What Dreamforce 2015 taught me about Sales Productivity: Part 2

In my previous post, I talked about how Dreamforce laid great stress on Social Selling, Sales Enablement and Accurate Forecasting. Well, that wasn’t all. Salesforce also laid emphasis on the significance of a healthy pipeline, sales coaching, setting the right goals and most importantly, prioritization, as the key focus areas for achieving greater sales productivity.

Do NOT Sideline your Pipeline

A healthy Sales pipeline is the key to your Sales performance. Not only does it signify that you have a healthy sales process that is obviously reaping benefits for you, it clearly translates into more revenue. A large number of Dreamforce sessions reiterated on spending more time in refining your pipeline that has more qualified prospects than suspects, and training your Sales team to achieve the same. However, it’s easier said than done!

Gartner reports have listed ‘healthy pipeline’ to be the second most important thing that Sales Leaders desperately need and do not get. The truth is, a lot of sales reps start out not being good at pipeline refinement and management but only the best ones master the art. So what’s the key to pipeline management?

Clichéd as it sounds, the key to a dream pipeline is an effective sales process in place. Statistics show that a dedicated sales process leads to as much as 18% increase in revenue growth through effective sales pipelines. Trained Sales reps are another big contributor towards a favorable pipeline (covered at length in subsequent sections), leading to 9-24% increase in annual revenue growth. Bottom line: revere thy pipeline and hold it in good stead!

Sales Coaching

Dreamforce revealed that the key to sales productivity is in pipeline management. But that does not happen on its own accord; you need to train your sales reps for that. Which brings me to the next pertinent aspect of sales productivity: sales coaching.

Sales reps need to be constantly coached with the right content that would help them close deals faster. This is achieved through a three-pronged process: Identification of ‘coachable’ activities, defining and detailing the coaching methodology and establishing a coaching rhythm that brings the best out of your sales reps.

Sales Coaching involves three key aspects that lead to setting the right goals:

• Breakdown of sales goals and how they will be measured
• Focus on the critical activities that lead to success
•  Focus on fewer goals done well rather than too many goals done poorly

Statistics reveal that organizations have seen up to 80% increase in revenue when sales reps are coached the right way. Dreamforce sessions certainly got this one right!

You need PRIORITY and NOT more time

The final yet the foremost thing that Dreamforce taught me! Any sales guy who tells you he wishes he had 48 hours in a day clearly isn’t on top of his game. The smartest of sales people are the ones who prioritize their prospects and deals, who know how to spend more time with the prospects that are more likely to give them business and Dreamforce could not have laid more emphasis on this fact. A lot of sessions in Dreamforce were targeted at increasing sales productivity through prioritization, and how spending more time with fewer prospects actually holds the key to productivity.

Your time is precious, and as a sales rep, even more so. Identify the prospects who are ‘mobilizers’ and engage with them through commercial insights, instead of mere leadership perspective. Take them through the stages of a verified and validated pipeline and monitor their progress. You will find that they are likely to give you more business than the ones who did not qualify.

Transforming your Sales Productivity: Where do you begin?

In a pyramid of sales productivity, your sales reps form the base. Only ones the sales reps are efficient and effective can they translate and provide value to their teams, organizations and customers, in that order. Therefore, for any organization that is looking to enhance the productivity of its Sales team needs to start at the base: with their sales reps, coaching and enabling them to achieve their targets. Once your army is ready and raring to go, it’s only a matter of time that the world will be at your feet!



Written by Nupur Singh, Pre-Sales & Marketing Expert at Eternus Solutions

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What Dreamforce 2015 taught me about Sales Productivity: Part 1

It’s been a while that Dreamforce 2015 concluded but the delirium lives on! There’s still so much buzz around the different products and services Salesforce introduced over the 4-day event. However, a CRM no matter how extensive and useful comes into play only when you have a great customer base and an extremely healthy pipeline. Add to that the fact that Salesforce recently posted revenues upwards of USD 5 billion, the first time they touched that number! Therefore, I was hoping that Dreamforce 2015 would cover sessions and trainings around Sales Productivity, as who better to teach you about Sales productivity than the elite member of the 5 billion club? Much to my pleasure, Dreamforce covered Sales Productivity at length and I learnt a great deal of new things!

Social is the new selling wand!

Here’s where you would expect me to write something like ‘Move over traditional sales, social selling is the way to go!’ Well, that ain’t happening! Fact is, social selling has always been there, much before you and I, much before cloud computing, Facebook, internet, anything that you can think of! Confused? Haven’t you always purchased groceries from the pleasant guy next block? Did you purchase your first bike from the guy recommended by your friend? Isn’t your dentist the one your colleague recommended you? These are all examples of social selling! You ask your peers and friends for recommendations, and don’t shy away from dishing feedback.

Same applies for selling anything using Social Media. The opportunities are simply enormous! Thanks to the networked markets, people know more about your products and services than some of your own folks. Use it to your advantage. Reach out to people over Twitter and LinkedIn, engage them in a conversation and help them know how you can solve their problems. Gain real time insight into what your customers are discussing online. You’ll be able to understand their needs (both individually and more broadly across the market). Build relationships and trust, and you’ll be able to engage them with useful, timely information to help.

Image Courtesy www.wsi-digimedia-marketing.com

Investment in Sales Enablement pays big time!

Your people are your assets! By that definition, your sales people are your most valuable assets. Therefore it is logical to invest in their enablement, helping them adapt to the ever-changing world of sales. Educate your sales teams to deliver the right message at the right time to prospects. When sales people are on message, they convert leads and close opportunities faster.

Invest time and money on their skill growth, so that they are aligned to the customers’ needs rather than focused on Why Choose Us. Encourage open communication and easy integration between team members and integrate this Sales Enablement process across the organization, ensuring a team approach towards right sale to the right client. Remember, successful Sales Enablement is 10% tactical and strategic contribution and 90% alignment towards a common agenda.

Image Courtesy: Salesforce.com

Accurate Forecasts is a must

I cannot possibly stress enough on the significance of Accurate Forecasting. However, a lot of sales people lay great stress on the accuracy of a forecast, often without realizing or finding where they are wrong. The trick is to break the forecasts into a series of assumptions that can be referred to later. But if you have ever been a Sales guy, you know this is easier said than done. So how do you make accurate forecasts?

The foremost thing to do is to enable your Sales reps with technology. Let technology do the numbers for them, find insights that they can use to engage prospects in meaningful conversations and guide them through the lifecycle. Use a software or an application that comes with an audit trail, so that you can note any changes to the deal value, customer or probability of cracking the deal and take necessary actions. Bottom line, let your sales people do sales and leave the data and accounting to your technology.

Accurate Forecasting is an art mastered with practice, one that needs your people trained to yield the desired results. Train them to identify the signs that help them identify a good deal from a bad one, enable them to focus on pipeline exceptions and analyze the cause behind them to take corrective action wherever required, and teach them how to constantly refine their forecasts.

With great power comes great responsibility and it is no different for your sales people. Let them know what is expected of them, give them complete autonomy but also make them accountable. Set aside time to review the forecasts, discuss action items for any exceptions and plan the way ahead. Reviewing the numbers together gives multiple views around the same potential problem, enabling the team to find a solution that is most suitable.

It is important to understand and acknowledge that Sales productivity is actually a series of keys that unlock the big prize that Sales productivity is. In my next blog, I will talk about how setting the right goals, sales coaching, a healthy pipeline and prioritizing go a long way towards enhancing the Sales productivity. Till then, happy selling!


What Dreamforce 2015 taught me about Sales Productivity: Part 2


Written by Nupur Singh, Pre-Sales & Marketing Expert at Eternus Solutions

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8 Things You Must Do Before You Implement CRM

Thinking of turning customer savvy and getting a CRM for your organization? Good! But have you done your homework? Do you know which CRM suits your business to the tee? Are your employees ready for this change? Do you know what you seek from your CRM?

Organizations have been managing their customers through custom developed applications and trackers for a while. It’s only since the turn of this century that the use of a dedicated CRM application or software has been in vogue. Often, organizations tend to either overlook these pertinent questions or are simply unaware that they need to be addressed before you embark on the journey of CRM. As a result, their CRM usually does not give the expected returns on their investment: both money and time. This blog looks at 8 most important things you must do before you implement your CRM, so that your CRM is as successful as you want it to be.

1. Know What You Want

As simple and inconsequential as it sounds, this is the key to having a successful CRM. Half the CRM implementations fail to live up to the expectation simply because organizations have no clarity on what they want their CRM to do. You have plans and programs chalked out for your CRM but not the vision or objectives of your CRM. Adoption fails because this question is never answered.

Think of the most significant questions or problems that your CRM needs to solve and ensure you ask this question to each of your departments. Getting a 360 degree perspective will help you outline the plan of action for the success of your CRM and will also help you get the required buy-in from your CRM users.

2. Plan it Out

As a CXO, you may have decided the budget or even the timelines for the CRM implementation, but have you zeroed down on the CRM champion in your organization? Does he have the full support of your management and employees alike? Does he have the required bandwidth to do justice to your CRM initiative? Is there a plan chalked out for your CRM? Is your Project Management Group aligned with the CRM champion and have they chalked out the implementation plan together?

Often organizations do not spend much thought on the planning stage and tend to rush to the implementation stage too soon. Involve your internal business units, ensure there is a plan before implementation that everyone has agreed to and they stick to it.

3. Look at Your Existing IT

Before you set about implementing your CRM, you must plan and design the interfacing for your CRM. This includes consideration of what apps the CRM will support, various data exchange between external systems and CRM and any other integration requirements. Does your existing IT demand an on premise CRM implementation or a cloud-based CRM would be more suitable?  It is important to answer these questions before you begin your quest for the CRM application.

4. Launch it with a bang!

Internal Marketing is often underestimated. A lot of CRM systems have failed to take off simply because not enough buzz was created around them. You need to market your CRM and get the buy-in from your internal user group. Talk to them about the benefits of having a CRM, how it is likely to simplify their workload and what impact it is likely to have on their department and the organization. More importantly, launch the CRM with much ado and fanfare.  Let it be an event that people talk about for weeks and use the time after launch to lobby around. People are likely to respond better.

5. Keep it Simple

It is important that you start off slow and steady and add the complex layers only when your user group is comfortable in their skin with the CRM. A simple, metro design and an application that is user-friendly goes a long way towards the success of your CRM.

6. Publish Internal Guidelines

You are going to want to use your CRM for a lot of things. Do not yield to that temptation. It is important for your organization to understand the imperatives why you want to implement the CRM and stick to the planned strategy. Form and publish the internal guidelines around the CRM and ensure the team sticks to that. This would invariably ensure that your objectives are met and the organization adheres to the vision of your CRM.

7. Chalk an End-user Training Plan

Even if you are an IT organization, do not forget to take into account that your end users might not know how to work with a CRM. Organizations implementing CRM often underestimate the importance of training their users and therefore do not plan adequately. It is essential that you train your users, make them familiar with the CRM vision, train them about the best practices and explain the purposes it is supposed to be used for, and for that, plan adequately, before the implementation is rolled out.

8. Select CRM Technology

Once you have your processes documented, strategies defined and aligned to your business vision, it is time to research and finalize the CRM that best fits in your plan and vision. It is important that you identify the CRM functionality, required integrations, and choose a CRM only after you have completed the previous steps, to ensure that your CRM meets the expectations.

The Final Word

The key to a successful CRM implementation is not so much magic or a secret recipe as it is detailing and planning, which if done properly, do not just lead to a successful CRM implementation, but also transform businesses in the true sense of the word.

Written by Nupur Singh, Pre-Sales & Marketing Expert at Eternus Solutions

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What Nobody Tells You About Outsourcing

“We have outsourced before and did not like the quality of the deliverables, hence we will no longer outsource!”

“Any outsourced work item almost takes twice the number of hours otherwise taken by my in-house team. Cost-effective Outsourcing is a myth.”

These are common statements I hear when I initiate a conversation with my overseas prospects. Over the years, I have realized that there are a lot of myths about Outsourcing. A lot of people who could otherwise benefit a great deal from outsourcing refrain from it, only because of a lack of knowledge around outsourcing.

Outsourcing is a piece of Cake!

Suppose you went to a bakery and bought a chocolate cake which did not quite turn out to taste like you expected it to. Would you stop buying cake altogether or would you search for a different bakery?

Often, companies refrain from outsourcing because of a past bad experience with their service provider. Well, outsourcing is a tad different from a cake and one bad experience doesn’t make outsourcing a taboo!

Having said that, I wouldn’t agree with those either, who say everyone should outsource. So the pertinent question is…

Who should outsource?

Let’s go back to my example. You have to throw a birthday party, make arrangements for guests, put the decorations on, buy gifts… you know the routine. Now with so many things going on, you obviously won’t have the time to bake a cake or even if you do plan on baking it yourself, you would have to hunt for the right ingredients to go in it. Solution? Voila! A Bakery! Not only do you get the options in the flavours and sizes but also you save a lot of time, energy and money by just buying the cake off a bakery.

Similarly, companies who are in a completely different business line, cannot look to hire resources for their IT needs and then keep them on bench. That would not only cost them a lot but their focus would waver time and again to manage the operational cost of those needs. Whereas, in an outsource/offshore company, one can find a pool of resources having expertise on various technologies. Talk about going to a one-stop shop to get all your needs sorted! Doesn’t that sound wonderful?

When should IT Companies outsource?

I explained who should ideally outsource their work. But that does not imply that IT companies themselves cannot outsource to get the work done. I am sure most of us have faced at least one of the following situations:

• When you don't have a particular skill required to get the job done:
  How many times have we faced this? I bet a lot! Sometimes a project comes in with requirements that fit your expertise, except for maybe one teeny tiny part that is out of your expertise and therefore you are forced to let go of that project with a heavy heart.
• When projects are coming in but you are understaffed:
  Similar to the previous situation, if you don’t have the resources to work, you again end up letting go of the project. Doesn’t situations like these make you wish you had more resources or skills sets available on hand? Of course it does, BUT let’s not forget, YOU would be the one paying for the infrastructure and salary cost for them, and if they are on bench, well, you are staring at huge overheads.
  
  Often business owners face a situation where they are at crossroads to decide whether to hire a new resource or outsource. Because humans are hard wired to play it safe, most of us would go with the former option and hire someone. And as I quote Mark Zuckerberg “The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that’s guaranteed to fail is not taking risks”, the ball is in your court!

Why should you Outsource?

IT or non-IT, all organizations are set to reap some serious benefits if they choose to outsource.

• Focus on Your Core Business: Once you have a trusted, dedicated outsourcing team managing your IT needs, all you need to do is to get a daily or a weekly update from them. This would ensure you spend your time and energy focussing on your core business, therefore positively impacting your top line.
  
• Technology Expertise: Thanks to the rapid speed with which technology keeps changing, in-house expertise is often insufficient for your growing and ever-changing needs. A good outsourcing vendor will always have expertise in Cross platform integrations, expertise on diverse frameworks and APIs, ensuring your needs are fulfilled.
  
• Business Understanding: Good outsourcing companies have a clear vertical focus, ensuring that they have skilled SMEs who understand your business needs and guide you through the correct processes and operations.
  
• One-stop shop: Why hunt all over the place for resources with experience in different technologies and spend resources on hiring and managing them, when you can just send the requirements to a company with all these expertise under one roof?
  
• Delivery Quality focus: There’s a beautiful quote by Jim Rohn which says, “One customer well taken care of could be more valuable than $10,000 worth of advertising”. If an outsourcing company has to compete in today’s world, it has to focus on the quality of services delivered. And if a company has retained clients over the years, that itself speaks enough about the quality of work they provide.
  
• Global Delivery Centre (GDC) and Savings on Infrastructure cost: Many companies are offering this as one of the engagement models for their clients where it is a win-win for both the parties. If you are looking to open a GDC, why not save a huge chunk of budget on the infrastructure cost and partner with an outsourcing vendor instead who can serve as your GDC?
  
• Pay for what you use, therefore save on infrastructure & operations cost: One of the perks of using Outsourcing as a service is that you only pay for the hours of service that you utilize and it gives you the flexibility of scaling the team as per your needs. Add the factor that you do not spend on the infrastructure and it’s a win-win deal you’ve got yourself!
  
• Cost benefits: You can save money by not outsourcing at all, but when you’ve got to accomplish something, outsourcing makes for a worthwhile investment. Efficient and quality delivery services reduces costs, improve your company’s effectiveness and boost your bottom line.
  
•  24X7 Support: Engage with a quality outsourcing partner and ensure that your systems are take care of round the clock. You never have to lose your sleep over the maintenance and upkeep of your systems anymore!

If done in the right way and with the right partner, outsourcing can and will work wonders for the growth of your organisation.






Written by Sahebkour Kung, Account Manager at Eternus Solutions

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