Is your sales team good at listening?  Really good at listening? The fact is that most B2B sales teams are quite poor at listening and ironically, that is arguably the most important skill in selling to the enterprise. Let’s examine the elements of listening and a framework for effective selling.

The first step in listening is to stop talking.  Sounds rather obvious but it’s often ignored by sales people.  The old adage ‘Telling isn’t Selling’ is absolutely true!  Sales people should try to talk no more than 20-30% of the time and listen to the customer the other 70-80% of the conversation. My observation is lots of sales people have that formula inverted and don’t feel comfortable unless they’re talking.  I’ve seen countless examples where that discomfort is displayed by the sales rep cutting off the customer mid sentence in the middle of some valuable information that is being disclosed about their business needs, only to say something that is irrelevant and they lost the opportunity to learn about what could be invaluable to a winning sales strategy.

The next aspect of good listening is the art of questioning.  There are several parts to this; one is to come in to the business conversation with a prepared list of smart questions to uncover important information about the customer.  The questions should be grouped and asked in a logical order.  Most sales teams are all over the map with how they ask questions of the customer and the ordering of the questions.  I have seen countless situations where sales teams actually offend the customer during the qualification and discovery process because of the way that they are asking questions and the fact that in the customer’s mind the sales rep wasn’t listening to their answers and asked the same question again.  As a sales manager, the most painful thing to observe on a customer call is when your sales team ‘lost’ the customer in the conversation by not asking good questions, asking redundant questions and not listening well.

Sales people need to learn how to formulate a question so that it is clear and easily understood.  That means each question contains only one question:-)  Sales reps have a tendency to ask multiple part questions and the problem with that is that the customer only answers one of the questions, which may be the least important one. Sales reps should be recorded during real customer conversations and role-playing customer conversations so that they can hear firsthand how confusing their questions were and the fact that the customer didn’t answer them because of that.  It’s like videotaping your golf swing to understand what you’re doing wrong and how to correct it.  When sales people see the difference in the information that they can uncover from clear, easily understood questions it’s analogous to the golf swing producing a 300-yard drive straight down the fairway based on correcting your swing from the videotape.

The other temptation that sales people need to resist is asking questions and then before allowing the customer to answer, the sales rep gives the answer they want to hear as the final part of the question. This is a ‘leading question’ approach that taints the integrity of the information that you need to get from the customer.  I always want the unvarnished answer from the customer because that is their reality and that is what we should be selling to.  This is also referred to as ‘bag diving’ when sales people ask a question and dive in to their bag and start selling some products or features as part of their question. This happens all the time and the sales rep doesn’t even realize that they are doing it.  Unfortunately, the customer recognizes it and perceives you as a sales rep that doesn’t care about their needs as a customer.  It’s never an effective sales approach.

Listening in a sales context is often referred to as ‘active listening’.  I consider that to be listening coupled with discernment.  Great sales reps always have strong discernment skills.  They can listen to the same customer conversation and find insight that others don’t pick up on and then they dive deeper in to those areas to uncover the golden nuggets of information that they leverage in formulating their sales strategy.  This is called sales discovery, which is the process of smart questioning, listening, discerning and applying the insights gleaned from that process in to your sales strategy for that account and opportunity.  Discovery is the foundation of effective B2B enterprise selling. All great sales teams and sales reps intuitively perform great discovery and discernment with the customer as part of their sales process.

One last admonition related to sales listening.  Please take written notes in a business meeting.  It blows my mind to see how many sales people don’t even bother to bring a pen and notepad to a meeting.  In a 2 hour meeting with 4-5 executive customer stakeholders involved, I will typically come away with 5-7 pages of notes.  Even if you have a didactic memory, customers appreciate the fact that you think they are saying things that are important enough for you to take note of.  I have a pretty strong memory, but I still review my notes from customer meetings and find things that are important that weren’t necessarily top of mind.  Additionally, there is typically some period of time that elapses in between the next meeting with the customer and it’s good form to review your notes carefully prior to the next meeting so that you can reference important points that were discussed.

In B2B enterprise sales, it’s time to stop talking and start listening!   Shhhh, did you hear that?  It’s a customer trying to tell you what they need…

1. Start Strong- There’s only one chance to make a good first impression and nothing is truer in presenting. Asking a provocative question or sharing a humorous anecdote is a god way to start a presentation. Start with something that is relevant to your audience, current and tasteful and you probably have earned yourself the initial attention of the audience.

2. Tell an Interesting Story- People love a good story. It has to be captivating and engaging. It’s also fun to tell a story with a twist that catches the audience by surprise as everyone likes to fast forward in their brain and guess the ending.  The story has to be succinct and clear to understand. Good storytellers (aka-presenters) build to a crescendo and close the story with a climax.  The story should have a point or lesson, and the point of your story is an illustration of what you are trying to convey in your overall presentation.

3. Interact with the Audience- No one likes being lectured to. The fastest way to lose an audience is to give a long, dry monotonous speech. Ask insightful questions, give pop quizzes, polls, surveys and then share facts related to the key topic. Think of clever ways to get the audience involved and interacting, it’s an essential ingredient for presentation success. Ask for feedback after the presentation and always extend an invitation for individual dialog for anyone that’s interested.

4. A Meaningful Conversation Between Two- Whether you are presenting to one person, hundreds or thousands, you should always try to visualize that you are conducting a meaningful conversation with one person in the audience. And that you are speaking directly to that one person and they are incredibly engaged in the conversation.  That visualization process helps you focus your presentation.  Your presentation and key topic is exactly what they are interested in. Even to the extent that you answer hypothetical questions that someone who is really interested in your presentation and subject would ask.

5. Have Fun!- The best presenters genuinely appear to be having fun during the presentation. The truth is that they probably are having fun because it’s rewarding and enjoyable to engage an audience and get positive feedback; whether you are a singer, a comedian or a sales person. Smiles and laughter can absolutely be contagious. When you are having fun as the presenter, it sets the tone for the audience that it’s okay for them to have fun to. In fact, good presenters may insist on the audience having fun!

I’ve always thought that Facebook is a fantastic business tool as it catches friends and acquaintances ‘off guard’ in relation to Linked-in, where everyone tries to package themselves to potential recruiters.   (Lets face it .. if i hang out with my close friends in person).  On the other hand, Facebook allows you to see something of the reality behind the people who you do business with and to sometimes reach out to them.    I had a boss once who told me he liked to see ’360 degrees’ of everyone he likes to hire; its kind of similar.

Facebook, Linked-in and good old search are a fantastic research tool for marketing, sales and customer service.  As far as I can tell, no-one has ever removed me from Facebook from approaching them about potential business (if done in the right way).  A few have ignored me but, hey, they probably would have done anyway.

I must admit however that I’m finding Google+ circles interesting but laborious to use in practice.  I already have circles fatigue.  I would much prefer to simply add someone as a friend or acquaintance .. then see what they write about and decide whether to limit our interaction over time.  To remove them from my immediate ‘concentric’ circle like peeling an onion.  For this, circles offers a much better way to decide on who you interact with over time than Facebook but thats not the way its structured at the moment.

On the other hand, hangouts is a killer video app which has come along at a time when Skype is really starting to annoy and Redmond promises only to make it less useful to non Windows users. We also maintain an Office 365 account for sharing documents in a Sharepoint environment with clients (even through I prefer Google docs for inter company documents) but they simply, don’t .. what can I say ‘get’ the network at a basic level.  Given a choice Microsoft will try to add user functionality rather than network connectivity functions.

On the other hand, I’m very very excited by the prospect of switching to Google+ if it links together doc editing, collaboration and presentation with hangouts (with screen sharing), email, chat and voice.  Apple will no doubt come up with a killer cloud offering in the fall but it will be I’m sure very consumer and digital media (e.g iTunes) oriented.  Google on the other hand has a potential ‘bundle’ of functions in its hands that millions of Office and iWork and OpenOffice users will I believe jump at:  the true virtual office.  I can’t wait to see what they do with this.

In general, let me say. I don’t think the PR industry still really gets the new world of digital media (or wants to get). They talk a good talk but under it all are threatened by the devastating impact self-publishing is having on traditional billing.

I did get an interesting email today though, from PR News. To summarize, even though daily there are more than 55 million updates on Facebook, 27 million tweets and three years of video content uploaded to YouTube, the majority of PR people still use print, TV and blog clippings as their major source of message measurement.

Shame on you.

Their advice is threefold. One, stop the clip book and get a real-time monitoring tool an analyze all the content types. Two, start listening to the tone of the conversation. Three, listen to the context .. analyze the themes into which the conversations fall.

They also say that PR people do two basic things .. ‘get the message out’ and ‘measure if they got the message out.’ If this is true, then most of the PR industry is only doing half of its job.

How does this relate to demand generation in 2011 and beyond? Because even if you hear the refrain and believe in the vision of building a demand generation capability within your company, it’s a lot harder to do than building a baseball field in the middle of a corn field. With no disrespect to Ray, building a baseball field in the middle of a cornfield is a fairly straightforward exercise if you have enough space (he did), time (ditto) and the right tools (ditto). Building a demand generation platform and capability for your company is a lot more complex. You can’t simply type in a Google search with “how to build a baseball field’ and get exact measurements and the tools required to build it. Try it out for yourself, what you will find in the Google search results for ‘how to build a demand generation platform’ are one-dimensional links to e-marketing tool companies. That would be analogous to the ‘how to build a baseball field’ Google search and if the results returned only have a single tool like a backhoe, which is a fairly complex tool that most people will never learn how to operate properly. It’s not very useful.

Since we’ve now determined that there isn’t a simple prescriptive recipe for how to build a demand generation platform or capability today, the question becomes why. The answer is that building an effective demand generation platform in 2011 is hard and involves many elements. These include a sound overall demand generation strategy, the tools and automation that you need to use, an overall content plan, the resources that you need to employ to execute properly, the communities that you need to participate in, social media, blogging, etc. This new world of demand generation requires a diverse set of skills and resources that typically doesn’t exist in the form of one individual or role. Some of the skills that you need are very new in nature and are not readily available. It also can be very costly to hire lots of full time people/resources when they are really providing a small piece of the overall demand gen puzzle, yet one that you need to do it well. It’s not about cost per lead or even how many leads you generate, rather it’s all about qualified sales opportunities (QSOs). At the end of the day, QSOs are what Sales reps and VPs of Sales care about.

Survey after survey shows that the #1 need for B2B companies is improved demand generation (aka lead generation) capabilities. Ironically, demand gen is typically an afterthought and relegated to lower level people that don’t have strategic insight or the power to make things happen. Demand gen is generally a fractured, siloed function within a B2B company that crosses functional lines without clear service levels defined or meaningful accountability. One recent survey showed that 80% of the leads generated by marketing are never followed up on by sales. That’s an appalling waste of resources and money! It’s clear that most B2B companies grossly underestimate what is required to build an effective demand gen platform/capability or they simply don’t know where to even begin. If you don’t know how to build it or are incapable of building it, how do you expect to build the necessary sales pipeline of QSOs to achieve your company revenue goals?

Here’s a primer for getting started with demand gen:

• Start with your customer
  • Understand their evaluation and buying journey
  • Map your demand gen efforts, content and sales to their journey and it’s phases
  • Identify your ideal customer profiles (ICP) with associated value props, differentiation, succinct messaging and tailored offers
• Develop an overall content strategy
  • Mapped to your ICPs
  • Broken down to the phase of their buyer’s journey & key stakeholders
  • Think easily digestible content chunks
• Decide on the automation/tools that you will need to use
  • Integration between the tools is paramount
  • Skills necessary to use the tools
  • Recognize that the tools are useless without the right content and themes
• Develop a ‘rolling thunder’ series of demand gen campaigns
  • Recognize that there is always some trial and error involved
  • Be ‘professionally’ provocative
  • Steady stream of outbound campaigns, themes, targets and offers
  • Remove all barriers to execute optimally

• Measure often and report regularly
  • Shared accountability (cross functionally)

• • Service level agreements
  • Reward over achievement
  • Refine based on real time results

True Sales Results provides world class B2B demand generation services on an outsourced basis as well as a unique rent to own model.  Find out why our customers are raving about our services:

http://www.truesalesresults.com.

What’s more interesting to me is that many companies are still not being smart. Companies are either intuitively getting the need to change or they aren’t. And some are still locking themselves in the box voluntarily and pulling over the flaps. All the time, we talk to executives who are stuck on the organizational boundaries of ‘who owns what’ versus ‘how to I build enough qualified pipeline with all the options possible.’ Or marketeers who forlornly cling to the hope that the tens of thousands of unqualified names in their lists and databases will yield results without working more closely and better with sales.

On the other hand, sales needs marketing more than ever too. I believe many VPs of Sales rue the day they ‘took over marketing’ and converted the headcount .. only to find they ran out of content to sell or fresh blood in their pipe.

For more than a month now, we’ve been stringing together hard facts from public reports from both sales and marketing watchers – from Meta to Aberdeen, and CSO Insights to Sirius Decisions. We’re doing this because of our continual desire to search for ‘best practices’ in the business case for more closely integrated sales and marketing (which is bottom line what we believe drives better results in 2011).

Here is one result of our research on the research. According to CSO Insights, one of the top sales effectiveness initiative remains from last year .. enhancing lead generation.

The $64,000 question .. how?

What the facts show is that there is a marked difference in the habits of highly effective versus lagging organizations in terms of answering this question.

And those that DO get it are pulling away from the pack. A shocking three quarters (and some say as high as 98% of the bottom performers) of marketing generated leads are STILL not acted upon in lagging organizations because sales still find them unqualified.

On the other hand, best in class sales & marketing organizations get around HALF of their leads that result in closed business from aligned marketing and sales. And they are also seeing a 20% INCREASE in improvement of revenue generated from integrated sales and marketing campaigns from last year to this.

So what are the habits of these companies? Here is my take on the facts in front of me.

First, they have an EXPANDED their view of lead generation from just marketing, into engaging via sales development and making sure that end-to-end INTEGRATION between sales & marketing actually happens. According to one analyst, 83% of the best organizations follow marketing campaigns with phone calls to qualify. Companies with integrated sales development convert eight times the numbers of leads into qualified sales opportunities!

Second, they focus on improving the QUALITY of leads sent to sales, not the top-line volume going into the pipeline. By this read one simple thing: they want leads that are accepted by sales as truly qualified. In one report, “generating high quality leads” is the top priority for marketers at 78%. In another, 82% rank increasing the amount of qualified leads as number one priority.

Third, they NURTURE. Not like a momma bear but as a sales and marketing parental unit. Based on a strong knowledge of their buyers journey, they use both sales and marketing in lock step. When we go into organizations, the signs that nurturing is happening is whether we hear of a notion of campaigns, a content marketing plan, unhampered use of real marketing automation tools like Marketo, and a sales development and/or inside sales team that operates to a ‘service level agreement’ with marketing and the rest of sales. One report shows that murtured leads can achieve a 47% higher average sales value and that companies that nurture can achieve a two to three times improvement from cold lead to qualified opportunity.

Fourth, they recognize the need for MULTI SKILLED marketing staff that can deliver multi-touch, multi-channel campaigns and INVOLVE SALES in strategy and campaign development. 50% to 82% of best in class companies are more likely than industry average to possess multi touch/multi channel skills in their organization. The days of marketing specialization are over inhouse. The surest sign we see that someone is suffering here is when we are mailed a ‘template’ by the lowest level person in a project chain who has the power to stop ALL progress as only they can click their heels to get (wait for it) .. a simple brochure or web page done. The truth is that there are literally hundreds of cheap tools nowadays that make it easy to do your own PDF collaterals, blog, web, graphics, animated presentations, interactive videos, press releases, emarketing .. you name it. Better learn them all. Or if you are a manager demand staff they try them all voraciously.

For me, the facts are clear, compelling and consistently show .. top performing sales organizations do integrated demand generation well and the laggards don’t.

This is a guest blog post by our partners @ Crowded Ocean (http://www.crowdedocean.com/).

It’s a marketing truism that you can’t manage what you can’t measure.  But, faced with all the challenges of starting a company from scratch, the question is:  what do you measure and when do you start measuring it?

Startups often think that it’s better to live solely on Salesforce during their early growth phase and to delay an implementation of Marketo (or any other marketing automation solution) for richer times ahead when budgets and headcount are less constrained.  That usually means the thinly staffed sales team has to undertake everything from lead scoring and qualification to database updates.

Implementing marketing automation early in the life of a startup can pay off down the road. There are three main benefits to making an early commitment to a marketing automation tool.  First, it keeps highly paid, strategic, executive-level sales people doing what they do best (and out of the weeds of sales operations.)

Second, it allows marketing and sales investment to be more easily measured and analyzed.  Third, it lets real data about the performance of programs like email marketing inform your sales content and website structure.  Our marketing mantra:  metrics tell you where you are (# of visitors, page views, etc.)  Analytics tells you where you’re going by deriving meaning and actions (e.g., changes to content) from those numbers.

In other words, you have to “believe” in the value of marketing automation in order to commit early to its purchase and implementation. The program cost of marketing automation is only part of the objection that we hear from some of our startup clients.  The other issue is the need for an in-house resource to “drive” the marketing automation tool and ensure that internal processes are followed across the marketing and the sales teams to make the system hum.

We address this objection by putting a marketing operation contractor on site or by referring a partner like True Sales Results who can drive the system and ensure that best practices are established and followed early on.  Investing in marketing automation, as a percentage of a startup’s overall marketing budget, represents an “incremental” investment.  It helps leverage your senior sales talent better.  It builds discipline and internal processes that are invaluable to ramping revenue and maximizing your sales talent.