GogitalBlog

Author: Richard Mello

  • Business vs Personal Values For you

    Business vs Personal Values For you

    Many B2B purchasing decisions are complex. On the one hand, your product or service must solve real problems for an organization. On the other hand, it must meet the personal needs of the people involved in the purchase process. It gets even more complex when you realize that there are several people involved in the purchase decision and their personal needs are often different.

    As individuals, we are exposed to many technology products and services in our personal lives. Consumer companies are much better at providing a great customer experience and creating products we love to use. Indeed, the consumer market drives our expectations when it comes to business purchases. We cannot easily turn off our high expectations in a work-related environment. Nor should we. Our personal expectations and preferences affect how we evaluate products and services for our companies.

    How can we build solutions that meet organizational needs as well as fulfill individual values? This is what sets iconic B2B companies apart from everyone else.

    What I’ve noticed is that B2B companies often communicate surprisingly similar values ​​to potential customers: ease of use, time savings, cost reduction, revenue growth, risk reduction, and so on. Some variations of these values ​​are reported by almost all B2B companies. What’s difficult is seeing a company proactively address the needs of individuals within an organization.

    The most useful work on the intersection of corporate and individual values ​​in B2B markets comes from research conducted by Bain & Company. In an HBR article, Eric Almquist, Jamie Cleghorn, and Lori Sherer summarize and categorize 40 distinct values ​​in B2B offerings, categorized into 5 levels.

    Source: B2B Value Pyramid

    This Value Pyramid helps you understand how B2B offerings can fulfill both objective organizational values ​​and individual and personal values. When designing an ideal customer profile, you want to outline how customers perceive your business and personal values. Listen carefully as they describe the benefits your product or service offers and what they get beyond the features and functionality.

    Business values ​​are easy to measure because they are usually based on metrics, reasoning, and logic that are somewhat objective. Personal values ​​are much harder to identify and communicate. That’s why you need to develop empathy for your customers.

     

  • Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): Customer Acquisition Process

    Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): Customer Acquisition Process

    Let’s be clear, the customer acquisition process doesn’t end when a customer signs the contract. You should analyze the buying process starting with how your prospects identify their pain and begin researching options and continue through the time they are using your offer and possibly making subsequent purchases. Before buying, you need to sell prospects on the values ​​and needs your product or service solves. After purchase, you must reduce friction when it comes to implementation, integration, and adoption.

    After your customers buy, they need to implement your product or service. Your company needs an implementation plan for more complex solutions or a customer onboarding process for simpler solutions. You want to design for the Aha moment that provides initial value. The Aha moment answers the question: How will the customer experience value first?

    Your ideal customer profile will not be complete without a clear understanding of how your customers purchase your solution. By learning how your typical customer buys, you can create a buying process that improves the experience and accelerates the purchase decision. Your team can anticipate obstacles and proactively resolve them.

    Sales teams can be trained to ask appropriate questions that will help them deliver a better shopping experience. Marketing teams can create content to address typical objections, implementation concerns, or risks associated with purchasing and using your product or service. Development teams can design better onboarding processes that align with how customers shop. And customer success teams can train customers on how to use the product or service.

    When creating your ideal customer profile (ICP), spend time researching how your customers buy. This will help you design better shopping experiences and improve the overall customer experience.

    According to the Fogg Behavior Model, for a sale to take place, the customer needs motivation and the ability to buy, as well as a prompt. And all three elements need to be in place at the same time.

    It’s important to understand what motivates and enables someone to make a purchase and to use that information to provide an effective stimulus or trigger to make the sale.

    Motivation:

    • What will they search for when they need your solution?
    • What questions will your prospects have before they even know they need your solution?
    • What objections do they have to your solution?

    Capability: Does

    Does your target customer have the authority to make a purchase below a certain price? For more expensive or complicated products, there are often multiple stakeholders and approval steps.

    • What is the purchasing power of your target customer?
    • What information do they need to get approval for the sale?

    It’s not enough to make your customers want your solution. You have to make your offer easy to buy. Designing a frictionless shopping experience is just as important as designing the solution itself. The easier it is for a customer to buy your solution, the more satisfied they will be with your company and offerings. 

     

  • Who do you want your Customers to Become?

    Who do you want your Customers to Become?

    The purpose of every business is to create customers, as Peter Drucker said. Notice, he said “create” customers, not identify or find. Great companies not only solve customer pain points but also change how their customers think, what they do, and how they feel. Successful products significantly change people’s lives in significant ways.

    The best way to create a customer and change your life is to think ahead. Michael Schrage, a research fellow at the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School, wrote for the Harvard Business Review: “The better we know and understand who customers want to become, the better we can invest in and develop the innovations needed to get them there. ”

    This future perspective is not just about creating better products, it’s also about creating better messages. You need to be able to describe the vision and promised land to customers so they can join you.

    Product design and sales teams can be myopic when they focus too much on the current customer problem and ignore their long-term goals. Can you help them achieve these goals? You can think as idealistically as you like, as long as you have practical messages, accurate data, and real solutions to back up your claims.

    When researching your ideal customers, describe exactly how you want them to act, think, and feel like your customers. How do you want to change their lives? How will their lives change because of your product or service? How will your customers’ actions change with your product or service? When developing your Ideal Client Profile, it is important to think about this topic to have better results. 

     

  • Empathy: What Customers Say, Think, Feel, and Do

    Empathy: What Customers Say, Think, Feel, and Do

    We often see the B2B sales process as a cold analysis of the customer’s pain points, values, and goals. We forget that people buy business products. And whenever people are involved, we are dealing with feelings and emotions that drive purchase decisions. We are not as rational as we believe when it comes to making decisions (as Dan Ariely points out in the book “Predictably Irrational”).  

    Empathy helps build trust with your customers. It shows that your goal is not just to sell something, but to improve their lives. When creating your ideal customer profile, understand what your customers say, think, feel, and do to develop that empathy. Understanding what they say, think, feel, and do helps you figure out how to motivate them to act/make a purchase, break out of inertia and take action.

    What is clear to me is that you cannot blindly trust what customers say. You need to hear how they feel, what they do, and how they think. Don’t wait for them to tell you the solution to your problems. Instead, pay attention to noticing subtle feelings and thoughts that paint a clearer picture of your day-to-day situation and activities. When we ask someone directly there is a filter and people tend to misrepresent and report when asked directly. In other words, often what we say and do are not in sync.

    My journey to find a systematic approach to learning about customer feelings led me to discover the empathy map that UX/UI designers and researchers use to gather customer feedback. The most sophisticated product teams regularly show customers new features and product updates before launch and use an empathy map to rank their input. Startups can use this process to showcase and test product features before developing them.

    However, customer development is not just for startups. Even established companies will benefit from showing and discussing product launches and features before committing large resources to build them. The customer development process never stops. Creating an ideal customer profile and conducting a customer discovery process are two sides of the same coin.

    By driving customer development and gathering feedback, you refine your understanding of the ideal customer profile. At the same time, by researching your ideal customers, you can find better ideas and strategies to improve your product and drive customer development.

    Here are some questions to help you get started with an empathy map:

    • What are the customers thinking and feeling? What are some of your concerns and aspirations?
    • What are your friends, colleagues, and leadership likely to say while the user is using our product? What would the customer hear in these scenarios?
    • What would the user see when using our product in their environment?
    • What might the user be saying and/or doing while using our product? How would that change in a public or private setting?
    • What are some user pain points or fears when using our product?
    • What gains can the user have when using our product?

    Source: Empathy mapping helps you better understand your customers: nngroup.com

    Your product and brand should strive to change how people feel about their responsibilities and themselves. Designing your solution to evoke feelings is a powerful way to connect with your customers. You first want to identify how your customers feel about their current broken or complicated process or unresolved issue. So you want to find out what they will feel after resolving these pains – including how they will feel afterward.

     

  • What are SMART goals, and why are they important?

    What are SMART goals, and why are they important?

    Setting goals and achieving them is essential to the day-to-day operations of an organization. However, prioritization matters most when it comes to achieving success in any business; setting the wrong target could have the worst consequences for your organization’s success. Success in executing these purposes needs to be measured and evaluated to ensure that the achievement´s objectives lead to the right impact at all levels.

    For this, companies use various KPIs. KPIs are defined, combined, and compared with some statistical data, i.e. metrics. In short, the achievement of the goals must be reflected in some important statistical data, namely metrics, to be later compared with other important metrics to see the impact of your actions on specific KPIs that indicate the measure of your success.

    Types of metrics

    There are several types of metrics, and only a few are important for your business. Therefore, your objectives must be linked to the appropriate metrics to measure success and levels of achievement against your purpose. Others don’t serve their purpose in measuring your success. For example, vanity metrics, as the name suggests, can give you a false sense of achievement while not helping to measure your organization’s success. Instead, you need to choose SMART metrics to measure your goals.

    What are SMART metrics?

    Successful organizations use goal-setting frameworks to select targets and their associated metrics to measure them. Different goal-setting frameworks are available and finding a suitable one aligned with SMART metrics will help organizations achieve their goals. 

    SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

    SpecificTheobjective must be precisely quantifiable as a number. For example, the sales team’s specific goal would be to achieve a 10% increase in the number of units sold over the previous quarter. It’s a specific, unambiguous goal, and the SMART metric for that goal would be a ‘sales goal’.

    Measurable: Goal achievement must be measurable so that managers can measure how much of the goal the team has achieved. SMART target achievement can be accurately measured using the ‘sales target’ metric by comparing current sales figures with those from the previous review period.

    Achievable: While pushing boundaries and going further and further is indispensable for successful goal setting and achievement, targets must be achievable at the same time. The key is finding the right balance between being ambitious and realistic. For example, the best practice in the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) system is to set stretch targets, where results and achievements are measured by SMART metrics. For example, the objective linked to the ‘sales target’ metric should be defined based on the past performance of individuals and the team, increasing it according to the business purpose. If it increases too much from what the team could previously achieve, employees will find it difficult to achieve them on time, leading to a loss of motivation. If it is set to low, it can be easily achieved and business goals will not be met.

    Relevant: The objective linked to the SMART metric must be aligned with the organization’s objectives. For example, if your organization’s goal is to achieve a 10% annual increase in sales growth, which is another important metric, the ‘sales target’ should be relevant to your organization’s goal and should be raised to similar levels. Otherwise, the purpose of the sales will not be relevant.

    Time-bound: The objective must be completed within a predefined time, and achievements must only be measured within that period. For example, the ‘sales growth’ year over year should be 10%, and the ‘sales target’ should be measured at 10% for the year. Achieving 10% beyond a year translates to failure.

     

    Importance of SMART

    Metrics 1. SMART metrics give teams clarity

    When SMART objectives are defined, they give teams clarity on what they need to achieve, what the objective is, and how to measure their success. Key metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) are used to measure performance against specific objectives. This allows the team to focus on what matters and work towards achieving their goals.

    2. SMART metrics make evaluation fair and objective

    When the achievement of objectives is measured using SMART metrics, there is no other way to misinterpret the results. The evaluation has to go through pure numbers, which makes it fair and objective.

    3. SMART metrics allow you to track progress

    SMART metrics allow individuals and teams to track their progress against their targets because they are specific and measurable. This allows employees to look at the numbers and constantly stay on track to achieve their goals on time.

    4. SMART metrics provide team motivation

    When goals and measurement mechanisms are based on past performance and future needs, they motivate employees as goals are realistic and yet ambitious. They give employees the confidence to push the boundaries as much as possible.

    5. SMART metrics allow you to verify the alignment of the purpose with the organization

    Objectives SMART objectives are aligned with the organizational objectives. Therefore, any progress against these targets must continue to create results for the success of the organization. Otherwise, SMART metrics will reveal a lack of alignment, which allows leadership to make quick course corrections.

    6. SMART metrics help you verify the effectiveness of actions and activities

    SMART metrics help you verify that your actions are producing the desired results. This helps identify needed changes to your operations and allows teams to optimize their action plan and performance.

    SMART: Frequently Asked Questions

    1. What are examples of good KPIs?

    Good KPIs avoid ambiguity. They are measurable and based on SMART goals.

    2. What’s the difference between a KPI and a goal?

    Goals are the results of your actions; are aligned with the vision and objectives of the organization. KPIs are the means to measure how well you are working towards goals.

    3. What are the KPI uses?

    KPIs are measurable values ​​that monitor a company’s progress against defined goals. What is the KPI? Primarily used for tracking goals and making more informed decisions.

    Final Thoughts

    Using smart metrics to measure and evaluate your business at periodic intervals helps you redefine strategy and correct course without wasting time. As Peter Drucker pointed out, “what gets measured gets managed”. Businesses will benefit significantly from making SMART metrics part of their daily operations.

  • Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): How to Create an Ideal Customer Profile

    Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): How to Create an Ideal Customer Profile

    The goal of business is to generate revenue through customers by convincing them to buy your product or service. The only way to achieve this goal is to truly understand the people whose lives you want to improve. The more an organization knows its customers define the success of its product and brand. 

    The organization that understands its target customer better and is closer to its customers than competitors will win.

    Understanding your customers is essential in building a solution that people are willing to pay for. You must put yourself in your target customer’s shoes to understand who they are and what they care about. You can only build a solution that customers need and deliver efficiently.

    However, understanding your customers goes beyond just knowing their pains and problems. In this sense the front line (marketing or sales professionals) are crucial to describe who your customers are and, most of the time, they will tell you all about their pain points. But understanding someone’s problems doesn’t give you the complete picture. If that’s all you know about your existing or potential customers, you’re missing the context in which this pain occurs. Building empathy for your customers, in turn, builds more brand credibility.

    Context is everything.

    From the seller’s point of view, it’s hard to know what he doesn’t know about the customer and what he should know to offer the customer the right option. In B2B sales, we generally know who our customers are and their problems. But that’s not enough: organizations must also understand the context in which their customers operate, what their typical day-to-day life looks like, how they feel about the issues at hand, what events they attend, and who they follow in the media. social media, what they read, and what products and services they use and like. Building empathy with your customers helps you create effective marketing and sales strategies that focus on your customers rather than your solution.

    Most companies start the process by creating customer personas based on demographics and psychographics that include things like attitudes, values, and interests. They can find industry-specific generic personas online or make guesses based on what they think they know about their actual or potential customers. Most of the time, these personas amount to assumptions. And there is a better way!

    Before developing a persona and ideal customer profile, take the time to understand your target audience more broadly. This knowledge will help you select the ideal customer segment to target and even the people whose attitudes, values ​​, and beliefs align with your organization. It will also form the basis of your go-to-market strategy.

    You cannot please everyone.

    Here are steps you can take to build a more comprehensive view of your customers.

    1. Understand the larger target audience that may be feeling the pain you are solving. For example, let’s say you provide training for sales reps. Your target audience could be the VP of Sales in organizations of all sizes or any industry. However, the fact that people experience the same pain does not mean that they have an identical context. While every VP of Sales feels it is important to train their sales reps, in a large organization, the VP of Sales has a larger budget to deal with this problem and may hire outside trainers. In a smaller organization, the VP of Sales may have to train their direct reports.
    2. Identify potential customers (people who have a specific problem your solution solves) outside of your larger audience group. For example, your prospects might be VPs of Sales for organizations that generate more than $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).
    3. Build an ideal customer profile (ICP). Your ideal customers are potential customers with problems you can solve who are ready, willing, and able to buy your product or service. Ideally, the person who fits your ICP is aware of the problem and already looking for a solution. 
    4. Create customer personas. Only after understanding the broader target audience and outlining the main target in the form of an ICP can you delve into psychographics and personality traits—attitudes, beliefs, values, etc. — from your customers.

    The aim is to analyze the broad target audience before defining your ideal customer profiles and personas to ensure you understand the market you are targeting and select the right targets. 

    In other words, understanding your customers requires you to first understand the entire market and then focus on an ideal customer profile to pursue. Understand first, then segment. It’s also worth noting that choosing the right market and the right customer can lower your customer acquisition cost (CAC). It’s easier to sell your solution to people who are already familiar with the problem, and even easier if your target customer is already in the market for a solution. 

    Additionally, a go-to-market strategy that targets the right customers positively impacts customer lifetime value (CLV) and churn. Low customer lifetime value (CLV) and high churn are the results of selling to the wrong people – those who aren’t experiencing the problem you’re solving or aren’t experiencing enough pain to justify the expense, whether whatever the costs of your solution.  

    The purpose of this article is to show you how to create a 360º view of your customer and what characteristics you should consider when selecting your ideal customer profile and persona. Learning about your broad target audience is key to defining your ideal customer profile, but it can be separate from the ICP creation process.

    The ICP is the foundation of your brand story, strategic messaging, customer acquisition process, and content strategy. Therefore, every marketing playbook and every go-to-market strategy plan should start with a careful analysis of your market, defining your ICP, and deeply understanding your ideal customer from every conceivable angle.

    To build a strong brand, you need to grab your target audience’s attention. To get attention, you need to make people care by showing them the vision and the promised land. And to do that, you must have an organization centered on the customer experience — a company that closely understands its customers, their feelings, beliefs, and attitudes as well as pains and concerns. Your customer’s feelings and emotions are an important part of the decision-making process. We often make decisions based on our emotions and then find a way to rationalize our decision. In the B2B market, not all purchasing decisions are made based on a rational analysis of how a solution will help the company. 

    As people buy solutions for their organizations, their individual needs must also be met. Purchasing on behalf of your organization can be stressful and anxiety-provoking. That’s why having empathy and knowing your ideal customer profile is the key to selling more.

     

  • How to build an Inside Sales Team?

    How to build an Inside Sales Team?

    Building an Inside Sales team is structuring a team capable of conducting distance sales with as much involvement as if it were a face-to-face sale. Removing the time lost in travel or with delays in meetings, of course. Sounds too good to be true? It is not, but it is an undertaking with some complexity.

    Many CEOs and sales managers believe that building a successful sales team is simply about hiring good, experienced salespeople and letting them “do what they do best”. They forget that team creation starts at the top and they need to have priorities well aligned.

    Design your sales process

    Before you start recruiting salespeople, you must define what your sales process will look like. This planning defines the steps that salespeople will have to go through and what approach they should have with a potential customer, to guide them from the first contact to the sale.

    For example: Prospecting › Contact and Qualification › Research › Presentation › Handling objections › Close › Interaction and expansion

    Whatever the process, the idea is to have a systematic, logical, replicable plan that proves to be highly effective.

    Segment the team No

    Regardless of your sales team size, the company can only benefit from segmentation. Thanks to segmentation, sellers can shape their message and customize the entire sales approach to contacts in a given segment.

    Segmentation can be done according to:

    • Company size, whether in number of employees or billing;
    • Sector or market;
    • Geographical location, time zone, or language;
    • Other criteria that you consider relevant in the reality of your company.

    Plan your pay and commissions

    Pay and commissions? Already? Yes, it is that important. All departments are indeed essential for the company’s success, but none is as directly linked to invoicing as sales. Therefore, the role of sales commissions is to associate performance with very concrete bonuses and guide the team towards results that are also concrete.

    There are some recommendations you can follow to strike the right balance between fixed salary and variable commissions:

    • Experienced and specialized salespeople look for more attractive salary bases;
    • If your sales process is very particular and you have to train talent with less experience, you can opt for a lower base and bet on commissions.
    • Salespeople who operate in long sales cycles need a fair salary base, as they cannot live on commissions;
    • You can opt for lower commissions if you have a small margin and work with a subscription service.

    Create the Sales Playbook

    If you’ve ever been surprised by how quickly and efficiently a sales rep responded to your request, chances are that rep has used a playbook sales as the name implies, these are each company’s “rules of the game,” which include processes, strategies, documentation, and resources to reduce response time and increase accuracy.

    When the entire team uses a sales playbook, your company also maintains a standard in customer service and achieves the much-desired sales scalability.

    Define the salesperson profile

    One bad hire can jeopardize the financial performance of an entire business year. But how can you reduce the risk of making a bad hire? Knowing very well what you want is something you must have already understood when designing the sales process and segmenting the team and the playbook. Create a detailed job profile:

    • What roles will you play?
    • What skills do you need to perform the function?
    • What behaviors, attitudes, or personality traits are associated with good job performance?

    Create a hiring funnel that also reveals other important characteristics, such as whether they are problem-solving people who like to learn, have a work ethic, like to work in a team, and fit into your company culture.

    Plan the onboarding and prepare for the ramp

    Contrary to what you often hear, sales are not an innate talent that only a lucky few have. It is a competency that people willing to learn can develop and train. Hence the importance of creating an onboarding to train new sales reps quickly and efficiently.

    Not only should you take this time to educate them on the sales process, approaches, and sales playbook, but it’s also important to give them time to get to grips with the product or service. It’s unthinkable to think they can sell well without knowing their solution inside out and the competition.

    I realize that many companies feel that they don’t have time to waste and that they need new hires to get down to business as soon as possible. But as they say in Portugal, haste is the enemy of perfection. In this case, the lack of training will greatly increase the ramp time, that is, the time that new reps need to be able to perform functions at a good level and independently.

    Building a team is more than looking at resumes

    Despite the focus on the profile and skills of each salesperson, it is essential not to forget one thing that is very well illustrated by the following quote.

    “Hiring the right people takes time, the right questions, and a healthy dose of curiosity. What do you think is the most important factor when building a team? For us, it’s the personality.” – Richard Branson

    If all of this sounds like a daunting task, it’s because anything new has a learning curve. Trust an Inside Sales specialist to help you create an inside sales commercial department or adapt your current structure to this methodology.

     

  • How to structure a Commercial Department?

    How to structure a Commercial Department?

    Structuring a commercial department is much more than hiring sales specialists and assigning certain titles. In reality, a successful sales department is made up of technologies that accelerate performance, sales support resources, and an agile sales force with certain skills – all under a customer-centric sales process. 

    And it’s not just us who say it. Renowned consultant and author Jacco van der Kooij, a SaaS sales specialist based in Silicon Valley, argues that these are the 5 best sales practices he has had the opportunity to see in action in successful Startups.

    • Customer-Centric Sales Process

    First of all, what is a sales process? A sales process is a guide for how sales should unfold, which standardizes and systematizes everything in order to create a quality, consistent and complete consumer experience. From the point of view of the sales manager, it is also useful because it allows evaluation of professionals, activities, and incisively acting on problems.

    In the sales process, everything is planned: contact cadences, how to discover pain points and objections, lead qualification, how to do a product demonstration, call scripts, all the steps to close the deal, etc.

    Companies without these internal processes end up in very precarious situations: they have difficulties in training new recruits, they do not learn from their mistakes, and they are dependent on the experience of a few isolated salespeople (who may leave, taking their good practices and contacts with them).

    Now that we’ve explained what a sales process is, let’s see why you should create it with the customer in mind.

    Focusing the sales process on the customer means adapting to their needs at each sales funnel stage. Over time, build a dialogue in which the customer feels heard and acts as an ally in resolving a problem.

    Taking the different stages into account helps to avoid a mismatch between where the salesperson thinks they are and where the customer actually is in their buying journey.

    This is a real risk. Sellers are results-oriented, so it’s very tempting to push a potential customer step by step, as quickly as possible, toward the purchase decision.

    Imagine, for example, that the salesperson is preparing the proposal while the customer is still just acknowledging the problem he has. As the seller fails to correctly assess the information needs of this contract, the negotiation is doomed to fail.

    To differentiate yourself from the competition, it is essential to adopt an advisory role and work with the pains, challenges, and specific goals of each prospect. Thus, you are helping a potential client to make the best decision and to cultivate a lasting relationship of trust.

    • Content Sales support

    In 2007, it took an average of 3.68 call attempts to reach prospects. 13 years later, it takes 18 attempts. Only 23.9% of sales emails are opened.

    The decline in effectiveness, and even with the emergence of social selling and referrals, the cell phone and emails continue to be important tools for direct contact. How to make them more effective? The answer is in the content: insights, tools, news, statistics or studies, anything that enriches the prospect’s life.

    Sharing a useful resource – and not more of the same, which is the product and the company – is increasingly asserting itself as the best way to start a conversation, gain the prospect’s attention and advance the negotiation.

    This forces you to hire sales specialists who manage to escape the traditional sales script (“I’m here to tell you about the upgrade we made to the XPTO product, etc”) and who are able to gather relevant insights (“the latest statistics in your sector show that X% of companies use a technological solution like ours” or “Have you seen the latest free tool we created to increase your productivity?”).

    In this way, they manage to position themselves as trusted advisors, reduce the perception of risk in the purchase and accelerate sales.

    • Sales-accelerating technologies Sales

    technologies are also known as enablement. No matter how well your salespeople are trained, you can’t expect exponential growth if you don’t use technologies that multiply efforts. Even because, probably, your competitors are already using them to make more and better contacts.

    These technologies can be part of the sales stack from any B2B company, regardless of industry:

    • Marketing automation software – automate contact management, segmentation and content nurturing.
    • CRM – prospect management, sales pipeline management and monitoring of key metrics.
      • Inside Sales Software – software to plan and make customer calls and remote product demonstrations with integration with CRMs; monitor the metrics and recordings of each sales rep, which allows for coaching.
    • Dashboard Software, Proposal Software, Email Marketing, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, etc.

    • Coaching for the Right Skills

    Traditional sales coaching is light years away from today’s sales reality. It does not focus on developing the necessary skills to sell online, it is not focused on the customer, and it does not include tools to accelerate sales.

    Modern sales force coaching must be done according to the specialization of each rep (Sales Developer, Account Executive, Customer Success Manager, Account Manager, etc.), always emphasizing problem-solving.

    • An agile sales force

    One of the realities of today’s commercial departments is a high turnover of just a few months. Therefore, it is important for sales managers to implement a process that can serve as a basis for quickly training new talent, as well as providing individual coaching. Together, these two strategies promote agile sales teams, capable of maintaining performance even in the face of turnover. 

    It may seem counterintuitive, but hiring top-notch salespeople with immense experience is not always a good bet for this sales force. The more experienced ones are not as permeable to coaching, and in these cases, the success of the sales operation depends on a consistent consumer experience in all stages, from Marketing to Sales and Customer Success. 

     

  • How to Manage a High-Performance Sales Team

    How to Manage a High-Performance Sales Team

    The role of a manager is never easy, but it is particularly challenging in sales. Salespeople are independent, self-motivated, self-assured, and dynamic by nature. If you’re a sales team manager, I don’t need to remind you how difficult it is to influence the working methods of people with these personality traits.

    So today I’d like to explore some strategies and principles that help you manage and improve your sales team’s performance. I’m not going to convince him to be the alpha wolf of the pack, which everyone fearfully respects. This creates a toxic environment that causes too much wear and tear. I’m going to talk about creating a motivating work environment that invites collaboration.

    Be Present

    Salespeople don’t have it easy. They spend the day hearing “no” and are always under pressure. Even after reaching the goal, they start from scratch each new month, like Sisyphus pushing the boulder to the top of the mountain.

    Even the best salespeople struggle under all this pressure and can become demotivated, especially if they feel unsupported on a day-to-day basis. That’s why it’s often said that 99% of a sales manager’s job is to be present.

    Being present allows you to provide moral support. But not only. With their attention and availability, it is possible to identify individual difficulties, be more successful in transmitting best practices, be a mentor, and even keep abreast of the market.

    Therefore, organize your time to dedicate yourself to supporting your team and avoid being away for long periods!

    Establish bonds of trust

    Before asking your team for words and funds, establish an interpersonal relationship. Try to get to know people, the way they work, their motivations, and their ambitions so that you can adjust your communication and keep them motivated.

    Be transparent about your plans and objectives

    Many companies do not consider it relevant to share the organization’s plans and general objectives with their employees. As a result, individuals do not fully understand their role and may think they are just a pawn in the game.

    That’s why it’s good practice for a sales manager to share his plans, goals, and tactics with the department. In this way, it gives the team direction, which helps them to understand the reason for the recommendations, practices, or changes that it tries to pass. The conversation is also an opportunity to hear your team’s views and involve them in the process.

    Focus on behaviors and not just results

    We’ve already seen the importance of being present to motivate the team. But there is another, even more, beneficial effect: the ability to correct your team’s counterproductive behaviors and habits right away.

    If you wait for the end of the month to observe the “inputs” of the salespeople, you will only register that a goal of the month has not been reached, for example. But this does not allow him to understand the reason for this result, and without it, he cannot be a good manager. Therefore, use your time with the team to review your actions in time, when it is still possible to step in and change course.

    Focusing on behaviors rather than just results gives you yet another valuable insight. If a salesperson exhibits the right behaviors, even if he doesn’t always hit targets, he’s a team member with potential. On the contrary, a salesperson who hits his goals but has undesirable behavior can destabilize the entire team – nullifying the benefits of his goals.

    Give your team regular feedback

    I want to reinforce the importance of feedback. After gaining their trust, being present, saying what you expect from them, and observing their behavior, it’s the right time to help your employees improve in the context of sales. 

    However, feedback is only effective if there is positive reinforcement. Think about helping to correct, them so that there is a positive development, not about tearing them down. As they say, flies are caught with honey, not vinegar!

    Then, don’t forget that only regular feedback can produce significant and permanent changes in the team’s habits and behavior.

    Give incentives

    Although all these actions are motivating and promote well-being and personal development, there is an asset that sales managers can use to encourage results in particular. I’m talking about incentives, monetary, and not only.

    Incentives can 1) promote concrete results and 2) promote desirable behaviors.

    Encouraging desirable behaviors is useful when introducing a new step in the sales process, for example. Even so, they are just as fundamental as incentives for results, such as:

    • Incentives for those who generate more revenue;
    • Who closes more deals;
    • Whoever reaches the goal first;
    • Whoever reaches a minimum income.

    Do not make the mistake of establishing unattainable numbers, which endanger you. Be based on achievable objectives that meet the needs of the company.

    Incentives can be concrete or intangible:

    Concrete: prizes, trips, dinners, parties.

    Intangibles: public recognition, medals, plaques, trophies.

    Now, go back to your company and apply these ideas! Then tell me how it went. 






  • Hiring for each stage of your sales funnel

    Hiring for each stage of your sales funnel

    By now, we all know that any customer goes through several stages before making a purchase. Traditionally, we describe these stages in a sales funnel. But if the purchase goes through several stages, the relationship with the customer has to follow this process to provide a good experience.

    Therefore, an Inbound Marketing and Inside Sales operation ideally has 3 distinct roles. A Marketing specialist generates leads, in the first part of the funnel; a Sales Development Representative qualifies leads during the engagement phase; and an Account Executive closes sales.

    As the company evolves or tries to take bigger steps, it is crucial to expand the sales structure and recruit for all necessary functions, to provide a better customer experience and become competitive.

    Therefore, today we are going to see in detail what is expected of each role, and the characteristics that candidates must have to be a good addition to your Inbound Marketing and Inside Sales team.

    Attraction

    At the beginning of the sales funnel, Marketing promotes paid media and owned media initiatives to attract the target’s attention. The content specially designed to attract the right person can generate visits to a variety of channels managed by the company. These visits are the first phase of lead generation.

    The responsibility for generating leads falls to Inbound and Outbound Marketing specialists. An excellent marketer is adept at designing personas based on the information they get from Sales and the quantitative data they capture from analytics tools. By getting to know the persona well, you know their preferred channels and pain points. And so all the ingredients for a successful inbound and outbound marketing plan come together.

    What to look for in Inbound and Outbound Marketing:

    • Ability to analyze data and gain insights
    • Ability to organize and manage projects
    • Knowledge and appreciation of automation
    • Deep understanding of the customer experience
    • UX
    • knowledge Advanced knowledge of social networks
    • Strategic thinking

    Recognition /Education

    O The purpose of this phase is to generate leads from the visits collected earlier. Marketing continues to operate at this stage, as it creates the contents and mechanisms that capture the visitor’s contact information, transforming it into a lead. 

    At this point, the Sales Development Representative (SDR) comes into play. It is usually a junior position, whose primary function is to contact leads, usually by phone, to qualify them.

    To fulfill this prospecting phase, they employ qualification criteria corresponding to the Ideal Customer Profile and forward the best opportunities to sales. They are the first human contact between the company and the potential customer, so they need to know the range of products “back to front”.

    What to look for in a Sales Development Representative: A

    • Natural communicator, which includes not only speech but also active listening
    • Coachability (permeable to mentoring)
    • Curiosity, love of learning, and ability to acquire new knowledge
    • Organization and excellent time management
    • Empathy and ability to build relationships
    • Ability to adapt to the interlocutor

    Selection

    In the selection phase, the lead becomes a sales opportunity. He has already consumed several contents and resources, he feels capable of making a decision and is ready to negotiate. However, you are likely comparing your service or product with competitors. 

    So it’s time to let the Account Executive step in. This is the professional charge of negotiating, making the proposal, and closing the sale. It is no longer time to educate; the objective now is to help potential clients make the best decision for themselves. Despite having results in his sights, he is an expert at building relationships, not just “closing deals”. 

    Characteristics you should look for in an Account Executive:

    • Great written and verbal communication skills
    • An assertive and confident attitude
    • Ability to organize, plan and manage time
    • Results-oriented
    • Highly self
    • Enthusiasm, perseverance, and resilience 
    • Knowledge of CRM tools
    • Knowledge of sales techniques
    • Emotional intelligence
    • Sales

    Onboarding

    The moment immediately after the purchase is a source of a lot of excitement. The customer wants to quickly confirm that they have made the right choice and see the return on their investment. The company seeks to facilitate implementation and adoption and deliver on its promised value proposition.

    Customer Success Managers (CSM) are the professionals responsible for managing this process, but their role does not end with onboarding. They are also responsible for technical support. The ultimate goal of this role is to reduce churn (cancellations) and extend Customer Lifetime Value.

    • Creativity and ability to solve problems
    • Relationship management and proactivity
    • Deep technical knowledge about the product/service, which may require other technical skills
    • Empathy and active listening
    • Management of expectations
    • Crisis management
    • Excellent communication
    • Ease of working in a team
    • Excellent interpersonal
    • Ability to work effectively under stress and time pressure

    Expansion

    Currently, the sales funnel is not complete without the expansion phase. This is the phase in which the company can obtain even more returns from the customer. By guaranteeing satisfaction through Customer Success, it becomes substantially easier to promote new business opportunities with the customer and to upsell a higher-value solution or cross-sell to another company solution.

    Account Managers (AM) manage the relationship with the customer outside the technical scope, which belongs to the CSM. In this sense, they are responsible for maximizing the Customer’s Lifetime Value, which includes obtaining referrals to other potential customers and ensuring the continuity of the commercial relationship. They are also known as “farmers” because they “plow the land” to extract the maximum benefit.

    • Empathy, understanding, and practicing active listening
    • Excellent project management skills
    • Excellent communication, written and oral
    • Work well in a team, but also independently
    • Leadership and responsibility
    • skills Analytical thinking
    • Excellent interpersonal
    • skills Expectation management
    • Ability to work well under stress

     

    Hiring for the sales team is not an easy task! But if you segment sales roles around the customer journey, it’s much simpler to assemble a team that is much more than the sum of its parts.