By: Jim Ward, president and CEO of BrainSell Technologies
One of Inbound Marketing’s primary tenants is to provide relevant non selling information. The reason is simple and if you think about the way you buy today and specifically how Gen Y and Gen X buy products and services, their approach has shifted to research and peer recommendations. This approach has been a result of our connected age via the Internet, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social outlets.
Frankly, beyond the clear benefits of Inbound Marketing that generate real leads for companies committed to inbound strategies, it’s refreshing to be able to provide information that helps prospects and clients of ours find the right product or service that fits their exact needs.
Funny, I was listening to a local radio broadcast, Prime Car Chat, hosted by Prime Motor Group President, David Rosenberg. David talked about their “no haggle pricing” and their “no bicker sticker” and he described the transition of his sales staff from heavily incented based on commissions that were paid on profit margins (sales price – cost) and how the “no haggle” approach changed the profile of folks selling cars. They went from being 80% sales 20% product knowledge people working 80 hours a week to make enough from their sales incentives to folks who can work a regular work week (say 40 hours) and they are now 80% product knowledge 20% sales. And the pricing strategy further gives the buyer the power to identify the best car versus the dealer trying to sell the most profitable car.
What is Inbound Marketing doing to sales? The same. Inbound Marketing strategies are turning the sales organizations on their heads. In fact, I dare say Inbound Marketing may help to bring down the historical divide between sales and marketing.
At BrainSell, we’re far more focused on product knowledge and consultative expertise that actually works to help clients achieve results they expect. It’s one thing to talk about delivering results it’s another to fully build your organization around giving away real and relevant information then turn your sales staff into into business analysts. It’s a fundamental shift. It’s good for both the seller and the buyer.
For those who only take the process half way and use Inbound Marketing, yet maintain traditional hard-sell tactics, let the chips fall where they may. Gen Y and X’ers will quickly see through that veil. Boomers too!
The result is an experience, for both seller and buyer , that’s less stressfull and more fulfilling than the traditional role of sales and buying. Long live Inbound Marketing.
I’ll be presenting with Kevin Goldstein from Pardot. We’ll go over basic features that you should look for in a system, like a sturdy CRM integration. I’ll also share what BrainSell has done internally with marketing automation to boost our sales more than 20% last year.
Sneak preview: When someone comes to www.brainsell.net and fills out a form, they’re added as a lead in the marketing system, we can see when they come back and they get points added to their lead score. When that score hits 75, they get added to SugarCRM automatically and a salesperson gets an email/to-do to call them. I know every time that person comes back to the site. It’s totally changed our sales process.
Below is a screen shot of my action on the BrainSell site. You can see that every move has been tracked. Points get added to my lead score as I hit the site, and drip marketing actions take place. All on their own.
Today, BrainSell and InsideView ran a webinar, Leveraging Social Media in SugarCRM. Nirav Bisarya, Channel Development Manager at InsideView, started off with a great overview of why sales people should leverage social data in their sales process. Social tools in SugarCRM were also demonstrated.
Guest Blog! This week, Koka Sexton, Director of Social Strategy at InsideView graces the BrainSell Blog with his social wisdom. Later this week, Sexton will co-host a webinar with BrainSell on Social Media in SugarCRM. Sign up for the Nov. 30 webinar here.
In order to be an effective sales person you have to be leveraging the Internet and social media to keep you connected to prospects. Sales intelligence is a driving force for sales teams trying to leverage all of the data about prospects and turn them into opportunities.
Social media and sales intelligence increases companies win rates of new business. Since driving more revenue is a cornerstone for companies, it shouldn’t be overlooked as a tool to enable your sales teams.
Social Media is the Key
There is too much information available online these days that a sales person is walking blind if they are not using it in some way. Sales prospecting lists for contact data is fine but it’s not very effective on a large scale. Gathering contact information is only the first step in an effective sales process. The real intelligence comes from contact data and the relevant information about that contact.
When a sales person understands the impact of having relevant information on their prospects being handed to them on a daily basis, they are able to decrease the amount of time spent researching information that can help. When acted on with social selling best practices, prospects will be highly engaged and you will close more deals.
What’s holding sales people back?
When it comes to doing pre-call research and getting some background on a prospect or company you are calling into, there is a lot of information gathered by just doing a Google search. The problem with this is there is very little context around the results. You can spend an hour digging through search results and other resources to get an idea of who the person is and what challenges their company is facing but you’re busy too and can’t justify a large amount of time to research to make a call that may only take 10-15 minutes. “Typically, there is a lot of knowledge out there,” says John Aiello, CEO of SAVO, in a video interview with Selling Power magazine publisher Gerhard Gschwandtner. “The gap is that people can’t find it.”
Sales Intelligence Drives the Conversation
As a sales person, there is no excuse any more for not knowing more about your prospects and the company you are calling into. Sales Intelligence tools enable you to have relevant information at your virtual fingertips that can be used to know in many cases exactly how to position your product or service. There are even free sales intelligence tools available that can help.
Sales people need intelligence to close more deals. Making that intelligence available in a way that sales can capture quickly and easy to find is a necessity. In an Accenture study of more than 1,000 managers in the United States and the United Kingdom, nearly 60 percent have to go to numerous sources to compile the information they need to do their jobs well. About the same number reported that information as poorly distributed across the organization.
Building your sales pipeline and increasing win rates is not magic. There is no secret code that needs to be cracked for success. All you need is more information and a better way of identifying what matters when you start making connections.
About the author: Koka Sexton, Director of Social Strategy at InsideView, is one of the most recognized social experts in the technology industry. With ten+ years of sales experience and a passion for social media, Koka is the perfect evangelist for social selling, a topic that he promotes through national speaking engagements and InsideView’s newest social media endeavor: Social Selling University. Koka’s expertise extends beyond his endless knowledge of social networks into his skill at employing them to drive lead generation, create new opportunities, and engage customers
On HubSpot’s partner webinar this morning, they mentioned Google+ for business. This awesome feature was released this week and we encourage EVERY business to get on Google+ and make a page!
Google is master of the web and any valuable content that you get out there will create web traffic and if you have marketing automation going, that traffic can convert in to LEADS!
Start by logging into your Gmail account. To be an admin and create a Google+ page, you need a gmail account. If you have a personal Google+ page, no worries, you can simply change from personal to business in a cool little tab.
Pick what kind of business you’d like to be categorized as. You can be a local business or place, Product or brand, Company, Arts or entertainment, or Other.
Google will walk you through what needs to be done, add profile info, pictures, links and start adding contacts to your circles!
PROMOTE. Now tell people about it! I tweeted ours, we’ll also put it on our homepage with the rest of our social symbols.
Google+ is another awesome way to get valuable content out on the web, and connect with customers and prospects, and gain a reputation as a knowledgeable, reputable source.
BrainSell Technologies, a Gold SugarCRM Partner, will unveil a Social CRM tool at the Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston on Wednesday, September 14, 2011.
The tool allows SugarCRM data to be graphically displayed with connections and relationships, reinventing how companies market to their valuable network.
Companies can now identify trends in social CRM data, enabling them to target prospects and clients with hypersensitive marketing initiates. With the tool, influencers among social data information can be uncovered, allowing for brand ambassador nurturing. Imagine rewarding your biggest brand fans and having them spread your praise for them.
BrainSell explains the tool and their work with client, Media Star Promotions, in their latest case study, From the War Room to the Board Room: Repurposing a Threat-Analysis Tool to Pinpoint Sales Opportunities in SugarCRM. You can download the case study here.
Sugar has thousands of cool apps, literally. One of our favorites is InsideView. It comes loaded up (free) with Sugar if you buy the latest version. It’s a cool little module that sits underneath contact details. InsideView pulls company info and puts it right under the contact record. Including people and their phone numbers and EMAIL addresses. InsideView isn’t just for Sugar, it plugs in with most CRM systems!
We’re putting on a webinar to show how it works, join us!
We recently delved into the arena of Marketing Automation after internally experiencing the toils of keeping tabs on Form Submissions, Web Site Traffic, Drip Marketing, Lead Scoring, and the DREADED, building Landing Pages and FORMS.
Unbeknownst to me, all of those items fall under the management of several marketing automation software packages. And the research began! We found 3 leaders that fit our needs. They’re different, and fit a variety of companies marketing goals.
As Marketing Director at BrainSell, I was originally on the hunt for an INTERNAL product. It just so happened that we loved 3 of them so much that we’re now reselling them. We saw a rediculous jump in marketing success here by using these tools that it was a no-brainer to bring these tools to our customers. Really, we love this stuff!
So how did we do it? Grow our business 44% in one year? With VERY little investment? The story is kind of long, so this is the abridged version.
***Side note, because I know my call to action needs to be higher up in the post, Sign up HERE for a free session with one of our marketing gurus.
Jim Ward, BrainSell’s President, read the book Inbound Marketing. He listened to what their message and hired me, an ex-journalist, to create valuable content for our marketing operations. No problem. Then I realized that it was VERY difficult to get this valuable content OUT. I would write a white paper and then have to spend 2 hours building a landing page from scratch (I’m a writer, not a programer). Putting a form on it for download, and putting the link up all over social media. I was SPENT. I hated this process and knew there must be a better way.
There was!
First I found Hubspot, mostly because Jim made me read Inbound Marketing, and the authors invented Hubspot. With Hubspot, I was able to create my content and have a FAST way of getting it out there. There is a landing page builder with FORMS that send people automated emails! And those leads are stored in Hubspot, and can be synced with CRM for follow ups. It will tell you if a visitor has returned to the site, and handle drip marketing, so once that visitor returns, they can get an automated teaser email.
Hubspot also tells brings your social media to one page. I was able to see what was trending in our industry and respond to Twitter posts right from Hubspot.
It made everything very VISUAL. I finally saw what was working. Our organic search traffic was up because of all of my white papers, and Hubspot told me that with their traffic source feature. About 9 months ago, we DROPPED PPC adds. And our web traffic kept going up. Up 120% year of year, in fact.
Hubspot guided me through my marketing education. And it was a lot easier than going back to grad school! I knew how to create the content, but just needed some help getting it out there. That’s where Hubspot shines.
Some companies already have expert marketers. They might need less social media guidance and more help on segmenting all of their incoming leads, to market to them correctly. That’s where those other 2 products come in.
I searched for more “bottom of funnel” tools for our clients who had the marketing mostly figured out. Pardot and Net-Results were clear leaders. They integrated with our client’s CRMs (MSCRM, SalesLogix, SageCRM, Salesforce, Sugar), they are easy to use, and they are VERY good at things that Hubspot does on a lighter level.
Pardot: Great landing page builder, more detailed drip capabilities than Hubspot, on-screen visitor alerts, superior reporting tool, superior lead scoring.
Net-Results: The only mar-automation company with a SalesLogix integration, industry leader on SEGMENTING leads (example: any lead who spent more than 32 seconds on 4 pages gets this drip email), great drag and drop campaign building UI.
This warrants a new white paper! So look for that soon (-=
We love talking about this stuff and want to tell you how to do what we’ve done. Sign up here for a free one on one to asses your current marketing opps. We speak from experience. Trust me.
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