Guest Post by Jill Konrath

In the movie Jerry Maguire, when Tom Cruise is in the midst of his proposal to Dorothy, she stops him with, “You had me at hello.”  Every seller dreams of hearing those exact same words when they approach corporate decision makers.

Unfortunately, the opposite usually occurs. Instead of capturing their prospect’s attention, most sellers create resistance with their opening remarks and blow the opportunity.

Why do bad things like that happen to good people?

In short, weak value propositions.

If you’re running into trouble cracking into corporate accounts, most likely the root cause is your failure to clearly articulate the business outcomes that customers realize from using your products, services or solutions.

A couple weeks ago, I did a new exercise while training a group of sellers. In small groups, they rated common value propositions that sellers could use when prospecting for new customers.

Using a 1-10 (tops) scale, they evaluated value propositions such as these on their effectiveness in initiating change from the status quo:

__ We offer one-stop shopping for all your (fill in the blank) needs.

__ We’re the industry leader in (fill in the blank) and have been recognized for our exceptional (fill in the blank).

__ We specialize in ( fill in the blank) and work with well-known clients such as Microsoft, Best Buy and Kraft.

After serious discussion amongst the sellers, these value propositions received scores between 4-6. Their rationale? They were nice benefit statements about the company, but not quite as punchy as they could have been.

Since my book, Selling to Big Companies, was required reading prior to the session, I assumed these sellers would ace this exercise. Not so! In fact, they were way off.

The truth is that all the above value propositions really deserve a score of one. Not four. Not six. Just a measly score of one.

“C’mon, Jill,” you might be saying. “How can that be? They’re not horrible statements. They’re nice.”

Yes, they are nice. I’ll give you that. But they’re grossly ineffective and that’s why they rated so poorly.

Capturing the Decision Maker’s Attention

While those commonly used value propositions listed above might be important at some point in the decision process, they’re totally and utterly worthless when prospecting.

When it comes to capturing a decision maker’s attention, here’s what you need to think about:

• Strong value propositions pique curiosity and entice. When prospects hear them, they want to learn more.

• Strong value propositions create a stark contrast from the status quo. When prospects hear them, they’re willing to consider making a change.

Consider this: If you were on the other end of the phone and a seller called with this message, what would your impression be?

“Eric. Jill Konrath calling from Selling to Big Companies. We offer one-stop shopping for all your sales training needs – everything from lead generation to closing. We use state-of-the-art methodologies to ensure our training sticks.”

Does it entice you? Not one iota. Does it get you to consider switching sales training vendors? Not likely. Does it make you want to invest lots of money that’s currently allocated elsewhere? Not on your life.

Statements about your company and what it does are NOT value propositions. Period. They are not value propositions.

If you want to get decision makers “at hello”, you need to clearly articulate the results the customers can expect from using your product, service or solution. That’s results, spelled R-E-S-U-L-T-S.

For example, a few months ago I trained the national accounts team of a well-known media company. All sellers identified one large corporate client with whom they wanted to set up a meeting.

As a result of the workshop, 87% of the sales force landed an appointment with their targeted account.

Those outcomes are unheard of in my business. Virtually every Vice President of Sales will want to learn more.

That’s the power of a strong value proposition. Even decision makers who weren’t considering a change will think it’s worth their time to find out about the sellers offering.

If you really want to “get them at hello,” then make sure you:

Talk results.

Decision makers don’t care about your products or services. They only care about the results they’ll see. Stress that and you’ll catch their attention. Omit those results and you’ve lost them.

Get real.

Refer to actual client successes and include measures or statistics. Success stories from other companies in their industry are especially compelling. By giving specific examples, you really pique their curiosity.

Test your message.

After you’ve planned what to say, ask, “If I were the decision maker, would this message entice me? Would it make me want to spend an hour of my valuable time with this person?”

If your answer isn’t a resounding yes, rework and revise your message till it is enticing. Don’t leave it to chance. Don’t hope that it will work. Your job is to make it so compelling that your decision makers “get it at hello.”

Jill Konrath’s fresh sales strategies, provocative insights & practical advice help sellers win business with crazy-busy prospects.  She’s an internationally-recognized author and popular speaker at annual sales meetings, kick-off events and professional conferences.

This post originally published at Selling to Big Companies blog at http://sellingtobigcompanies.blogs.com/selling/2008/06/are-you-losing.html. Reprinted with Permission.

http://sellingtobigcompanies.blogs.com/selling/2008/06/are-you-losing.html

Ever wondered why some SaaS businesses are achieving record sales, while others flounder?   The difference is not the economy, and rarely their industry.  The difference is strategy & execution that begins with effective demand generation that segues into the sales conversion process where Altus has focused most of its attention. Examples in the webinar come from companies that had record 2009 revenue. In some cases, they were struggling until they hit on the right demand generation process.

Click here to register.

Here is how the Matt described the event:

In this Webinar, you will learn:

- Which marketing channels are working, and which aren’t

- Compelling offers that generate leads AND closed sales

- How companies are generating sales-ready leads from the social Web

- How to get started with nurture marketing today (without new tools or content)

- Specific case studies from some of the SaaS industry’s most successful marketing & sales campaigns

PLUS, each attendee will receive a demand generation audit checklist, specifically prepared to help you evaluate your current demand generation strategy and make immediate changes to improve performance, response and revenue.

Join us Thursday, February 18^th, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific.  Click here to register.

Too often, sales & marketing blame each other for a lack of results. The leads aren’t good. Sales doesn’t follow up. The excuses go on and on.

If this sounds familiar for your organization, there are things you can start doing right away to mend fences and start on a path towards not only better relations, but far better revenue results.

Call a sales & marketing summit, and don’t let anyone leave the room until the following five things are agreed upon:

Common Lead Definitions: What, exactly, is a qualified lead? What are its characteristics? Get as detailed as you need to be, but make sure both sales & marketing agree on that definition. That way, when leads are delivered to sales, they at minimum meet the basic criteria you’ve both agreed on to make them worth the sales team’s time for follow-up.

Initial Response Time: If the leads are good (and meet the minimum qualified definition), you need a “service agreement” for how quickly those leads will get their first response. If the lead is waiting for something (a white paper, for instance) response time should likely be no longer than 24 business hours. In other cases, 48 hours may be acceptable. Decide what’s right for your organization and customer, get sales management’s buy-in, communicate it clearly to the sales team, and put in place reporting tools to make it super-easy to track this on a daily basis (and send both you and the sales rep alerts when leads fall outside of the service agreement).

Lead Follow-up Steps & Channels: How many times should a lead be attempted before the sales rep gives up and moves on? Should all of those attempts be via phone, or should there be a mix of other channels — email, social media channels, in-person, etc.? If you don’t reach agreement on this critical process, every sales rep will have his or her own idea of what’s right. Some will call once, leave a message, and consider the lead dead. Others will call the poor prospect 20 times. Create a standard with sales not only to ensure leads are thoroughly vetted, but also to ensure sales is moving on to fresher opportunities if there’s nobody at home.

Clear Lead Stages: A lead comes in. The rep starts to attempt a call back. They reach the lead and determine it’s a good prospect, or long-term prospect, or just not qualified. How do they report this information to you? What lead stages have you set up in your lead management or CRM system to not only make it easy and clear how you want sales to categorize their working leads, but also to report to management progress & quality of leads (not to mention improve your lead generation ROI performance moving forward)? Don’t go overboard – 15 lead stages gets way too complicated – but 4-6 stages is reasonable and actionable for most sales environments.

Handing Leads Back to Marketing: According to MarketingSherpa and others, the vast majority of leads generated by B2B organizations in particularly will buy – just not right now. Those leads (once they’re identified as such) need to be passed back to marketing for active nurturing. Make sure there’s a clear process for sales to do just that – ideally with the click of a button.

Last week, Byron Deeter and his colleagues at Bessemer Venture Partners wrote a terrific piece entitled “Bessemer’s Top 10 Laws for Cloud Computing and SaaS. “ The article laid out why it is critical for SaaS-based businesses to abandon many of the long-held tenets of historic software business models and adhere to a new set of laws. Where Deeter did a nice job of laying out “why” managing a Cloud/SaaS software business must be done differently, we have created a set of ten laws to explain “how” to succeed at SaaS Sales and Marketing.

Our SaaS Sales and Marketing Laws are based on success stories that span many sectors – from higher education to online advertising to HR solutions to energy efficiency to vertical markets, such as the dental industry. Our experience implementing these ten laws at dozens of companies has been a consistent 50 percent-or-greater reduction of customer acquisition costs combined with a dramatic increase in revenues.

One great example of the laws in action involved a SaaS company that had an expensive field sales model. Over the course of six months, the field sales force was replaced by an inside sales team and a structured sales process was put in place. The result: A 16-fold increase in Contracted Monthly Recurring Revenues. The combination of lowering costs and increasing revenues led the company to achieving its first profits. It went from a $400,000-per month loss to its current status as one of the high fliers of the Seattle tech scene with a very bright future.

As Mark Leslie of Veritas fame stated in his seminal “Sales Learning Curve” paper in the Harvard Business Review, the risk for technology startups has shifted from technology execution to go-to-market strategy. Sales and Marketing is one of the pivotal aspects of go-to-market strategies. Leslie’s Sales Learning Curve principles permeate the philosophy of the laws outlined below and leads to a much lower sales burn than what is typically experienced.

Click to see the full Ten Laws for SaaS Sales & Marketing Success article.

With SaaS models most of the time the revenue per customer is less than $100,000 per year making it difficult to pencil out a traditional shoe leather sales model. Consequently, we have gained extensive experience with low cost customer acquisition models. Deeter does a great job of laying out the “why”. In a follow-on piece, we’ll address the “how”.

Here’s the opener for Byron’s piece.

At Bessemer Venture Partners we fundamentally believe that the emergence of Cloud Computing – and the three core components of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) – is going to completely change the economics of the multi-billion dollar software industry. We have been fortunate to be investors in many of the early Cloud winners (such as Postini, Netli, Trigo, and Cyota), and continue to invest actively behind one of the largest Cloud portfolios in the venture capital industry. Periods of tremendous transformation create tremendous opportunity, and we consider ourselves privileged to be working with many of the great entrepreneurs who are currently creating the next giants of the “software” industry.

When we first published Bessemer’s Top 10 Laws for Being “SaaS-y “ on Sandhill.com almost two years ago in conjunction with our annual Cloud/SaaS CEO Summit, we were overwhelmed with the positive response and feedback we received. We have heavily modified many of the best elements that we believe are still relevant, and have added several entirely new concepts for this update publication on Cloud Computing and SaaS.

The following is the press release they put out on the wire today:

Today Sesame Communications, a dental industry pioneer in online patient connection management, has been recognized by the Puget Sound Business Journal (PSBJ) as one of the 100 Fastest-Growing Private Companies in Washington State for 2009. The selection was based on the company’s level of net revenue growth over the past three years. The PSBJ and RSM McGladrey accounting firm conducted research to verify the company’s net revenues and growth rate. Sesame was honored at the PSBJ’s October 15th evening reception as one of Washington’s fastest-growing businesses, and featured in the October 16th issue of the Journal on newsstands today.

“The tougher economy, increased competition among clinicians, and a strong patient preference to interact with service providers online have all accelerated the adoption of the Sesame 24/7 Suite of services,” said Frith Ann Maier, CEO of Sesame Communications. “Dentists now see that being online means being in touch with patients where they spend their time.”

This recognition comes on the heels of Sesame’s endorsement by the Washington State Dental Association as its preferred online service provider. With over 2.7 million patients around North America getting information from their dental professionals through Sesame’s email services and online information access portal, the company expects to continue its growth pattern.

An emerging growth company, Sesame has steadily built its market penetration with substantial year-over-year growth and sustained profitability since its inception in 2000. In 2008, the company posted 47% revenue growth and its pace has accelerated in the first half of 2009. Sesame has anchored its growth in a comprehensive suite of solutions helping dentists effectively connect with patients, ultimately translating to practice profitability. Sesame’s service offerings for dental providers include high scoring patient appeal rated websites and search engine optimization, 24/7 information access, electronic patient feedback mechanisms, appointment reminders, online doctor-to-doctor collaboration, as well as online marketing modules. For more information about Sesame’s services, go to: www.sesamecommunications.com

Sales is an odd function in early stage companies.  The traditional salesperson is tasked with presenting the company story in front of as many prospects as possible.  If those prospects are not responsive, move on to the next.  The best salespeople get fewer no’s and cycle faster.  In a start up, the situation is different and the role even more critical.  Generating revenue is still paramount and product pitching is the daily focus;  but now the cash from those sales becomes the immediate and essential life-blood of the company.   Beyond revenue, Sales often carries the additional responsibility of ensuring customer satisfaction, accumulating market feedback, acquiring competitive intelligence, defining product requirements, assessing vertical and channel strategies, and being a key influencer in the company’s morale and momentum.  However, many startup leaders still hire their initial sales team based on the traditional sales profile and the desired quota performance with little consideration for these elements.

Mark Leslie, founder of Veritas and currently professor at Stanford, calls the traditional class of salesman “coin-operated”, suggesting they are great at execution and tenaciously drive a consistent and proven process.  But in order to perform they require tools, infrastructure, and support that simply do not exist in a startup.  The result is missed forecasts and high turnover in the position.

One client with a SaaS offering approached Altus out of board pressure due to lower than expected sales.  What we found was two Quota Club Kings as regional reps; they were in the field and miles away from the product with limited support.  The repair was a few months of assessing the best sales process, identifying the target customer, and bringing in two inside reps matching a profile more consistent with a product manager–to listen, learn and share their experiences internally.  Now with a closer connection to the right customer, the closing ratio and sales cycle improved.

Another scenario we find in early stage sales is the under-hire, where precious cash has been allocated outside of sales and the plan is a junior rep / CEO tag team. This model creates the opposite challenge with relatively junior people trying to find, qualify, and manage prospects for the CEO to close.  Now you have a lack of experience, no process, no tools and often an incomplete product representing your company in the marketplace.  These recruits tend to thrash, driving more activity than results just to create an impression of productivity.   The result again is a weak qualified pipeline, missed targets, and often “bad revenue”—a customer willing to listen but who is ultimately not a good match to the product.  Now you have product development thrashing too.

We saw an example of this with an online offering looking for key partnerships and distribution.  Here the lower cost junior rep was able to build a large list of companies and activities that were not strategic or prioritized and the CEO was not able to support the volume while managing his other duties.  The repair was a senior part-time business development profile that could identify and close much bigger transactions with far bigger players.

Many leaders and boards believe ‘sales is sales’.  The perception is that a good sales person will always be good regardless of when or where you drop them.   While sometimes true, it is certainly not the case in the early stages of a company.  The profile of the best sales people for early stage is what we (and Leslie) refer to as Renaissance Salesperson.  The Renaissance rep is one who is more driven intellectually than financially.  He wants to learn and therefore asks questions and listens to what customers, and ideally markets, truly want and need. He evolves to what resonates with buyers and adapts quickly from one call to the next.  He likes to share his findings with the company and help to shape and evolve the product while it is still in its infancy. Most importantly, he is resourceful and can inform and persuade prospects with little infrastructure, support or materials.  He is challenged, intrigued, and motivated rather than frustrated and demanding more resources.

We recommend early stage companies begin their sales with this renaissance profile, and in small numbers, until a replicable model starts to take shape.  It is critical at this stage for the company to learn and adapt quickly and understand that results do not come quickly or easily with a sales group versed only in mature products and markets. This is the time to build the system that will henceforth guide the company’s sales (and perhaps marketing) strategy.

Once you can see the beginnings of a repeatable and scalable model you can now shape the sales organization into a high-yielding machine.  And just as sales people are not all created equal, neither is the makeup of a sales organizational model.   There are many different structures that can be implemented to maximize the cost, speed, and efficiency of sales, i.e.:
Inside / outside
Qualify / close
First sale / growth sale
Volume / relationship based
Direct/channel

Consequently these different models require different profiles of salespeople in order to be successful.  Failure to clearly understand and define the role will again translate into a bad hire, turnover, and loss of momentum and profits.

This recommendation is often hard for CEOs to accept because they need more revenue and rapid adoption and therefore bigger investments in sales. Most companies we begin working with tend to build to an immediate sales model based on their experience or council from established and successful companies in which they used to work and to which they aspire to return. However, just as a company evolves and matures its development cycle through prototypes, so too do sales strategies and tactics.

Although counterintuitive, the fastest path to the greatest revenue is to begin slowly with fewer salespeople until you feel a foundation capable of building on. They will burn far less money and create an environment where traditional sales will succeed.

Didn’t we learn anything from the childhood Tortoise and Hare story?

Implemented Quarterly ROB and killed it at the end of Q1. Big celebration here!! Very fun. Biggest day, Biggest month!! Now they get why we care about the Rhythm of the Business!! Closed down shop at 3:30PM (on 31st of month) and went for margaritas.

The Rhythm of Business is one of the core processes we leave behind during a Sales Process Optimization project. It makes a huge difference.