending on the type of gatekeeper. For administrators and assistants, it’s important to ask them something very specific, such as referring to a speech or presentation given by the person I’m trying to reach. I also tell them I do NOT know their boss. No point in pretending you do when they know everyone their boss knows! Also, I never ask questions such as, “Who would your boss recommend I speak to…?”  Rather, I ask, “Who do YOU recommend…?” Their referral is often every bit as valuable. 

• Question: What are some techniques that you have used with any type of gatekeepers to solicit their help while achieving your goal of getting “access to power”?

• Look at leaders successfully monetizing social media in a b2b environment; BMC Software is an example mentioned during Katie Paine’s session
   
• Understand that social media is not “free”; it requires a significant allocation of resources and time in order to have an impact
• If you are “tweeting”, get a handle on both reach and influence using some great tools: Twinfluence.com, Twittergrader 
• Tools like Socialmention and Xinureturns are wonderful tools for looking at broader social media impact
   
• Consider using dedicated URL’s: e.g. www.YourCompany.com/Twitter  in order to track activity generated by source
   
• Search Twitter for key terms related to your business and connect with those posters you find most consistently have relevant content related to your brand

An interesting insight from one session: larger enterprises often have the challenge of organizing and presenting content–especially through social media; smaller businesses are challenged to develop content. Which begs the question: if you are a smaller organization, who will produce the content necessary to fuel your social media efforts?

A clear theme that relates directly to this point, one echoed by many at the conference: don’t start what you can’t finish. If you aren’t serious about finding a way of making social media meaningful for your business–whether in terms of brand recognition, lead generation or customer communication–it’s more likely that you’ll launch abortive efforts.

Best of luck, and you can follow us on Twitter.

Therefore, optimizing your sales territory design and aligning your finite resources with the best sales opportunities is more important than ever before. The good news is, sales territory design is completely controllable and can be altered in line with your changing business needs.

When designing or revising sales territories, I recommend this three-step process:
1)    Start with the opportunity and work backwards
2)    Determine your coverage and touch strategy
3)    Design your sales territories

1) Start With The Opportunity & Work Backwards

Effective territory design starts with identifying your sales opportunity and working backwards. A sales opportunity analysis will identify where your sales are most likely to be generated from and what specific characteristics make a company more or less likely to buy your products.

These factors include industry/vertical, employee size, location, buying and consuming patterns. There may be certain geographic markets where you have a greater or weaker value proposition and competitive advantage.

At the highest level, your sales opportunities will fall into three categories: existing/renewal business, winback business and brand new business. Then, leveraging data and analytics, you need to drill down into more specific “buckets” of opportunity.

For example, you may uncover that your best opportunities lie with customers in financial services, with more than 500 employees located on the East Coast. Or, your best new business prospects could be very small real estate firms, with less than 20 employees in Florida and Georgia.

If you are a Sales Leader in charge of the United States sales region, trying to cover every possible company that may buy your product is simply not feasible or wise. Completing a detailed opportunity analysis is critical in identifying where your company should focus their attention and align their resources for the best return. And, it should also provide direction on where NOT to align resources.

2) Design a Coverage & Touch Strategy

Once you know where your opportunity is, consider what type of coverage and touch strategy is appropriate. The coverage strategy considers “how” and “how often”…. Whether the business requires face to face visits, telephone calls or a “self service” approach to best cover the opportunity. And, how often and how much time salespeople will need to touch customers.

Factors that will impact your coverage or touch strategy include: size and number of locations for target companies, complexity of your product or service, average deal size and type of sale- new business versus renewal business.

Your coverage strategy should be as specific and quantifiable as possible, so you can feed this information into your territory design models.

For example, you may determine that all active customers with 5000 or more employees and a spend of $25,000 or more will have a Field Rep assigned to them. After accessing your company’s CRM, you identify that there are 200 of these and they all reside in New England.

To maximize the opportunity, you want Field Reps to make 4 visits per year, that take 6 hours each in planning, driving, presentation and follow-up time. This set of customers will need about 4,800 hours devoted to them in the next year (200 customers X 4 visits X 6 hours = 4,800) Since there are roughly 2,080 work hours in a year, you would need approx. 2 Reps covering these accounts. (4,800 / 2080 = 2)

3) Design Your Territories

Now that you’ve completed your opportunity analysis and designed your coverage strategy, you’re ready to divide and create your sales territories. There are many options…

Geographic Distribution: Geographic or “geo” territories are designed by strategically grouping a set of zipcodes, DMAs or states together to form a defined territory.  For field sales reps, you can bring this design down to a science by leveraging mapping software such as Callidus or  Territory Mapper to plot out a maximum driving area you want reps to cover. This is often called a “radius” design.
•    Sales Reps can become experts in their geo territory and can leverage local information, local events and regional trends within their sales process and discussions with customers.
•    When firms have both Field Sales and Inside Sales teams, geographic designs help enable teaming between inside and outside personnel.

Vertical Specific: Vertical or industry focused territories are aligned based on grouping together customers and prospects that have the same or similar verticals or industries. Examples: Financial Services, Healthcare, Government. Your opportunity analysis should uncover whether this makes sense for your line of business. Adding dedicated groups will often add cost to you sales model, so you need to ensure you have the appropriate return on investment
•    With Reps who have expert knowledge on a vertical of industry, you should be able to sell more and better retain and service these customers.
•    A dedicated group may help you better compete and add to your unique value proposition.

Best Customers: Best Customer, Key Account or Strategic Account territories are often created for an established business that can identify the accounts that spend the most, have the most future sales opportunity and/or are very high profile, ex, “Google”. Many companies like to align their best, most experienced salespeople with their best customers. If you grow and retain OR lose just a few of these customers, it may have a significant impact on your business results.

Hunter & Farmer: The skills and work required to generate new business are very different than retaining and growing existing business. Therefore you may want to create new business specific often called Hunter territories and separate active customer or Farmer territories.
•    Hunter Reps focus 100% of their energy on bringing in new business for your firm without getting tied up in customer service and administrative work, often required to retain existing business. These Reps get in, close the business and move on to the next opportunity.
•    Farmer Reps are masters at relationship building. They are the face of your company and likely why your active customers are loyal to your product or service. These Reps focus on long term account management.

Campaign Specific: Every customer or prospect does not need to be part of an official sales territory. Instead you may want to leverage a campaign approach. In this scenario, you group types of customers or prospects together based on a set of criteria and ask salespeople to make contact with them during a set period of time with a specific message or offer.
•    The campaign approach allows you to test different types of offers or approaches and may work well when introducing new products or moving into new geographic areas.

Which one is for you? Some companies use just one type of territory design, while others use a combination of methods. The right territory design for your firm is the one that best aligns your resources with your opportunities, meets your budget requirements and supports your overall business plan and objectives.

Using Experts to Help

If you need help, there are companies that specialize in territory optimization and forecasting. Some of these include:

• ZS Associates
• TerrAllign
• InfoGrow

Doing It Yourself with a Business Information Service

Many companies already subscribe to a business information service that provides information on companies and contacts (often used for sales prospecting and research).  Using one of these services, you could export lists of companies, states and other data elements and complete analysis using Microsoft Excel.

If you are already subscribing to a business information service, this approach can help you get it done without spending any additional hard dollars.  If you don’t already subscribe to such a service, but are considering one to help with sales prospecting, then the ability to also use the service for territory optimization may provide the additional value that helps you justify the purchase.

Data and analytics are required in every step of territory optimization and for the final step of tying everything together to determine the ideal number of salespeople and territories required to maximize your sales opportunity.

I recommend partnering with your Marketing and Finance colleagues to build a formal “what if” model that allows you to plug in variables and test different outputs.

What You’ll Gain

By optimizing your sales territories; aligning your important selling resources with your best and most valuable opportunities, Sales Leaders will be able to “do more with less” and be more successful in growing sales, retaining customers and meeting profitability metrics.

Submitted By Marci Reynolds, Author of The Sales Operations Blog.  All Rights Reserved.

The challenge? How to: 1) acquire new ones; 2) retain existing ones and 3) improve customer lifetime value, in that order.

• 88 and 87% of executives said that net-new acquisition and customer retention were important
• On a scale from 1-5, “expand to new geographies” was lowest-rated at 2.62
• Optimizing the marketing mix was the top-rated factor in achieving growth targets

According to this survey, few executives appear to be sold on their company’s effectiveness; 85% responded something other than “very satisfied” on this metric.

This widespread concern over effectiveness is driving a tactical focus on ROI, web analytics, CRM and SEO.

To drive marketing effectiveness, consider these four keys to success:

1. Agree on KPIs, measure them consistently, and regularly
   All marketers have had the experience of producing multiple reports that aren’t read, understood and utilized. Keep reporting to core KPIs; the reports must drive insights leading to action.
2. Clarify roles and responsibilities–make people accountable
   The old adage “if everyone is responsible, no one is responsible…” couldn’t be more accurate. Project plans become more important than ever in an age of staff and budget consolidation—when team members may be asked to take on new tasks.

3. Create a strong, consistent and viable process to generate leads and measure ROI
   What process do you currently have for tracking leads? Are youmeasuring revenue generated by program and campaign? How often do you generate reports? Consider the value of qualified andnurture leads when considering ROI, and establish a consistent time frame for measurement. Analyze by channel, as well as specific campaign. Experiment with your marketing mix to ensure that you are driving optimal results and remember that gaining exposure in different venues allows you to reach different audiences, at different points in the sales cycle while building brand equity.

4. Create buy-in—foster an atmosphere where folks are willing to be accountable and innovative in order to optimize results
   The team must agree to stress measurement: embracing reporting and owning their numbers. In turn, management must be open toworking with struggling team members in order to improve performance.

   A “culture of accountability” does not mean that team members not meeting KPIs are immediately dismissed, or penalized. Assisting in personnel development and collective improvement, while supporting innovation, goes a long way toward building consistently good results. Work to do post-mortems on unsuccessful efforts, debrief with your team and build a “marketing playbook” to help your weaker players learn from others’ success.