Complex Sales Archives

Navigating Complex Sales: Build a Sales Development Team to Support Pipeline Growth

June 15, 2022June 20, 2022 by Alicia Assefa

Companies that have complex solutions have additional challenges in meeting their revenue targets due to obstacles or delays. This is a major problem that many of our clients struggle with. SOMAmetrics specializes in helping clients address a number of issues related to complex sales. This article discusses some important points executives should think through when it comes to generating sales pipeline for complex solutions.

For discussion purposes, we will define complex sales as those that typically target large organizations (Fortune 2000 companies and government entities); poses significant perceived risk and cost for the customer; involves, at the very least, a handful of key stakeholders besides the final economic decision maker (i.e. CEO, CFO, CIO, a CXO); entails a complex sales process and decision making process; and usually comes about as a result of a company or division-wide initiative.

Assessing the Prospecting Process

To complicate things further, different titles may be in charge of the same initiative or drive in a given sales environment. This makes it difficult to determine where to begin the prospecting process. Hence, a complex sale involves research over time to uncover the moving parts and weave together a coherent sales strategy or assessment. The following are a few examples of information that this assessment may address:

What is the driving issue/initiative behind the need?
Who are the key stakeholders involved?
What are the key pain points and concerns of each?
Who has the most urgent pain, and therefore wants to see this taken care of sooner rather than later?
From where is the funding going to come for this? Is it all in one place (department or division), or will it be shared, and how?
Are there multiple decision makers? Who is the final decision maker?

These are only some of the early questions to begin assessing whether there is a viable sales opportunity for your complex solution.

Using Sales Reps to Prospect is NOT a Good Idea

Often, we find that companies rely on their field sales reps to find viable opportunities within large, complex organizations.

We don’t think this is a good idea. This task differs greatly from what sales reps are expert at: calling on prospects who have agreed to see the sales rep. Prospecting, however, requires making 10-15 dials just to reach John Doe, who might not even be the right person to start with. Then, John may only have time for a quick conversation and suggest the rep call Jane Smith. Twenty dials later, the rep finally reaches Jane, who adds more to the story and suggests calling Mike.

And this is only the first round of calls; there will be follow-up calls to multiple stakeholders to find out more about one or more issues.

It is not unreasonable to expect that 500+ dials might be made into a single account to determine whether there is value in moving forward.

The question here is: who is better at quickly and cost-effectively uncovering viable sales opportunities? A field rep that will make 10-20 dials a day, or a seasoned SDR who makes 70-80 dials daily?

The SDR Solution to Complex Sales

Our experience repeatedly shows that field salespeople engage in early prospecting ONLY when their pipeline dries up. This, in turn, makes it very difficult for companies to reliably forecast what their revenues will look like over 3-4 months out. Since the sales cycle for most complex sales products tends to be six months or more, this means that a company cannot reliably predict revenues outside of the current quarter.

Our recommendation is to use SDRs to build the sales pipeline for the sales team (Read “5 Reasons Why Your Sales Development Team Is Failing“). This avoids the yo-yo effect and makes revenue targets more reliable. In this scenario, a senior SDR will do all of the initial research to gather the coherent sales opportunity story and pass it on as a Sales Qualified Lead. This opportunity story is a synopsis of the key initiatives; which departments or divisions are directly involved; who the key stakeholders are; which CXO is driving the initiative; what the individual pains, concerns, and desires of the various stakeholders are; and what a reasonable timeframe looks like for making a final decision on the acquisition of the solution.

Choosing the Right Person for a Complex Sales Role

The right type of Sales Development Rep (use our free Top SDR Interview Questions Resource) to successfully perform this would have the following qualities:

Has experience as a quota-bearing field or inside sales professional who understands sales, particularly complex sales into enterprise account
Is very comfortable and successful at accessing and selling to CXOs
Has the right temperament to work alone as well as to enjoy interacting with others
Is an avid learner, always trying to learn more about his/her industry and what the pain-points and new concerns for the targeted CXO’s are
Understands that this is painstaking work that will require hundreds of dials and many dozens of conversations that may or may not lead anywhere, and still enjoys the hunt
Is results-driven and has a strong sense of urgency

This is a specialty area, and the right person must align to the job. Start with Sr. SDRs while you grow your SD Organization. Once you have nailed the messaging, processes, and metrics, you can scale with SDR’s who are less experienced in this role.

Read the book The Radical Pipeline Strategy: How to Grow Pipeline and Revenue by Optimizing Sales Development. This book outlines tested best practices and implementation strategies that I developed while rebooting and building 65 SDR and Inside Sales organizations.

Schedule a Meeting with Alicia

Find out more about SOMAmetrics’ Intelligent Prospecting Platform and get free resources on our website at www.somametrics.com.

SDR Candidates: Best Interview Questions to Find the Right Fit

Prospects are Real People Too: Using Prospect Personas to Land Calls

Use Task Force Teams to End the Great Reshuffle

How Difficult Is It to Generate a Meeting? Common Misuses of SDR Teams in Appointment Setting

The Right Measures of Accountability Matter

February 10, 2020August 13, 2019 by Alicia Assefa

Traditionally, employees are taught that if they designed a tight system and measured everything that could be measured, they would have enough accountability. If everyone did everything they were supposed to do and did it well, they were assured of success.

Well, now we know that doesn’t work. In fact, it’s a prescription for failure! The thought leaders in high-performance organizations know that isn’t going to take us where we want to go.

Here’s what works: figuring out what’s really important and establishing accountability for such measures—and only that. Don’t try to micromanage your people—if you do, you’ll see that they always hit the metrics you lay out for them, but the organization misses what’s really important. If you measure the wrong things, you get the wrong results.

Let’s look at the well-documented case of fake bank accounts at Wells Fargo.[1] Management wanted to increase the number of depositors, so they set quotas for each branch to open new accounts. When genuine depositors did not appear, the branches simply opened fake accounts. This ensured that the staff and branch management hit their numbers, but at a very high cost.

First, opening these accounts absorbed considerable clerical time. But it didn’t end there. After a full year of investigations led by Arizona, Connecticut, Iowa and Pennsylvania, the Bank agreed to pay settlements of $575 million. Aside from this steep financial cost, the Bank also lost considerable credibility due to a lack of accountability, and suffered a setback to its reputation in the marketplace.

This is an extreme case, but it makes the point: tightly measuring the wrong metrics leads to the wrong results.

Management needs to focus on the big picture metrics: revenues, profits, market share growth, share price, brand recognition, and the number of people who apply to work at that company. They need to create a vision that everyone can relate to–everyone from the senior management team to the front lines. Then management needs to trust their people. That doesn’t mean you let everyone do whatever they want—it means you give them the latitude to do what’s right for the company and the customer. If the vision is clear and the results are recognized, the results will be stellar and demonstrate accountability.

Don’t believe this? We can show you the research that proves that companies with strong, performance-enhancing cultures significantly outperform those without such a culture; they realize four times the average revenue growth, 12 times the stock price, and 756 times profit growth of those with counterproductive cultures.

[1] https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/business/2018/12/28/iowa-wells-fargo-settlement-attorneys-general/2431320002/

Insights into Missed Sales Quotas in B2B Selling

February 11, 2020November 8, 2018 by Eskinder Assefa

Missed sales quotas are becoming the new norm

Misses sales quotas are becoming the norm rather than the exception. An extensive digital transformation of the commercial world has left many B2B sellers floundering in the dust. Accustomed to the personalization, immediate fulfillment, and transparency of consumer experiences fueled by artificial intelligence, buyers have changed their expectations of sellers. Unfortunately, B2B sellers are too often unable to meet these new demands. According to CSO Insights’ 2018 Buyer Preferences Study, about half of sales representatives were meeting or exceeding their quotas in 2017— the 5th straight year of decline in quota attainment.

The main challenge for today’s sellers is that “buyers are changing substantially faster and to a greater degree than sales organizations.” Sellers are slow to change alongside the rapidly developing array of consumer options available to business buyers, who transfer their consumer experiences into buying expectations. Buyers no longer view salespeople as a valuable resource, since so much information is available online and through Artificial Intelligence technologies. A CSO Insights survey of business buyers revealed that only 23 percent of buyers view vendor salespeople as a top three resource to solve business problems. In general, vendor salespeople placed ninth out of ten buyer preferred resources.

Sales Reps are no longer the preferred source of Information for Buyers

Because sellers are no longer as valuable to buyers, buyers are not inclined to engage sellers early in the buying process. CSO Insights found that about 70 percent of buyers preferred to engage a seller only after they had already developed a clear understanding of their needs, while almost half of buyers preferred to wait until they had also identified a solution to their needs.

Unfortunately, the longer a buyer waits to engage a seller, the less value a seller can offer to the buyer. If key buying decisions have already been made, sellers have less time and creative space to demonstrate their value. Instead of helping the buyer identify and prioritize needs, sellers are relegated to explaining their products while asking questions to understand what the buyer has already learned.

As a result, sellers start to look alike to the buyer. In fact, almost 60 percent of buyers in CSO Insights’ study saw little difference among sellers. Buyers see sellers as representatives of products rather than solvers of business problems, which drives their tendency to engage sellers later in the buying process once they have already identified a solution, which in turn constrains the seller’s ability to demonstrate value and ultimately feeds back into the perception that sellers are merely representing products. If sellers continue to be perceived as lacking value, they can be excluded from the buying process altogether.

However, 90 percent of buyers are open to engaging with salespeople earlier in the process— which would allow sellers to break out of this dangerous cycle. According to the CSO Insights study, there was more interest in early engagement when the business challenge was new for the buyer, perceived as risky for the business, perceived as risky for the buyer, or complex— in that specific order. Those who feel that salespeople exceed their expectations are more likely to involve sellers in the initial stage of buying. So, how do sellers demonstrate that they are valuable, expectation-exceeding resources?

What Sales People should do to become Relevant to Buyers Again

Today’s buyers want four things from sellers:

1. Understanding of the Buyer’s Business

Because retail websites collect data about customer digital activity in order to provide tailored recommendations and customized search results, consumers are used to the idea that sellers already know their needs and preferences. Buyers want sellers who have already conducted extensive research on their businesses and industries. What they don’t want is having to waste time explaining their challenges and circumstances to the seller.

2. Excellent Communication Skills

For today’s buyers, every interaction needs to be compelling, concise, and worth their time. Each interaction can either build or degrade the seller’s relationship with the buyer.

3. Focus on Post-sale

Buyers feel that sellers focus too much on the buying phase and fail to demonstrate enough commitment to the post-sale phase. Sellers need to show continued interest in the company’s success after the sale, as long-term relationships require long-term investment.

4. Insights and Expertise

Providing perspective is the seller’s biggest opportunity to exceed buyer expectations and differentiate themselves from other sellers. However, this capability can only be mastered if the seller has already acquired the first three— deep understanding, communication skills, and long-term focus. Buyers want to learn new methods for progressing toward their future goals, along with insights that shape their vision and expand their expertise.

Integrating these four components into the selling process will require commitment to holistic change. In order to minimize missed sales quotas, sellers need to employ a systemic solution in transforming the way they sell. SOMAmetrics is here to facilitate this process so that sellers can consistently win new business in a changing commercial environment.

SOMAmetrics designs and executes its proven 4-step Digital Account Based Marketing programs to deliver more leads that close faster and at higher rate for 20% of what it costs clients to do it themselves in-house.

We have worked with nearly a hundred companies, from startups to Fortune 500 companies, spanning a number of industries including Healthcare, Financial Services, Education, Local and State Government, Data Center Services, Manufacturing, and more.

Our experience enables us to learn our clients selling environment quickly and deliver world class digital marketing and lead generation services faster and cheaper than what it costs our clients to do in house.

We obtain superior results because we are deeply committed to the Principle of SOMA, “Sales Optimization and Marketing Accountability”. The key to optimizing Sales is to make Marketing accountable for consistently delivering high quality leads that close faster and at higher rate so that Sales can consistently hit revenue targets.

Schedule a call today.

Teleprospecting Best Practices for Complex Solutions

June 6, 2022September 22, 2013 by Alicia Assefa

For the most part, my experience has been in the design and implementation of Teleprospecting organizations for companies that sell complex technology solutions. During my years as a consultant and employee, I have developed a set of Best Practices that enable Teleprospecting teams to successfully drive Sales Funnel growth. Essentially, there are 6 Teleprospecting Best Practices that I have found to be the most effective:

Marketing and Sales should be focused on the Sales Funnel. The Sales Funnel is King! Marketing and Sales should both be responsible for building a quality Sales Funnel. These two departments need to work together and agree on the lead qualification criteria and other key metrics that will ensure that a quality Sales Funnel is being built and is consistently growing. Both teams should be responsible for the quality of sales qualified leads (SQLs) since they are the source of a healthy Sales Funnel that produces revenue growth. Therefore, the implementation of a process for tracking the quality of SQLs is a key factor to the growth of the Sales Funnel.

Hire experienced staff. In most cases, the Teleprospecting team is the first contact that prospects will have with your company. It is therefore counter-intuitive to put your most junior people on the front lines. They have neither the experience to navigate the complexities of a complex solution nor the ability to speak with Senior Level Executives. Furthermore, since Teleprospecting has been around for nearly 30 years, “Seniors” are readily available. Hire experienced people and you won’t regret it.

Focus Teleprospectors on one solution. You can’t expect your teams, Juniors or Seniors, to be effective if they have to learn and sell multiple Complex Solutions. From my experience, Teleprospectors are more successful when they are focused on qualifying for a specific solution. If your company sells multiple solutions, divvy out responsibilities and focus each person on a specific solution. This focus enables team members to become experts at qualifying for the specific solution and will result in better leads for your sales teams.

Develop and implement Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), or metrics, to manage your team. Effective KPIs can include metrics such as:

Total Key Conversations with prospects who can move the sales process forward
Size of the Teleprospecting Funnel, which should be at least 3X your monthly SQL quota
Achievement of the monthly SQL quota

Effective KPIs are the metrics that directly impact your ability to meet your stated objectives. Total daily dials are important because dials lead to conversations. Key Conversations are more important than dials, because they help to generate the Teleprospectors’ Funnel growth. Know your KPIs and weigh them based on priority of importance (Key Conversations are more important than Dials). Once the KPIs are established, have the team build plans, outlining how they will achieve their assigned objectives.

Develop a Teleprospecting Playbook. A Teleprospecting Playbook is a set of tools that Teleprospectors will use to guide them through the complexities of qualifying for prospect need and interest. The playbook should be written and assembled by people with sufficient knowledge, such as experts from Product Marketing, Marketing, and Sales. It will serve as a consistent source for your Teleprospectors to maintain professionalism while also increasing efficiency.

Build compensation plans that drive desired behavior. Good compensation plans motivate Teleprospectors to excel at their jobs. The role of Teleprospecting is to generate leads that build the Sales Funnel. A good plan will compensate Teleprospectors for meeting a pre-established “approved” lead quota, as well as provide compensation for leads that go into the Sales Funnel. While Teleprospectors aren’t responsible for closing deals, they are responsible for generating quality leads that build a Sales Funnel. Deals that close generate revenue and these deals come from quality leads, therefore Teleprospectors should receive some compensation for their leads that close. When Teleprospectors are paid for the process from the beginning (leads) to the end (closed deals), the quality of leads becomes very important and motivates them to consistently generate viable leads.

Companies that have asked me to turn-around their Teleprospecting teams had initially set up Teleprospecting as an after-thought. None of the companies had these Teleprospecting Best Practices in place. Then, in each of the turn-around situations I implemented these best practices and saw not only the Sales Funnel grow dramatically, but also significant revenue increase.

Building Quality Pipeline for Complex Sales

June 6, 2022April 19, 2013 by Alicia Assefa

Companies that have complex sales solutions have additional challenges in meeting their revenue targets because it is even harder to predict if a deal will close. Anything can go wrong to delay or even stop the deal from closing. This is a major problem that many of our clients struggle with. SOMAmetrics specializes in helping clients address a number of issues related to complex sales and this article discusses some important points executives should think through.

For discussion purposes, we will define a complex sale as one that typically targets large organizations (fortune 2000 companies and government entities); poses significant risk and cost for the customer; involves at the very least a handful of key stake holders besides the final economic decision maker; many times involves a CEO, CFO, or CIO (a CXO); where decision making process is complex; and is usually the result of a company or division-wide initiative.

To complicate things further, even among similar companies, different tiles may be in charge of the same initiative or drive, making it difficult to determine where to begin the prospecting process. Hence, a complex sale involves significant research time to uncover the many moving parts and weave together a coherent sales opportunity assessment:

What is the driving issue/initiative behind all this?
Who are the key stakeholders that must be involved? What are the key pain points and concerns of each?
Who has the most urgent pain and therefore wants to see this taken care of sooner than later?
From where is the funding going to come for this? Is it all in one place (department or division), or will it be shared, and how?
When all is said and done, who is the final decision maker?

These are only some of the early questions that must be answered to even understand if there is a viable sales opportunity or not.

Using Sales Reps to Prospect is NOT a Good Idea

Often, we find that companies rely on their field sales reps to prospect and find viable opportunities in complex organizations from scratch.

We don’t think this is a good idea. This task is very different from what sales reps are very good at–calling on prospects who have agreed to see the sales rep. It requires making 10-15 dials just to reach John Doe who may or may not even be the right person to start with. Then, John only has time for a quick conversation and suggests the rep call Jane Smith. Another 20 dials later, the rep finally reaches Jane, who adds more to the story and suggests that the rep also give Maggie and Mike a call. And so on.

And this is only the first round of calls. There will be follow up calls to one or more of these stake holders to find out more about one or more issues.

It is not unreasonable to expect that 500 or more dials might be made into a single account to determine whether or not there is a viable opportunity to move forward.

The question here is: who is better at quickly and cost effectively uncovering viable sales opportunities? A field rep that will, on average, make 10-20 dials a day, or a professional Teleprospector who regularly makes 70-80 dials a day?

Our experience repeatedly shows that field sales reps engage in early prospecting ONLY when their pipeline dries up. This in turn makes it very difficult for companies to reliably forecast what their revenues look like more than 3-4 months out. Since the sales cycle for most complex sales products tend to be six months or more, this means that a company cannot reliably predict revenues outside of the current quarter.

Our recommendation is to use Teleprospecting to build the sales pipeline for the field sales. This avoids the yo-yo effect and makes revenue target more reliable. In this scenario, a senior Teleprospector will do all of the initial research to gather the coherent sales opportunity story and pass it on as a Sales Qualified Lead. This opportunity story is a synopsis of what the key initiatives are; which departments or divisions are directly involved; who the key stake holders are, which CXO is driving this initiative; what the individual pains, concerns, and desires of the various stake holders are; and what a reasonable timeframe looks like for making a final decision on the solution to this set of challenges.

Choosing the Right Person for a Complex Sales Role

The right type of Teleprospector to successfully perform this would have the following qualities:

Was quota-bearing field or inside sales professional who understand sales and particularly complex sales into enterprise account
Is very comfortable and successful at accessing and selling to CXO’s
Has the right temperament to work alone as well as to enjoy interacting with others
Is an avid learner, always trying to learn more about his/her industry and what the pain-points and new concerns for the targeted CXO’s are
Understands that this is painstaking work that will require hundreds of dials and many dozens of conversations that may or may not lead anywhere, and still enjoys the hunt
And finally, the right senior Teleprospector is results driven and has a strong sense of urgency

This is a specialty area and the right person must be matched to the job.

SOMAmetrics helps clients build quality pipeline for their complex sales by assembling all of the various components necessary to deliver the desired amount and quality of pipeline including: project management; best practices; marketing and sales automation; expert Teleprospecting; and clearly defined metrics against which performance is measured each month.

Alicia Assefa is intimately familiar with building quality sales pipeline for complex sales. As VP of Global Teleprospecting for a global software company, her team of 35 Teleprospectors supported five Business Units: Enterprise Management Solutions (EPM; Workload Automation; Project Portfolio Management Security; and Mainframe). Each Teleprospector carried a SQL to Sales Funnel Quota of $10M and a SQL to Closed Deal Quota of $4M. One division with eight sales reps generated $80M in Sales Funnel and $32M in revenue from the SQLs provided by Alicia’s team. The same resulted for the other business units.

As General Manager of the SOMAmetrics Sales and Inside Sales Practice, Alicia brings her expertise in helping clients design end-to-end solutions for building quality sales pipelines for complex sales.

Read Alicia’s latest book on the topic, “Teleprospecting for Executives who Sell Complex Solutions“, detailing Alicia’s experience, knowledge, and philosophy on building highly effective Inside Sales and Teleprospecting Organizations.

Please contact Alicia Assefa today at 510 206 9263 or email her at Alicia@somametrics.com

Navigating Complex Sales: Build a Sales Development Team to Support Pipeline Growth

Assessing the Prospecting Process

Using Sales Reps to Prospect is NOT a Good Idea

The SDR Solution to Complex Sales

Choosing the Right Person for a Complex Sales Role

The Right Measures of Accountability Matter

Insights into Missed Sales Quotas in B2B Selling

Missed sales quotas are becoming the new norm

Sales Reps are no longer the preferred source of Information for Buyers

What Sales People should do to become Relevant to Buyers Again

Teleprospecting Best Practices for Complex Solutions

Building Quality Pipeline for Complex Sales

Using Sales Reps to Prospect is NOT a Good Idea

Choosing the Right Person for a Complex Sales Role

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