I spoke to 500 inside sales managers at a recent American Association of Inside Sales Professionals  (AA-ISP) conference. They were there to learn how to make their ever-increasing sales quotas with a small to non-existent headcount growth allowance.

One question I asked at the start of my talk, was “how many of you are getting confused between the role of marketing and the role of sales”.   Not surprisingly a large number of them raised their hands.  Are they serious ?  Are they really getting more, not less, confused about their role as a sales manager ?

Selling Has Changed – A LOT

What sales managers  now have to respond to is the increased role and responsibility that inside sales reps have for a “helping and assisting”  approach rather than “selling” in the “traditional way”.  It is a far cry from the usual straight line selling process based on qualify-sell-close on-a-schedule measurement that they are used to.

What’s Going On ?

Customers are now in the driver’s seat MOST of the time.    Salesmanship has a lot less to do with success than facilitation – - objection handling has a lot less to do with moving the process along than informing.  ”.    (I covered these trends in three earlier articles – Sales Prospecting at the Speed of Trust, Selling at the Speed of Trust, and  Checklist for Launching a Time-to-Trust Sales Campaign. ).

Micromarketing – the New Selling

 The most effective Inside Sales organizations I am working with have changed their selling approach to use Micromarketing techniques.   I see our Inside Sales customers at TimeTrade routinely increasing their close rates by 30% and their time-to-close by 40% . That’s an extraordinary increase compared to small, single digit improvements with incremental techniques aimed at improving funnel yield.

Here’s what a Inside Sales people in high performance Inside Sales groups using a Micromarketing approach are now doing:

1. Providing materials on their product or services, and their value proposition.
2. Helping prospects find customer reviews
3. Using social media for relationship building and management
4. Playing a strong facilitation role during the process
5. Selling ONLY at key “pivot points” in the process – - the product demo, the quote, the contract discussion.

Doing all this requires a new   for the Inside Sales group.   It is a combination of sales skills, product advisor, social marketer, and content creator.    The online tools to use for this go way beyond Salesforce.com, and I’ll cove these in my next post.

Changes to the sales process and funnel management are well under way.  Consumers now rule what once was a sales-rep driven process. In the 2009 article “The Consumer  Decision Journey” McKinsey & Company point out that the familiar sales funnel selling has given way to a much more buyer driven process.  You can also find more discussion on this topic in the Harvard Business Review Article “Aligning With The Customer Decision Journey”.  Both are worthwhile reads.

Social CRM

In my earlier post Selling At The Speed of Trust I cover how sales managers should look at this new reality.    Now it’s time to talk more about what to do in your sales organization in response to these changes.    Here’s what most sales managers think the selling process looks like:

It looks familiar – engage the prospect and drive it to close.  But this doesn’t work as well as it used to !  That’s because the power of social media combined with the level of participation of the average buyer has thrown a monkey wrench into traditional thinking. It’s no wonder that selling initiatives we used to rely on like cold-calling and phone prospecting, have become only marginally effective and have instead been replaced by Social CRM engagement.

Now, the real sales engagement looks like this:

The sales process that you are driving is just part of the prospect’s overall purchase decision picture.   Social media is most of the time a more influential and important source of information than the sales reps !  Why ?  Prospects feel social media is a better place to get pinions and ratings on your product or service than from you or your web site. IBM published  in a study “From Social Media to Social CRM”  showing that most companies miss this point entirely and continue think product information is a key to success – - which it is not !

Checklist for Using Social CRM and Time-to-Trust Prospecting

In the Time-t0-Trust Selling info graphic view of the sales process (above), it’s clear that two new things have to be addressed for effective selling. First, your companies Brand Experience has to be up to the task.    Second, the sales process has to be changed to take into account engaging with prospects at the speed they want to engage.

There are three things to do to modify your sales approach to match the new reality.

1. Use a Time-to-Trust Prospecting Model

Forget about timeline-based selling. I see a lot of sales organizations continuing to measure progress selling milestones against timelines to determine qualification level and funnel position.  With the prospect and buyer in control of the process now, this is no longer an accurate measuring stick.   (See Sales Prospecting at the Speed of Trust). And when the buyer is in control of the process it’s very hard to make them move on your selling schedule since a lot of the information they are looking for does not come from you.

2. Determine Your Prospect’s Level of Social Media Reliance

It’s easy to figure out if your prospect is going to make extensive use of social media.  A quick check of their LinkeIn profile, Google + profile, Facebook page, Klout score, and Twitter posts are an accurate indicator.  The more they are connected and the larger their “social graph” is, the harder it will be to control the sales process in a traditional way.

3. Create a Persistent  Personal Social Media Presence

It should be easy for your prospects and existing customers to get a hold of you 24/7. Why ?  Because in the new social selling, prospects are more apt to engage when they are on the verge of a buy decision and not before.  When they have reached the trust “Pivot Point” they will come to you. The best way to be available is to make sure you have personal profiles on ALL of the social media services, and have links in the profiles so prospects can call you or schedule an appointment with you instantly. Remember, you don’t have to be available instantly.  But providing the means for the prospect to let you know they are interested and want to talk captures and commits their interest – - a key milestone in the selling process.

4. Use Social Media as Part of Your Outreach and Selling

There’s a lot of debate around using social media communications – - messaging, twitter direct, texting etc. – - for selling.   But the fact is that prospects who are social media savvy are starting to ignore e-mail and voice phone calls in favor of social communications. It’s easy to be successful with this.   Think of your social media relationship with a prospect as reaching a Trust threshold.  If you try a social media outreach and get a response, you’ve reached a selling-trust threshold. Not getting a response probably means your prospect is still mining their social graph for information and comments about your products, and you should try again a little later.

Persistence Is The Key

The most important thing to remember is that social networking’s role in selling is still evolving. If you keep in mind that Social Trust level is the pacing item to the sales process, not how long it takes, you’ll start to see some positive results in your close rate.

Suggested Reading:

Brian Solis, The End of Business as Usual

Brian Solis, Engage

In my earlier post Sales Prospecting at the Speed of Trust I talked about the trust timeline and gave some examples of trust based selling dialog.  So this was sort of a sales-rep view of trust selling.

I recently had the opportunity to do a speech for the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals covering trust selling from a higher level sales managers point of view.   A really key point in this presentation is around the diminishing power of the traditional sales funnel process, and the quickly increasing trend toward customer self-service selling where the prospect actually approaches the company and engages when THEY are ready, and not the other way around:

What do you think ? Is your sales funnel process rapidly producing diminishing returns ? Is it time for a new approach ?

The reality is the top of the sales funnel is a veritable “death zone” for leads.  On average, only about 17% of leads make it out of the top of the funnel to become genuine sales opportunities.  I started using the “death zone” label after realizing the majority of the time and effort spent by many of the inside sales teams I was talking with is wasted on leads that never become opportunities (see The Bridge Group for great comparables on funnel analytics).

It turns out if you start out climbing a big mountain (a.k.a. the Next Quarter) too high up, you can’t make it all the way to the summit.  You get sick, have to leave, and never get to the goal.   That’s why mountain climbers call it the Death Zone.

Apply that paradigm to the sales funnel and what do you get ?   Same thing – - a selling Death Zone.   Since only 17% of leads convert from being qualified leads – - meaning they met some minimum qualifying criteria when they were collected – - that means  83% ! – - eighty three percent ! – become casualties of the selling Death Zone.    It’s alarming to think most sales managers take 83% of their sales budget and conduct calling campaigns that result in $0.00 of sales !

Try applying some sales funnel “situational awareness”. A lot of sales managers are focused on improving the 17% yield a little bit, maybe to 18% for example, and view that as a HUGE  win.

Change your viewpoint here and what happens ?  Suddenly things don’t seem quite so productive.  You start to see that  a great deal of sales time and effort is being wasted. Same funnel, same metrics, but an alarmingly different viewpoint.  If the majority of sales resources are being used-up  calling, waiting, and chasing prospects that perish in the Death Zone, it makes it hard to scale any sales operation cost effectively, especially if your lead generation is growing quickly.

Also watch out for compounding the Death Zone affect  by rewarding small incremental increases in opportunity creation with disproportionately large incentives.  Instead, why not address the big problem and refocus resources being wasted in the Death Zone by setting some aggressive objectives for putting them work in the Opportunity area of the funnel. That’s where time spent selling has a much better chance of creating a closed deal.

Over the next couple of posts we’ll look at ways of avoiding the Death Zone by changing the game and putting those wasted resources to work for much more productive yield, so stay tuned…..