Turning Sales Into Science

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Case In Point
Andrew Creach had a hot sales lead--and a problem. A sales manager at Intervoice (NASDAQ:INTV), a Dallas-based provider of call center software, Creach was targeting a major financial services company. But his contact there was only authorized to make decisions for one department. Intervoice's systems are expensive and designed to run call centers for entire companies. A quick Before the Call search helped. Creach learned how Intervoice could work elsewhere in the company; he also came away with some good contact information. He crafted a new pitch, designed to appeal to multiple decision makers. The result? A six-figure opportunity for Intervoice. "It was invaluable for navigating a company this big," Creach says. Indeed, Creach estimates that since subscribing to Before the Call about a year ago, Intervoice's sales team has become 20 to 30 percent more efficient.

7. Get more out of your salespeople

The Products
Landslide, ShareMethods

How They Work
Managers have long sought to manage their salespeople. And salespeople, being an independent lot, have tended to dismiss such efforts as meddling. Indeed, that's been a huge problem with CRM systems, which require salespeople to spend too much time entering data into cumbersome and crash-prone systems. But new so-called guided selling is now adaptable enough to automate and provide a flexible script for the sales process while making the lives of salespeople easier. These guided selling programs incorporate elements of traditional CRM and contact management but also add some new tricks to make the sales process run more smoothly--giving sales staffers what they need, when they need it, to close a deal. Key players include Landslide, which runs $100 per user per month, and ShareMethods, which costs $25 per user per month.

Case In Point
Peter Seiff is a vice president of sales at Aethon, a Pittsburgh-based vendor of robotic devices designed to push carts around hospitals. Needless to say, the decision to lease a robot to roam hospital corridors is not undertaken lightly. Closing a deal means convincing a range of people--the directors of nursing, food service, maintenance, and technology, not to mention the financial executives who sign the $1,500 monthly lease checks. And each group requires a different sales pitch and process.

So you've got your target list. Now it's time to start selling. Think a minute before you pick up the receiver. Do you know anything about the people you'll be calling?

That's where automation comes in. Seiff turned to a sales process management system from Landslide. The system allows Seiff to create sales scripts, white papers, graphics, and other sales tools that reps in the field can access when speaking to different kinds of decision makers. "If the vice president of nursing is so excited that she wants a sales guy to talk to the CFO right now, he can easily pull up the proper documents showing what a CFO would want to know," Seiff says. But the really interesting part: Seiff can track how different salespeople progress through the process and identify things they are doing wrong or right. "I can figure out what works and what doesn't far more quickly and help improve sales performance on the fly," says Seiff, who says Landslide has cut sales training time for new hires from seven weeks to three and reduced the typical sales cycle from six months to four. Seiff has done this while expanding the sales force from six reps to 20 within a year.

8. Hold your (potential) customer's hand

The Products
ExactTarget, Silverpop, Epsilon Interactive, Constant Contact

How They Work E-mail marketing often has meant building as big a list as possible and hitting the Send button. However, smart marketers have realized that campaigns work better if you can customize an e-mail pitch to fit a particular customer's needs, rather than cramming a single sales pitch down everyone's throat. These systems also boast sophisticated tracking and analytic capabilities, which help marketers develop a better sense of which triggers will cause potential customers to hit the Buy button.

Case In Point
Andrew Ritter is founder of Lactagen, a 38-day program designed to reduce lactose intolerance through the use of specialized nutritional supplements. It's a big market--an estimated 50 million Americans are moderately to severely lactose intolerant. But potential customers always seemed skeptical.

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